Having the odd occasion to try to determine if mail sent in a foreign language is spam or not, I have found Babelfish entirely invaluable. Combine that with the old chaining of machine translations game, and you end up Lost in Translation. I had not been able to find any particularly enjoyable phrases to Babelize, though I find myself suddenly excessively fond of what happens to "Forced Perspective" if you include Chinese, Japanese, and Korean: "Perspective of the resistance." That's us.
I neglected to post this bizaare beached whale remains story when it was first brought to my attention, but as with most rotten things, it hasn't gotten appreciably worse in the meantime. Bonus phrase: "a 'skeleton suspended in a semi-liquid mass within a bag of skin and blubber'."
It's hyper-infectious, ubiquitous, and we don't know what it does. Maybe we could use it as a gene delivery service. Bonus phrase: Nanette van Loon.
I happened to see a summary of results from a recent trial of a hormonal contraceptive for men. Some of the details: "[T]here were no major adverse reactions to treatment and no deaths. Roughly one-third of subjects had a side effect from the study, the most common of which was weight gain." Also, "The rate of 'azoospermia', that is, a sperm count of zero was 90% in the group which received testosterone injections every 4 weeks and 75% in the groups which received testosterone injections every six weeks." I'd feel better about higher rates of azoospermia, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to get a shot in the ass every four weeks. Maybe, though. Anyway, "The company with which we collaborated, Organon Pharmaceuticals, is excited about these results and is therefore funding a larger Phase IIb trial of 350 men in 14 countries based on a similar regimen. If the regimen continues to be safe and effective in this upcoming Phase IIb trial, Organon will use the results from our completed study and the Phase III trial to apply for FDA approval for this method and men will finally have a contraceptive option besides condoms, vasectomy and abstinence." And that will be a good thing.
The thing I found most notable about this Wired article about how the Mac G4 Cubes have inspired fanatical loyalty among those who purchased them, and are continuing to sell well on eBay, is the complete absence of references to NeXT.
In trying to track down information on whether the Seattle Lusty Lady (they don't have a useful home page, or I'd link to it) was going to be closing, I ran across this mention that the SF Lusty had been acquired by an employee co-op, rescuing it from closing. According to an earlier report, there were no plans to close the Seattle branch.
Salzburg's mayor is embarrassed over a new statue unveiled on the eve of a visit from Prince Charles. The photo on the BBC page is discreet but does convey the essentials, if not the full enormity.
That makes today's bonus phrase "two-foot erection."
Apparently a French 75 is made with gin, while a French 125 is made with brandy. Both involve champagne, ice, sugar and lemon. Your alcohol research fact for the day.
Do you want to write a book? Sure, we all do! Here are a few suggestions for topics that are currently not covered well in the world of books that are actually in print (updated as I think of stuff):
Boat and RV upholstery projects
Good tattoo ideas, including the meaning of mysterious symbols and characters
Phrasebooks and foreign language dictionaries aimed at eating in restaurants (see Chowhound's translation card, we need more of this!)
Baby names in Vietnamese: specifically, American names with their meanings explained in Vietnamese.
Heeey, Nazis hate American libraries!
Northwestern U. has a lovely archive of US WWII posters. My other favorite source for such lovelies is the National Archives collection Powers of Persuasion.
A wonderful archive of historic home-ec books! *Swoon*
Things that it would be nice to have growing in my garden, if I had a garden:
mint
rosemary
basil
thyme
strawberries
lavender
coriander
flowers
Further searches have come up empty for Bob Newhart slash, but there is Starsky & Hutch slash, f'r chrissakes. And much, much more. I also feel like I should have mentioned the likely pairing of Howard/Jerry, which plays on the frequently seen theme of apparent antagonists secretly yearning for one another. The Spock/McCoy, if you will.
Yes, I'll join the herd of bloggers linking to a report that "the more men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop prostate cancer." Five times a week seems to be the magic number, as in "those who had ejaculated more than five times per week in their twenties, for instance, were one-third less likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer later in life (BJU International, vol 92, p 211)." And to save all of you the trouble of reading the article at all, one more quote: "The team speculates that infections caused by intercourse may increase the risk of prostate cancer. 'Had we been able to remove ejaculations associated with sexual intercourse, there should have been an even stronger protective effect of other ejaculations,' they suggest. 'Men have many ways of using their prostate which do not involve women or other men,' Giles adds." Just goes to show that being master of one's domain isn't healthy.
Some guy has cobbled together a posthumous interview with Philip K Dick. All of PKD's "responses" are genuine quotations, and the one that made me rush over here and post the link is "The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum." It seems a very Dick thing to say, and reminds me a little of staring at the static between tv channels (or better still, between satellites) until it starts to make sense, or EVP (which the interview pretends (not very hard) to be collected from).
I got to wondering the other day if there is any 70s Bob Newhart Show slash fiction. A couple naïve Google searches have yielded nothing promising. So, if anybody out there runs across any, I'd be a little bit interested to know about it. And if there isn't any, why not? Star Trek is an older show, and Kirk/Spock may be the canonical slash. Are we to believe that the idea of Bob/Howard or Bob/Jerry or Bob/Howard/Emily just doesn't fire anybody's imagination?
Everybody's favorite hot chick, Alyson Hannigan, talks about life, acting, and her courtship with Alexis Denisof. One particularly crushing remark: "It was also a challenge as an actress, because I am not attracted, sexually, to women in the slightest." Surely she just hasn't met the right woman.
Jon Stewart appeared on Bill Moyers's show on Friday. PBS has a transcript available.
I've often heard of the top ten stolen cars, but here's the whole list. I don't think that it's actually the best way to justify your purchase of a Boxster: your spouse may encourage you to buy a Eurovan instead.
A loyal reader forwarded this gallery of the Hanford "Alphabet Houses." (We're all sorry about the pop-ups) The site doesn't (as far as I could tell) get into the history of the houses (the gov't decides to import a shitload of folks, so builds a shitload of houses in a hurry for them), but having recently toured residential Richland, I must note the irony that a bunch of houses that were designed for rapid (rather than durable or especially interesting) construction have held up astonishingly well for 60 years or so, and the neighborhoods look less uniform than anything I've seen built in the last 30 years. Where's the best place in your house to be during an air raid?
Some guy thinks blackmailing porn sites is a good idea. As some of the operators in the article imply (rather strongly), that industry has friends who don't much care for being messed with. It's a shame we probably won't hear how it plays out.
Yahoo has a listing of their news photos by most emailed, most viewed, and a best rated system. Memepool is highlighting a guy who's trying to make a comic strip out of every day's top 3, but he seems to be having a tough time of it. I think that the top emailed pictures are another way to look at what people are interested in, like blogdex. Warning: you may or may not want to peek into people's souls.
An excellent review of a comic book-- that is, the review is really neat, the comic was apparently stupid.
Ocean cruising & cruise ships 2003 by Ward lists Carnival Conquest as "not yet rated."
The CDC's cruise ship inspection program awarded the ship an 89 out of 100. A detailed report is available, listing the problem areas.
They had an outbreak of the Norwalk virus in 2002.
There are a few reviews on epinions.
Cruise Critic also has a review.
Cruise Reviews also has some cruiser comments.
Cruisedirectonline, also.
Expedia has a very professionally written review.
How much a nerd am I? Here's this cool and strange author, Harry Stephen Keeler, who I heard about in a commentary track for a Futurama episode on DVD.
