- Yeah, yeah, yeah...I swore off the Oscars last year with a blistering attack on their politics and morality, but darnit, I love make Oscar predictions, so here we go:

Best Picture: Toughest category to pick this year. I am going with Babel, because it has a political message, and Hollyweird loves a movie with a message.

Best Director: Scorsese finally squeaks one out, but he should have won for Goodfellas.

Best Actor: Forrest Whittaker. However, I wish Peter O'Toole would win. IMO, O'Toole is the greatest actor to never win an Oscar. How he didn't win for Lawrence of Arabia is beyond me (he was awarded a life-time achievement Oscar, which he almost turned down.)

Best Actress: Helen Mirren. Easiest pick of the night.

Best Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson. 2nd easiest pick of the night.

Best Original Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine.

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Departed.

- 50 things we know now that we didnt know last year:
http://www.tbo.com/life/MGBUFCRF5WE.html

- Do you have what it takes to be president? Take the following quiz to find out:
http://www.mentalfloss.com/quiz/quiz.php?q=40

-Almost lost a finger during shop-class in high school? Don't worry about it. Soon, you will be able to grow a new finger if you lose one:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/19/ap/tech/mainD8NCNHQO0.shtml

- The origins of meanings, phrases, sayings and idioms:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/index.html

- I would never, ever move to New York city. Heck, I have no plans on ever leaving the Phoenix area, but I found the following article fascinating. It is a guide for how to move from one city to another. Some very good tips on city-dwelling, even if you arent planning on moving:
Moving to New York City

- A list of the most difficult novels to film. I agree completely with the selections. A truly wonderful list:
http://www.screenhead.com/reviews/the-unfilmables-a-list-of-the-hardest-novels-to-film/'

- Love to debate people on the internet? I use to spend WAY TOO MUCH time arguing with people over messageboards. I grew out of it, but the following website is devoted to people who want to start a topic, and then discuss/debate/argue about it:
http://www.convinceme.net/index.php

- I hate the Daily Show and the Colbert Report (by the way, his real name is pronounced "Steve Col-Bert", not "Stephen Colbare". He changed it when he got to Hollywood.) I have always hoped that someone would create a conservative version of both these shows to fight the lies and hypocrisies each show spews out to the public. Well, Fox News is working on such a comedy show. Here is an article all about it. However, don't get your hopes up. Just today I read that Fox News only signed on for two episodes of the show. Apparently the humor in the first few episodes was very hit-and-miss.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117954244.html?cs=1

- Have you heard of the battle between HD-DVD and Blue-ray? They are the two new DVD technologies fighting it out for supremacy of your TV and computer. Both sides have major contributors. HD-DVD has Time/Warner and Microsoft. Blue-ray has Sony and the adult entertainment industry. I have followed this struggle fairly closely, and from everything I have read, the battle is almost over. Looks like HD-DVD will win. Here is an article explaining why:
http://news.digitaltrends.com/talkback158.html

- Since I am a huge Batman fan, it's only natural that I would also be a fan of The Shadow. Alec Baldwin did a movie adaptation of the pulp crime-fighter 12 years ago, but the movie was dreadful and tanked at the box office. Well, now the director of the wildly popular Spider-Man movies is taking a crack at Lamont Cranston. Personally, I don't care for Sam Raimi's directing style, and I think the Spider-Man movies are mediocre at best, but at least someone is willing to take another shot at the man who can cloud men's minds:
The Shadow returns

- Since we are on the subject of movies...do you think that every morning, when Harrison Ford wakes up, he thanks the almighty that he met George Lucas? Probably not, but he should. Yesterday uncle George told the press that they are finally doing a 4th Indiana Jones movie. It starts filming in 2007, and will be released in 2008. 2008 is shaping up to be a very interesting movie-year. A new Batman movie, an Iron Man movie, and now an Indiana Jones movie.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240177,00.html

- NASA plans a permanent moon-base by 2024. It's about time!
Back to the Moon

- Ten gadgets that changed the world:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredphotos6/

- I didn't know that Hunter S. Thompson grew up in Louisville. That must explain why his descriptions of the Kentucky Derby are so darn funny and bizarre. Here is his most famous article about the 1970 Derby:
http://www.derbypost.com/hunter.html

- The 15 best places to waste time on the internet:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128122/article.html

- The top 15 strangest coincidences (I am sick of the Lincoln/Kennedy coincidences, but the rest of the site is worth reading.)
http://2spare.com/item_51964.aspx

- Place the 50 states onto an empty map of the U.S as quickly as you can. I scored an 88% accuracy and finished the test in less than 3 minutes.
http://subliminalmessages.com/vip39.htm

