Quote mining.

Spotted on Capital Hill, Seattle

"If we [Cuba] still had nuclear missiles,we would have used them against the very heart of America including New York."

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate."

"Hate as a factor in the struggle, intransigent hatred for the enemy that takes one beyond the natural limitations of a human being and converts one into an effective, violent, selective, cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be like that."

All of these quotes are also from Che.

A very frustrating Saturday

This post was supposed to be a triumphant announcement about another stage of Kouryou-chan's life, in which I praised Omaha's heroic efforts to keep a household of screaming, sugar-hyped children under control while we celebrated Kouryou-chan's eighth birthday.

Omaha was positively heroic under fire, from arranging the birthday cake to buying (and sometimes making) the decorations, of Kouryou-chan's favorite cartoon character. There once were decorations made, but no more. They're considered a "vintage" license, and it seems no one wants to license them anymore. So Omaha cut and pasted and guessed and glued, and everything was coming together nicely for a lovely sleepover party with a basement full of giggling girls, in which Kouryou-chan got her best present, a new bicycle that actually fit her.

Instead, Kouryou-chan woke up this morning with a horrible cough, developed a fever as the day wore on, and was so underpowered that she ended up napping through part of it.

Instead, I had to drive into Seattle to get something and ended up spilling a latte' all over the inside of my car. I did manage to clean it out with the carpet shampoo machine, so hopefully there'll be no rotted milk smell throughout the cabin but that was a half-hour of my day I had allocated for other purposes.

Instead, Omaha and I played a round of Quake 4, and at the very end we managed to kill each other but out of turn, but her game disconnected her immediately upon registering her death. My game correctly identified "sudden death," but it was too late; she'd been kicked out. It was effectively a tie, but there aren't supposed to be ties in this game.

Instead, we gave Kouryou-chan the bicycle in a quiet little ceremony (we gave her riding gloves to protect her hands, then told her she could practice with her new bicycle as I keyed the automatic garage door opener hiding in my pocket; I felt like Bob Barker) only to discover that it was too big for her and we have to take it back. She's not big enough for a 24" bicycle, and they don't make 22" wheels, so she's down to a 20". We'll be doing that tomorrow.

The whole household is kinda low right now. It's been a very frustrating day. Kouryou-chan still has a nasty cough, and I'll be giving her dextromethorphan (and bugger what the FDA says about its effectiveness, it works for her), and hoping she gets enough rest.

I'm ready to shake the hand of my octopoid mistresses!

It takes a bit of navigating (hint: go to the freezer, not the 'fridge) to find it, but there's a 60-second ad for orange-flavored sugar water feature pole-dancing anthro flamingos, a deer doing the flower scene from American Beauty, another doing the splash scene from Flashdance while her bear boyfriend looks on, and an hot babe octopus doing, uh...

... you just really have to see it. Visit Orangina!

Fisher Price's My First LJ Icon

JWZ was one of the first people to originally mention the Orangina octopus somewhere where I could see it, although I didn't find the video until PZ Meyers pointed it out to me.

JWZ then issued a challenge to turn the squirting octopus scene into an LJ icon. I have, uh, attempted to rise to the challenge, and my contribution is visible there on the right. If you go to JWZ's LJ you'll see many worthy variations, although right now I'm holding out for dossy's as the best so far.

To make this, I first cut it out with mplayer:

mplayer -vo png -ss 00:52 -endpos 00:56

Then created a common map with netpbm:

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i > $i.pnm ; done pnmcat -lr 0*.pnm | pnmcolormap 48 > map48.pnm

Then created a collection of cut, scaled, and remapped gifs (I determined the dimensions of my cut with GIMP):

for i in *.png ; do pngtopnm $i | pnmcut -l 93 -t 34 -w 243 -h 243 | \
  pnmscale -xy 100 100 | pnmremap -mapfile=map48.pnm | \
 ppmtogif > ../$i.gif ; echo $i ; done

And then assembled them together with gifsicle:

gifsicle -d 24 --loop=forever -D bg -O2 *.gif > anim.gif

I did some judicious removal of frames with rm (I could always rerun the script to regenerate them) and it took a little tweaking, but comes in at 38,410 bytes. Because there are so many dropped frames, I slowed it down a little, from 160ms to 240ms. I think the frame jerkiness suggests watching something in slo-mo, and tweaking the speed emphasizes that, so the experienced viewer won't be annoyed by the painfully low frame rate.