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?

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.

The Flikr pool that asks “What’s in the bag?”

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."