Courtesy of Robert W., here’s a lovely time-lapse video, shot from the deck of a cruise ship, showing various scenic locations around the world. It’s hi-def, so do yourself a favour and watch it full-screen.
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Got potatoes? Take them down to be mashed.
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In tonight’s adjunct to the Tips we look at something that’s kinda like ice fishing, only it’s completely different. Whatever you want to call it, don’t try this at home.
h/t Dave S.
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Have you been looking for a product that will dispatch pesky varmints in a humane and spectacular way? Well, the Barnes Varmint Grenade may be just the product you’ve been looking for. (h/t Black Mamba)
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In tonight’s tips music, dyspeptic Scot Ivor Cutler performs a jolly rendition of How Are You? Shut Up!.
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In tonight’s Tips music, from an episode of The Wilburn Brothers Show, a syndicated variety series that ran for 12 years starting in 1963, Loretta Lynn joins those Wilburn Brothers in a performance of Oh Come, Angel Band.
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For several decades starting in the 1920s, the “Meyer Davis Orchestra” would perform in multiple cities, hundreds of miles apart, on any given night. Meyer Davis, you see, was “one of the first dance band contractors, supplying orchestras for society gatherings, weddings, hotel ballrooms, country clubs, and presidential balls.” At one point, there were sixty-two different orchestras bearing his name. Tonight’s selection is a 1930 recording of the a Meyer Davis Orchestra, along with vocalist Frank Munn, playing It Seems To Be Spring.
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In tonight’s tippity amusement, BBC news anchor Jonathan Charles keeps a commendably stiff upper lip as he tells his harrowing life story.
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Yesterday was May 24 will be Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday. I’d love to post something from his remarkable oeuvre, but his record label has recently taken to blocking videos in particular non-sanctioned regions, including Canada, apparently, and those that do make it through tend to get taken down quickly, so I’m going to present a cover version of one of his songs. Fortunately, it’s a very fine cover that artfully draws out the lyrical sense of weight and struggle that, admittedly, doesn’t always reveal itself to Bob-fans. Without further ado, here’s the late Nina Simone, gracing us with her solemn, reverential, and almost revelatory interpretation of Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.
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Dave S. writes:

“Since it’s springtime, when gardening restarts for another season, it’s important to remember NEVER to let a Boeing engineer fix your power lawnmower.”

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In tonight’s light tips music, someone named Randy Lee takes an inordinately long time getting to The Question. Talk about loading it up.
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You know, if you stare at your hand for a while, and just keep looking at it…you realize that, logically, the brain works at the speed of light. And if you could, like, speak to a photon, and if photons had ego-consciousness……Oh, wow…
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In tonight’s pop music oddity from 1978, former Miss Finland Armi Anja Orvokki Aavikko and her partner Ilka Lipsanen (who performed under the stage name of “Danny”) lip-sync their way through a performance of I Want To Love You Tender. The song itself is as trite and inconsequential as anything in the history of Euro-pop, but the choreography of the accompanying dance group is… extraordinary.
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In tonight’s Reader Tips amusement an Australian man – a real man – named Nick Vujicic talks to an assembled group of students about the meaning of life as he sees it.
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Tonight’s musical selection is a song about a young Irishman’s odyssey of anger, drinking, sorrow, fatigue, drinking, fist-fighting, exhilaration, and drinking: here are The Dubliners performing the classic slip jig Rocky Road to Dublin. (Lyrics here.)
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The products of modern science can be unsettling at times. At Aalborg University in Denmark, a human-like robot has been built whose facial features and movements have been modeled, with eerie accuracy, after Henrik Scharfe, the director of the University’s Center for Computer-mediated Epistemology (the “study of knowledge and justified belief.”)
From the Center’s website:

Geminoid|DK will be the first of its kind outside of Japan, and is intended to advance android science and philosophy, in seeking answers to fundamental questions, many of which that have also occupied the Japanese researchers. The most important questions are: What is a human? What is presence? What is a relation? What is identity? We intend to pursue these questions while looking at areas such as emotional affordances in HRI, the novel concept of Blended Presence, and by studying cultural differences in the perception of robots.

Videos of Geminoid|DK here and here.
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The director of the Israeli Government Press Office has taken issue with CNN’s use of what some might call “sarc quotes” – or, perhaps more aptly, “Yeah, right” quotes – in the following CNN headline:

Israeli family of 5 killed in ‘terror attack,’ military says.

“Your remarks sound,” the director pointed out, “as if we are talking about an IDF ‘claim’ that this was ‘a terrorist attack’ and that this is not necessarily the case. If this is not a terrorist attack, then what is?”
CNN said in its defense that it is “standard journalistic practice for news organizations to put quotation marks around remarks attributed to third parties.”
Great. I guess that means we’ll be seeing CNN headlines like –

NATO “bombs” kill three Taliban insurgents, locals report

or –

Over 10,000 dead in aftermath of “earthquake”, Japanese authorities say

In addition to being a superb songwriter and a fine guitarist, Illinois native Robbie Fulks is one of the most entertaining – and wickedly funny – musicians extant. None of his album tracks, or even off-the-mixing-board live performances, are available at YouTube or other video sites, so here’s the next best thing: an audience POV video of he and Nora O’Connor performing an acoustic version of Fulks’ Parallel Bars. (Lyrics here.)
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In tonight’s Tips amusement, brought to us by the folks at Old Jews Telling Jokes, Harold Zapolski, Professor Emeritus of the Physics department of Rutgers University and former Program Director for Theoretical Physics at the National Science Foundation, tells the one about the deli.
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Because of the language barrier and the absence of subtitles, it’s not immediately apparent that the play-by-play man who is the subject of the action in tonight’s video was a personally troubled, obsessive-compulsive, nit-picking critic. And a pothead.
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