This stylish bag is now available for just $150.
“Get yer breast bags here! Hot breast bags! I got yer hot breast bags right here!”
The Avid Acutus turntable is radically different from current design theories.
Yeah, so radically different that the average consumer — in this case, me — can immediately recognise it as a turntable.
I thought they’d at least have the cojones to make the record sit still and have the tonearm and stylus move or something. C’mon, “radically different from” doesn’t mean “a clone of.”
The BBC is running a documentary on BBC Two this Sunday, 28 March, that chronicles his life through the eyes of acquaintances.
If anyone has satellite access to BBC Two and the capability to encode this to MPEG format, I’d really like to see it.
Dubya has all but admitted the WMD ruse was just that: a ruse to get approval for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.
Please, please, please let the voters remember this in November.
As I just mentioned, one of the things I found in my wallet this afternoon was a stanza of a Robert Frost poem.
For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the title of the poem. I hit Google, first searching simply for “Robert Frost,” which yielded several interesting sites but nothing to jog the memory. I then Googled the first line of the poem that came to mind: “But yield who will to their separation.”
This produced an immediate result, which is wholly unremarkable except for two things. First, I went to college with a kid named Alex Dodge, who happens to share a name (though not a body, as I quickly ascertained from the Alex Dodge link on the sidebar) with that blog author’s son. Second, the sidebar contained a link to a site with a strangely familiar-sounding name: uggabugga.
I have no idea where I might have heard of uggabugga, but upon seeing it, absolutely nothing looks familiar.
But the site is great. It’s another one of those “Dubya is horseshit” blogs, but it’s really really interesting and isn’t just a bunch of leftist ranting like one might expect. There are links to stories like “Bush Wants Kerry to Identify Supporters So He Can Invade Them,” a reference to Kerry’s recent statement that he (Kerry) has the support of “foreign leaders.” (It’s funny. Laugh.)
Early this afternoon, Eric IMed me, saying cryptically, “I have too many cards.” Turns out he was talking about wallet pollution, a plague with which any college-age guy ought to be intimately familiar. Of course, I was thus inspired to take a look through my own wallet, whereupon I discovered the following:
The wallet pollution wasn’t as bad as I had expected it to be, although my wallet has gained very little over the last 18 months, and I gave it a pretty thorough cleaning before I moved up to Ann Arbor. The only three things I tossed were the expired health insurance card, the expired motorcycle insurance card, and the ACS student membership card. But the whole experience got me to thinking: as Capital One asks, “What’s in your wallet?”
What time, you ask?
Time to me to dig out the steaming pile of donkey poop that is Internet Explorer 5.2 and do my tax return.
Why, oh why doesn’t anyone write an online tax prep engine that is both free and functional with something besides IE?
It isn’t even a matter of user-agent spoofing, either. Nothing but IE will even communicate with CompleteTax’s servers once a tax return editing session is begun. Argh.
Ah well, on the bright side, it hasn’t crashed. Yet. (Knock on wood!)
Apparently, having the ability to obtain a private pilot’s licence doesn’t mean you have common sense. A British balloonist (tangentially related quiz question: what’s the only word in English with three double letters in a row? “Balloon” is an example of a word with two consecutive double letters.) launched a hot-air balloon from Greeley, Colorado, ascended to a claimed altitude of 42,000 feet, and landed about 3.5 hours later near Akron, about 100 miles east of Denver.
The FAA is investigating him “for several possible violations, including crossing into Denver International Airport airspace.”
And for that…
Red Forman Dumbass Rating:
After three hours at the doctor’s office, some minor mix-ups, including someone losing my audiogram, which it later turned out didn’t matter anyway, I am now the proud holder of an FAA first-class medical and student pilot certificate.
Oh, and my vision is better than 20/20 in each eye, nyah nyah nyah.
Someone’s getting fired for installing critical space shuttle parts backwards.
And then not noticing it for 20 years!
Herbs and whiskey aren’t going to cure cobra bite, but some people just can’t be convinced that modern medicine does occasionally have its uses.
Australians have too much time on their hands, as evidenced by the two contenders who lost to the singing dingo in the voting for top Australian trivia item. The two runners-up: a guy who can jump in place on his unicycle 232 times per minute, and a guy — this must be a guy — who can shoot his toenail clippings direct from toenail to wastebasket with 90 percent accuracy at a distance of a metre.