- As many of you know, I am going back to ASU this spring to finish my degree in computer science. I am taking another crack at calculus. I haven't taken a calculus class in 10 years, but I am looking forward to the challenge. I found the following ASU calculus readiness test on the internet. After looking over the test, I am encouraged. I can answer most of these questions, but not necessarily in the proper fashion. I think I will print this test, and do each question correctly before my class starts.
http://math.asu.edu/fym/calcreadinesstest.html

- A few weeks ago I received a very funny, and very surprising phone message from the madman and socialist-stooge Alec Baldwin! When I answered the phone, it sure seemed like Mr. Baldwin was actually talking to me. He knew my name, knew where I was from, even knew what I do for a living and that I like to play video games! After some investigation, I found that the official NBC website for the TV show 30 Rock (which I highly recommend you watch. It's a well-written show) allows you to send personalized voice messages recorded by Alec Baldwin to anyone with a phone number. I suspect whomever played this prank on me also played it on many of the people who read this site:
http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/25/Floridian/Heard_from_Alec_Baldw.shtml

- Do you know the difference between "its" and "it's"? Do you also know the difference between "there", "their" and "they're"? Take this test to find out. I scored 10 out of 10, and it's because of my website that I scored so well. Four years ago I would have missed a few of these:
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/cgi-shl/quiz.pl/its_there_quiz.htm

- More optical illusions! Can't get enough of this stuff:
http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

- Perhaps you heard of a new internet technology called RSS (Real Simple Syndication.) It allows you to pull information from numerous websites, and display all of this information on a single website, so you don't have to bounce from page to page to get your information. If you find yourself viewing lots of websites each day, I highly recommend you look into RSS:
http://www.techiediva.com/weblog/2006/11/the_simple_way_.html

- How do the TV networks display the first-down line during football telecasts? Here's how they do it:
http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/ref/first-down-line.htm

- 12 years ago, ol' slick Willy fooled me into thinking there is life on Mars. Now scientists have found even more evidence that life could exist on the red planet:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=420833&in_page_id=1770

- Plan on buying an Xbox 360 (which I own), a Playstation 3, or a Nintendo Wii for Christmas? The following website has charts comparing all three:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/xbox360_vs_ps3.asp

- Do you know who invented radar? Thomas Edison? Inventor of the radio, Guglielmo Marconi? Brilliant German scientists? No, no, and no. If you haven't heard this before, I doubt you will believe it...American 1930s movie starlet Hedy Lamarr helped invent radar! You can read all about her here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

- USA Today's list of the most influential fictional luminaries:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-10-16-influential-people-list_x.htm

- Three emerging technologies that will someday have a profound effect on your life:
http://www.thetechzone.com/?m=show&id=631&page=1

- 29 Things to do when your internet connection is down. I am adding one to the list...work on my Jim Tressel voodoo doll.
http://www.keepersoflists.org/index.php?lid=6094

- The life of a trivia junkie:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/10/24/jennings.jeopardy/index.html?eref=rss_showbiz

- Another NBA season starts in a few days. The only thing new on the Laker's bench is Phil Jackson's artificial hip. I doubt the Lakers will make the playoffs. My predictions for the season:

Eastern Conference finals: Chicago over Miami in 6.
Western Conference finals: Phoenix over Dallas in 6.
NBA Finals: Phoenix over Chicago in 5.

Here are the ESPN power-rankings for the new season:
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/powerranking?season=2007&week=-1

Since I am doing predictions, let me give you my predictions for the elections a week from Tuesday. I give the democrats a 55% of winning the house, and a 40% chance of winning the senate. I think the democrats pick up 20 seats in the house, and 4 in the senate. One of the best political writers in the country, Michael Barone, writes about how things might actually shake-out on November 7th:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/10/the_story_behind_the_polls.html

- The U.S. population passed 300 million a few days ago. America has the highest birthrate among all industrialized countries. Why? Simple. Americans can afford their kids. People in Europe and Japan are over-taxed, over-regulated, and under-paid, so they cannot afford to have kids:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061017/D8KQCF780.html

- It may sound grotesque, but everyone of us has parasites crawling inside and outside our bodies. Scientists have found a particular cat parasite which they thought was harmless, but large concentrations of it in a woman can effect whether she gives birth to a boy or a girl. This may explain why in most countries the birthrate for males is slightly higher than the birthrate for females:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1920165,00.html

- Americans are kicking butt in the Nobel prize awards this year. Since the inception of the Nobel prize, no country has more Nobel winners than the U.S. Here are 20 things you may not have known about the Nobel prize: (link might not be working.)
http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-06/departments/20-things-nobel-prizes/

- The 10 worst portrayals of technology in films. I could add 50 more examples to this list. One in particular that jumps out at me...in the movie Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum, using a Macintosh, uploads a computer virus to stop the aliens. Thank goodness the aliens, who live light-years away and have virtually nothing in common with us, also use Macs!
http://www.gideontech.com/content/articles/326/1

