ON THE LITE SIDE- Dilbert 12/12/2011

Dilbert
12/12/2011
(click to go to site)

ON THE LITE SIDE - Puppy Learns, Priceless Video

Time Marches On
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
"Puppy learns to lie down" (and more)

ON THE LITE SIDE- Tax Rates for the Rich

(click to go to Dilbert.com)


For those unfamiliar with Dilbert, baldy is CEO of the company.

ON THE LITE SIDE - Goals

Dilbert
(click for bigger view)

ON THE LITE SIDE - Humor Times Satire

Humor Times

ON THE LITE SIDE - Political Humor 11/2011

Humor Times
(click images for better view)

ON THE LITE SIDE - Portal to Another Dimension

Dilbert

ON THE LITE SIDE - Claiming Credit

Dilbert
by Scott Adams

MUSIC - "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls"

Another of my favorite groups and song.....

"Waterfalls" aka "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls"
By TLC

ON THE LITE SIDE - Two Dogs Dinning

Couldn't resist.....

MUSIC - My Latest "Love" ....Adele

Thought I'd share and get a bit off the hard news. Enjoy.

"Rolling In the Deep"
by Adele

ON THE LITE SIDE - Dilbert, "Worked for My Ex-Wife"

Dilbert
8/22/2011
(click for better view)

ON THE LITE SIDE - Better Driver? Robot or People?

"Google Engineer Worse Driver Than Google's Robot Car, Apparently" by Andrew Dalton, SFist.com 8/5/2011

Today in things that Google computers are better at than you, simple human: Driving. An incident involving a Google driverless Prius was originally reported by Jalopnik this morning as the first traffic accident for Google's fleet of robot cars. Which could have been terrible PR for the Google autonomous vehicle program that's been quietly logging hundreds of thousands of miles on the streets of California and Nevada. As it turns out, the incident in which a gPrius rear-ended another Prius near the company's headquarters in Mountain View occurred while the vehicle was in manual mode. So, the robot car wasn't trying to mate with another hybrid vehicle, then?

In a statement to Business Insider, a Google spokesperson said, "Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car." Of course, Google could just be trying to cover their ass here by pinning their blame on the poor engineer who was in the driver's seat at the time. But if human error is to blame then we suppose we've finally arrived at the new and exciting future where human drivers are obsolete. Now if you'll excuse us, we'll be napping on cruise control.

ON THE LITE SIDE - Circus Smirkus Boy Clown

(click for better view)

"A Young Clown Follows in a Father’s Giant Footsteps" by DAN BARRY, New York Times 7/28/2011

Excerpt

Down Clown Alley, in the backstage tent for Circus Smirkus, a slight boy of 14 studies his clown self in a jagged piece of mirror. This is Sam Ferlo, the son of a former circus clown and a former circus showgirl, and the godson of a man once known as the Human Cannonball.

Guess what Sam wants to join when he grows up.

Seeing the need for a touch more of the garish, the boy dabs a finger into the greasepaint he keeps in his most precious possession, a makeup kit that is small, red and well traveled. His every move is watched by the tiny photograph of a clown taped to the inside of the kit’s lid. Practice, this clown tells the boy. Take clowning seriously. And always: Be big.

Throughout New England and parts of upstate New York, summer means that the traveling youth circus called Circus Smirkus will once again be pitching its tents on dry-grass fields, inviting one and all to see circus acts performed with precision by the summer-camp young. Tightrope walkers. Acrobats. Jugglers. And clowns, but not the scary kind.

This year the troupe has nine clowns, including Sam, the smallest. Hunched now in a fold-out chair, dwarfed by steamer trunks and surrounded by other teenagers tending to their looks (“Do my eyebrows work?” one asks), Sam paints his cheeks, pats his face with a white sock packed with baby powder and studies with a portraitist’s care the clown face about to be shared with another fidgeting audience in the big-top tent a few yards away.

