Judging by the posts of the last month, you could be forgiven for thinking that the era I'm referring to is the era of government-funded space flight, what with the first successful privately-funded space flight and all, but that's not actually what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something much more significant. I'm talking about the end of regular posts to Kekkuli.

(Dramatic pause for that to sink in.)

Yep, for over three years we have managed to write some garble on this site of ours almost weekly, sometimes even more often. It's been fun, and still is, but it has just started to feel like work lately rather than fun. It might have always been work, but when you're not working you don't mind even if something feels like work. Sadly, a regular day-job is definitely a kekkuli-killer: first, Tero dropped out when he found one (a real one, that is) and now me. Yet another reason why we should all have robots that do our day jobs for us so that we can concentrate on more important things, like filling up the internet with barely intelligible garble.

I'm pretty sure this is not the end of it all. I'm pretty sure that sooner or later I will come across a huge urge to share something stupid with the world. The thing is, I don't want to feel bound to share something, which amazingly even such a tiny amateur site as this one can make one feel. I don't know who my audience is, whether they visit frequently or whether they're just search engine bots, but seeing that there are around 30 unique visitors per day to Kekkuli somehow brings with it some kind of feeling of responsibility of keeping them entertained. It's completely silly and stupid, but that's how it is. It's not like they'll find anything else worth wasting their time on the internet. So, chances are, the moment I've told everyone that I won't be posting on Kekkuli for the time being, I suddenly feel liberated and want to post. If that is the case, then all this text was for nothing. More likely, I will have a nice, long extended summer vacation, after which I come to realize I have all these things in my head and on my browser favorites-list that I want to tell people about, and I get back to kekkuling (hey, googling is a verb too!) For that reason, I want to give you, dear reader, the chance of not having to remember to check once every two months if I've come back to my senses already. Instead, I will send you an email notifing that Kekkuli's back in business. If you're interested in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, just send me a note (jani@kekkuli.com) and I'll add you to what will most certainly prove to be a hugely extensive list of people. The one and only message that will ever reach you via this list is "Hey, we're back". Whether that's in two months or two years, I don't know. We'll just have to live and see.

Until then, it's over and out for real. Not to leave you hanging in the air, I do have some suggestions where else to spend your precious moments here on Earth. Although I haven't read it myself in a long time, Fark.com was always a premium site for mundane content.
Lately, I've enjoyed The Smoking Gun's emails, which quite often have pretty amusing stuff on them. Most recently, they've added a Backstage section, where you can wonder over the crazy requirements stars have for their comfort while on tour.
And to put us in the company of giants, why don't you also go back to our highly poorly-organized archives (if I remember correctly I promised to do something about them about a year ago...) and see what kind of craziness we dug up over the years. And if you desperately need a reason to come read the Kekkuli front page, those space news on the right won't disappear anywhere. That's the good thing about automation.

Okay, that's about it. Ciao for now, it's been fun.

Things definitely advance rapidly when you start following them: after only a couple of weeks since I posted that last post on testflights to space, it now seems they're ready for the real thing, a private manned flight to space. Anyone living near the Mojave Desert should definitely head out to the launch pad on June 21st.

I'm off to a well-deserved vacation to Sicily. You would probably not even realize it due to the slow updating of Kekkuli recently, but I thought I'd let you know now that I actually have some kind of a reason. Check back in 9 days or so. Over and out.

So the going rate for a trip to space is currently 20 million dollars, and it looks like I won't be making that much money in this lifetime (unless it gets extended by a lot). So if I or any other regular Joe hopes to make it to space anytime in the next few decades, I think the odds are better that someone develops a cheaper way of making it possible. And it looks like we're getting there. This week, a privately-funded rocket/plane made it up to 70 km, which apparently is pretty close to the edge of space. At least on the video next to the story, Earth does start to look like a planet seen from space. According to the guy who designed the ship, the price for getting up to space will be 100,000 by 2020, later to drop even lower to the price of a "two-week luxury cruise". Now that's starting to sound feasible. Of course, an hour and half barely reaching space is a whole lot different from a shuttle trip to the moon, but it looks like we'll have to be happy with anything we get. It's still a long way to a space hotel, even though apparently we were supposed to have one next year. Oh, but that article was written in 1999, when I think a lot of other hypish things were written and predicted. Still, a swimming pool in space sounds pretty cool.

Time sure flies when you're having fun. Three weeks and not a single update at Kekkuli. Pitiful. The truth is, I wouldn't be (I'm not) so stressed about updating Kekkuli regularly, except for this nagging fear that if I leave it for too long, I'll never get back to it again, and Kekkuli would become another one of those sad, dead, obsolete websites that the internet is full of. Instead of the happy, vibrant, always-in-the-beat site that it currently is. *sarcastic snicker*
I do have a lot of stuff lined up for you all thanks to the long quiet period, but let me get the boring stuff out of the way first. I'm only saying it's boring so that my real geekness won't show from being excited about these things.
Have you ever wondered why a perpetual motion machine is not doable? Well, even if you haven't, you might still find the Museum of Unworkable Devices entertaining. You'll probably end up doing what I did, which is just to look at the interesting pictures ("This much text? My attention span isn't nearly good enough to read through it all") at first, but realize soon that you've actually read the whole thing trying to figure out why the devices shown in the pictures won't work. Fun and entertaining, just the way we like it.

