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One of the highlights of my year was getting a glimpse into my genetic heritage: Finding out that my ancestors most likely came from Iceland! So, to highlight that part of the past year, let’s look at the wonderful world of Vikings:

First, here’s some music to listen to while you read.

Next, let’s start at the very beginning: Your new word for the day is Ginnungagap, which is the word in Norse mythology for the vast nothingness that existed before it was created by the Norse Gods.

Let’s all say it together: Gin-nun-ga-gap.

Try to use it in conversation tomorrow, to practice the word in common usage.

Next, read what Wikipedia has to say about Vikings and the Viking Age. Among other things, the image of the Vikings as unwashed and ungroomed seems to be undeserved. Remember that many cultures back then put personal hygeine on the back burner, and many of these people considered the Vikings to be just a bid fastidious with their soap, and their bathing once a week whether they needed it or not, and their extensive arsenal of grooming tools. (“This week on the Discovery Channel: ‘Vikings, the First Metrosexuals’!”)

Read about the epic Viking Sagas and the Viking Heritage.

Viking food, feasting and recipes.

Vikings in Ireland.

Okay, enough of this educational stuff, let’s have some fun:

A Flickr comic strip set: Duck Vikings Raid Toronto.

Play an online demo of the classic Lost Vikings computer game. Man, I used to waste many hours on this …

Viking blades on Ebay. Check ‘em out, some of these are pretty sweet …

Kirk Douglas in The Vikings.

Full-size Viking ship made of ice cream sticks in Amsterdam.

The Viking 5, a stop-action animation film about Vikings.

Real-time strategy game: Tribal Trouble:

A group of Viking raiders got so drunk that, thanks to navigational ineptitude and the occasional tropical storm, they were shipwrecked and washed ashore on one of the South Sea islands. What’s bad about this is that the (now somewhat sober) Vikings decided to stay for a while and raid the native villages for fun and new loot.

Hagar the Horrible, the Viking that’s probably best known to most Americans (and my Outgoing Boss’ favorite comic strip, BTW.

Viking images on Google.

The 13th Warrior: Vikings team up with an Arab to fight a flesh eating terror. There’s some great dialogue too, like when one of the Vikings asks the Arab (Antonio Banderas), “When you die, may I have your sword? I want to give it to my daughter!”

Vikings on Flickr.

And finally: The Viking Kittens!

Jewish One-Minute Movies

The New York Minute Film Festival.

BBC

Amateur filmmaking is within the reach of most people this days, but putting together even a short feature is a daunting task — as I know personally as the producer of some ten-minute training videos that each took weeks to write, film, narrate and edit.

That’s at least part of the reason for the recent explosion of popularity of the one-minute film.

Check out these galleries of 60-second video works:

Brickfilms, stop-action animation using Legos and other techniques.

The One Minutes.

one minute video’s made by young people.

Croatian one-minute films.

Coming this March, the Lithuanian short film festival, sponsored by Pravda.

OneMinuteFilms.com

We’re a third of the way through, so it’s time for some random links!

License to Pill, a satire on our prescription drug culture, to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

(Via Zfilter.)

Really funny T-shirts
(via Found on the Web.)

Check this out: Signpaintr, a new Flickr group about hand-painted signs. (Via Drawn.)

This one’s for The Wife: The Virtual Tour of Heaven (via our friend at Look at This).

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You’re welcome!

One last post while it’s still Christmas Day:

Our friend ILuvNUFC at Look at This has posted lots of Christmas link, and you can find several bunches more of his Christmas links here.

And while I’m at it: hope y’all had a great Christmas!

Various junk for the start of the work week:

Check this out: Big Brother’s Julie Chen, in “But First!” (Once you get to the site, click on her picture to play the video.)

Somebody needs to set this to music, if they haven’t already …

Ohh, I need this: A coffee table with sliding top panels and built-in book hangers — kind of like shelves combined with a table.

Cooool …

I missed commenting all these cool news events last week when I was off the grid, like the end of Ted Koppel’s rein on Nightline, Jessica Simpson’s official breakup with ol’ whats-his-face, CNN’s Cheney-X scandal, and the release of the XBox 360.

And now Pat Morita has died.

I just can’t keep up …

I left the house without my cell phone this morning, which these days makes ya feel a bit naked. Of course, since I hadn’t been to work in 10 days, I’ve been so disoriented that it’s a miracle I actually had pants on, so being phoneless wasn’t so bad.

But then I got to work and Katie said that my receptionist called her to say that she left a message on my phone. “I didn’t bring my phone,” I replied, “What was the gist of the message?” “I don’t know, she didn’t say.”

I had my geek hat on almost all day today (figure of speech; no actual headwear was involved): I had to take the huge, high-quality color laser printer away from the receptionist and give it to New Boss in Training, then go to Staples and buy a new cheap printer for the receptionist.

To be fair, she was glad to be rid of the color laser, because of the bureaucratic firestorm that erupted every time an ink cartridge had to be ordered at $80 a pop (and print cylinders at $200 each).

Now that headache is no longer hers.

Anyway, most of the rest of the day was spent setting up a couple of new computers for our people — and when I say new, I mean used castoff crumbs from our High Holy Corporate Office that were too shabby to continue to disgrace their environs, but which are still better than what our people were using (one of the computers being replaced still had an ISA slot!) and we should be grateful to have them, and our jobs too.

Seriously, though: I took the liberty of opening up one of the units, and it was actually pretty cool: It was an IBM, and about the same size, shape and weight of the IBM PS2 that I bought in 1992. But unlike my 92 model, which I couldn’t get into even after taking out all the screws and snipping off three metal tabs, this newer model popped right open, with a hinged cover raising up from the back, and the front panel, with all its drive carriages tilted up as well for easy maintenance. The unit was still awfully small, meaning it could only hold one disc drive and one hard drive, the hard drive is SATA (meaning the cable is smaller than the standard ribbon cable) and the floppy ribbon cable is paper-thin.

Everything was so tiny (at least compared to my 27″ Antec case, which gives me plenty of room to move around), it was downright cute, just like a kitten.

Tomorrow I’ll try to take a picture of the inner workings so you can share my geek joy …

Busy getting ready for my next trip to Lubbock, so this’ll be quick: Yay Kim sent us some cool postards last week — click on the picture to view full size.

And thanks much Kimster!

Psycho New Jersey.

Psycho Mom — real video of a screaming woman. Can’t get enough of that.

Psycho Pong and other really cool games.

Psycho Studio: Edit your own shower scene.

Team Psycho, a competitive triathlon group since 1991.

Psycho Clown Posse paintball team.

Psycho Diver.

Lyrics to the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”, and the parody song “Psycho Chicken“.

Psycho Humor.

Miss Psycho, professional photographer.

Psycho Clown Tattoo.

Psycho Squirrels!

Psycho bands: Psycho Daisies, Psycho Zydeco, Go Psycho, a French neo-rockabilly band.

Psycho Goldfish: A great collection of games.

Finally: Here are some numbers that don’t mean anything: 01010100011011110110010001100001011110010010011
1011100110010000001110011011001010110001101110010011001010
1110100001000000111011101101111011100100110010000100000011
010010111001100111010001000000010000001010000010100110101
100101000011010010000100111100101110

(Althouh if you were to try to decode it, you would need to remove the line breaks of course.)

You’re welcome.

I knew all along that my rain report earlier today wouldn’t satisfy my nagging drive to post something today, so here’s some stuff:

Check this out: You’ve seen those those pen tablets, right? The ones you can use like a pen, except your drawing is input into the computer? Well, now there’s the I/O Brush, that takes the graphics program input device to a whole new level.

It’s Halloween, of course, and we celebrated by pretending we weren’t home. Okay, look, we paid our dues for years, using our hard-earned money to buy candy for the ungrateful brats of strangers, and a few years ago we decided that the little piggies could belly up to somebody else’s trough for a change.

