August 28, 2003
Lost Stuff: Found and Sold
Good Lord! A fascinating combination of shopping and snooping, Unclaimed Baggage. Conveniently located in Alabama.
Horrifying Illness Name
Hilarious and horrible disease name of the day: Leaky Gut.
It's mentioned in the title of a book on "invisible illnesses" so you know there will be many many hits on anything on the web containing the phrase. Not to cast aspersions on people with imaginary, erm, invisible illnesses. I'm sorry your gut leaks, but please ask a medical or information professional to help you find reliable information.
I'm going to regret putting this entry up, I know it.
PS Tuesday's animal of the day: Sugar Gliders.
August 27, 2003
The Future is Then
There are other Futurama signs available, and it would be interesting to find other resemblances.
Is there a WPA poster encouraging you to bite my shiny metal ass?
Look familiar, Mike?
Learn from MIT
Couldn't afford an MIT education? Couldn't get in? No problem; now you can learn, MIT-style in the comfort of your own home. You don't get the paper to hang on your wall (nor, according to their site, do you get "an MIT education"), but it's about the learning, right?
August 26, 2003
McSweeney's
McSweeney's seems like it's put together by the kind of people I'd like to hang out with. Or maybe I'd hate them. They publish a variety of stuff, from open letters to obscure poetry forms to lists, some of which are interesting, and/or amusing. Some of it is written by people you may have heard of.
Knitting, eh?
From today's OED Word of the Day:
knitting, vbl. n. [...]c. A girl or girls. slang.
1943 C. H. WARD-JACKSON Piece of Cake 39 Knitting, girl or girls. 1946 J. IRVING Royal Navalese 104 Knitting, girls in the plural. The singular of this is ‘A Piece of Knitting’. 1962 GRANVILLE Dict. Sailors' Slang 68/2 Knitting, girl friend or girls collectively.
The rest of this entry is left as an exercise for the reader.
Old people don't get it
The tone of this story about aging and humor is very optimistic, but it has me wondering what sorts of crossword puzzle-analogs I have to do so that I'll still find funny when I'm older the things I find funny now. I'd hate to turn 70 and suddenly be nonplussed by "You know what my favorite TV show is? Xena, Warrior Princess. They should just call it The Patton Oswalt Masturbation Hour. Big moon faced amazon with a stick, beating people up -- what god did I please?"
Or, even worse, develop a fondness for the 3 Stooges.
August 25, 2003
Ads, ads, ads
Despite my nearly pathological avoidance of advertising, I was pleased to see Bob Garfield's Ad Review. You don't even have to watch the ads there, if you don't want to; you can simply enjoy his criticism of them. My favorite review so far: Hummer, the Truck for Jerks. And why is Bob Garfield's name so familar? I'm imagining he must be the guy NPR interviews after every Super Bowl to talk about the latest crop of stuff.
Librarians: so often the albino squirrel of print news
A librarian with a job on the side (are you surprised? Combine municipal employment and a female-dominated profession and you won't be.) as a dominatrix apparently makes for a hilarious news item. My favorite comment: "Shahan, who worked for 25 years at the Western Washington University Library, took the Concrete job without telling the Upper Skagit Library District's board of directors about her unusual predilections." OK, which do you think would be more likely to keep you out of a job: being into leather or bringing it up in your interview?
Also, I have the sneaking suspicion that part of the hilarity is the idea that a librarian might have an interesting home life. Who'd a thunk it????
August 22, 2003
They Don't Write 'Em Like They Used To
From the New York Times, October 29, 1852:
"A piece of romantic rascality lately transpired at Taylor's Springs, Lauderdale County, Ala. About a year ago, a man calling himself Anderson, a gay and elegant Lothario in appearance and manners, located there as a school-teacher, and soon married a young lady of respectable family. Not long since, however, a gentleman and lady, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, visited the place, and recognized in the handsome teacher and happy bridegroom, a man named Henderson, who had a wife and three children living at Baton Rouge. The intellectual and fascinating bigamist, that night, stole a neighbor's horse, and sloped to parts unknown."
All commas are from the original.
Why my home town is cooler than most of yours
Rumor has it that the Grand Opening of the Fry's Electronics in Renton will be the 29th of August. It's the first one in Washington.
August 21, 2003
The Gender Genie
A couple guys got together and developed an algorithm to guess the gender of a writer from the writer's text. Some other folks put together a web-accessible implementation of that algorithm. It thinks more than half of the Craig-written blog entries that I tried it on were written by a female. I'm too self-absorbed to have tried it with Sarah-written entries.
