Blizza Blizza

Nature is reporting the decoding of the Bacillus anthracis Ames genome…tomorrow? Ah well. Dates are irrelevant. The important thing is that 52 people from 12 different research programs got their names on the paper as authors.

It’s like a horrible car crash. I keep trying to tell myself this doesn’t exist but I just can’t tear my eyes away.

Nobody. The Italian BeppoSAX satellite, which had been deployed on an X-ray mission, splashed down harmlessly in the Pacific yesterday after nearly 40 countries around the world were on a “space debris alert” issued by Italy’s space agency. The satellite was powered down last April and contact was lost immediately following deactivation, but NASA had been tracking the lifeless hulk to guard against any potential reprise of the Skylab debacle.

Ladies, does your guy have gasoline running through his veins? He might not have so much running where it counts if a recent study of Italian toll-booth attendants can be believed. Exhaust fume exposure appears to reduce sperm counts and sperm motility, making it more difficult for affected men to father a child. No word on whether the effects are reversible yet.

Virginia’s governor has just signed into law a new bill that can allow the Virginia government not only to seize the assets of spammers, but sentence them to up to five years of jail time.

The good part: it applies to any spam/UCE sent through Virginia, no matter the origin or destination. The bad part: tracking down, let alone arresting and prosecuting, the foreign hosts responsible for a large part of the spam flooding the Internet is going to be next to impossible.

Hey, there’s a new episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not on TV tonight, I think. Maybe they can start prepping this story about a 7-year-old boy pregnant with his own twin brother for the next one…

Today is the 50th anniversary of Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins’ discovery of the structure of DNA. The journal Nature also has a nice section on the celebration.

Being the, well, I can’t quite think of a word for it, but being the person that I am, I’ve found myself recently wondering about eye boogers. Where do they come from, what are they (obviously some sort of protein-like secretion), why do they form, why do they get all long and stringy and springy if you stretch them out and dry them carefully by blowing on them…

Ahem. Anyway, I decided to hit Google, as per my usual practise when I want to know more about topics I know nothing about, and found that the Internet has a great dearth of information about eye boogers. The best site I found also happened to be the funniest by a long shot. The eye booger bit is about 2/3 of the way down the page.

Whilst I’m on the subject, I probably ought to mention what I fondly refer to as the Internet Nose Hair Site. I got really bored one day about a year ago and started searching Google for random things, and “nose hair” was one of them. That site is the first hit on Google when you search for “nose hair.”

And since I’m talking about it, “Weasel Eye Boogers” would be a great name for a rock band.

And when the boy saw a real wolf prowling amongst the flock, he cried out, “Wolf! Wolf!” But no one came, because they thought he was up to his old tricks again.

Aesop reminds us that we should never cry wolf unless absolutely necessary. So, George W. Bush, I ask you: on what grounds have you been crying wolf this time?

Hmmm?

I miss having this stuff on TV all the time. Or seeing it in person at the WACA. Now if only I had the time to play and get good, maybe I could make the US National Team (yes, we do have one). I figure competition can’t be that stiff :)

And incidentally, way to go Aussies!

I can’t possibly be the only person to have noticed the comparative silliness of the fastest novel ever and the Monty Python sketch that I’m sure played some part in the idea.

This has to be the best example of a completely worthless solution to a problem that I’ve ever heard of. Does anyone really think renaming South Central to simply “South Los Angeles” will change anything about the neighbourhood at all? C’mon. It’s like someone suddenly decided the Tigers were a crap team because they were named the Tigers. Changing the name to the Detroit Asskickers isn’t going to make them any better…

This is something only a very select few people will find amusing, but I’m putting it together because those people will find it amusing and I’m <voice type=”Jimmy Jones”>all about hardcore amusing people.</voice> (And even fewer people will get that reference, and the intersection of the set of people who get the former and the set of people who get the latter probably has as its sole element yours truly.)

Anyway.