Another fun and entertaining site (or program, more precisely) is GeoPlayer Mars. Somebody has gone through a lot of Mars images and created a pretty accurate 3-d map of Mars, in which you can travel at different levels of detail, depending on what kind of data there is (for example, the rover landing sites are quite detailed). It's really rewarding to zip around a whole planet, finding the tallest mountain in the solar system and the Marineris canyon system, which dwarfs Grand Canyon. Hell, this is the closest we'll ever get to exploring Mars at the rate that space exploration is currently advancing.

So have you given any thought to what will become of you? If so, you might want to remind your future self of your current plans with an email so that you don't forget about them by the time you make it to the future. This naturally requires that you know what your email address will be in the future, but hopefully by then someone will have solved the spam problem and it's no longer a big thing to keep the same email address forever (at least I'm hoping so, I'm not giving mine up, even though they show up on a lot of websites and hence the amount of spam is appropriately huge).
One of the things you might want to remind your future self of is to take and keep a job that you won't be replaced from by a robot too soon, but according to at least some sites, that's a futile quest, since robots will be doing pretty much everything in a few decades. Maybe it's my socialist upbringing in a welfare state, but I don't really see that as a problem at all: if robots do all the work, there should be enough wealth around to allow for a handsome "citizen's wage" to everyone. But maybe the reality will indeed be different: capitalists will own all the robots and let the working class starve to death. Either way, robots are cool.
And even if a robot does take your job and there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go, don't despair: you could always freeze yourself and wait for better times like the Williams family have done.
Ted Williams played for Boston Red Sox. Boston Red Sox's archrival is New York Yankees. The Knicks are a New York -team. Whew, for a moment there I thought I wouldn't be able to find any way to squeeze in that last word of the title to this post, which I just put at the end because it was phonetically pleasing. Doesn't help much, though, since I don't have anything to say about the Knicks. Basketball is weird.

There you have it, children, today's lessons: robots are cool, basketball is weird. Keep those thoughts close to you, and one day you might find them valuable.

Several years seems more like the time since my unimpressive contributions were last seen here on kekkuli.com, and for that there is only one thing to blame, lack of willingness to perform, a.k.a. slack. In all honesty I have been extremely busy with a new life here on the greener side of the Atlantic as well as with various very important issues revolving around day-to-day matters, mainly things like sleeping and eating. Life is hard. The hardest part is that I have missed out on exciting things going on here at kekkuli, such as becoming visitor number 8888. Besides, most of my clips or links or comments I have been saving and wanting to post here since the last time, are pretty much out-dated by now, so please forgive me if some of these things seem old. Some of my material actually dates back to the eighties. Be afraid.

Although I have been gone, I have not stopped visiting kekkuli.com as often as possible to see what is really going on, for we all know that this site provides you with it, whatever it is. One thing I seem to be missing lately in my dull and boring life is pure unadulterated (well, almost) fun and games.

Therefore I recommend you spend the whole day today playing an all-time favorite game of mine, Space Invaders, as well as another space-related classic game Asteroids. Also read this article about what would you do if you actually got a call from a real alien. Then read this text on what they might look like. And once the aliens eventually come for a visit, I guess it would look pretty much like this to them when they slowly approached our front lawn from a galaxy far far away.

Another alien who is now in office in California, and whose looks we all know all too well, got there because of a democratic election (well, if something like that is even possible in the United States), but was it because voters saw this video beforehand? Knowing California, my guess would be pretty much yes.

And coming back to games from the outer space I let myself drift to apparently, please do not open this link unless you want to doom yourself to hours and days spent eating little yellow dots and colorful ghosts. Another one of my old favorites. We even had a little arcade version of this game at home, until my brother decided to wash the battery compartment with water and soap. Luckily I can listen to Gollum rapping to help me forget.

If you wish to observe another type of games, with a healthy sexual message one might add, then Trojan games are for you. This link is of course for our mature readers only. But really, do we have any other kind!! Yeah, no wayyy dude!! And while on the topic of stupid stuff for brainless guys, here is a quick and very easy way to hypnotize almost any one of them. Only the blind will be spared.

My girlfriend recently bought a T-shirt that has a drawing of a building with a sign stating "Stupid Factory" sitting on the roof, and a little round boy's face peering out of one of the windows, looking slightly lost. The text below the drawing says "where boys are made". Damn funny.

Several years ago, a tv ad was aired in the US where Seinfeld and Superman acted together in a part-animation, part real-life advertisement for American Express. As is often the case with entertaining ads, it found itself on the peer-to-peer networks, which is how I got my hands on it. It's pretty funny, and worth the trouble to find.
Now the same trio has struck again, only you no longer have to be satisfied with poor-quality ripped-from-tv video files if you're not in the US, but can enjoy the ad right off your computer screen. My personal view is that the older ad is funnier, but "a uniform used to mean something" is certainly better than your average internet-movie clip. Have a look for yourself, I'll try to remember to let you know when they come out with the second episode, which they are promising "soon".