- A funny article from Steve Martin, in which he apologizes for all of the horrible things he has done in his life:
http://www.stevemartin.com/world_of_steve/print/a_public_apology.php

- During the 2004 elections, blogging became a huge part of how people received their election news. I found one particular website especially informative. A little known political scientist by the name of Jay Cost made absolutely perfect predictions about the 2004 election. His analysis, while not only being uncannily accurate, was so darn thorough that he was even predicting election numbers in small, but important districts which even the republicans or democrats could not predict. He stopped updating his website last year, but he now writes for realclearpolitics.com. Read his latest articles to get a good feel for how the congressional elections will turn out this November:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/author/jay_cost/

- Participating in online gambling is not illegal in the United States, but running an online gambling site is. However, Microsoft may have found a way around this. Microsoft is considering allowing Xbox 360 owners to play Texas Hold em on their Xbox site, and winners would earn Xbox points, which they can then use to buy products and video games for their Xbox from Microsoft. You can already buy Xbox points using regular money, so you can see Microsoft opening a whole new can of worms if they proceed with this. The following article explains more:
http://www.canada.com/topics/technology/story.html?id=e374bd6a-2850-4cf3-b4ff-77ec18c67c3e&k=37387

- The 25 most important questions in the history of the universe:
http://www.neatorama.com/2006/07/24/the-25-most-important-questions-in-the-history-of-the-universe/

- I keep talking about free online storage options on this site, and now a really good one has emerged. AOL has created a completely free website which gives you 5 gigabtyes of online storage. You can put anything you like into the space they give you, and then share the files with anyone you like. I am going to start putting all kinds of stuff onto my XDrive storage area:
http://www.xdrive.com/

- I taped and watched the whole Path to 9/11 docudrama on ABC. At first, I wasnt sure if I would watch it, since I am justifiably weary of any political drama appearing on any network. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Path to 9/11. It is definitely conservative, it definitely trashes the Clinton administration (especially Madeleine Albright. She comes out as a twisted, politically correct hag-beast) and it definitely taught me some things I did not know regarding the lead-up to 9/11. I found the whole thing riveting, and Harvey Kietel was excellent as John O'neill. Famed conservative historian Victor David Hanson writes about the 9/11 documdrama:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/the_path_to_911a_postmortem.html

- I am tired of people comparing the war in Iraq to Vietnam. The two are completely different. The war in Iraq is going much better than the war in Vietnam ever did. The next time some crazy left-wing nut (also known as a moonbat) gets in your face and tells you Iraq is another Vietnam, quote him or her the statistics from the following website:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg1954.cfm

- Imagine this...your nine year-old son or daugther is in the championship baseball game for his or her local town little league. Your team is guaranteed a win if you walk the other team's best player, then pitch to the worst player on the other team, but there is a problem...the worst player on the other team has cancer! What do you do? It's a tough moral question. This exact situation came up in a little league game in Utah last summer. Read the following article, and then comment on what you would do. What would I do? I would have walked the best player on the opposing team, and pitched to the cancer kid. After all, I have to think about the 20 players on my team who worked their tails off during the regular season to win the championship. The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/rick_reilly/08/07/reilly0814/index.html

- The 10 creepiest television commercial icons of all-time. I absolutely agree with #5:
http://www.yesbutnobutyes.com/archives/2006/08/ten_creepiest_i_1.html

- Sunday, August 13th was left-handers day. How do you determine if someone is left-handed? There is no hard-core rule. I use the simple rule of which hand do you write with. If you write with your left-hand, you are left-handed. Here is just a small list of famous left-handed people, and two websites devoted to celebrating left-handers day:

Thomas Jefferson (the declaration of independence was written with a left-hand!)
Benjamin Franklin
George Herbert Walker Bush
Bill Clinton
Ross Perot (that's right. All three presidential candidates from 1992 were left-handed.)
Clint Eastwood (at the end of Dirty Harry, which hand does he use to throw his badge into the pond?)
Robert Redford
Bruce Willis (watch Die Hard again. Which hand does he use to hold his gun?)
Tom Cruise
Angelina Jolie
Jerry Seinfeld (remember the check-signing from the Super-terrific happy hour?)
Mark Hamill (Which hand does he use to throw the rock which brings down the gate on the Rancor?)
Will Ferrell
Oprah Winfrey
Nicole Kidman