The list so far:

• Sadistic Eddie
• Sadistic Dave
• Sadistic Dendler ( = Sadistic² Dave)
• Nikki Finneman’s Evil Twin
• Anti-Sadistic Frank Church
• Sadistic Przybyz (that’s “SHIBB-ish” for you non-Polish folks)
• Sadistic Corey
• Sadistic Geiger

I guess I probably ought to give at least a basic explanation. Sophomore year of college, one of the freshmen in my psych class bore a very striking (yet somewhat evil) resemblance to one of my friends (whose name was Eddie). So he became “Sadistic Eddie.” My buddy Dave and I took the concept to new heights senior year in the cafeteria, mostly by accident, as people who looked like slightly demented versions of our friends just kept walking by. The concept took a turn for the silly when we started applying mathematical principles to the various levels of sadism, inventing inverse-sadist concepts, etc. But at this point, the basic categories have been defined: sadistic, anti-sadistic, and “evil twin,” which is loosely defined as “way more sadistic than sadistic, almost a sadistic² but in the same person rather than via an intermediary.” (If you had seen Nikki Finneman’s Evil Twin you’d know what I mean.)

One thing Dave and I have both noticed (Dave swears I’m the only one with the talent for seeing the sadistic versions of our friends, so maybe it’s just me) is that our male friends seem to be much more prone to having sadistic versions of themselves running around than our female friends. Maybe it’s just because it’s hard for girls to look sadistic and strongly resemble people we know.

Thoughts? Theories? Seen a sadistic version of your friend(s)? Let me know…

Burt Rutan, developer of the Voyager, the first airplane to make a nonstop circumglobal flight without refuelling, has nearly finished development on a rocket plane similar to NASA’s abandoned X-15 program that he hopes will take the $10m X Prize for the first privately-funded manned space flight.

It sure looks interesting, and if they can do it successfully, who knows - maybe space tourism isn’t as far away as we once thought. Get it down to a few thousand per person per ride and I’d definitely start saving up.

In a continuation (and closure) of Thursday’s Celebrity Deathwatch, Earl King is dead at 69. The New Orleans R&B legend died Thursday from complications related to diabetes.

This is funny, but only in a “I hope it never happens to anyone I know and like” sort of way.

Although I can definitely think of some people who deserve the hassle.

Jurassic Park is still a pipe dream, of course, but some Danish scientists have come a little closer by recovering some 400,000-year old DNA from the permafrost in Siberia. It isn’t intact by any stretch of the imagination, but the fact that they managed to recover any at all is impressive, and leaves open the tiny possibility that some day, science might bring various Stone Age-era animals back through cloning.

The BBC wants to know, and so do the millions of us Americans who still don’t support this so-called “war” whose only purpose thus far has been to remove Saddam Hussein from power and give the rest of the free world one less reason to trust the United States and its citizens.

I can just see how this developed now…

“Hey, look, Jeb, a ‘tater gun!”
“Yeah, Billy Ray! I just done got it over that thar Innernet las’ week. Let’s go shoot us some spuds!”
“Sounds fun, Jeb! I’ll grab that big ol’ sack Maw has under the back porch.”

(15 minutes later, after Billy Ray’s mom’s 20-pound sack of potatoes has been launched somewhere in the general vicinity of the next county and the can of hairspray still hasn’t run out…)

“Hey, Jeb, we shore used up them taters quick. Let’s find some other crap ta shoot!”
“I know, Billy Ray! We can ketch us some frogs an’ see how far THEY go!”
“Great idea, Jeb!”

(They go down to the local creek and snoop around for a few minutes, managing to snag a single frog about the size of a fist and failing to catch about 20 more that are all immediately repelled by the vicious B.O. rays the two boys are emitting.)

“Here, Billy Ray! I GOT one! Awright! Now you hold the gun an’ I’ll load ‘im in.”
“Hey, gimme the Aqua Net, Jeb! I gotta get ‘er ready to fahr!”

(They fill the combustion chamber with hair spray and put the frog in the barrel. The frog, being rather intelligent, unlike our two heroes, tries to get away, preventing a hermetic seal in the barrel.)

