Or maybe not. At lunch today, some folks at a nearby table were going through a presentation packet whose cover sheet said "Magazine Program Launch". There were no visible "confidential" or "proprietary" markings, just the Costco and Ingram logos. I wasn't able to see any details of the pitch (other than seeing that a US map was on one page), nor hear any of the discussion, but I can only infer from the evidence I did gather that your local Costco will be getting a newsstand.
Another misheard library book title: Mira Nair: Real Estate Agent. Actually Millionaire Real Estate Agent.
Ushering in a whole new era of exploitation of living organisms, scientists working at Harvard have coerced algae cells to carry tiny polystyrene beads around. When will the enslavement end?
I'm considering getting a Powerbook, in part because of its NeXT heritage, and for some reason that got me thinking about the old Sprint word processor, which is what Borland called Mark of the Unicorn's Final Word product. I loved FW so much that I bought Sprint during the brief window when it was available. It never made the transition to Windows (as far as I know) — not that that makes me love it any less, but it did hasten the product's demise.
Thanks, Bill Spitzak, for a fine word processor (and thanks especially for the Emacs mode in Sprint, and providing the means to hack it up to be even more Emacs-like)
Update: I ended up just getting another Dell Inspiron. It's not as lovely as an Apple product would have been, but I have all this infrastructure in place, and I'm just too lazy to change.
Here's how to get your boat and possibly your butt into the water around here. I would like to find a nice place to float around in my lifejacket (a little like tubing, but with less stuff to carry in the car). I tried at one park and the lifeguards told me that I had to stay in the swimming area and was only allowed to wear the life jacket in the wading portion. Lame! I want to float all over, though I suppose I would like to avoid being chopped up by a speedboat.
Info on local rivers is out there, too.
Lawsuit! Allegations! The Island is apparently strangely similar to Parts: The Clonus Horror! But is Ewan McGregor in teeny red athletic shorts?
Blockbuster's late-fee gambit seems not to have paid off. It seemed unlikely that they'd be able to make up in volume the $250-300 million they were losing by discontinuing the fees.
I had occasion to see the abbreviation AI5 today, and I thought "Wasn't that that cheesy science fiction show with Daryl Hannah?" Then my retrieval system came up with the tagline: "VR.5 is real." Then IMDb told me it was Lori Singer (whose character was called Sydney, I surely hadn't remembered). And that it featured Tony Head, too.
Sarah: And Penn Jillette and Adam Baldwin. Man, remember VR? And jetpacks?
Wow, is July over already? Just assume that I did something incredibly productive in all the time I wasn't reading.
One hundred more poems from the Japanese, compiled and translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Quite an interesting collection, with bonus dirty poems. Three stars for lyrical and steamy both.
I Am The Messenger, Zuzak (Y)
Wow, this book was great! Recommended for adults and high school type persons. I liked the structure and the writing style and the characters. Five stars for giving me chills and misting me up.
2gether 4ever: Notes of a Junior High School Heartthrob, Larson (Y)
The author kept a lot (all?) of the notes passed to and fro in Junior High and publishes them in a slim volume of photographic reproductions. This did not appeal to me. One star for premise and packaging, but not much else.
Odd jobs: portraits of unusual occupations, Schiff (Y)
I love this sort of book-- part noveltly, part actually educational. Pictures and short paragraphs about the jobs and the people that do them, from beer taster to tampon tester. Three stars for vocational education.
Siberia: a Novel, Halam (Y)
Great description, character motivation, and pacing are far-too-unusual additions to the great premise (the last hope of the genes of long-gone mammals in a frozen future). Four stars for a great science adventure.
Plus: got a compliment on my outfit from a patron
Minus: patron trashed a co-worker's outfit in the same breath
Mitigating Factor: patron believes world is controlled by lizardlike aliens.
Is it still a compliment? You make the call.
Did you know there is a Shinto shrine in Granite, WA? Neither did I! It was mentioned in the information about the Aki Matsuri festival sponsored by the Eastside Nihon Matsuri Association.
As previously reported here, Pluto has no business being called a planet. 2003 UB313 gives us yet another chance to rectify the situation.
In at least some cases, texting profanity in response to a (legitimate) marketing SMS message has the same effect as sending an explicit opt-out request. I'll be sure to publish any surprising excerpts if I can get my hands on a list of what constitutes "profanity."
Pretty much everything you need to know about calcium in your diet. I was interested to see that some of the possible benefits of calcium are more likely to occur with lowfat dairy products than with tablets. Dairy products also seem to be more efficient than broccoli, according to the eye-catching chart. And since kids need tons of calcium starting at about age 9, I'm going to be brewing yogurt in 10 gallon drums.
Apparently Joss won't be at DragonCon after all (there are actual comments ostensibly from him on the Whedonesque page). This sucks, but the suck is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we would have missed his scheduled panel anyway.
Update: It's looking more and more like Universal has committed Joss to be there. We'll be missing that last panel either way, though.
Joss talks about just about everything. Even though I haven't been especially impressed by Veronica Mars, I'm interested that he enjoys it. I admire Mars creator Rob Thomas, and I find it pleasantly reinforcing when a person whose work I admire admires the work of someone else I admire. He talks about Serenity, but he said nothing that I didn't want to know before seeing the film.