Robert Budd Dwyer (November 21, 1939 – January 22, 1987) was an American politician in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He served from 1971 to 1981 as a member of the Pennsylvania State Senate representing the state’s 50th district. He served as the 30th Treasurer of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1987.

In the early 1980s, Pennsylvania discovered its state workers had overpaid federal taxes due to errors in state withholding. Many accounting firms competed for a multimillion-dollar contract to determine compensation to each employee. In 1986, Dwyer was convicted of receiving a bribe from a California firm trying to gain the contract. Throughout his trial and after his conviction, he maintained that he was innocent of the charge and that he had been framed.

On the morning of January 22, 1987, he committed suicide with a gun during a televised press conference at his office in Harrisburg, the state capital.

(via Wikipedia)

+ Julian Assange – 60 Minutes Interview

Last evening 60 Minutes aired a thirty minute interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  It was interesting to hear his take on the role that Wikileaks seeks to fill in the pubic discourse.

From the profiles that I’ve read on Mr. Assange most people who spend any amount of time with him say that he is intelligent, eccentric and kind of an asshole.  I was expecting him to be off putting during the interview but he came across as a man with good intentions.  Oddly he sounded more like a politician running for office than an activist when outlining some of his foundations goals.  I think this interview will work in Wikileaks favor as they try to legitimize their origination in the mind of the public.

It’s nice to see that a grassroots organization can have such a huge impact on global events even if, and largely because, they are a  pain in the ass to the power brokers of the world.

Watch the interview HERE.

+ Incredible Stuff I’ve Made – Solar Powered Death Machine, Banana Skin Coat, etc.

I hope to be like this man when I own a home with a garage in which to build things.

He built a gigantic solar concentrating parabola, also known as a DEATH-RAY, out of a 6 foot satellite dish and a ton of small mirrors.

He built cyclone box, which is basically a self-contained tornado, with the sole purpose of setting off fireworks inside of it to see if they are more enjoyable inside a spinning vortex of air.

He made a Banana skin coat and a costume of a giant box of candy.

Bottom line is that this guy rules.

Disregard the 1993 Geocities feel of his webpage and realize it adds to the charm.

Visit his site HERE.

Five of the top career fields for the future.  Nothing that surprising, but if you’re looking for a career change then become a nurse.

+ Buy Coffee

and insulate it with an endothermic reaction…

Get a free heatswell HERE.

+ Buy Furniture

Brent Comber

+ How will Obamacare affect you?

Here’s a nice concise rundown of how the new healthcare system will affect you.

+ Late Pass on the Tickle Fight

How did I miss this?

Representative Eric J. Massa, who resigned from Congress amid allegations of sexual misconduct, vehemently denied any wrongdoing during a television appearance on Tuesday even as he described having tickle fights with staffers in a house they shared.

(via NYTimes)

+  The new Balance and Composure song Kaleidoscope is soo fucking good.  Listen to it HERE.  They’re releasing a split with Tigers Jaw in May which features 4 new songs from both bands.  I’m really looking forward to that.

+ 4Chan founder interviewed at the TED conference.  Nothing really profound happens in the interview but it is interesting to learn that he started the site at 15 and he doesn’t look as nerdy as you would think the founder of 4 chan would look.

+ This is pretty amazing.  The Bloom Box is a small wireless device that can generate power without being connected to the grid.

Depressing Things

+ Girl sings a cover of Tik Tok by Kesha on youtube and gets flamed horribly.  People on the internet are pricks.  StreetBoners has some funny stuff to say about it.

It’s more abuse than anyone in human history has taken. She’s like an experimental crash-test dummy for a bleeding-edge form of online punishment: rapid-fire, anonymous, continual, explicit, targeted, specific. It’s life-changing, serial-killer-making EGO DESTRUCTION.

Even the worst American Idols are not exposed to this degree of punishment. Their millions of mocking viewers can only laugh in their livings rooms — they can’t directly lash out…

Observations:
A) WHAT the fuck is wrong with her parents that they could expose her to this? This girl is not just overweight, she’s also got some kind of developmental issue. WHERE the fuck are her parents? The trailer can’t be that big.

B) WHAT the fuck is wrong with humanity? It’s so great to see how people REALLY act when they have anonymity. It’s like staring into a stranger’s eyes from a subway platform once the subway doors have closed — you each know the other guy can’t physically get to you, so all bets are off.

