At the clinic today, I had to hang around for an hour to make sure the four injections into my belly fat didn’t go horribly, horribly wrong; and since the usual magazines there aren’t really suitable for killing time (and I didn’t know I was going to be in the group with the side-effect injections, so I didn’t bring a book), I looked through the January Esquire, where I found Ten Things You Don’t Know about Women, which seems to be a regular feature, written by a different celebrity woman each month. In January, it was Cheryl Hines, of Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. I’ve stolen the text and put it in the extended entry information, in case Esquire makes the original go away (or if you don’t want to look at their ads). From this, and from the current installment, I feel like I learned more about the guys these particular women date than about women as a class.

Continue reading →

Another publisher’s description, this time of The Prostate: Everything You Need to Know:

“Taguchi, a urologist (Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal), explains the most common prostate problems in plain language, with a bit of humor, for general readers.”

Because there’s nothing people like more than a bit of prostate humor. Craig? Any prostate jokes?

From a publisher’s description of Betty Crocker’s Cookie Book, 2nd edition:

“Betty Crocker’s celebration of the cookie includes more than 240 recipes for everything from Deluxe Chocolate Chip Cookies to Walnut Biscotti. Rpclu Rpad Bars, No-Roll Sugar Cookies, and more.”

Rpclu Rpad Bars?

Three nuns in their sixties are awaiting heavy sentencing for breaking into a nuclear missile site and painting crosses on the silo cover in their own blood, plus some fairly symbolic (given that the nun in the picture is fairly petite– your fun size nun, if you will) hammer damage. Their lawyer says the serious crackdown by the Man is due to intolerance of dissent since you-know-what, but I’m betting that it may have something to do with how far several fairly small non-muscular older ladies got in their quest, and how very much further anyone with any active malice or appropriate tools would get.

I’m confident that everybody who reads this also reads memepool, but I will nevertheless point to the Rotten Library. Their summary of everybody’s favorite money-draining cult pretending to be a religion (I won’t name the beast, lest it look in my direction, but you can find it under Religion. Kathy Griffin calls it Somethingology) is brief, to the point, and right on the money.

If you need to preserve food for a long time, you have a few main options. If you’re going on a long space journey, I recommend canned food. If you’re backpacking, I recommend dried food to reconstitute on the road (make sure you find potable water!). If you’re at home, try freezing your food.

A few freezing tips are available from your local (or not so local) agricultural extension office (North Dakota), (Ohio), food conglomerate, or bridge club (huh?).

You can also try preserving in fat or pickling if you have dodgy electricity.

The ultimate in retro car customization: an in-car record player! Bonus points if you can engineer one that doesn’t require specially-engineered records.

A weblog of cool tools, edited by a guy who used to edit Whole Earth Review.

The wonderful Sara Ryan mentions in her blog a piece by Sara Paretsky called Truth, Lies and Duct Tape, about bad shit that has happened in publishing and libraries and the culture in general. It’s not real cheering.

According to this article (and why would the Sci-Fi channel lie?), there will be a Firefly DVD release, with at least some commentary, including the three unaired episodes. Also, hold on to anything that might come loose, it looks like a movie is in the works!