| song notion of the moment: "I Don't Wanna Watch" |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|02:40 pm] |
90% of the spam I've gotten today is about selling watches.
So it'd combine instances of "I don't want A watch" with "I don't want TO watch."
(And why would anybody pay more than $10 for a timepiece? It used to be expensive watches cost that much because they were more accurate. Well, now the cheapest watches are as good as ones that grabbed $1000 in 1970.) |
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| phrase of the fortnight |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|07:05 pm] |
"... brightly-colored sporks of revolution." Singularity Sky -- Charles Stross
(And yes, that's "sporks," as in spoon/fork) |
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| hey, jack |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|01:19 pm] |
Like many people, you only post about your relationships' endings and the hope phase of their very beginnings. Evidently, in between, you're too busy actually having a relationship to post to your LiveJournal about it.
And that's all well and good. It's part of what LiveJournal's for.
However, it means your readers don't really have intelligent answers when you post a poll asking about how good you are at relationships.
We only get the crunchy edges, not the middle bits. |
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| Due to overcrowding in the afterlife ... |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|01:36 pm] |
All Souls' Day will henceforth be split into A thru L Souls' Day and M thru Z Souls' Day.
And that means another observation is split, into Half o' Ween and The Rest o' Ween. |
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| new opportunities for disaster |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|12:36 pm] |
The mini-cafeteria has something that is just inviting catastrophe, for clumsy people like me.
Their soup "bar" has deep buckets of relatively yummy soups and chili. Each bucket has a long-handled ladle for us to serve ourselves. The ladle's handle is longer than the distance from the top lip of the bucket to the bottom lip of the sneeze guard covering the whole thing.
What could possibly go wrong? Especially when there are neatly dressed people to either side of me, all eager to get on with assembling their lunches.
Happily, nearly all the soup I ladled wound up in the container it was intended for. I credit the double ration of coffee I'd had.
Also, learned that my agency's official Swine Flu Policy amounts to: Getting swine flu means at least one week off, without pay. |
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| restoring some nerd credibility |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|03:53 pm] |
I just spent an hour doing trigonometry, FOR FUN!
(It was to figure out the layout of a hexagon for Bryce tweakage.) |
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| last century's state of the art is now standard issue |
[Oct. 17th, 2009|12:56 pm] |
Took my extra paycheck yesterday and spent it on what I'd been planning to.
I got a new monitor and new speakers. I'd been using the same monitor for a decade, an Apple thing with built-in speakers. The screen was maybe 12 inches with three inches on each side for speakers, and the thing was DEEP. I mean, it was over a foot and a half, front to back. So it took up a lot of space on this table. Also, it was annoying to have to have the monitor itself in standby mode when I just wanted to run the speakers.
So I went to my local big box-ish store and bought what I'd previously scoped out online, a 20" flat screen and their middlingly-expensive amplified speakers. Either these models are wildly popular, or they overstock them massively.
I also got Season 3 of Dexter.
The new hardware installed just fine. I'd been expecting the wide screen to be impressive, but these speakers! I haven't gotten bass sound like that from this size of thing, ever! (Of course, my ears are older than they were in the 1970s/1980s, when I aspired to audiophilia.)
I wound up watching all of Season 3 in one sitting.
Now I just have to get a shelf to raise the monitor high enough that I can place a laptop between the keyboard and the monitor, when I feel like using a laptop's MIDI stuff in conjunction with the Mac Mini. Currently, I have the monitor sitting on an inverted wire basket, and it tends to start wiggling as I type. |
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| when gurning goes bad |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|08:06 pm] |
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I just mis-heard a lyric as: So you think that you can chew your mouth off ... |
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| Is Jimmy Hoffa buried in Arlington National Cemetery? |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|07:05 pm] |
From Salon today: But Arlington's newest unknown, buried without special ceremony, is the exception to what was intended to be the rule. The cemetery buried someone in grave 449 -- likely relatively recently, since that section is an active part of the cemetery -- and then lost track of the paperwork showing the identity of the remains. In 2003, workers went to bury a newly deceased service member in that plot, only to find unmarked remains in the ground. Paper records had listed the plot as vacant.
Rather than publicly admit this error, Arlington quietly left the remains unmarked for six years. For those six years, passersby saw only an empty plot of green grass in spot 449, surrounded by stones etched with names.
This remained the case until this past summer, when Salon began working on tips from current and former workers at Arlington who said these kinds of mistakes occur with disturbing frequency at the cemetery, which calls itself "our nation's most sacred shrine."
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That apparently caused Arlington to change its tune. "Arlington National Cemetery officials have known about this situation since 2003, when in the process of preparing for a burial, a casket was discovered in grave 449 in Section 68," Horst then admitted. "At that time, a review of records took place to locate the corresponding documents. The files could not be matched."
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But the fact that the cemetery installed a marble headstone marked "Unknown," rather than the small temporary markers used at Arlington, suggests a degree of permanence. Also, the fact that the Army, which runs Arlington, has done little to identify these remains over the past 12 weeks suggests a reluctance to take the most rudimentary steps towards a possible identification.