Vodafone has a very nice-looking site to browse around and to see what the future may look like. What I like about it is that it focuses on individual, everyday lives, which really is where most change happens, but usually without anyone really noticing it that much. The amount of technological accessories we'll be carrying out with us all the time will continue to increase, not to mention the amount of technology we'll be surrounded with. Mobile phones and bulky tv's will seem as old-fashioned as anything from the 1950's seems now. It's a brave new world out there, and I can't wait for it.

Okay, so technology is changing rapidally and radically, but what about us? Won't people become somehow changed and improved through technologies such as genetic engineering and/or nanotechnology? Most likely. Which is why, although at first it sounds like a grotesque idea, I'm actually for this planned tv show. But like they say, predicting is difficult, especially predicting the future, so probably our lives will not look anything like Vodafone thinks, and we won't look like anything those Channel 4 scientists think. Which, to continue stating the obvious, is why the future is so interesting.

And it seems like I'm not ready to let go of the past either, or so you may think about the amount of posts still hanging on this front page. I promise, I'll try to start dumping those earlier ones (October 2003? Jesus...) into the archives. But would you believe that I'm really busy? Thought not... If anybody out there is reading this site with a 33.6 modem, I apologize, but must also ask: what the hell are you doing? Join the rest of us in the 21st century, will you?

As a service to any people out there who might enjoy the occasional chat/newsgroup/mailing list, but are much too often bothered by annoying ignoramuses who write annoyingly stupid things, I forward this rather extensive list of insults you can pass onward to these aforementioned jerks:

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, and a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. Insensate, blinking calves, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, and a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane.

You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are Trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on.

This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away all of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a coherent statement was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a patch of paranoia among a load of babbling was hardly effective...

Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometime forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicapped space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

I've accidentally stumbled upon an excellent and quick test of how close peoples' sense of humor is to mine. It revolves around Mel Gibson's new movie, of which almost everybody has probably heard about already (at least you need to know that it's sadistically violent). I haven't seen it and most likely will not, but I read somewhere on the internet something that really hits a nerve in me. So, if you want to know whether it's worth your time to keep reading Kekkuli in the hope that I'll throw you something that you'll find amusing as well, here's the sure-fire test (which I've tested succesfully on a number of people already). If you think the following retitling of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is at least somewhat funny, you're not wasting your time (well, relatively speaking, of course): Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.

Still gets me smiling. Of course, having heard what kind of a movie Gibson directed about Jesus's life, one cannot help but to recall the Simpsons episode where Homer helps Gibson out with his newest production, making a film about Washington politics unnecessarily violent. I guess Mel picked up something from Homer after all.

The future is fascinating. Law firm tv dramas are not. I'm very interested to see what a combination of the two looks like. Those of you in the US can tune in, and only a few years ago I could only have lamented the fact that most tv series never make it across the Atlantic, as this one probably won't. But thanks to the internet, there is at least the possibility that someone uploads the show so that we deprived Europeans can get a hold of it too. We'll see how well this system works for more obscure shows, Friends and Simpsons is no problem, although watching Friends nowadays is. They should've ended that show a few years ago, now it's just tormenting to watch the actors make total fools of themselves acting out lines they must know are idiotic.

Back to the topic. Well, actually there isn't much more I wanted to add. Except that if there was something you didn't know about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence SETI- program, you're bound to find it somewhere on this site.

It looks like for the foreseeable future, the number of posts per week here in Kekkuli will be one, sometime around the end of the week. That's what happens when you start the working life: Tero dropped out completely, and I can barely hang on.

Ok, I realized there's been too much politics on these pages lately, so I figured it's better to get back to what we know how to do best (which is of course highly relative): providing links to amuse. So turn up the speakers on your computer, click here and have fun. Or if you're into ridiculing moronic people, you'll definitely get a laugh out of the complaint letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission about "nipplegate" at the Super Bowl.
Enjoy the break, I'm sure the Bush administration is bound to end up doing something worth commenting about soon enough. Ridiculing moronic people indeed.

Inadverently, this site is becoming an anti-Bush political blog. But I can't help it, it just seems he's constantly going around doing ludicrous things that just have to be mocked. In terms of science, it's changing the members of his Council of Bioethics to better suit his personal views (the link goes to NY Times, which you have to register for, but it's free and full of great content, so you might as well). In terms of religion, it's changing the constitution to better suit his personal views, namely by forbidding the marriage of same-sex couples through a constitutional amendment. For a rather good commentary on why this is evil, you can turn to the Economist, for example. Another good point to make is why stop at declaring marriage to be between a man and a woman? Why not go the whole way on what the Bible says about marriage? Somewhere in the back of my head there's this nagging thought that Bush would probably agree on all those points...

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