“All right! Three…two…one… *click*”
“Hey, what the hell was that, Billy Ray? Nuthin’ happened! You done broke my hunnert-dollar ‘tater gun!”
“Naw, Jeb - the frog’s jes’ stuck in thar. Have a look!”

(As Jeb looks in, the frog, who has been trying quite unsuccessfully to escape, suddenly jumps into the combustion chamber and activates the sparking mechanism. A loud boom follows, and we are suddenly treated to the answer to the joke “What’s blind, wet, red and green all over?” Jeb, of course…)

Potato guns, like most other forms of firearms, are perfectly legal in Texas, so prosecutors are not going to press charges. Apparently, they have completely forgotten that using living creatures as ammunition for said guns is still illegal in all 50 states.

This is just too cool. Let’s see if I can get a screen shot of my desktop right now…awwwww yeah!

Here, have a look (click for a full-size image):

What’s running on there? Let’s see…

Top left corner is AquaMon. Across the menu bar you’ll notice Sony Ericsson Clicker (which I’ve been meaning to remove, actually, since I never use it), Apple’s modem status menu, a CPU cache controller menu whose name I’ve completely forgotten, Apple’s Keychain Access menu, Unsanity’s Cee Pee You, the battery status menu, iSync’s menu, the AirPort menu, and PTHClock. Hard disk icons down the right side are enhanced with DriveGauge, which puts a little thermometer-like gauge on the icon to show you how much of the drive is used. The Moon is MoonDock X, the Earth is EarthGlobe X, and the background is actually a live screen saver (IX Xirtam, from the IX Screen Effects package) put on the desktop via DeskEffects (145K disk image).

And thanks to Benet Leong and ResExcellence for pointing out the transparent goodness that is AquaMon to me.

And for today’s episode of “Blizza Blizza Presents,” we bring back WGRD’s ever-popular “Rick, Darla, and Scott Celebrity Deathwatch.”

The premise behind this theory of Rick Beckett’s was that famous people die in threes. Whenever someone moderately famous died, two more famous people had to die within the next two weeks or the theory would be, well, “violated.” In about eight years of listening to their morning show daily, I can’t think of a single counter-example that ever occurred.

So I’m kicking off this Deathwatch with Dr. Atkins (of Atkins diet fame) and John Paul Getty Jr., the billionaire philanthropist and recluse. Both died earlier today.

(Note to you statisticians out there: yes, I realise how patently ridiculous the whole thing is. Merely glancing at the New York Times obit page is enough to keep the Celebrity Deathwatch going for years, and with a period much shorter than two weeks. But it’s fun, OK?)

The sendoff has begun. Even the BBC are running an article saying farewell to MJ. CNN also has a link, and ESPN has a game recap and a whole bunch of other stuff as well.

Nike is running a new “Mars” spot in honour of MJ, and I just can’t get those old Gatorade commercials out of my head:

“I wanna be/ I wanna be/ I wanna be … like Mike…”

“Hi, I’m Eric, and, uh, I rush the field at White Sox games to attack umpires and opposing players/coaches.”
“Hi, Eric.”

Seriously. Can this please stop?

At least he’s been charged with a felony.

Side note: if you read the history of attacks in Chicago carefully, you’ll notice the Tigers swept the Sox by forfeit in 1979.

Which was probably the last time the Tigs swept anybody.

Ba-dum *ching*.

I love ‘em, but damn, they suck.

“…Clear sailin’ ahead for our precious cargo!”
“Uh, would that be the hot pants, sir?”
“Aye, the hot pants!”

Thanks to the Simpsons Archive for the correction on the quote, which I always seem to get slightly wrong. (It’s from El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer for you Simpsons trivia buffs.)

New York City, that bastion of progressive laws in the United States, is banning cell fone ringers during public performances as of Sunday. So let me get this straight…I can’t let my fone ring during a movie/concert/play and I can’t smoke in bars.

Where do I sign?