C) Every ten comments or so, someone surfaces who can’t bear the raw and terrible honesty of nature. They tell her how beautiful she is, and how if she keeps at it, she can make all her dreams come true. These people are worse than the haters; by giving her these droplets of hope, they are keeping her addicted to the punishment channel like a smack addict crawling through a burnt-out poppy field.

What a clusterfuck.

+ If you’re worried about the economy read this article and figure out that the future is looking bleaker than you had imagined.

Last spring, an organization called JobNob began holding networking happy hours to try to match college graduates with start-up companies looking primarily for unpaid labor. Julie Greenberg, a co-founder of JobNob, says that at the first event, on May 7, she expected perhaps 30 people, but 300 showed up. New graduates didn’t have much of a chance; most of the people there had several years of work experience—quite a lot were 30-somethings—and some had more than one degree. JobNob has since held events for alumni of Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard; all have been well attended (at the Harvard event, Greenberg tried to restrict attendance to 75, but about 100 people managed to get in), and all have been dominated by people with significant work experience.When experienced workers holding prestigious degrees are taking unpaid internships, not much is left (for everyone else.)

Graphic Designer Eric Testroete decided to build a big-head paper craft costume for Halloween this year.  Eric says has was inspired to build the costume by the big-head mode found in many video games.

Man, I’m really jealous of this.  I’m glad this guy was able to pull it off so well though and didn’t just half-ass the construction process or print it out at a low resolution.  His other photos of the building process are really interesting.

Jamie Hewlett is best known for being the guy behind all of the Gorillaz art work.  OMGPosters just did a post on him.  Check it out HERE.

+ CCAS Interview

Aural States interviews one of Charm City Art Space’s founding member’s – Mike Riley.  Pretty good interview.  It’s interesting to read about how CCAS got started.

Read that HERE.

+ Can’t you See I’m Busy!

If you have a boring desk job and a nosy boss Can’t you see I’m busy will help you pass the time during your 9 to 5.  There are 3 games to choose from so far including a pong-style game, a space ship game, and a jenga type game – all stylized to look like word documents or spreadsheets.  It would be better if they created games that haven’t been ripped-off so many times.

+ How Dali Payed the Bills

“About 30 years ago Dali was still forced to go out and more or less hustle his pictures to pay his hotel bills. One evening, drinking in the St. Regis bar in New York, he ran into a machinery manufacturer from Cleveland, A. Reynolds Morse. Their minds met and Mr. Morse bought a Dali on the spot for a piddling sum, a thousand dollars or so. He also said, as Dali tells it, “Any time you need another thou, send me a picture.” Dali sent him a good many in the course of time – Morse now owns about 400 Dali works, and is building a private museum in Cleveland to display them. If he ever disposed of them at current market prices, from being a minor-league Cleveland millionaire he would become one of the 57 richest men in the world.” Dali’s Dollars, Robert Wernick for LIFE Magazine, part of an article on Dali’s money-making, 1970

Also, a thousand dollars in 1940 is about $15 thousand now, adjusted for inflation.

(taken directly from Constant Siege)

Bre Prettis is one of the creators behind MakerBot – a low-cost 3D printer that uses plastic filament to create anything you can dream up.

“Right now we have a way of distributing and manufacturing products that is completely alien, compared to what people were doing 100 years back. We shop for things, often online, and we find the thing that most suits us. We order it. It was probably built very far away, and it ends up getting shipped to some other place and some other place and some other place before it comes to you. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. You could just shop for something online, download a file, and print it out at home on your 3D printer.”

Full Interview HERE.  (via DesignGlut)

+ Interesting People

I didn’t know about this until right now but google reader, which is what I use to read blogs, has a section where they show you what blogs some really interesting people subscribe to.

I subscribed to Thomas Friedman (NY Times foreign-affairs columnist)and Jason Kottke (runs a huge blog, kottke.org).

Check out the rest HERE.

+ Best of Wikipedia

“A twice-daily updated collection of some of the best reading on Wikipedia.”

A couple of my favorites:

Mary Toft hoaxed doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits.

Experiments in the Revival of Organisms is a 1940 motion picture which documents Soviet research into the resuscitation of clinically dead organisms. The film depicts and discusses, without going into much technical detail, a series of medical experiments. It closes with a dog brought to clinical death by draining all blood from it, leaving it for ten minutes, then connecting it to a heart-lung machine. After several minutes, the heart fibrillates, then restarts a normal rhythm.

Visit Best of Wikipedia.