I write left-handed, but I use my right-hand for various tasks:
I throw right-handed.
I bowl right-handed.
I golf right-handed.
I play tennis and ping-pong left-handed.
I throw darts left-handed.
I drive right-handed.
I smoke left-handed (I would burn myself if I even tried to smoke right-handed.)
I eat left-handed.
I tie my shoes left-handed (people get creeped-out when they watch me tie my shoes.)
I drink left-handed.
I use scissors left-handed.
I kick with my left-foot.
I talk on the phone left-handed.
I play NTN trivia with my right-hand.
I use my mouse with either hand.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/28075/a-hand-for-the-lefties
http://www.lefthandersday.com/

- 20 reasons why college football is better than pro-football. I love both, but I really do prefer college football. I love his comment of "history demands that Michigan must win." You cant fight history!
College Football versus pro-football

- More Iron Man real-world technology. A mechanical exoskeleton that can increase your strength ten-fold!
http://ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?&aid=61474

- Over 50 years ago Alan Turing devised a test for checking if a computer is truly artificially intelligent. It's appropriately named The Turing Test. No one has yet to create a machine which has actually passed this test. Computer scientists debate whether any machine will ever pass this test. I think someday a computer will pass this test, but such a computer still will not be artificially intelligent. Instead, it will simply have so many possible responses stored in its memory that it gives a human-like answer no matter what you ask it. Read more about the Turing test here:
http://tt-blogs.com/comment.php?id=47

- Have you ever noticed that the floppy-drive inside your computer is labeled the "A drive" and the hard-drive in your computer is labeled the "C Drive." What happened to the B drive? Why skip the letter B? Here's why:
http://ask.yahoo.com/20050304.html

- Summer of 2005 was a big season of movies (at least it was for me.) We got a new Batman movie, and a new Star Wars movie. Sounds like summer 2008 will also be a big season of movies. We finally get an Iron Man movie, and now Time-Warner has annnounced The new Batman movie. It will be titled "The Dark Knight." The word "Batman" does not appear anywhere in the title. I like it, but it's not all good news. Heath Ledger will play the Joker. Ugh. Yes, the Heath Ledger from Brokeback. I think this is horrible casting, but it's not quite enough to completely ruin my enthusiasm. I am hearing that the new Batman movie will be darker than Batman Begins, and the Joker is going to be really nasty. Personally, I thought Jack Nicholson was the quinessential Joker; a twisted monster with no regard for human life. Others thought Nicholson's Joker was too soft and fuzzy. Here is the official press release for the new movie:
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news06/060731n.php

- Famous sports traditions:
Famous Sports Traditions

- Strange, little test I found on the net. How quickly can you click a series of boxes using your mouse? Look on the right-hand side of the following website to test yourself. The best I could do is 30 clicks in the time given:
http://www.lookuptables.com/

- I love stories about home-made jetpacks. Especially the ones where the inventor operates it for the first time, and runs into a high-voltage power-line. The following inventor didnt make that mistake, but he did give the jetpack a rather familiar, and cliche'd name:
http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/skywalker_jet_packs_it_works.html

- Supposedly this is one of the hardest, yet most rewarding puzzles on the internet. There are 137 parts to it. Definitely need to think "outside the box" to solve these puzzles. One afternoon I worked up to page 8 before I stopped. I might give it another crack:
http://www.deathball.net/notpron/levelone.htm

- The top 100 name brands, according to Business week:
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2006/

- FilmCritic.com picks the top 50 film endings:
Top 50 Film Endings

- The following website asks you a series of questions to determine which superhero you are most like. Apparently I am most like Green Lantern, which disappoints me. I have never cared for Green Lantern:
http://www.seabreezecomputers.com/superhero/

- Is there a certain word or speech pattern that you repeat far too often during conversations? For example, do you use the word "like" too much? Maybe you use "uh" or "um" too often to pause in between sentences or thoughts? Personally, I use the word "just" far too often when I am talking. It's a passive-aggressive trait, but I have never tried to stop doing it. Here is a website which gives you tips on how to curtail those annoying verbal habits we all have:
http://www.mtannoyances.com/?p=417

- A few months ago I wrote about how your cell-phone, TV signal, internet signal, and every other digital signal you use every day will all come from one source. The following article explains how this could all happen in just three years time. Soon we will think of the internet in the same way we think of the radio; free, always available, and accessible from everywhere:
Nation-wide access in three years

- What kind of genius are you? According to this article, there are two kinds:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html

- A few days ago marked the 150th birthday of Nikola Tesla, America's 2nd greatest inventor. If it wasnt for Tesla, you wouldnt be reading this website, I would be out of a job, and you wouldnt even be sitting in a well-lit room. Over 100 years ago, the great and all-knowing Thomas Edison was too stubborn to give up on Direct Current (DC), but Tesla knew that Alternating Current was the wave of the future. Tesla proved to the world that if you want to wire an entire city with electron-goodness, you had to use Alternating Current. Here is a biography of Nikola Tesla:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla