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Pam's past fun links of the month!

August 2010: Africam, a selection of wild animal cams in Africa, some with night vision! Often the animals are far away from the camera, but the sounds are always incredible. (Sorry for all of the ads, but that's how they can fund such a reliable site. I've looked at many other animal cams that don't have anything online most of the time, but this one does. Observe the time zone difference, too -- for a good part of the day in the US, it's nighttime viewing in Africa.) Note that the blue heron nest cam in Washington state is still going (intermittently, it seems) at the beginning of August, and so I'm leaving it up. Aren't they pretty!

July 2010: The blue heron cam is still operating in Washington state. The herons have apparently located near transportation -- occasionally you can hear a passing train or airplane in the distance on this webcam. Also from last month, one eagle chick from Hornby Island hasn't quite fledged yet, and so there may be some viewing time left in July. Both web cams have sound!

June 2010: A repeat from last month -- The eagle cam from Hornby Island, with sound! Because that eaglet started later than The Norfolk Botanical Garden's Eaglets, there's still plenty of action at the Hornsby nest! (The Norfolk nest is occasionally visited, but the eagle cam will shut down at the end of June.) You can still check for other wild animal cams on Wild Earth TV.

May 2010: The Eagle Cam from the Norfolk Botanical Garden! This is a wild bald eagles' nest with three chicks! They're expected to start flying on their own by the end of May, so enjoy them while you can. If that eagle cam is too slow for you, check out The Eagles of Hornby Island, with sound! That eaglet is a little younger and will probably stick around longer than the Norfolk birds, although service can be spotty at times. It also doesn't have a live manned blog with people responding to questions on eagles, as Norfolk has. For more wild animal cams see Wild Earth TV.

April 2010: With Easter coming early this month, I'm reminded of a classic South Park episode, "Quintuplets," featuring Janet Reno in a bunny suit. (Of course, true to South Park's tacky nature, the Romanian agents mispronounce the Russian word for grandmother repeatedly -- accent on the FIRST syllable, it's BA-bush-ka, boys!) That episode aired right after Reno raided Elian Gonzalez' relatives' home in Miami to return the child to his father in Cuba. There was another memorable Easter special by South Park, the "Fantastic Easter Special," featuring the "Hare Club for Men". Of course, South Park is an incredibly tasteless and profane show, and should not be viewed by anyone easily offended.

March 2010: "Spring Time" by Jackie Matelski, Tabi Starjnski, Leslie Kim and Amanda May (Video) -- With Spring coming in the month of March, I chose this short rough animation by UW art students. There's a story behind it. When I walked into a Wisconsin coffeehouse over the holidays, I saw an amazing mural on a wall there. (I had withheld the name of this coffeehouse for the privacy of the artist, but it has now closed, and so I'll reveal that it was at Dunn Bros. coffee at 6430 Green Bay Road in Kenosha, WI. - PR 20-Aug-2010) It was a combination of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and Munch's "The Scream," only with a red-orange theme and some creative changes. I was impressed, as I'd seen other artists' variations on "Starry Night" (e.g. there's one hanging on the wall at Daddy Maxwell's Arctic Circle Diner in Williams Bay, WI), and had considered eventually painting my own southwestern-themed "Starry Night" for my home. ("Eventually" as in, when I have time, which usually means years from now or never.)

I asked the barista who had painted it, and he pointed to the artist's signature -- a former employee of theirs turned art student at UW, Jackie Matelski. (Now folks, let the girl finish her college education -- don't be harassing her with requests to paint Starry Night variations on your walls... at least not until the summer when she doesn't have classes and could probably use the money.) So I started Googling her name to find any art she may have online. I found a few photos which were OK, and references to her ceramics, but nothing I liked as well as the mural pictured to the left. Also, I found the animation short linked to here which was obviously done for a class at UW. The teacher has uploaded other students' work, like The Route, Space Dance, Lonely, Picnic, Money Does Grow On Trees, Hot Potatoes, 3 Easy Ways to Cut in Line at the Supermarket, and Restless (this one's a little crude). I can't say they're as good as professional animation (hence the need for comedy writers), clearly they're just rough animation -- you can see where erasures were made, the figures are pretty crude and there's rarely color added. But they're SHORT, a little different, and kind of fun.

February 2010: A "Vegan Video" by Dan Piraro from www.bizarro.com -- after so many political "fun links," I thought we should have a vegetarian "fun link" for a change. After all, this is a VEGETARIAN "fun page."

January 2010: An ABC segment on Pat Robertson's Haiti remarks -- last month's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" fun link was of the noble variety, now this month's is more of the screw-up variety. I like this segment because it takes the time to juxtapose Robertson's Haiti remarks with other craziness the man has said through the years, for a sort of timeline effect. Of course with Robertson, there's too much material for anyone to fit it into just one news story.

December 2009: John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" song with war footage. (For those who can't handle the graphic war footage, here's a Christmas card version, and a Lennon snapshot version.)

A close second was the Mark Fiore cartoon "Obama Interruptus". It tries to poke fun at the war escalation in Afghanistan, announced just before Christmas 2009.


November 2009: South Park's famous "Starvin' Marvin in Space" episode -- although it has crude language and includes stereotypes of just about everyone, it does a great job of spoofing TV evangelist Pat Robertson (part of the flashback series of Pat Robertson's crazy remarks -- see archives from the first half of November 2009). This was selected after the Huff Post linked to clips of a new "South Park" episode spoofing Glenn Beck, and with Robertson's friend Bob McDonnell winning November's governor race in Virginia, I remembered that South Park makers enjoyed mocking Robertson's infamous frequent requests for money from his viewers.

Added bonus: After linking to South Park's "Starvin' Marvin in Space" episode, I complained that Ethiopian languages don't have "clicks." Even if they did, African language clicks don't sound like that, and so I decided to give my readers a listen to some REAL African clicks. Here's Miriam Makeba singing the "Click Song" in 1966 in the language of the Xhosa, one of the more populous ethnic groups that uses clicks. (Makeba died in November of 2008 after a concert in Italy.)


October 2009: "Yet Another '9/11 Was An Inside Job' Song".


August/September 2009: San Diego Zoo's Panda Cam with Bai Yun and her cute cub !


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