Not quite done. Not quite ready for that finishing touch, a rubbery nose the color and size of a cherry.

Every one of us clowns has a back story, and here is Sam’s.

Nearly 30 years ago, the train for the blue team of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus pulled away from Florida and up the Eastern Seaboard, a clown named Ted Ferlo and a showgirl named Mary Beth Combs in tow. The clown car was close to the showgirl car and, well, things between them blossomed like a bouquet of paper flowers.

When the train reached Rhode Island, Ted summoned the nerve to ask Mary Beth out for a slice of pizza. They were a team after that. She strutted about in feathery costumes, and he worked hard for laughs as a kind of Chaplin type. But he was definitely his own clown.

They took some time off after Ted injured himself falling from his stilts, but came back to join the circus’s red team and were part of the final tour of the animal trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams. They got engaged in an elevator before rehearsals for a show in New Jersey. The ring presented by Ted neither buzzed nor squirted water. It was for real.

They got married in Rome — the Rome of upstate New York, Ted’s hometown — during a short break in 1991, rejoined the circus and quit at the end of that season. After briefly trying to make it in show business in Manhattan, the couple returned to Rome, got what Mary Beth calls “regular jobs,” and began raising two sons, Sebastian and Sam.

But Ted kept his white-gloved hand in the game by becoming a marketing manager at the nearby Turning Stone Resort Casino, which allowed him to hire some of his circus friends. He also performed occasionally at the casino and at various fund-raising events, but only after rehearsing for hours in his garage or basement. He was a perfectionist.

The Ferlo boys became enthralled with clowning, especially Sam. At the age of 2 or 3, he began watching videotapes of Chaplin, Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. “You could tell he was studying them,” his mother says.

Ted soon began to include his sons in the act. They practiced their balance on a board and cylinder called a rola bola, learned how to juggle and became comfortable on unicycles. He taught them how to make every movement count, from a raised eyebrow to a pratfall.

“Make it big with your whole body,” Sam says his father would say.

But behind every “washerwoman gag,” with the three of them slapping one another with wet rags, and behind every “dead-and-alive gag,” with Sam playing a stiff-as-a-board stiff, were days of grueling, unfunny rehearsal. This is what it takes, his father would tell him.

Sam listened. He wanted to be like his father. Ted, though, was a worrier. When not wearing greasepaint, he worried about his job, his kids, his life; Mary Beth says he sometimes had trouble keeping the pressures of the world at bay.

Last summer, Ted helped Sam develop a short audition tape to submit to Circus Smirkus, a nonprofit organization that accepts only a few youths a year to join its troupe of about 30. Ted appears briefly in the tape, and only to assist Sam, who balances on his chin a wooden ladder that, at six feet, is a foot taller than he is.

ON THE LITE SIDE - Today's Tea Party

(click for better view)

Humor Times

ON THE LITE SIDE - You're Very Rational Today

Dilbert

THE LITE SIDE - The Mole People are Coming

Dilbert


Humm.... Mole People aka Tea Party?

ON THE LITE SIDE - Bin Laden in Pakistan

Humor Times

(click for better view)

ON THE LITE SIDE - Angry Birds, Addictive Gaming

"Sleep Can Wait. The Birds Are Angry." by RICK MARIN, New York Times 4/28/2011

YOU didn’t play Donkey Kong with your dad.

Mine wouldn’t have known what it was. And even if he did, it would have felt like a transgression of the respect/dignity boundary that used to separate men from boys.

The iPad has changed all that. It’s the ultimate generational equalizer. Take Angry Birds. The game phenomenon from the Finnish company Rovio, with 40 million active users, 75 million paid and ad-supported downloads and 2 million plush dolls sold, has become among the man-boys in our house a furious competition for power, points and digital “Achievement,” a word that flashes rewardingly on the Angry Birds screen.

The game’s principles are simple: you slingshot red, yellow or whatever birds at smug green pigs who in the game’s narrative have stolen the birds’ eggs. Hence their anger. The goal is to kill the pigs and destroy as much of their protective housing as possible with as few birds as possible.