And on a related note, the cell fone companies aren’t very happy about the requirement that they allow customers to keep their numbers when changing carriers.

Tough friggin cookies, guys. You screw us every other possible way, so I think maybe it’s time you gave a little something back to your customers.

Remember this?

Yeah, like I said…

Also from the “Former-Iraqi-Politician-News” department: the BBC pointed me to this very aptly-named site this morning:

www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com

I LOVE the Internet.

(For those of you who prefer domestic media outlets, CNN also has a story.)

Some people just don’t have a clue. From MacMinute:

According to [Opera software] chief executive Jon von Tetzchner, Opera has “decided to stick with the Mac after all, citing … what he called market demand for the Mac product.”

Right. We Mac users are clamoring for a browser that sucks worse than Jenna Jameson the day before her period. Because we really need another browser that supports fewer standards than Netscape 4, or IE 3.

Opera, why can’t you just go away?

Disproving the “science” of creationism has become something of a hobby of mine since taking Evolution freshman year of undergrad. So you can imagine my amusement when I saw this page.

It’s too bad this thread got locked before they could see it…

“May we stone him?”

It’s really sad, but it just lent itself so well to that joke…

This article is just generally funny, but my favourite quote is this:

Saddam’s wife, Sajida Khairallah Telfah, is also his cousin. Together they had three daughters and two sons, Uday and Qusay.

Yeah, that explains a lot. A whole helluva lot.

How do you know if an Iraqi dictator’s daughter is a virgin?

She can still outrun her dad.

Ba-dum *ching*…

Am I the only one who thinks that these fines are ridiculously low for breaking the law?

Mmmm…American Corporate Welfare. No wonder Enron fell apart at the seams.

Not in New York City bars you don’t. A new law just went into effect banning smoking in public bars in the city of New York.

So now that a bouncer has been stabbed to death in an argument over a cigarette, the bouncer’s family is blaming the mayor??? Uh, hello! How about the stupid fucks who thought it was OK to stab someone to death because they wanted a nic fix?

Nah, they’re not responsible at all. What is wrong with you people?

The Japanese now have their own version of Jesse Ventura, pro wrestler-turned-politician.

I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The Humane Text Project looks sort of interesting…

All I have to say about this is that Stetson University is damned lucky it’s not a public institution. Because if it was, the ACLU would have their sorry butts in court tomorrow.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it anyway. Violation of free speech rights is still violation of free speech rights. Just ask my three friends, who did something very similar (except indendent of the school, and on their own time and with their own money), about that one. They were threatened with revocation of their admission for it, by a lame duck Dean of Students who didn’t have a leg to stand on and who was supported by the chickenshit paranoid administration because of the racial hysteria surrounding the campus at the time.

Yes, I can say that now, because I have my diploma, and to quote Denis Leary, “there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it.”

Paula Radcliffe shattered the women’s marathon record in the London Marathon this weekend. With a time of 2:15:25, she averaged a 5:10 mile. For over two hours.

Wow.

This is a bit late, but the final theatrical trailer for the Matrix Reloaded is out.

30 days and counting…are they selling tickets yet? More importantly, can I start camping out yet? :)

So the girl who lives upstairs from me used to come down and complain regularly when I’d be on the fone at 0100 because she said she could hear me through the floor and it kept her awake. Those of you who know me know that I’m not that loud on the fone. And for all the flaws this apartment building has, paper-thin walls aren’t one of them.

I’m sitting here trying to get some work done and I keep hearing this “thunka-thunka-thunka (pause) thunka-thunka (pause) thunka-thunka-thunka” repeating over and over and over again. I couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was until I heard some muted moaning, and then I put two and two together.

The little slut was getting humped by some guy in the bed, which is apparently missing a foot on the end of one of its legs, which was causing the thunking sound. Not that I would have taken her complaints seriously before, but she just ensured that I won’t do so ever again.

April, according to my latest DTE Energy bill, is “Dig Safely Month.” Send your loved ones a shovel and flowers to celebrate. [Insert further snarky commentary here.]