And we have found the ensuing years to be peaceful and surprisingly guilt-free.

And anyway, we don’t really observe Halloween — All this fuss about horror movies and undead spirits and all, it’s just not us.

But, we have been known in the past to celebrate at any lame excuse, so tonight I scanned in and uploaded two versions of my best costume ever, my werewolf getup in 1987, here and here.

While you’re at it, check out the other Halloween pictures people have been uploading to Flickr these days; some of the costumes are really creative.

I’ve been busy working on stuff today (just STUFF, okay? Don’t push it …), so check out our friend Look at This‘s recent excellent collections of links on pot and other drugs, television, and comics.

That oughta hold ya …

One thing I’m starting to notice about the effect of five days of my living out of a suitcase and a snack bar is that my grasp of news events was a bit lacking. Of course, I couldn’t have commented on some of the stories anyway, having only limited PC access during that time, but still it was a weird feeling finding out a couple of days late about, say, the death of Rosa Parks, or the nomination of Alan Greenspan’s replacement.

In fact, here’s how slow I am: I didn’t know until this morning — after it was all over! — that the World Series was being played.

Hey, shut up — I’ve been busy. I had to change a tire, for Pete’s sake. That act alone devoured a lot of my ability to pay attention.

Now that I think about it, though, I do seem to recall that a baseball game was on the airport cafe TV in Lubbock yesterday, and that a lot of people were focused on it, but I didn’t think much about it.

In retrospect, it all starts to make sense.

I didn’t even know for sure who was playing, although I had heard in recent weeks that the White Sox were doing better than they had done since the bribery scandal of 1919, which involved “Shoeless Joe” Jackson and others (see, I do know a little about the subject), but, not knowing that The Big One had started, I was unclear on the participants.

Anyway: The White Sox won, and I say more power to ‘em. Not that whoever they defeated were less deserving, but unless it was the Cubs (and I feel fairly sure it wasn’t), they weren’t a bigger underdog.

It can be the Cubs’ turn next year.

Anyway: I did catch the occasional bit of news while I was in Lubbock, and sports news at that: The big news item of Wednesday was that Sheryl Swoopes is gay — an announcement that resonates in The Hub City because she first rose to prominence as part of Texas Tech’s championship Lady Raiders basketball team in 1993, plus the fact that she’s from nearby Brownfield.

This generated a lot of local chatter, Lubbock being the conservative bastion that it is, but is anyone really shocked these days when a female professional athlete turns out to be gay?

I’m more shocked when they’re not.

At any rate, ESPN reports that even though she had been open about her sexuality, the announcment was part of her new endorsement deal with a lesbian travel service, which only hires celebrities that are all the way “out”.

No turning back once you’re on the ship, I guess.

But finally: Here’s another piece of news — nerd-news in this case — that I found out just today, and only because I saw it on Look at This: William Hootkins, who played rebel pilot Red Six (aka Porkins) in the first Star Wars movie (he was the first to get shot down in the battle to destroy the Death star), has died of pancreatic cancer.

I guess I’m just not enough of a Force geek, because the movie roleI’ll always remember Hootkins (another Texas native!) for is his portrayal of Major Eaton in Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of two U.S. gvoernment officials who persuaded Indy to go searching for the Ark, then stonewalled his attempts to get any information on the ancient artifact after he had recovered it. (Hootkins’ character told Jones that it was being studied by “top men”. Like who? Indy inquired. Fixed stare: “Top … men.” Why do I think of Dick Cheney whenever I watch that scene?)

And one thing that I haven’t seen in a lot of the news reports is that Hootkins (love that name! HOOTkins! Ha!) has further geek cred as the voice of several of the elven and dwarven NPC’s in the talky RPG sequel, Everquest II.

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So anyway: I’m just about caught up on the news now (having heard about the Miers withdrawal several hours late), so I’m almost back to normal.