Learn to Dance with Napoleon Dynamite - This flash-based page breaks down every move that Napoleon does in his dance, tells you what it's called and how to do it, lets you watch it in normal time or slow motion and lets you choose what music to play with it. If you have been wanting to impress your friends with the ability to do dance just like Napoleon, then this page is for you.

(via Digg.com)

Stephen Colbert gets his own show - The Colbert Report is scheduled to debut early this fall. He's my favorite correspondent on the Daily Show, so this should be good. He'll be making fun of the pundit shows that cable news is peppered with.

This is a move that is making geeks everywhere happy. Kevin Rose was one of the last TechTV personalities left on G4TV. He was unhappy with the way his friends got fired and the way he wasn't allowed to do as much tech content as he wanted on the dumbed down incarnation of The Screen Savers. He also happened to be locked into a four year contract, so he couldn't quit. But, after a month of negotiations, he was released from his contract, and he's moving on. I see this as one more nail in the coffin for G4. They've already lost most of their good talent, cancelled or ruined the good shows they brought over and, what's most telling, they've exchanged all the relevant and profitable tech company ads for exercise equipment ads and infomercials like you see on PAX late at night. I'm hoping they'll close up shop soon.

On the upside, Kevin Rose has some good projects underway. Last night his downloadable tech show, Systm launched. I watched it this morning and it was really fun. It reminded me of some of the best segments from TSS. Now that he's doing this full time, it should be high quality and frequently released. If you like tech at all, this is worth a download. Rose has another project I like quite a bit: Digg.com. And the whole TSS team gets together once a week to record This Week in Tech, a 60 minute podcast of technology news and discussion.

I mentioned Stumbleupon a few weeks back, and here's another site for finding cool stuff: Digg.com. It's mostly for tech news, but it's set apart from sites like Slashdot because it is totally user moderated. Any user can submit a story, which then shows up on the digg all page. If you like a story, you just click the link next to it that says "+digg". The page doesn't even have to reload, you just see a quick visual effect letting you know that your digg has been recorded, and you can keep reading. Once a story has been dug 15 times, it's promoted to the front page. I've found a lot of interesting stuff at this site. You can hit the front page for a quick look at the most popular news stories, or if you have time you can sift through the most recent submissions and help decide what should be promoted. Take a look at my profile page to see what I've beein digging, what stories I've submitted and read my comments. I also added a "recent diggs" section to my sidebar at Danny's Blog Cabin. There is an RSS feed for my diggs. If you register there, let me know what your username is.

Another cool thing about Digg.com is that it was created by Kevin Rose of TechTV fame. His other current projects include This Week in Tech, the podcast featuring the old TSS gang, and Systm, an online TV show that launches on Monday. I hope that these projects can be successful enough for Kevin to be able to quit his job with G4.

After reading about the history of the Wilhelm Scream, a movie sound effect that has been reused in dozens of films, I found a page about other movie sound cliches. That lead me to some pages about movie cliches in general. I am hereby inventing a game: Movie Cliche Bingo. To make a game card you randomly place some movie cliches from the lists onto a 5 x 5 grid. Put on your favorite movie (or a really cheesy one for faster games) and mark your card as you spot cliches in the flick. I even made the first card for you.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." --Dwight D. Eisenhower (R), November 8, 1954

The bit about the Texas oil millionaires almost makes this seem made up, but Snopes confims that Ike did write this. They go on to say that he was a Republican generally in favor of smaller government, but he did feel that Social Security was worth the expense.

(via Snopes.com)

In somewhat related news, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist buys some $295 shoes from a store that's in the same building as the offices of Americans United to Protect Social Security. And, what do you know, they meet him at the door with a rally protesting the privatization of Social Security. Wonkette.com has pictures.

(via Wonkette)

Blender settings from 180 years ago

Another of my submissions to Digg.com got promoted to the front page. Huzzah!

Ready.gov is a little Department of Homeland Security website that they whipped up to both prepare you for surviving an attack and scare the crap out of you. But they uses pictures throughout the page that can be much more fun if you add some captions.

After exposure to radiation it is important to consider that you may have mutated to gigantic dimensions: watch your head.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the usually conservative editor-in-chief of US News and World Report, had an editorial this week about the estate tax. In the 2000 campaign Bush talked a lot about getting rid of this "death tax" which he claimed would put family farms and small businesses under. The funny thing is, that's not how it works. The first S1.5 million of an estate is exempted, and there are no examples of what Bush described ever happening. Bush and the Republican Congress began reducing the estate tax in the 2001 budget, and the House has a motion to repeal the tax altogether. This will cost close to a trillion dollars over ten years. Democrats have proposed a compromise that raises the exemption amount to $3.5 M per person. That sound more reasonable that repealing the tax. The article has more numbers and some good background on the issue.