I just saw this in an article on the BBC’s site about the Arab media lambasting the US and British troops for failing to do more policing in Iraq:

Muslims are the biggest source of instability in the world as they are killing one another or killing others.

Al-Watan - Kuwait

Keep in mind that that’s an Arab news organisation, most likely run and owned by Muslims, offering that opinion.

A recent issue of the journal Science is reporting that primitive humans may have been cannibals based on modern genetic evidence showing some humans are protected against prion diseases such as so-called “mad cow,” or new-variant Creutzfeld-Jakob, disease. The reasoning is this: if there are humans with genetic protection against such diseases, there must have been an evolutionary advantage to having such protection in the past, and such diseases can be passed through cannibalistic activities. Thus some humans evolved to be resistant to such diseases, and passed on their genes more than those who weren’t resistant (and who, as a result, died before or soon after reaching the age of reproduction).

Interesting theory, anyway :)

I just discovered a wicked cool feature in Camino: it supports Rendezvous, Apple’s name for the Zeroconf spec.

Sounds pretty boring, right?

It is, until you realise that under the Go menu is a little submenu called “Local Network Services.” In this menu, you’ll find all the local HTTP and FTP servers that are Rendezvous-compliant. Since I’m on a LAN with my WWW server, the various sites hosted there are all visible in the menu for an instant jump-to.

OK, so I’m a computer geek. But it’s still wicked cool.

If anyone has a copy of this song in something other than RealMedia format, please let me know. I’m dying to hear it.

What’s the bet some of these show up on eBay within two weeks?

And on a related note, this is just pathetic. Yay for capitalism, though. You won’t catch ME buying any of that crap, but kudos to the lucky sonsabitches who have the goods to sell. You people buying that stuff are just sad.

Something about this whole “farting ocean” theory has me rather amused. I think the methane hydrates would make a wicked cool demo for chem classes, but I don’t think the evidence supporting them as a cause of global warming is solid.

I can’t remember who it was I was discussing this with, but sometime in the last two weeks I had a chat with one of my friends about Pvt. Jessica Lynch’s rescue, and a comment was made along the lines of “I bet there are already folks at her bedside trying to buy the movie rights.”

Looks like we weren’t far off.

The American media are shameless.

For those of you who don’t know, Ferris State University is in Big Rapids, Michigan, about an hour north of Grand Rapids on US-131.

And they just banned gravity on campus.

Michigan is famous for its strange and highly variable weather, although after going to school with folks from around the country for five years, I must say that I no longer think we hold exclusive claim to this dubious honour.

Sometimes, though, it’s just too strange. I provide this morning’s NOAA report (provided by Son of Weather Grok) as evidence:

• Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor Municipal Airport, MI, United States
• Download Time: 07/04/03 at 08:19
• NOAA Time: Apr 07, 2003 - 06:53 AM
• Wind: From the NE (050 degrees) at 20.8 km/h (11 Kt, 13 mph) gusting to 36.8 km/h (20 Kt, 23 mph)
• Visibility: 1.6km (1 Miles)
• Sky conditions: obscured
• Weather: heavy snow; freezing fog [emphasis mine -cl]
• Precipitation last hour: A trace
• Temperature: -2.8° C (27.0° F)
• Windchill: -9° C (15° F)
• Dew Point: -2.7° C (27.0° F)
• Relative Humidity: 100%
• Pressure (altimeter): 1023 hPa (30.22 in. Hg)
• Pressure tendency: 0.01 inches (0.5 hPa) higher than three hours ago
• Ceiling: No Ceiling

The British are reporting that Chemical Ali has been killed in a bombing raid on his mansion outside Basra Saturday. Note, for the record, that coalition troops brought him to a merciful, quick end, unlike the thousands of Kurds he was responsible for poisoning in the late 1980s.

If anyone ever had designs on making one of Crichton’s stranger novels come true, they had better hurry up. A new report in Nature, as reported by the BBC, says gorillas and chimpanzees could be extinct within 10 years if drastic conservation measures aren’t undertaken immediately.