The birds chirp and squawk. The pigs grunt and snicker as the game’s Tchaikovsky-lite musical stings insinuate their way into your brain.

Like everyone else, I was sucked in by the easy early levels, challenged by the later, trickier ones, then driven mad by Level “It’s 2 a.m. and I’m Wasting My Life.”

My wife now falls asleep to the sound of glass breaking, TNT exploding and digital farm animals meeting their violent demise, mystified by the simpleton she now finds herself married to.

And mother to. Because our two boys have joined their role model into this mind-numbing insanity.

“What level are you on?” became shorthand around the apartment. Diego, my older boy, soon eclipsed me with his 6-year-old reflexes. Meaning I had to stay up till all hours to catch up. And if I surpassed him, he freaked out.

“Don’t play Angry Birds,” he’d admonish me before going to bed.

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I’d say, in reassuring tones.

Then, of course, I did.

So now Angry Birds was making me lie to my own children. Pitting father against son, as we tried to yank the iPad out of one another’s hands. It’s like the world’s cheapest crack.

I found my older spawn under the covers of his Ikea bunk bed with my iPad, sneaking in late-night Angry-Birding of his own.

His younger brother, Kingsley, fights bitterly for Angry Bird time, too, then plays the game in a completely noncompetitive way. He just likes shooting the birds.

When I wasn’t around, the little addicts talked their clueless mom into blurting out my iTunes password, allowing them to buy the Mighty Eagle, a giant bird that, when activated, wipes out all the pigs.

The Eagle is a cheat. I refuse to use it on principle. Just like I wouldn’t watch the YouTube or Bing hints.

My friend Chris fell into that. Because he has girls. With no one to compete against at home, he had to make the game his enemy. It wasn’t enough to clear every level; he craved the Golden Eggs.

At one point, the sound went out on the game, a glitch that the diabolical Finns at Rovio claim to be working on. I immediately lost interest in playing. Turned out I was playing for the sound effects. Then, “for the children,” I went online and found out how to get the sound back. And sure enough, the monkey (or the Mighty Eagle) was on my back again.

There’s no Cold Turkey in the Angry Birds aviary. Addicts are on their own. My friend Jonathan forced himself to remove the game from his iPad. Like my college roommate who could stop watching TV only if he stuck it in his closet.

I’ve never had that kind of addictive personality. Which is why it mystifies me now, being trapped in these fugue states of pig-killing — porcicide. I get the attraction for the boys. What’s in it for me? Blowing stuff up? Mastering “levels”? Just having a mindless activity to shut down my brain at the end of the day?

Then I realized this is what my father did in the Spanish Civil War. When he joined the Republican army against Franco’s fascists, they assigned him to the artillery because he could calculate the trigonometric arc to fire a shell into the air and have it hit a target several hundred meters away. Which is exactly the skill required to slingshot those vengeance-bent birds at those fat (dare I say fascist?) pigs.

So I could claim it’s in my genes. But that doesn’t quite explain the death match I’m locked in with my boys over a 99-cent game. I’m talking about physically yanking the iPad out of their hands.

When Diego was ordering me not to sneak in any Angry Birds after bedtime, I asked why he cared if I got ahead of him. “I’m proud of you when you do something I can’t,” I told him.

“Yeah,” he had to explain to his slow-witted old man. “But I’m not proud when you do it.”

That this elemental Oedipal dramedy had to be explained to me by someone four feet tall is proof that not only is he better at Angry Birds than I — he may be smarter. And for that I bought him the $11.95 yellow-bird plush toy. And for his brother, the “bomb.”

My father died 15 years ago. He never knew his grandsons. But as I watch them execute their own trigonometric calculations to skillfully, passionately combat their foes, that word lights up on my screen, too.

Achievement.

ON THE LITE SIDE - One of my Favorite Songs