random stuff

[The Feral Slasher]

Corey Kluber won two Cy Young awards. This is more shocking to me than Lindsey Buckingham singing holiday road. Crazy stuff

[heyelander]

The rag-doll AI bots are back! This time, there are 2 of them and they learn to play table tennis. The hilarity begins at 3:27:

They may be the most spastic creatures you've ever seen, but they never give up. They continue playing even after collapsing on the ground!

How long before we have professional AI robot competitions featuring competing AI programmer teams?

These are always entertaining... maybe I should have watched the previous 2, but would have liked more analysis of why they thought the ragdolls were making some of the moves they were.

[madducks]

Wow, really? I like that song. My oldest son also sang it in a school play awhile back.


Here's two bits of trivia I recently stumbled upon and found to be mind-blowing:

1 - Victor Conte of BALCO infamy, perhaps the architect of the biggest doping scandal in sports history, is neither a doctor nor a pharmacist. But what he is, in fact, is a world-class bass guitarist who played in the 1970s and 1980s with Herbie Hancock's backup band and with the Tower of Power.

2 - In the mid-1960s Chevy Chase attended Bard College and was an avid drummer. He joined a band called "The Leather Canary" alongside two classmates, but deemed it a "bad jazz band" that "wasn't going anywhere" and left soon thereafter. Those two classmates, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, went on to found Steely Dan a few years later and the rest is history.

Here's one that I just found out about:

While watching the documentary "I Am Chris Farley", I noticed a familiar face performing at an improv theater alongside Farley back in the early 80's. It was a young Bob Odenkirk, who in more recent years played Saul Goodman on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul". Odenkirk later worked as a writer for SNL before becoming a star in the two AMC TV shows. So, Saul Goodman started out doing improv with Chris Farley.

[madducks]

Something else that I just found out:

Cassandra Peterson aka "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark," played the biker chick in "Pee Wee's Big Adventure."

[GwynnInTheHall]

Here's one that I just found out about:

While watching the documentary "I Am Chris Farley", I noticed a familiar face performing at an improv theater alongside Farley back in the early 80's. It was a young Bob Odenkirk, who in more recent years played Saul Goodman on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul". Odenkirk later worked as a writer for SNL before becoming a star in the two AMC TV shows. So, Saul Goodman started out doing improv with Chris Farley.

So, at the new theatre I work at in Tucson, it took me 3 shows to realize that our Costumer, Kathy Odenkirk, was indeed Bob's sister. For some reason I never made the connection until someone else mentioned it.

[madducks]

This one starts out slow but gets better as it goes along.

[madducks]

I thought this was interesting seeing how many celebrities had guest appearances on the original Miami Vice. Some of them weren't even famous yet.