Daily One Inch Button - Old Style VCR

We, the people of the human race, were at one point in a way attached to these machines. At the same time, they were our liberators. No longer did we have to be in front of our television at a certain time on a certain day: as long as we had our VCR programmed correctly (assuming we could get that horrible blinking 12:00 to go away) and had a VHS tape (or BetaMax if you were cooler, I hear) in the machine and the tape wasn't full already, you could come home later and watch your recording of whatever you really wanted to see on PBS.

The death bell for the VCR started to sound when a certain machine called the TiVo(TM) made its appearance on the scene. Suddenly you no longer needed a tape. There was a lot less of an uncertainty. Still, considering that this is the kind of machine that my brother and I used to record the Fat video on MTV (am I dating myself? Yes, MTV actually used to play videos!) I think it still stands the test of awesome time.

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Daily One Inch Button - Janis Joplin

There are many sad facts about Janis Joplin. When she was in school, her skin broke out and she was overweight, the combination of which led her classmates to torment her and ridicule her. She started recording music in 1962 with the song "What Good Can Drinkin' Do?" Within a period of three years, unfortunately, her drug use was so extreme that her friends noticed a skeletal appearance to her (perhaps to counteract her youthful weight problem) and encouraged her to move home to Port Arthur, Texas to get better.

Janis took a year of courses at Lamar University but in 1966 she joined the band Big Brother and the Holding Company. By 1967 she was performing regularly but was back into drugs. She left Big Brother at the end of 1968 and began performing solo; she did quite well at that but it didn't stop her from using copious amounts of heroin. Indeed, it was believed that a combination of heroin and alcohol took her life at the young age of 27 on October 4, 1970. Some of her last recordings are also her best known ones including "Me and Bobby Mcgee" and "Mercedes Benz" which ironically was used by the company despite it being a song against them and materialistic indulgence in general.

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Daily One Inch Button - Vampire Bear Dancing

Vampire Bear knows how to dance, don't you know? He used the dance to teach people about the Hebrew letter Dalet, and how to read it. It's from his series, Learn to Read Hebrew with Vampire Bear. Aren't you familiar with that educational series? Every week, Vampire Bear teaches you how to read a different letter or vowel of the Hebrew Aleph Bet - did you know that the etymology of alphabet is the first two letters of Hebrew: Aleph and Bet? Did you know that without Hebrew, there wouldn't even be letters called Alpha and Beta? Fun stuff.

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Daily One Inch Button - Elyse Keaton

She was the mighty matriarch of the Keaton family and she kept things together. Elyse, like her husband Steven, was of the more liberal variety even though the actress who portrayed her was really not; I guess that's why they call it acting. We could always count on Mrs. Keaton for moments of humor and to discipline the children when good old dad just was being too nice. When the rest of the family was complaining about being stuck in their home due to a terrible snow storm, she managed to make the best of it and showed them how awesome it could be to spend time with your family in front of a fire.

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Daily One Inch Button - I ride my bicycle to work

How do you get to work every day? For me it's not so much of an issue because I work from home but for a lot of people it's a daily struggle; whether people choose to wait a long time in traffic while their cars go through gallons of gasoline that keep on going up in price, or squeeze into a regularly crowded bus, it can be quite unpleasant. The alternative can be quite appealing, if you think about it: riding your bicycle. What do you mean, you don't have a bicycle? The good news is that a bicycle pays for itself within a matter of months, especially as gasoline gets ready to hit five dollars a gallon and shows no sign of slowing down.

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Daily One Inch Button - Digital Camera

Go on. Tell me more about how digital "photography" will never catch on because it's not really about taking photographs and it's more about capturing images digitally. You have to admit that for the majority of people who buy cameras, that is enough. The majority of people out there aren't shooting from the hip lomographers, they are ordinary people who just want to get everyone in a circle to say "cheese" and every pose is as important as the next. John Proletariat isn't interested in the refraction of light off of real celluloid - he wants to be able to take a hundred pictures of his kid smiling with Buzz Lightyear and then erase most of them if they don't come out quite right.

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Daily One Inch Button - John Candy

I get a little teary eyed just thinking about it, honestly. The day of his death was one of the saddest in my life. I felt as though he were a friend of mine after seeing so many movies with him, from Uncle Buck to Trains, Planes, and Automobiles. Remember the scene in Uncle Buck where he makes the giant pancakes? How about the way he was amusingly sleazy in Splash? Who was Harry Crumb? It was John Candy, of course.

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Daily One Inch Button - Vampire Bear Pointing Up

Where is he pointing? Probably at some letter.

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Daily One Inch Button - Screech

Who was your favourite character on Saved by the Bell? I honestly have to say that for me, it was Screech. Why? All of the other characters had a lot more moments of triumph than of losing out. Screech was a regular underdog, though he did save the day more than once - remember when he and Lisa developed a special dance and won the dance competition while managing to really impress Casey Kasem? Somehow after years of pining for her, Screech let go of his obsession with Lisa. He was one of the few characters who made a reappearance in Saved By The Bell: The New Class. That's an understatement because he was on the show for longer than he was on the original Saved By The Bell. Believe it... or don't.

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Daily One Inch Button - Micro Processor

Ah, the microprocessor. Without it, we would still have massive rooms full of computer parts that would barely be able to do in the matter of a few months what my Blackberry is able to do in a few minutes. Who would have thought that processing could get smaller and smaller yet faster and faster? I imagine that there were plenty of science fiction / fantasy writers in days gone by that dreamed up computers that would fit in your handbag but just could not fathom how they would possibly work.

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