I heard a rumor in my misspent youth that the major tobacco companies had registered trademarks such as “Acapulco Gold” and “Maui Wowie” in anticipation of the legalization of pot. For some reason, I recently remembered that rumor, and figured the gummint is sufficiently technologically advanced that I could find out, and indeed they are. The reefer vendors would have to fight with Classic Marketing over Acapulco Gold (registered as a tequila brand), and some enterprising dude who doesn’t appear to be a major tobacco company has filed for Maui Wowie as a brand of smoking paraphernalia.

Harry Houdini not only hated spiritualists, he also had magnificent taste in stationery.

(Later note: I can’t make this stupid link work. Try searching here for “houdini letterhead” and see all of the ones he had- I had chosen to highlight the most colorful one.)

I’m giving another shot at putting a usable mailto: link in my author information. According to this paper, using html character entities should prevent the address from being harvested. The fact that it’s in a mailto: may make the strategy not work as well, but that’s what disposable addresses are for.

As has been strongly suspected for a while, SARS is a new cold mutation. So now all we have to do is develop a vaccine against colds.

I just noticed that greymatter seems to want the timezone configured manually; or maybe I should have just made it PT. Sorry about the last week and a half’s times being mis-labelled. We’re thinking of going to Movable Type, anyway; it seems like having the blog software ask the server what the time and zone are shouldn’t be too much to hope for.

(later) I guess I’ll just go to PT, since it applies the label to everything on the mainpage (and presumably to every article that gets rebuilt). Argh.

(and later still) The GM FAQ says “The board is not designed to handle the changeovers between standard and daylight time so during summer months the time may be an hour different from the real local time.” As much contempt as I have for Daylight Saving Time, I have more for software that doesn’t implement it correctly.

I really like the American Memory exhibit “Architecture and Interior Design for the 20th Century: Photographs by Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner“. Because the photographs, taken between 1935 and 1955, are intended only to illustrate architectural form and detail they are mostly empty of people. The result is a wonderful assortment of empty landscapes. I’ve just started reading a book on everyday life in 18th century Japan, the everyday life of the people who weren’t rulers, warriors or landlords. They didn’t leave behind any works of literature or even diaries (most couldn’t write), they just went about their lives, leaving behind broken pottery, worn tools, and empty buildings. What will you leave behind?

Welcome, all visitors from yoyology.com and howdy to fellow librarian Karl! Since the library world is small and incestuous, you must all promise not to get me fired for my various glib comments! If you break your promise, may you never again score free stuff from the vendor booths at library conferences. (Speaking of which, I got a little toy VW Beetle from BigChalk once, which has nothing at all to do with how impressed I am [very] with the insane variety of full text sources in their eLibrary product. I mean, Beef magazine? How cool!)

The headline “Fantasy games ‘not for geeks’” entirely misses the point the article actually makes: geeks are getting older and many of them have jobs that pay well. And, yes, many of them still play silly games.

Some Dutch commies seem to have a quite a nice assortment of digital exhibits, some with English info as well. All in all a pretty nice web site!

In an entirely foreseen development, Israel is using our actions in Iraq as ammunition in the struggle to keep the Palestinians homeless (for 50 points, how long has Israel been in violation of UN Security Council Resolutions?). Also, while we’re surveying the potential for WWIII, Turkey is sending in troops to ensure that the Kurds get the hell out of Kirkuk, lest the Kurds start thinking they might get a place to live.

On the other hand, it looks like the Serbian authorities did a good job of keeping the Prime Minister’s assassination from being the beginning of something bigger.