What happens when you unleash a bunch of computer geeks on a kitchen? How about this? Don’t get me wrong — I think it’s wicked cool — but I think it’s somewhere up there on the laziness scale with the Internet-connected washing machines and dryers in the laundry rooms at MIT.

So where can I buy one?

And today’s Song of the Day is…Wabash Cannonball, originally popularised by Roy Acuff in the late 1940s. I’m listening to the Johnny Cash version, however; Cash first recorded it on his 1966 album Happiness Is You. The lyrics are somewhat different from other artists’ versions:

From the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shore
She climbs the flowering mountains, o’er the hills, and by the shore
She’s mighty tall and handsome, she’s known quite well by all
She’s a regular combination on the Wabash Cannonball

Chorus:
Listen to the jingle, the rumble, and the roar
As she glides along the woodlands, o’er the hills and by the shore
Hear the mighty rush of the engine, hear those lonesome hoboes call
Travelin’ through the jungle on the Wabash Cannonball

Well she came down from Birmingham one cold December day
As she pulled into the station, you could hear all the people say
“She’s from Tennessee, she’s long, and she’s tall”
She came down from Birmingham on the Wabash Cannonball

(chorus)

Here’s to Daddy Claxton; may his name forever stand
And always be remembered in the courts throughout the land
His earthly race is over and the curtains ‘round ‘im fall
They’ll carry ‘im home to Dixie on the Wabash Cannonball

(chorus)

I’m one of those people who puts a song on repeat and then listens to it for three days straight. It drives my best friend crazy, as well as most other people I know. But hey, I like it ;)

Ever seen that movie? It’s a must-see for any grad student, or potential grad student. But I really hope I never turn into this guy…

I saw a link to The Jargon Dictionary on a forum yesterday. Be sure not to let the magic smoke out of your computer ;)

Favourite entry: bogo-sort.

I’m still laughing.

Boom Boom
cl
In other war-related news, somebody give this guy a medal. He did the right thing, although I wish our troops could have gotten their hands on the bastards who were beating a 19-year-old girl. I’d love to see what the folks in Jessica Lynch’s hometown would do to them if they were ever caught and brought to the US.

And in related news, my sympathies go out to Bill Walsh, copyeditor for the Washington Post, which just lost the first US journalist in Iraq. Michael Kelly, columnist for the Washington Post, editor-at-large for The Atlantic Monthly, and former editor of The New Republic, died in a HUMVEE accident that was apparently unrelated to combat.

Bill Gates was assassinated today. Or, uh, wait a second…no, he wasn’t. Shoot.

Question for Korean stockbrokers: why did you think Bill Gates’s assassination would affect how Microsoft is run? He stepped down as CEO over a year ago and doesn’t meddle in the day-to-day affairs of the company to any great extent any more.

I wanna see the reaction on the mother’s face when her six-year-old son brings home one of these from the beach…

John Siracusa, in my opinion one of the most talented technical writers in the computer industry, has weighed in with a new article dedicated to the Mac OS X Finder, incorporating and expounding upon ideas that went rather undeveloped in previous columns.

The infamous Iraqi general Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known to Westerners as “Chemical Ali,” has had his palace near Basra looted.

By locals.

How do you like them apples?

As if there weren’t enough reasons already, you can add this Iraqi’s story to the mix. I still say war isn’t the only way to get rid of the regime, though.

So I was reading the Top 100 April Fool’s Pranks (see “humour” entry below) and saw this one:

#98: Soy Bomb Lands Record Contract

Viewers of the February 1998 broadcast of the Grammys were surprised when a semi-naked man with the word ‘Soy Bomb’ scrawled on his chest danced out onto the stage during Bob Dylan’s solo performance. The man (who was definitely not supposed to be there) was quickly escorted away by security guards. But a few months later, on April 1, Rhino Records proudly announced that it had signed Soy Bomb (as he was now known) to a two-year, six-album recording contract. Soy Bomb’s first album would include covers of popular classics such as ‘Dancing Machine’ and ‘You Dropped a Bomb on Me.’ A spokesman for Rhino Records commented that they had been moved to offer Soy Bomb a contract because the experience of watching him dance had been for them “kind of like when you eat too many Whoppers and you feel a little nauseous, but you’re so happy you ate them.”