Benton County, Oregon, has said “screw you all” and banned all marriages as of Tuesday afternoon. Rather than deal with a legal mess if or when the state decides whether gay marriage is permissible, county commissioners are now refusing to allow any marriage at all. As you might expect, the homophobes are violently up in arms about this, and completely puzzled by the county’s refusal to allow “legal” marriage.
For just $3.96, you too can own William Hung’s new EP, entitled “Inspiration.” (iTunes required for link to work.)
The four songs are Ricky Martin’s She Bangs (of course!), R. Kelly’s I Believe I Can Fly, Elton John’s Rocket Man, and a song called Free, which I don’t recognise and can’t seem to find an original artist for.
My mom suggested, after hearing Hung’s butchering of R. Kelly, that maybe I should try to get a record deal, too.
I told her that the difference between William Hung and me is that I have shame. And he doesn’t.
Excuse the terrible pun, but these wooden mice, amongst other wooden accessories, are very classy-looking.
It isn’t exactly a new idea — the Apple I prototypes were built with wooden cases way back in 1976 — but these are very professional, stylish pieces.
For readers in the US, there’s also WoodBin, though I must say a brief glance through both sites shows the Swedx pieces to be nicer.
Jesus has been knocked off His lofty box-office perch by a bunch of zombies.
Reason number 381 not to use a software firewall: firewall software isn’t free from worms either. I mean, it makes sense not to use Outlook/Outlook Express or Internet Explorer, because everyone knows they’re terrible. But it’s not a good idea to blindly trust your firewall software, either, and hardware firewalls (present in most SOHO-class routers, from vendors such as Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, etc.) don’t have several gigs of sensitive data on them that can get hosed if an exploit takes them down.
In case you missed the other 380 reasons not to use software firewalls, SamSpade lists a few.
Clyde Tombaugh, the amateur astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto in 1930, spent a good portion of the next three decades building a massive (for an amateur project) telescope in his backyard. That 16-inch monster is now for sale.
Anyone got a semi truck, a few weeks of time, and maybe a spare 20 grand or so? My backyard said it feels empty.
I went to the bank Friday afternoon to deposit a check. My bank happens to be in a grocery store. As I pulled into the parking lot and got out of the car, I noticed a crowd of store employees huddled over and around something on the sidewalk.
As I got closer, I realised they were sitting on someone. One of the guys was holding about 10 styrofoam meat trays full of steak, and three more were sitting on a guy who was struggling to get away. Two more guys each had one of the thief’s legs.
Now, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s hilarious that anyone would think he could escape on foot with 15 pounds of fresh steak tucked in his pants, but it’s sad that someone would feel the need to steal food in order to eat.
Based on my conversations with various store employees, I suspect the man was not, in fact, homeless or hungry, but rather stealing because he could get away with it.
The really pathetic part of the whole incident is that nearly every store employee other than active cashiers immediately ran outside to see wht the commotion was all about, so I’m thinking this guy should have had a partner. Simple, really: steal a few things as a giant (and extremely effective) diversion, while your partner walks right out of the store calmly pushing a cart full of free groceries. Even the tellers at the bank ran out to investigate when I mentioned what had happened outside.
For trying to escape a store with 15 pounds of fresh steak shoved down his pants, the perp gets the following award:
Red Forman Dumbass Rating:
…going twice…gone.
To a 44-year-old engineer and divorced father of two, for £8400.
Notwithstanding the fact that I wouldn’t pay for sex in the first place, I certainly wouldn’t pay that much money for any sex act. Again, some people apparently have more money than sense…
The Spirit rover has seen a UFO in the Martian sky. Scientists aren’t sure what the object was, but there is speculation it could have been the American Viking 2 orbiter, which has been inactive since July 1978.
The FDA plans to define “low-carb” by summer, in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to the current mess in supermarkets across the country.
Child-porn charges against R. Kelly have been dropped in Florida for want of evidence. The judge ruled most of the photographic evidence inadmissible due to insufficient evidence provided when the search warrant was issued. This follows closely on the heels of Chicago-area prosecutors dropping several charges against him there relating to the infamous video tape that allegedly shows Kelly in, uh, “compromising positions” with a then-14-year-old girl.
A French motorist has been sentenced in the attempted vehicular manslaughter of a pedestrian the motorist claimed looked like Osama bin Laden. He was ordered to seek counseling and pay a 500-Euro fine.
