These things just spring up like weeds!

First we have this sobering and inspiring video.

Intellectually, somewhere in my memory banks, left there from my childhood, was the knowledge that, when I was nine years old, there was this thing called ERA that had not passed in the USA.

I think I thought it was a bill at the time, even though the word “amendment” is right in the name. But the point is, I knew this had happened.

But until I watched that vid, I did not realize just how fucked up that is.

Here in Canada, our Constitution has equality written right into it. So it never occurred to me that the situation was a lot more precarious down in the USA.

I can’t imagine a movement to pass the ERA now would fail, 31 years later. When it came up in 82, people were still arguing about whether husbands should let their wives work outside of the house.

We are so much further ahead now. Sure, the Tea Party types would reflexively oppose it, but they blew all their political capital on trying to stop Obamacare anyhow.

So really, who would argue with it?

Then we have snuggles for sale.

A bunch of ladies in Madison, Wisconsin are looking to start a professional cuddling service. For $60/hour, clients can go into private rooms and get professionally cuddled.

Needless to say, local authorities think that sounds just a little too much like prostitution to them, and so the ladies are having trouble getting a business license.

But the pro snugglers insist that all the rooms have cameras and will be monitored constantly to make sure that nothing more than cuddling goes on.

That’s all well and good. But a lot of fellows are going to start to have certain feelings while enjoying a nice cuddle with a gal, and at the very least the ladies will have to be experts in pretending there isn’t an erection poking them somewhere.

The rooms all have panic buttons, though, so if the fellas get too frisky, presumably all hell breaks loose.

Then we have this marvelous piece of work from the talented people at Bad Lip Read.

Man, they are getting good at what they do. They have learned that it’s funniest when it’s not totally random. Plus wow, now they have people that can Photoshop things into the backgrounds of videos fairly convincingly.

And more than that, this time they had a whole concept behind the piece that really takes their work to the next level. I found it was a joy to watch and just enjoy their increasing mastery.

Someday, they will re-dub an entire movie. And it will be awesome.

And speaking of the awesomeness, check out this new kind of display system :

The first thing I thought of when I saw that was “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi… you’re my only hope!”.

But seriously, how “the future is now” is that? One of the things I am most looking forward to seeing in the future is all the science fiction of my childhood coming true.

We already have a lot of things, like cybernetics, nanotech, and real-time brain scanning via fMRI. Heck the USA even has a working large scale laser weapon at, of course, RIDICULOUS cost versus its actual effectiveness.

But when you tell a bunch of generals “We can build a laser cannon”, they just can’t throw money at you fast enough, because laser cannons are cool and surely if the enemy sees our awesome new laser guns they will be like “Damn, that is so much cooler than anything we have! We totally surrender. ”

That is seriously how these people think.

Anyhow, the mid-air display technology is, like the laser cannon, cool as hell, but I am not entirely sure what functional benefits it has. And at a price tag of $20K, you better be able to make some sort of halfway decent business case for it.

Granted, that business case might well be “this will impress the hell out of visitors, including potential investors, with how awesome we are. ”

I can see a lot of middle management types wanting one of them NOW NOW NOW, before that smug asshole over in Accounting gets one.

Then we have this impressive bit of craft which depicts an entire relationship in 5 minutes.

Warning, it’s very stagey, consists of just two actors talking to the camera, and is in black and white.

Why is it in black and white? Who knows. Maybe they thought it would make the whole thing seem more stark and emotional. Or maybe they were just being pretentious.

Regardless, I greatly admire the craft that went into it. It’s all one long shot, so the actors had to be really, really on their marks with every line, and there are a LOT of lines. And the writing is quite deft in the way ot gives you clues as to the passage of time in what they say, as opposed to having to introduce some artificial and obtrusive device that would have ruined the purity of it all.

I can’t say I really enjoyed the experience a lot, but I am impressed by how well it is made.

And then we have our adorable cat animated GIF of the day.

All cats are ninjas. Some just aren’t very good ones.

I LOL’d so hard when I saw that. We cat lovers live for moments of feline comedy like that. Sure, it seems a little mean to laugh at them when they mess up like that, but most of the time they are so poised and agile and perfect that it just slays us when they do something goofy like that.

Especially when it’s one of their awe-inspiring “spring loaded cat” moments that goes awry. The speed at which we go from “coiled steel” to “where kitty go?” just makes the clip that much funnier.

Sorry, kittums. We love your little furry self so much. But sometimes, you’re hilarious.

I am sure we are pretty funny to you sometimes, too.

Finally, we have this little bit of rantiness I recorded today.

I feel good about that one because I managed to keep it under 5 minutes in length, after considerable trimming, and thus was able to keep my points fairly compact and concise. It also allowed me to concentrate more on putting in the extra stuff in order to punch it up a little.

After all, it’s a lot easier to come up with stuff for 5 minutes of video than for 15!