Mario Marathon kicks off for its fifth year today – don’t forget to tune in and drop some coin to help support Child’s Play! 
Buying Gold is for Idiots
I can’t stand all of those commercials on TV telling people to buy up precious metals like gold and silver.
And it’s not necessarily because of any investment strategy, per se – in all truth, I have no idea how stuff like that actually performs against traditional stocks and bonds and whatnot.
No, in reality I think I just hate these commercials because they pitch gold as the thing to buy, as if the world is on the brink of collapse and in the new world, gold will be the only thing that has any value … not those false idol greenbacks you’ve got stuffed in your wallet or worse yet, some mysterious bank balance that a corporation “claims” that they’re holding for you!!!
It’s always the same shot – some guy wearing a flannel shirt is putting another stack of gold coins into his safe … there’s typically a shotgun mounted on the wall with a dead animal of some sort right next to it … and he knows where his money will be when the world market collapses.
You know the commercials – they run on FOX News in between ads for Liberty Mutual and the one about getting dia-beet-us supplies through the mail.
I guess the core reason that they bug me is pretty simple. You know what the only thing that has any value will be if our economy collapses and civilization is thrust back in time 200 years???
It’s FOOD.
You can’t eat gold bullion, and nobody is going to care about trading your worthless rocks for chickens and fish!
Maybe you can make bullets out of it or something, but something tells me you’ve already got a whole separate stockpile of those anyways…
That’s all I’m saying. If you want to buy gold for actual investment purposes, then be my guest, but if it’s simply because you think you’re obtaining a more tangible form of currency that will outlast coins and paper money, you might try re-focusing your efforts on corn just the same. 😕
BBQ Awesomeness
Tonight my wife requested my assistance in helping her pull some BBQ chicken for us to have for meals over the next couple of days.
When I was done, it was put back in this pot to simmer.
I’m probably supposed to leave it alone, but frankly I’m not sure if that’s going to be possible.
It’s 11:00pm and the sweet, succulent scents of barbecue are wafting into my office from across the house.
Forever taunting me, teasing my taste buds with its delectable odors.
I’ll try to hold out as long as I can, though I am but a man…
8-Bit Art/Music
Here’s a fun, little video from PBS that talks a bit about the resurgence of the 8-bit graphics and music that we remember from all of those classic Nintendo games of the 80s and 90s. I’ve always been a big fan of 8-bit-styled art, like the DoctorOctoroc version of Dr. Horrible or even that old Code Monkeys show from G4 that was fun to watch for the graphics, even though the script was absolutely terrible, and I’ve already talked in the past about my resurfacing passion for 8-bit music, thanks to the likes of Penny Arcade: The Series and its numerous musical contributors.
It made me wish the entire thing was about two or three times as long as it ended up being, but at least it served to drop a few names of some 8=bit artists who I haven’t heard before! 😀
Through the eyes of security cameras…
I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with Coke, but this is still kind of a neat video…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auNSrt-QOhw
Places I’ve been, and so on and so forth…
http://www.scottsevener.com/about/places-ive-been/
This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, but just never sat down to actually put together. It’s kind of fun to not only speculate about the places that you’d like to visit in the future, but also review your favorites from places that you’ve already been.
Admittedly, I do kind of feel like I need some more on my to do list, especially from an international perspective, but for now I just put the ones that immediately came to mind – Australia, Japan, France, Egypt. I’m sure I’m missing lots of cool islands and places of vast cultural significance, but I think this is a good enough start to consider it a work in progress… 😉
Super Semantics
If you ask me, Super Mario > Superman AND Batman… 😯
Why will my dog not stop humping the air?!?!?!
I’m not supposed to be posting this picture because Sara says that it’s too embarrassing for Cleo, but I just can’t help myself.
If I knew how to make animated GIFs, this would make for a hilarious LiveJournal icon back in 2004… 8)
Let’s Pizza!
I want one of these for my house… 😀
Matt Mullenweg on Blogging, Open Source, and BBQ…
It’s taking me a little while to get through because it’s 2 hours long, but I’ve really been enjoying this interview that PandoDaily did last month with WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. He talks about all sorts of topics including the “corporate culture” at Automattic, why he believes in the open source ecosystem, and even a little about his own passion for BBQ…
Some really intriguing points, and I especially loved to hear him talk about how the right directions to take with WordPress as a whole have not always been the ones that would simply make the most for investors in the near future. I love that when you listen to Matt talk about the future of blogging, he talks about a marketplace dominated by open source software and not just his own … it really shows that he cares about giving back to the online community, and I say this not simply because I’ve been able to use his software for free to drive my own publishing interests over the last five years! 😉