ankewehner.de

Indigo Road, by Ronn McFarlane

Chasing Cars, originally by Snow Patrol, covered by The Baseballs

Thought I’d dump a bunch of links here I found funny or otherwise worth sharing. People who follow me on twitter will probably have seen most of those already.

Airline pickpocket strikes as passengers sleep – My mental picture was a pickpocket declaring he was on strike because his job was too easy this way.

Swandog in reply to a poll, about the roads in winter in Norway: “the main danger is running into moose licking salt off the road”.

Oil spill photo

A German student “mooned” a group of Hell’s Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer

Broccoli looks like fireworks if you take an MRI-picture. (From a blog dedicated to MRI-pics of food. Note that their main page (not the individual post linked to) can take a while to load, since it has a lot of those animated images.)

Recently there was an exhibition of various Elvis memorabilia at the shopping centre in Koblenz, so I got to see his last car, among other things. As far as memorabilia go, tools used in Elvis’ autopsy are pretty weird, though.

Counter-protest against Westboro Babtist Church picketing at Comic-Con

You heard about the Octopus predicting FIFA World Cup results? Here’s an explanation. (Link via drhoz)

The Difference Between a Door-to-door Sales Orc and a Door-to-door Sales Elf

… and the world stops to look. Or something.

The waves this is making are pretty amazing. I probably shouldn’t be as amused as I am.

My favourite wrinkle: The UK sends an aircraft carrier to France to bring tourists home? Now that’d be a cool surprise to end your holidays with.

Another year’s over. I don’t feel like writing up a detailed look back on my year. I feel like I’m growing, but slowly. I think during the last month I did a lot to get out of my chronic habit of putting things off, at least as far as housework is concerned, but I need to get that to grow and include all aspects of my life. One other thing I need to work on is deciding what to pursue and what to let drop.

Right now I feel more focused ont he future than the past, and I think that’d be a good thing to keep up.

Have some links instead:
Celebrate what’s right with the world, a video that might make you feel all warm and fuzzy. I loved the last story.

Some images found on deviantart:

Incidentally, this is the 100th post published on this blog. Nice timing, entirely unplanned.

Octopus wants to be a clam. Tool use hasn’t been an exclusively human thing for a while.

There’s a new Simon’s Cat video up at youtube. It has a birdee. ^_^

There had been a great version of Bohemian Rhapsody on the Muppets Studio youtube channel, but now it’s gone due to copyright kerfuffle. Ehwell, it still has The Blue Danube (performed by chickens), Ode to Joy (performed by Beaker), and Ringing of the Bells (featuring Animal, see post title)

Once upon a time, when the Game Boy Color was cutting edge technology, and I had a Game Boy Pocket because the two Classic models we had had worn out, I had Pokémon Red Version. Honestly, I don’t think I got particularly far – four, maybe five badges, and it’s not like the game ended there. However, I loved the concept. Cute critters, and collecting, and the strategy aspect, and the fact you could just spend some time levelling to make things later easier.

One problem was that I couldn’t find people to trade with, what with being shy/messed up/whatever.
Three generations of handhelds later I heard the latest games of the series enabled interaction via the internet. And, well, the graphics are a LOT better, but still very close to the isometric SNES RPGs that I’m used to from back when, with only some added 3D effects, as opposed to all-out 3D graphic, which I find confusing.

Then comes the DSi, with an SD slot – hell knows what that can be used for other than the 0.3 megapixel cameras that are built in – and such a really nice matte finish, and, yeah. Cue me getting a DSi and Pokemon Platinum as a late birthday/early Christmas present for myself.

Of course then it turns out that if I had waited another few months, I might have gotten the “next” generation as they came out. Well, they’re remakes of Gold and Silver, but, well, shiny! (And I didn’t play those, anyway.) That got me reading up more in the series history. What got remade with polish and tweaks as what is kinda interesting. Since I’m a visual animal, here’s a graph:

A generation of Pokémon games always starts with a pair, which are identical apart from the bit that some of the critters can be found in one, but not the other, to encourage trading. This is followed later by a retooled version, which has tweaks like improved graphics, a different set of pokemon, altered/added dungeons or story elements, whatever.

The very first – Red & Green – were released only in Japan. The improvements in their retooled version Blue were used for the out-of-Japan versions Red & Blue. After the anime became a hit, Red & Blue got mixed-and-altered into Yellow (and somewhere an arts teacher is crying). Yellow was a game for the Game Boy, but got additional support (ie predefined colour palettes) for GB Color.

If one occurrence is a pattern already (hey, it worked with Blue being the new-and-improved combination of Red & Green), HeartGold & SoulSilver won’t get a combined version. On the other hand, the DSi is relatively new, so maybe DS-compatible stuff will stick around longer.

Either way, I get the impression that one Pokemon game can keep you occupied a long, long time. Breeding (added in Generation II) sounds fun, and so is growing berries (the “plant them yourself” bit was added in Generation III), and the Underground treasure-digging game is a horrible, horrible timesink (Added in Generation IV). And that’s just stuff to do on the side, as opposed to plot and level grinding. And if I get bored of that, I can try to figure out the Contests. Whee, I guess.

Ah… does anyone here play those games, too? What with the friendscodes, and trading and such…

That there on the right is Jayne from Firefly, here in a screenshot from The Train Job.

The badge on his sleeve shows the parka belonged to a police uniform of Rhineland-Palatinate, the German “state” I live in. I wonder why and/or how that happened.

Jayne of all that crew… XD

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Female police officers in Paris are not women. Logic says so! Otherwise their being required to wear trousers would be against the law.

Some things police deal with are… somewhat weird (old stuff I saved on my delicious account):

• Naked swimmer evades police in Tokyo
• Drunk badger disrupts traffic
• Drunken tractor driver leads police on slow chase
• Bride spends first night with crate of vodka
• Speeding player thought police were fans chasing him
• Handcuffs, Taser used to catch emu
• Crocodile thrown in jail cell for loitering
• German police investigate kebab sauce after attack

Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (“..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (“…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (“…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

Once upon a time in Gürbetal, Switzerland, there was a car parts dealer who after finishing cannibalising old cars parked them on his property. This happened from the 1930s to the 1970. A lot of the cars are still there.

Official website (German)
Forest of Sleeping Cars flickr sets by elessar_ch
Album on mth-fotografie.ch

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Steampunk webcomic find: 2D Goggles – The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Some rule of cool and/or funny revisionist history in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace didn’t only design a working computer in theory, but it actually got built.
Updating schedule is “a batch of pages whenever I have them”; so far there are the “origin” chapter plus two episodes, and a bit of smallstuff. Lots of links to the creator’s research material in the author’s notes, just the right thing for some types of geeks.

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Deep Sky Colors
Astronomical photography.
Wired.com had a step-by-step example of the photo postwork which I found very interesting.

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Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris
A study of different versions of letters in graffiti tags.

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Villafane Studion pumpkin carvings
Pretty impressive, particularly the Predator.

Because some people take drink recipes including kerosene and battery acid far too seriously

In other “news”, I really regret leaving my camera at home today. I could have taken a nice one of a power pole and titled it “everything is full of starlings”.