Utah has banned execution by firing squad, leaving lethal injection as the only means of capital punishment. There have to be Mormon and SCO jokes in there somewhere…
Bill Clinton’s boyhood home, at 321 East 13th Street, Hope, Arkansas, is for sale on eBay, where bidding has surpassed $216,000 as of this post. Mildly overweight interns and large desk are not included.
Finally, the Detroit Pistons are after a record. A ‘fro-fearing record. The team plans to distribute 5,000 red, white, and blue wigs to fans under the age of 15 at its home game against Denver this Friday in an attempt to set the Guinness World Record for “most people wearing wigs in a single venue.”
Fear the ‘Fro.
The BBC is reporting on a study published in Nature that proposes a mechanism by which prions, the misfolded proteins suspected of causing so-called “mad cow” disease, chronic wasting disease in deer, and the human analogue, new-variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, get their shapes and “reproduce.”
Essentially, prions are governed by the folding “rules” that govern ordinary proteins: temperature, pH, and hydrophobicity of their environment will affect their shape. The researchers subjected yeast prions to heat, causing some of them to unfold and re-fold into a different configuration. These modified prions then served as templates in the development of identical prions when introduced into prion-free yeast, much as DNA or RNA can serve as a template for the manufacture of more RNA or DNA.
See the green background? Nice touch, eh?
In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, I offer these classic Irish jokes:
Q: How many Irishmen does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Five. One to hold the bulb and four to drink until the room spins.
Two old friends, Patty and Seamus, are sittin’ on their front porch, sippin’ pints o’ Guinness. Patty turns to Seamus and asks, “Seamus, me old friend, would ye do me a favour?”
“Oh, sure, Patty, anything ya ask.”
“Would ye make sure I have a nice funeral, with a piper there playin’ Amazin’ Grace on the pipes as they lower me into the ground?”
“Oh, sure, Patty, no problem.”
A few moments later Patty turns to Seamus again and asks, “Would ye mind doin’ me one last favour?”
“Oh, sure, Patty, just name it!”
“Would ye pour a bottle o’ fine Irish whisky o’er me grave when I’m gone?”
Seamus thinks for a moment and asks, “Aye, Patty, no problem. But would ye be mindin’ terribly if I passed it through me kidneys first?”
A young Irish lad walks into a bar in Dublin and orders three pints of Guinness. The bartender gives them to him, and the lad takes his three pints to a table in the corner where he sets them around the table. He takes a sip out of the first pint, a sip out of the second pint, and a sip out of the third pint. He keeps alternating pints in this fashion until they’re gone.
The lad goes up to order another round, and the bartender observes, “Ye know they stay fresher, lad, if I only pour ‘em one at a time.”
“Aye, I do. But one of me brothers has moved to Australia, and the other to America, and when we split up, we promised each other we’d drink like this every Monday night to remember the good days of our childhood here in Dublin, when we could drink together.”
Well, the bartender thinks this is a charming story, so he gives the lad his three more pints on the house. The lad becomes a real regular at this bar, and one day about a year later, he walks in and orders two pints.
The bartender notices, of course, as do all the other regulars, but no one really wants to say anything. Finally, when the lad goes up to order his second round, the bartender screws up his courage and says, “I don’t mean to intrude upon your grief, but I’m terribly sorry to hear about your loss.”
The young lad looks very confused for a moment, but then realises what’s been said, and replies brightly, “Oh, no, sir, everything’s fine. I’ve just quit drinkin’.”
This guy can’t get enough spam. The fact that he’s a grandfather at age 45 ought to tell you a lot. Why can’t guys like this die in terrorist attacks instead of bright young individuals like my friend Brad Hoorn?
NASA is planning to send a probe to the Jovian moon Europa to search its oceans for life.
Pooping on your keyboard might clean it up a bit. The typical restroom toilet seat
contains some 50 microbes per square inch, while a typical keyboard contains 21,000, according to the BBC’s story.
Clearly, God is the God of the Jews, and is angry at Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism.
I mean, why else would He have sent a Plague of Locusts to Australia?
Give Apple 12 months and they’ll have a 4 GB iPod micro based on these 0.85” Toshiba hard disks.
Mark my words: this is next January’s big MWSF introduction.
You can now get a sex-ed video for pandas.
No word on whether it’s available on KaZaA yet…
Right behind “has elected two movie stars as governor” comes “city officials nearly vote to ban foam cups because they’re made with water.”
