Why, it looks as though Hugh Laurie, brilliant comedian and author, may be modelling corsets in Seattle.

Noted futurist Dan Bern will no doubt be pleased to see that his prediction is coming true. As soon as they realize that putting barcodes on babies isn’t early enough to prevent all mix-ups, I have no doubt they’ll start putting them on fetuses in utero.

In a ruling that appears to me to call into question the common-carrier status of ISPs, Verizon has been ordered to reveal the identify of one of their customers who downloaded 600 songs in a day. They are not doing so immediately, pending appeal. The DMCA is a ridiculously over-reaching piece of legislation that accomplishes no public good.

“‘We’re starting our decent now, buckle up. It’s gunna’ get bumpy,’ he yelled over the defining engines.”

It turns out that the youth of today don’t read enough to write well. They’re pretty much just writing phonetically at this point.

There’s nothing like googling yourself and finding a page full of how you feel about reproduction at the moment. Or even how you felt about it a couple months ago. Not like I wasn’t signing up for exposure by agreeing to be the poster-boy, but it’s still a little unnerving. Also, for the record, despite the fact that the oral version is what got all the play, I was actually more recently involved in a trial of this.

An interesting (and stomach-turning) article on Minnesota garbage houses posits that people who end up creating a garbage house are a symptom of people not coping well with information overload and the rush of modernity. Personally, I suspect that garbage housers, like cat collectors and pack rats (the article makes a distinction, I don’t know how much of one there is, besides the existence of paths in the chaos and the theme of the obsession) are the dysfunctional height of an inclination in a lot of people. Like severe depression or alcoholism, I think there are many (not all) people with the potential who don’t actually end up developing the disease. Who knows what pushes you over the edge, but many people live careful lives to avoid a genetic curse.

Hey, look! Someone else already did the related web searching I was going to do after posting this- I’m going to go read it now.

Internationally famous science journal The Stranger investigates the cultural effects of drinking huge quantities of liquor. The results are amusing.

The Chinese place near my work provides a wonderful Dim Sum magic decoder ring (in addition to their wonderful Dim Sum).

Now that we’re getting regularly crawled by Google, we’re getting a few more hits than we probably used to. A thing that I found surprising is that almost all of the Google-generated hits go to Saint Sarah.

Update: Ever since the weekend of the 403, we’ve largely dropped off Google’s map in searches for our patron saint, so I’m thinking maybe this sort of attempt to drive traffic by internal linkage isn’t helpful.

OK, I’m going to play hooky from work and go to London. I will be bringing this map. Just tell my boss that I’m sick with the 2 week can’t answer the phone flu.