Tuesday, July 30, 2002

ELECTRICITY...E-LEC-TRICITY!!!

Few things are more annoying to your job than a power outage. This is especially true if your job is checking people's software for bugs. Thus this morning was really annoying for me. Apparently one circuit breaker, which controls half of my building's wing, kept tripping, following last night's electrical storms. As a result, my wing had no power. Now power, no computers, therefore in succession, no code, no editing, nothing to do but sit and get jacked on caffeine (the coffee maker and vending machines are on a separate circuit.) So they spend most of the day morning trying to get us up and running. This prompts me to take a long lunch, where I hear that local ESPNradio is holding a contest where the winner gets two tickets to San Francisco via Vanguard. This of course I find even more amusing when I realize that Vanguard went belly up this morning. S'anyway, after lunch, banking, lubing and washing the car, I come back to find everything back up. Until 3pm, when the other half of the wing goes down. Taking along with it, our air conditioning. Let me tell you, software engineers under a deadline are not the best of people, but when you cut off our electricity and air conditioning, we are not a pleasant people.

Monday, July 29, 2002

A double barreled shotgun of "did I hear that right?"
Within five minutes of each other on the TV just now. A dating phone line citing that one of their example stooges enjoys "romantic walks to the convenience store." and the opening of a women's pool match where the challenger is referred to as "THE DUCHESS of DOOOOOMMMM!!!" Somehow I always thought of Doom not as a land area but as merely a descriptor of buildings and objects. You can have the Realm of Darkness, Planet of Evil, Subdivision of the Damned, but Doom, that's for temples, not ducal holdings. I'll shut up now.
[Opens it up later]
Well, maybe I won't shut up. Am I the only person out there who, when he sees that clip of Saddam Hussein firing off a shotgun from the balcony, has the uncontrollable urge to scream in a cranky old man voice: "Hey, you kids! Get OUTTA MY YARD!" Yeah, just me. Okay.
You have chosen death...by quiz bowl, quiz bowl.
The beast of our weekend work is dead. And surprisingly it kicked before my work day ended. (I had 8:30 PM EDT in the pool for this assignment.) I feel good about it. It's a good set, geared exactly to what quiz bowl is not these days, that is accessible, interesting and fun for people who don't spend every waking our tooling through old packets. It's a good thing we're done with it, too. I can measure my level of stress sometimes by the pace of the music that gets stuck in my head. Usually it's mellow, but this time it was Bronzing the Garbage moving into Dogs and Chaplains, neither of which really works to have in your head when you're trying to type. (Incidentally: The one bit from Bronzing the Garbage that should have made it into stadium rotation would have been the perfect music for the hard inside pitch that doesn't hit the batter. Imagine that setup, and then someone drops in "HAVE I GOT YOUR ATTENTION?!" through the loudspeakers.) A lot of people did incredible work to make this set roll, especially when we had to do it outside of the normal Ginseng channels, had we blown it by not making the deadline, that would have been toxic to the whole state of the cabal. I felt really good about the output to put it over the top, I pulled down something like 80 over 3 days, and Joe got back in it a little.

Well, now off to relax...crap, still have to write the Burns packet.... And the music starts playing again. "I'mahappyveryHAPPYVERYHAPPYGUY!!"

I'd have links for you, but a lot of you reading this are playing. I'll let you have it next week.

Saturday, July 27, 2002

Hour 28 of the 72 hours of doom.

Most dead on hilarious thing I've seen this week.
Mike and I have kicked around the notion of doing a parody of the show called "Behind the ROM: Evil Otto" This only furthers our plans by showing us how it could be done. If anyone's willing to do diligence on whether the history portrayed on here is legit, I'd really like to know.

A website that answers most of my questions about these type of items.
In fact the only one it doesn't answer is was I hallucinating the following: About 1992 I saw a puzzle in a shop in Toronto, it was a big plastic padlock shape, except there were a series of small blocks that went along the length of the padlock body. Each block then had a set of three switches on it, that when put in the correct position would either allow the block to slide or be removed. I didn't buy it because it was too costly, but I never saw it again. Anyone ever seen something like this?

Thursday, July 25, 2002

There is currently a large Puerto Rican flag hanging from our third flagpole outside the office. Thankfully it doesn't mean that Pennsylvania has sold us out. Today's Puerto Rico's 50th anniversary as a commonwealth.

I almost cursed it...
There were apparently plans up this morning to move some diet colas back into my section of the building. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed, (or at least my screaming about diet cola). We now have a map of the building telling us where to go for everything. Somehow this is benign Dilbertization.

Not so much tooting my own horn as much as it's such a perfect setup line...
"John Doe A man who knows everything doesn't know his own name or how he got where he is. Kind of like if Dwight Kidder got knocked on the head and left in a corn field in Nebraska." --Mark Coen

Don't think people haven't tried. Of course, if I end up in Nebraska, here's prime suspect number one. For the record, I don't know everything, I don't even know everything that's "important".