Red Forman Dumbass Rating:
Heaven forbid I should ever get into trouble with the law in such a capacity as to require a trial by jury.
Article III, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution specifies:
The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury
The oft-misquoted addition to this, that the jury shall consist “of [the accused’s] peers,” is actually from the Magna Carta and is present in neither the U.S. Constitution nor the current Constitution of the State of Michigan (dated 1963).
This is what we in the industry refer to as A Good Thing™.
“But why?” you ask. “Isn’t being tried by a jury of your peers an ideal situation?”
Sure, if more than 20 of your peers can be arsed to actually show up for a jury summons. I overheard a couple people talking while we sat around the jury room this morning, one of whom had just been told by the clerk that “60 percent” of the people summoned for jury duty today failed to show. Now, it’s obvious some people consider jury duty to be an imposition. Pay for district and circuit court cases is terrible: $12.50 for the first half-day, $25 for the first full day, and $20 per half-day thereafter, and you still have to pay for parking out of your own pocket. Even someone working at McDonald’s makes more than that. So I can understand why people are reluctant to take an unpaid leave from work.
But that doesn’t excuse them from the civic responsibility of serving as potential jurors. As the Hon. Philip Schaefer, judge of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court, so eloquently put it:
I want you to do a simple math problem. Take the number of hours of jury duty you’ve served. Triple it if you want to. Now, divide that by the number of hours you’ve lived in our free, democratic society.
Go on. Do the math.
All this is not to say I think the present jury system is perfect. It’s not. Today was a great example of why picking jurors at random from the citizenry at large is a bad idea. But those of you who didn’t show up today, you should all be ashamed of yourselves. If you can’t be arsed to show up for potential jury duty, you can’t be arsed to go to the polls in November. If you can’t be arsed to vote for your leaders, then you have absolutely no leg to stand on when complaining about anything wrong with the United States. If you can’t be arsed to fulfill your civic responsibilities, the government can’t be arsed to send you your Social Security check, or your Medicare payment, or your welfare check, or — God forbid — your unemployment check. Because clearly, unemployed people have so many more worthwhile things to be doing with their time.
Think about it.
Apologies if you tried to visit sometime in the last hour and a half and got some strange PHP parsing error or other oddity. See, Eric suggested I randomise the faces used for Red Forman’s Dumbass Rating in the previous two entries and this week’s Darwin Award Nominee.
At first, I sort of dismissed it out-of-hand as too complicated, because at the time I was thinking of how horrible it would be to implement in JavaScript.
Then I remembered I ought to be able to use PHP for this fairly easily. Well, I wouldn’t say “fairly easily” is a proper description, but coding the PHP took about 15 minutes. Getting it properly integrated into Movable Type is what took so long. I had to switch over to all-PHP output, since I can’t seem to get this Web host to parse .html files as PHP no matter what voodoo I perform on the .htaccess file.
But yeah, the end result is that each time this page loads, the floating heads representing Red Forman’s Dumbass Rating are randomly picked from images of Eric, Kelso, Hyde, and Bob Pinciotti.
Man, I really need to be sleeping right now instead of doing this!
Barely missing the title today is the person(s) responsible for this amazing piece of irony (from Macintouch):
The US Department of the Interior, with repeated “F” grades in computer security, and repeated Internet cutoffs by court order for poor computer security, now requires everyone to take Web-based computer security training. The training works only with Windows, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player. [Emphasis mine. -cl]
Let’s see…teach people computer security on the least secure platform in the world. Smart. Really.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Red Forman Dumbass Rating:
Alice Regina Pike is today’s winner for trying to buy $1675 worth of merchandise at Wal-Mart (Side question: what did she buy, a thousand pairs of panties or something? I didn’t think anything at Wal-Mart was that expensive!) with two gift cards.
The gift cards had a combined value of just over $2.
When that didn’t work, she handed the clerk…are you ready for this?
A one-million-dollar bill.
Trivia buffs out there will remember that the United States has never issued a million-dollar bill. The highest denomination ever issued was the $100,000 bill, series 1933, which featured Woodrow Wilson and was used only for inter-bank gold transactions. It was never released for general circulation. The highest circulation issue was the $10,000 bill, featuring Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. All bills over $100 were officially recalled from general circulation in 1969.
Red Forman Dumbass Rating:
…to Mars, where a bunch of people with lots of time on their hands and very overactive imaginations (or prescriptions for highly entertaining psychotropic substances) have “found,” well, the white rabbit. Along with stone tools and dinosaur fossils.
