davidgagne.net — The personal weblog of David Vincent Gagne

• Drop everything and go watch Teenage Zombies right now.
• The Green Day rock opera album American Idiot is now a Broadway show.
• After a grueling 58 hours of continuous play, John McAllister of Seattle, Washington officially became the best Asteroids player on the planet.
• I also spend a fair amount of my life trying to determine what went wrong, so I can appreciate a stroke of luck.
• Well this is pretty crazy: There are a bunch of functioning oil wells hidden around Los Angeles. The first one they feature is about two miles from my house; it’s covered by giant paintings of flowers right next to a high school football field. (I always thought it was some funky art project!)
• A few drinks and a little idle curiosity have led to the discovery of a hidden chapel under a family home.
• This is what I keep wondering about Dancing with the Stars: “Oh you mean world champions like Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Ocho Cinco, who make millions because of their brilliant hand-eye coordination and ability to move in a rhythm with exact timing and precision? How will that translate to dancing?”
• It has a double penis, is as long as a tall human, and lives in a heavily populated area of the Philippines. Yet somehow the giant lizard Varanus bitatawa has gone undetected by science until now.
• I’ve been skeptical of solar power for a long time. There are simply too many cloudy days. (Not here in LA, but certainly in Florida.) But I’ve always been a fan of wind. [ed: I have since changed my stance! Solar power is awesome!]
• The reason why Apple is going to win — again — with the iPad, is because the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about Flash, software, files, directories, RAM, or whether their machine has a CD-ROM drive. They just want stuff that works.

• Potholes are a serious and dangerous road hazard in Los Angeles. Designers in Italy are promoting the idea of a brightly-colored second layer of asphalt which would turn roads into a sort of skin, so you can easily tell when there’s a pothole to avoid.
• It’s so very hard these days — but so very important — to remember that the email address on the other side of the screen is a real person, a lot like you.
• There is much to be learned from analyzing photos of Michael Bublé being stalked by a velociraptor. But you might have more fun looking at a few dozen movie posters recreated to feature Garry Shandling.
• There are only a few single English word domain names still available to register.
• Grab the Airplane and Go: True Tales from the Airplane Repossession Business
• The Los Angeles Department of City Planning audited itself and learned that it does a very poor job of planning.

• Looking for free WiFi access? There is, of course, an app for that.
• Great idea: Are You An Asshole? (.com)
• I really need to get my tickets for the 10th Annual Kickspit Underground Rock Festival!
• You’ve seen the Periodic Table of Candy and the Periodic Table of Booze, of course. There are lots of periodic tables of things on the ‘net. That’s why someone made a Periodic Table of Periodic Tables.
• It’s Literally, A Web Log: An English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word “literally”.
• The big, unspoken problem with immortality is that eventually we’ll run out of room on the planet for any species that doesn’t die. Luckily (?) for us, there’s lots of room in the world’s oceans, because scientists have recently discovered a jellyfish that lives forever. I, for one, welcome our new jellyfish overlords.

• That’s What Bea Said!
• Avoid customer service prompts and long hold times with GetHuman.com. (And, of course, there’s an iPhone app for that.)
• The graphic Jish found depicting a Visual Explanation of Family Relationships is the first I’ve ever seen that made sense.
• If you live here, you already know this: Los Angeles is a lonely city.
• “If you believe what you read in scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.” This is (probably) why everything you think we know might be wrong.
• Behold! The Periodic Table of Science Fiction!
• Chris Coyier explains the genius of asking for the hard part first.

And if you care about football and the NFL Draft at all, ignore what all the pundits are predicting and make sure to read what Cold, Hard, Football Facts says in A Tale of Six Quarterbacks:

Tebow not only passed the ball far more effectively than any of these No. 1 overall picks (Peyton Manning, Tim Couch, Eli Manning, JaMarcus Russell, and Matt Stafford). It pays to remember that, in his spare time, he set the SEC career record for rushing touchdowns. Oh, and he won a Heisman Trophy and two National Titles. Other than that, he didn’t do much.
But Tebow didn’t just put up big stats … he put up supremely efficient stats. He was more accurate, and produced more big passing plays, and was more likely to put the ball in the end zone, and more likely to keep it out of the hands of opposing defenders, than any of the recent collection of No. 1 passing phenoms to come out of the SEC.