The Accent Archive
A moderately cool collection of recordings of many people from different places reading the same paragraph. The IPA transcriptions of the readings are pretty interesting, too.
August 19, 2003
Software and Seventies
Wow, I don't think I'll be porting a huge number of text entries into a new format again anytime soon. But if you must port your blog, do it this week while watching I Love the 70s on VH1 (which also has a whole new look).
August 18, 2003
Welcome to the New Order
The long-threatened conversion to Movable Type has finally happened. Sorry to all you search tool users who got here off the old GM links. If you're interested in what we said about something, try a search from here.
August 14, 2003
Many of the nodes in my social network may enjoy this
Of the cool Friendster-backlash pages mentioned yesterday on memepool, The Onion's is my favorite.
August 13, 2003
Mmm... earworms
Not three days ago, a friend of mine told me that the German word for a song stuck in your head is ohrwurm (earworm). And now, This article about the phenomenon shows up on Blogdex. I have found in my research that the implantation of the parasites is more effective if the recipient's brain has to go looking for the song. So, if I say "Laughter, tears, hopes, fears," you're more likely to want to punch me than if I just whistle the tune.
In other toe-tapping news, we have Eigenradio: the music without the redundancy. 'Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you're tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you're hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear.' 100% of visitors to my office have asked that I turn it down. It's really effective for killing earworms.
August 12, 2003
Oh, fine
It's been on Blogdex too long for me to ignore:
The most common match is Galadriel, apparently.
August 06, 2003
Matrix, shmatrix; I'm talking weight loss
Based on the "Human Battery" headline, I'm guessing much of the blog action regarding this article has people discussing whether The Matrix was stupid after all. Trust me, it was stupid (fine film, but that bit was stupid, and making it all another dream doesn't make it any smarter). What I like about it, though, is the possibility of an external calorie sink, so everything you don't need to live runs your iPod or something. I've been thinking for a few years that nano-bots wandering around converting fat to energy would be a nifty idea (except for the raging, brain-damaging fever).
Logo of the Day
The Pest Risk Analysis group in the USDA has the best logo I've seen on any federal website. The Homeland Security guys should take a hint from those threatening-looking bugs.
Book of the Day, Phrase of the Day
Today's book of the day is "Mammal Tracks & Signs: A Guide to North American Species" because the review features today's phrase that pays: "scat photos."
August 05, 2003
Joss is a fuckin' genius, part N
Just watched "Once More, with Feeling," the musical Buffy episode. Someone I used to know had the same basic idea a long time ago (some malevolent force makes everybody act as though they're in a musical), but Joss executes it as few others could. I think two of the reasons he pulled it off as well as he did are that he loves musicals and he loves television. He talks in the commentary about how he's sorry that it ran long (8 minutes long, he says), since part of his thesis is that yes, you can do this in an episode of television, if you try. I'm guessing the length (and maybe the letterboxing) is why those of us who were catching the episodes on FX haven't seen it. It's also a demonstration of what a widescreen frame should look like. This is a marked contrast to other Buffys, which upon further reflection look empty on the sides of the wide frame; and even Angel, which looks to me like it was composed wide, but with a conscious effort to make it look okay in 4:3. "Once More, with Feeling" is clearly never intended to be shown in 4:3, and it's beautiful. (Perhaps) unfortunately, because it's just another episode, and therefore advances the various season 6 arcs, it's not the best "Watch this and you'll see why I think Buffy is so amazing" episode. I think "Hush" is a good episode for that purpose, though. And despite my reluctant acceptance that Buffy is fundamentally a 4:3 show, if you come over to my house, I'm liable to show you the widescreen "Hush".
One sentence, many concepts
From an article in the Guardian: "The blast, which happened at the Marriott Hotel, was "very likely" to have been carried out by a suicide bomber, Jakarta governor Sutiyoso, who, like many Indonesians, goes by a single name, said."
August 04, 2003
August 01, 2003
Love, soft as an easy chair
Elsewhere, I ran across this description of love (from the charming and delightful Roxann Ireland), and it struck my fancy:
Love is a big, flashing neon sign that says, "Get away from this person while you still can!"I'm just kidding.
No, I'm not.
I'm too much of a big, sappy dope to wholly endorse the sentiment, but I surely recognize it; and I think maybe there's a little big, flashing neon sign in all of us.