A retired Air Force pilot has even “found” the letters E and G written on Martian rocks.
You know, because the Man in the Moon and the Face on Mars were real, too.
Thanks, Slashdot.
Orange County, California, used electronic voting extensively in county and state elections last week. In 21 precincts, there were more ballots cast than registered voters. An estimated 1500 voters cast the wrong ballots, and at least 5500 ballots were tabulated for the wrong precinct. There’s a good discussion of this over on Slashdot.
Remember, the 2000 presidential election was decided by far fewer votes than this. All it takes is one fucked-up county in a swing state, and we’ll have four more years of Dubya and the Little Bushie Brigade. Couple that with Diebold’s CEO’s statement that his company is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year,” and you have a very scary situation.
UPDATE, 12 March: due to being Slashdotted, Dean has taken the site down for the time being while he searches for another willing victim…er, host. Give it 24 hours or so. Oh, and nyah nyah nyah! I scooped Slashdot by three days!
Everybody who knows jack about Web design realises that IE is a scourge on the landscape of the Web. Most of us would probably rather see IE shrivel up and die a slow, lingering death than continue on as a browser.
Those people unlucky enough to pay their bills via Web design, however, might sleep a bit easier tonight knowing that Dean Edwards has developed a DHTML patch for IE 5.5 and 6.0 that brings full W3C compatibility to IE’s CSS rendering engine.
The delightful irony of this little gem is that it patches IE by using W3C-standard CSS.
Keep an eye on this site for a possible beta-test. I need some time to digest what Dean has done before I start messing with code again.
On a related note, I really really really REALLY appreciate the effort that went into something like this, and I think it will probably be welcomed with open arms by most of the Web design community.
But there’s a big problem with something like this, just as there is with user-agent spoofing:
It does nothing to encourage the developers behind the stupidity to FIX THEIR BROKEN PRODUCT. In fact, not only does it not encourage developers to fix the shortcomings, it may discourage them from doing so. Why put forth the effort to fix a problem when someone else has already done so?
An honest, forward-thinking developer would fix the code because it’s the right thing to do, but if honest, forward-thinking developers and managers worked for Microsoft, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.
Something to think about.
A 19-year-old New Zealander thought it would be smart to replace his car’s brake fluid with dishwashing detergent. He crashed soon afterward, though he has yet to eliminate himself from the gene pool…
Red Forman Dumbass Rating:
OK, this isn’t scary. Sorry.
Well, at least not in the “shit your pants and run away” sense. It’s kind of scary in the “this guy has waaaaaaay better things he should be doing with his intelligence and time” sense.
Besides, doesn’t he have any CLUE what a dragon should look like?
Trogdor is un please. Now, he proceeds you burninate.
I’ve been trying to convince all my h4X0r phr|3ndz that Apple was such a ‘leet’ company, and now I finally have proof, from Yahoo Finance at the close of trading today:
I have jury duty on 16 March. Please, God, let me get a case like this one.
I promise I’ll try my best to keep a straight face when the defence counsel states, in his closing arguments, “You, the jury, have heard testimony that my client was otherwise occupied and most certainly could not have been driving Mr. Esposito’s vehicle while simultaneously performing oral sex on him.”
I only ask because some student-athletes at the University of Georgia might be getting really familiar with that phrase. That’s the phrase they’re going to need after they “graduate,” if they graduate.
See, in the fall of 2001, former UGA men’s assistant basketball coach (and son of head coach Jim Harrick, Sr.) Jim Harrick, Jr. was teaching a class entitled “Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball.” Three scholarship members of the men’s basketball team were in the class, and all three were given a grade of A, despite being allowed to miss several class sessions AND the final exam.
The very difficult final exam.
Consisting of multiple-choice questions like “How many points does a 3-point field goal count for in a Basketball Game?” or “How many halves are in a college basketball game.”
This was a real final exam, in a real college class, for real college credit, at a real accredited college. These real grades are going on real college transcripts and will contribute to people getting real degrees.
Does this bother anyone else?
In a story that should surprise absolutely no one, Columbia University researchers have found antibacterial soaps are ineffective against viruses.
In other news, hammers were found to be poor tools for removing screws, and screwdrivers were found to be ineffective for driving nails.
Is it really 01 March already? Where did February go?
More speficially, why did it skip from 29 February straight to 01 March? I didn’t even get until the 31st to claim my prize.