The reporter misses something BIG, here, probably due to not watching enough NCIS and CSI teevee.
If the cemetery didn't even know there were remains there, how can they, or the reporter, assert "The cemetery buried someone in grave 449" with any certainty?
How do they know somebody ELSE didn't bury somebody there? How do they know the remains are of a soldier? Perhaps it's a civilian.
So who is it? Well, there are lots of missing people to consider. Me, I like Jimmy Hoffa for it. What better place to hide the body than in the same place his nemesis Bobby Kennedy is resting?
Even alleged mob hitmen have a sense of irony.
(My Mom always said she wanted to be buried at Arlington. She served in WWII, at the coincidentally named Arlington Hall, on a building-sized contraption full of vacuum tubes. Y'know, one of those gizmos we came to know as computers.) |
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| Infinity's End |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|03:27 pm] |
After maybe three years, I finished reading Infinite Jest last night.
I gotta find a copy for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) grundoon, 'cuz I may start re-reading this one. |
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| House season premiere |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|06:56 pm] |
So we're about to start a new season of "House." As you'll recall, the last season ended with him committing himself due to pesky hallucinations.
This goes back to the first question I asked at Television Without Pity when I discovered the show in its first season: Is this show titled "House," or "House MD" as it says in the titles? What I meant was, will this show always stay in the same setting, or will we follow Gregory House in his inevitable downward spiral, as he's (quite justifiably) fired and kicked out onto the street?
I imagined him becoming the title character in Tull's "Aqualung." (He already has the bad leg, but he'd have to take up smoking.)
But despite the previews for tonight's episode, I suspect this will be more of a Buffy Season Three thing, in which we have one episode with the protagonist in a new setting, but then back to Sunnydale, or Princeton Plainsborough.
Just my guess. I haven't looked at any spoiler sites about this.
(Update, 15 minutes in: Evidently, House has never seen the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Or maybe this is to be the last show?) |
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| Re-watching Babylon 5 |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|06:39 pm] |
I've been wondering about Minbari evolution. For those of you who haven't seen the show Babylon 5, the Minbari are aliens who, in the best television space opera tradition, look almost exactly like humans except instead of hair, they have what looks like a tiara of bone around the back of their heads.
This implies that the world they evolved on is just like ours with one crucial difference.
I imagine the primordial jungles of Minbar, where all the lesser creatures were terrorized by the Clownhammer Birds, who would swoop down and deliver blows to the noggin with no notice or remorse.
Or perhaps they were schooled by the unrelenting ghost of Moe Howard? |
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| My inappropriate responses to Kennedy deaths |
[Aug. 26th, 2009|12:25 pm] |
Have I ever told you that when JFK was killed, we danced in the street?
True story.
Of course, I was just seven years old at the time. And it wasn't intended maliciously. Y'see, the grown-ups were all pretty freaked out, so they sent all us kids outside, even past our bedtimes. The street was just one block long, so we kids generally used it as a playground. And since we were all out there together at an odd time of evening, that's where we played. I don't know how or why, but we got to a point where we'd all joined hands in a big circle and were dancing about .... when a grown-up looking out a window noticed this and started yelling at us to be ashamed of ourselves.
Hey, I was just a spoiled little kid at the time.
When RFK was gunned down, I was a spoiled somewhat larger kid, and I got upset that they pre-empted Batman to cover it.
Now, speaking about assassinations, I naturally have been worried about some of the crazies and their talk about Obama. Last winter, I was imagining what I'd do about it if I were him. I figured the best thing to do would be to establish a trajectory for the administration that would only gain momentum if I were shot.
And I wondered, could Medicare and Medicaid have been passed by a President John Kennedy? I suspect not. But as I recall, LBJ used the window of opportunity after the assassination to strong-arm the programs through.
Okay, maybe that's a bit simplistic.
But today, perhaps the noisy people on the Right who seem to believe in witches and omens and the like will be satiated for a short spell by Teddy Kennedy's death.
And maybe some sort of non-onerous health care reform can be passed. |
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| The first step is admitting you have a potentially profitable problem ... |
[Aug. 20th, 2009|02:58 pm] |
A job listing:Addiction Recovery Associate - New York North
The Addiction Recovery Associate is responsible for maximizing sales of Alkermes products in his/her respective territory. This will be done by having thorough product, disease state and market knowledge and sound selling skills. He/she will utilize available resources to help educate and influence healthcare providers. Finally, he/she will use their analytical ability to determine targets and will use approved resources and efforts accordingly.
Me, I think it should be called an "Addiction CASH Recovery Associate." Prior applicable experience could include picking up passed-out drunks by their ankles and shaking them for pocket change. |
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| Finally, a bomb on TV without a magic timer! |
[Aug. 17th, 2009|06:20 pm] |
Out of the corner of my eye, I note on the TV that the show's heroes have spotted a nest of wires and slabs of stuff and a beeping timer.
They all clear Out Of There real fast, diving behind their car for cover. And then ...
... the next scene has them still sitting behind that car. One of them's whittling, and another is checking text messages. They're arguing whether what they saw was really a bomb, or not.
And a bit later, the bomb finally goes off. |
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