Ten years ago, Ron Avitzur was sneaking into the offices of his former employer, Apple, to continue development on a project that had been officially discontinued:
Q: Do you work here?
A: No.
Q: You mean you’re a contractor?
A: Actually, no.
Q: But then who’s paying you?
A: No one.
Q: How do you live?
A: I live simply.
Q: (Incredulously) What are you doing here?!
(via Richard Eriksson)
Joy to the world, no more death penalty in Kansas.
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This was funnier when I thought it said “Find a little naughty for your niece.” |
You can sponsor Planned Parenthood by donating a dollar for every protester outside a clinic. Just like a charity marathon. As they say, “Even Our Protesters Support Planned Parenthood”. (Smug jerks. But it’s kind of funny.)
Sandbag Superadobe shelters are made from sandbags filled with local earth and barbed wire. They can withstand earthquakes and are suitable for refugees and disaster victims. They can be made into permanent shelters, can have multiple rooms, and have just won an architectural award.
Does your home rotate? This one does.
Well, Tavis Smiley has not renewed his contract and his show is going off NPR. I don’t know where I’ll get daily information about the reparations movement now. Or where I’ll get to hear every issue under the sun framed in terms of race, from politics and culture to diet and entertainment. Or hear people justifiably angered by discriminatory assumptions, but who in turn assume everyone listening is a conservative Christian. Or hear Tavis tailor his accent and vocabulary to match each guest’s, giving the impression that he has no real accent or vocabulary of his own. And I’ll miss the experience of feeling racist because I think he and his program are full of shit. But I think I’ll learn to cope.
Today I had someone with nipple piercings explain to me that navel piercings are “gross”.
Google begins to digitize paper books. Amazing potential.
For the culinarily adventurous, may I recommend you still stay away from durian smoothies.
TV-B-Gone. If you are the kind of person who enjoys being self-righteously but passively aggressive. This is probably the same same set of people who think anonymous chalk graffiti is a great idea.
Whisky-themed neckties. Unfortunately the Euro exchange rate makes them $43 apiece. (Have you seen the exchange rates recently? $1.34 to buy a Euro; $1.95 to buy a pound.)
X ROCK radio is reporting a new Pearl Jam album sometime in 2005.
sorryeverybody. We tried.
“The mutant phenotype that we saw when we crossed the two deletions … was an inability of [fruitfly] larvae to carry out vigorous, concerted head swinging to scrape their way out of the egg shell…” So they named the gene “amontillado”. And a mutation causing learning defects is named “turnip”, because “vegetables are not well-known for their mental acuity.”
Cartograms give more realistic election data than geographic maps, and most states are purple anyway (this is really good — if you follow only one link on this page, make this it.) More on cartograms, and one of the world that will lead you to the conclusion that, as a first-order approximation, the whole world is Asia.
Call me a nature hater, if you must, but I’m not too thrilled about encouraging beetles and spiders to nest in my roof.
Daily cash withdrawal limits from your PayPal debit card are either $300 or $400, depending on your service level. You can see your limit by going to your “Account Overview” page and selecting “View Limits”. Remember this, because when I forgot and tried to withdraw $500, I ended up locked out of my account (presumably for the rest of the day, although I won’t know that for sure until tomorrow.)
Why was I trying to withdraw $500? To deposit into my checking account. I know it costs $1, rather than being free (as a bank transfer is), but I hate having my funds in limbo for four days, absent from my PayPal account but not yet in my bank account.
Scotland will now fine you £3,600 ($7,700) for smoking in public. How times are changed since I was there three and a half years ago, when you couldn’t escape the smoke to, as it were, save your life.
I made a $60 eBay error. I listed an item as “immediate payment required when Buy It Now is used,” not realizing that that forces the item to be “ship to U.S. only.” Be warned of this.
Well, now it’s official. A whale cannot sue a person.
“Are they thy punters’ keepers?” If we excuse the lousy grammar, we can answer “yes, in California”. Bartenders absolutely have culpability when serving drinks to inebriated customers. But everyone who has been in the situation will understand the difficulty when it’s your friend who gets behind the wheel after having too many. What do you do, physically restrain him? Call the cops? Or just decide never to drink with the person again?
France just decided that the Fraisses were not culpable. I wonder what California would say.
Missed prognostication, as promised: No earthquake occurred.
If you install the Audible DownloadManager for iPod & iTunes, don’t spend a long time debugging why it doesn’t seem to do anything. Simply download a program from Audible, and it will automatically be added to your iTunes library. No documentation I’ve been able to find, but there you go.
Actress Francie Swift, although I loathe the name, left an impression on me nine years ago on an episode of Law & Order in which she played a supposed victim of multiple personality disorder. I couldn’t tell watching the episode whether she was not quite successful in her portrayal, or whether she was perfectly successful in portraying someone who was faking multiple personality disorder. I actually don’t remember what the answer ended up being, but I clearly remember her ability to smile with vacant, soulless eyes. I’ve seen her in one or two other roles since then, but was just re-impressed with her on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “Semi-Detached” that aired recently. Still those haunting eyes, and a lot of neat facial tricks that while not exactly subtle are quite compelling, especially when they are framed together with D’Onofrio‘s still-stuck-in-an-Edgar-suit mannerisms which I also enjoy watching. There are more pages of unwritten dialogue in that episode than written dialogue.
The nine years have also done her well physically, and I think she’s even prettier now, in a not off-the-shelf manner.
What a mess for Billy Connolly. I’m reserving judgment on his Ken Bigley comments until someone produces an audio recording. But it cannot be fun to be him right now.
(OK, I know I’m posting a lot, but it’s because my ear is feeling better.)
The local 99¢ Only store has a range of Ajax-brand liquid dishsoap in different citrus aromas. Bizarrely one of them is Ruby Red Grapefruit. Even more bizarrely, it smells great. Updates to follow on its grease-cutting ability.
I heard Ralph Nader on the CBC yesterday. Man, I hate when that happens. I end up wanting to cry myself to sleep because he doesn’t get to be president. He’s not even in the ballot in California.
His comments on the presidential debates included the sentiment that not enough of the foreign policy discussion was on the topic of global infectious diseases and environmental regulations, and not enough of the domestic discussion was on universal health care, and altogether too much time was spent on terror and Iraq.
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