Category: looky

something cool I found on the internets

Make your own harai gushi

looky

Harai gushi / harai kushi (祓いぐし) are those “lightning wands” you see Shinto priests waving around, made of bundles of folded paper strips attached to a wooden handle.

The strips themselves, called shime, are also used to hang individually

A single one on a tree is a tamagushi (玉串 = たまぐし)

See also:

How-to links:

From David Lister’s
“Zigag Papers in Shinto shrines“:

O-shide are the simplest form and usually have a single zigzag. They may, howevr be double, anging in pairs. Go-hei (御幣) are also like twin O-shide, which re joined at the top. Harai gushi on the other hand are a whole bundle of zigzags tied to the top of a short rod. They look superficially like a cheerleader’s pompoms or “wavers”

Spaztastik

looky

Spaztastik provides “fire performers,” DJs, and rave equipment (lighting, decorations, etc).

It’s run by friend Scott, who worked with me at a startup. He was working as a sysadmin, but at the same time was a certified EMT, who was an acrobat and stunt-rode motorcycles for fun.
Web link of note: Spaztastik
(At http://www.spaztastik.info/)

Magic “which”

looky

I’m using .bash. For whatever reason, it doesn’t detect aliases!

This bit me on the ass recently: a party who shall remain nameless had the default grep aliased:

alias grep='grep -i'

Yuck.

So when I searched for some debugging info, I got thousands of lines of false positives. Very bad.

But when I did a “which grep” it just told be the location of the executable. Not that it was aliased. So it looked like my grep (bash on debian) was broken!

What I wanted for which is:

  • if there is an alias, display the alias
  • if not, display the path of the executable

So the magic command to make which behave like it should is:

alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --read-alias'

Just kidding. What that does is “crash your bash.” Who knows why. Crebbs told me that’s what it was (so much for nameless) and I almost locked myself out of my computer.

Turns out the “magic” command is simply

type

which is built in to bash. Gah!

Twisted Firestarter

looky

I’ve been playing a little GTA: San Andreas, and I gotta say, if there’s one thing I’m pretty stellar at, it’s fighting fires. I must be the only firefighter in Los Santos who has bought 4 homes just out of money earned from freelance firefighting.

Once you get to Level 12, you become fireproof. Not explosion-proof, just fireproof. This will be handy if I ever get the flamethrower…

But while you are fire proof, you can still catch on fire. This enables my new hobby- I wreck my car, which catches on fire, and then blows up, spreading flaming debris all over the street. Then the fire department comes, and parks in front of the car as they try to hose it down.

While they are busy, and partly blocking the road, I set myself ablaze. Then I walk to the cars blocked behind the fire truck and set them on fire with my own flaming carcass. If I can get enough cars on fire, enough of them blow up to keep the firefighters perpetually busy.

Soon the entire street is covered in piles of flame. Cars start blowing up without my help because they cannot escape the street inferno. A car blows up every ten seconds. People run around in a panic, but there is nowhere to go. I have created hell!

Sort of ironic since I am a retired firefighter. I guess it’s like Dennis Hopper in Speed, since he was the retired bomb squad guy who took up making bombs as a second career. Except it’s almost nothing like that.

Bernie Goetz And Frank Miller On The Subway

looky

I was just reading about Bernhard Goetz, the ‘Subway Vigilante,’ in a chapter in The Tipping Point, a book on epidemics of memes. I was reminded of Frank Miller’s Batman: the Dark Knight Returns.

Miller’s famous Batman story almost single-handedly ushered in a new era of comics for adults, and I have read it many times. Since I first read it in the early 1990’s when I was in high school and didn’t read the news much, I didn’t catch a number of the cultural references. I had no idea about the crime wave that was hitting most of the country, which would crest in the late 1980s / early 1990s (for those who are feeling nostalgic, don’t worry, I have a feeling the insanely high crime rate will be back soon).

Anyway, one such reference: In a subway scene, young hoodlums drop a hand grenade into a doomed woman’s purse. The news reports the story in a single sentence. As Batman mania hits the streets, an unemployed wrestler is inspired by Batman’s vigilante methods and attacks a “client” in a restaurant, dressed as Batman. Another, Taxi Driver-inspired maniac hears the backwards lyrics to Stairway to Heaven and goes on a shooting spree in a porn theater. This time, both incidents are blamed on the Batman by the media (no that porno theater shoot-out had nothing to do with Batman).

In another reference, the psychologist of The Joker analyses the Batman and how his personality predisposes him to violent situations, and how The Joker is a victim of his Batman-infested environment. Much as people at the time made excuses for Bernhard Goetz and saw patterns in his life that led up to this particular incident on the subway.

The epidemic of crime in New York in the 1980s cannot really adequately be described. I remember my parents telling me about how rotten the subway was. But when I finally rode the subway, it didn’t seem so bad. The difference? About ten years- they had ridden it in the mid 1980s, and I rode it in the late 1990s, after several waves of highly successful “clean up” initiatives.