I realised I still remember when WGRD 97.9 (for those of you in the southwest corner of Michigan) interviewed the Soy Bomb guy, probably about a week after the original incident (at the Grammys, which really did happen). I remember listening to the interview at the end of Rick Beckett, Darla Jay, and Scott Winters’ morning show in the parking lot of KAMSC after getting over there early one morning when Rick, Darla, and Scott were wrapping up the show, and I remember the Soy Bomb guy mentioning something about “Bird bird bird, the bird is the word.” He was really fuckin weird, and the bird clip from that interview was in the ad for the morning show for the next month. Hysterical. And damn, that was five years ago. Jesus, I feel old.

Side note: Rick Beckett left WGRD last summer, Scott followed soon after, and Darla had already left sometime around the time I entered college. I still think those three were about the best morning show anyone in SW Michigan had from middle school to when Darla left, and they were far better than anything I’ve heard since that time. But now Rick and Scott are back, according to the Grand Rapids Press. Glad to have those guys back on the air. They’re great.

In honor of yesterday, I present the Top 100 April Fools’ Pranks of All Time…

And in our first episode of “Blizza Blizza Presents,” we bring you Run Into Random Friends from High School Day.

I was heading over to pay my rent this afternoon after lunch and ran into a friend from high school I hadn’t seen in some weeks, which only began the cascade. Not an hour later, I was back in the chem building looking for someone and I glanced back and saw this rather attractive girl walking down the hall. She walked by, and I followed, as I was going the same direction. She stopped briefly in the doorway of a friend’s lab (my destination) and then, as she turned around, we both sort of did a big double-take. (Hi, Andrea!) Hadn’t seen her since I graduated high school in ‘98. So that brightened up my afternoon quite a bit.

But it wasn’t over. I was on my way to grab dinner at Panchero’s before group meeting and who do I run into but the guy I did my Biomed project with senior year. Hadn’t seen him since graduation either. And not two minutes later, as I was walking to Panchero’s, I ran into one of our mutual acquaintances from high school.

Four in one day, none of whom I see regularly, and three of whom I hadn’t seen since high school. Talk about random coincidence!

Is it any wonder that we have Enrons and Worldcoms and Martha Stewart when businesses make decisions like these?

I’m a big fan of:

3 What the hell. It worked with that Chaucer term paper they “wrote” in college.
After hyping its new disposable cell phone as “innovative” and “technologically advanced,” Hop-On (HPON) sends a sample to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, who cracks open the casing to uncover the phone’s “revolutionary” secret: Nokia parts. The company explains that it had run into glitches and had missed its deadline.

4 As for what’s in it, we’re guessing Nokia parts.
In an attempt to show that, no, really, they’re serious about this cloning thing, Clonaid sells the RMX 2010, a $9,220 contraption that … well, nobody’s quite sure what it does. To help clarify the matter, Clonaid lends one to a British science museum — under strict orders not to open it to find out what’s inside.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the two University of Michigan affirmative action suits today. A decision is expected “by late June,” according to CNN.

Hint to protesters on both sides: the nine judges on the Supreme Court don’t give a damn what you say, so shut the hell up for the next three months. OK?

There’s a great review of the 12” PowerBook G4 at The Register today.

From a friend’s AIM away message:

your love is like a giant pigeon…crapping on my heart.

Honourable Mention:

Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself.

—President George W. Bush, on how far we’d be willing to go to defend Taiwan, Good Morning America, 25 April 2001

From a friend:

Rene Descartes walks into a bar, sits down and has a beer. When he finishes the bartender asks if he’d like another. Descartes says “I think not,” and disappears.