Our minor league sports dipstickery of the day:
Okay. Two things:
1. Would you want to coach the a team called the Nutz?
2.. Remember this team has something like an 20 game season, and they're on FOUR coaches?

I will agree with the idea that they are interesting, only in that a dying mall is the most soulless place on earth. That said, I went to this site and found something wrong within 4 minutes. (A minor point about Pyramid Mall, Ithaca which only would interest...wait...no, not even me...) I point this one out only because they've done their research on finding chain info. Look under Store Locator.

One very relevant quiz bowl issue I thought of last night.
Could the current business climate (or lets call it the current business prosecution climate) serve to bring back one of the categories that no one seems to write any more? I can trace the exact moment Current Events:Business questions went in the tank as a category, and it was right about the time Pat Matthews and Doug Bone stopped writing so damn many good ones. I will hold that they, like all current event questions have some value in asking, but like a lot of categories, we forgot to write about them along the way.

Gleaming the Cubicle: Three items about my day job.
The common thread I've seen in a bunch of weblogs, and conversations with people is general dissatisfaction with one's workplace, or lack thereof. As boring and as banal that observation must seem, I'm wondering if I am unique these days in being moderately happy at my job. I even got the jollies out of the most banal thing possible this week, my the coke machine in my wing swapped out all the stuff I didn't like (diet colas, my personal gastro-intestinal kryptonite), in favor of stuff I had asked for (root beer and lemonade). This shouldn't amuse me. It really shouldn't. We as a wing voted, and our voices were heard. But the mere fact that it did work, it didn't even get screwed up or Dilbertized in the least, that's what keeps my sense of wonder intact.

Pointed out on Slashdot I really don't know why I never ran across these in interviews. Everywhere I have been hired was probably a little too old-school engineering and not cutting edge for these. Not that these have any bearing on your actual job, folks. In fact, I would guess that hearing someone challenge you with these is less a sign of insightful questioning than an uninspired culling process.

I was sitting at work today, just after our quarterly meeting, when I suddenly realized that I had overlooked my own anniversary with the company. I'm usually anal about such things, so forgetting that I was hired on the day after the Fourth 1998 kind of rattled me. I always mark personal time obsessively. I think that comes from knowing my birth minute, so I can spend the last minutes of my birthday driving myself nuts over what I have and haven't accomplished in the past year. Same thing happens New Year's Eve. So losing that moment when I could do that, that just leaves me out of sorts. I suppose the more I forget the passing, the more normal I become. Normal is usually overrated, but if it means I'm not paralyzed by analysis, well that's a normal worth being.

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

Don't panic.
I do like how they manage to blow it out of proportion with the graphic, but really, until we have better info, now's not the time to panic. It would be awfully hard to keep a panic like that going for 17 years.

I have great respect for bears
This is especially true after the last trip to Alaska, where one Kodiak went right under me as my legs hung over the decking, and the big guy just rubbed against one of them and passed along. Still, I look at this and go, the hell?

We're basically killing off PBS' Mystery! program at this point.
Rumpole: Dead. Earlier this year, Morse: Dead. If I were David Suchet, I'd watch my back.

Okay, we know you're going to do it, let's just be honest about the sources you're ripping off. In addition to ripping off Lipton, you are ripping off: The Real World, Survivor, Big Brother, Celebrity Jeopardy!, parodies of Celebrity Jeopardy!, the Osbournes, and The Oregon Lottery. I don't know if it's a step above or below Celebrity Boxing. But I just love how Mr. T. is now some sort of K-T boundary in the celebrity strata.

"I don't care that it's unwise medically. I'm not going to watch it bleed."
I see a long infomercial career ahead of John Daly.

And now: a jokes too obscure even for me. The story
Somewhere out there there's a thetan-infested talking koala who told him to do this.

I know, the more I talk about it, the more I'm just encouraging them.
More SupHerBowl preparations.

If you thought the Fox puck was annoying...
Interestingly, we actually got to see a FoxTrack puck while at the Naismith Museum. This, however, just looks like another way to anger the purists while not impressing the South about hockey.

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

Now's a good time to kill me. Well, maybe after we make the deadline on Monday.
I don't know folks, somehow I liked my free markets better when they were more free of marketing. I suppose Law and Order: Death by Chocolate isn't far behind. (shakes head sadly) I think this should be the LaPlaca bonus game this year, pick the series that gets cancelled while it's the flavor of the month.

A different angle on this
I just think this is kind of neat:
The Reds also acquired infielder Matt Boone, a son of manager Bob Boone, in exchange for infielder David Espinosa and two players to be named.
This would also be the reason I'd love to swing a trade getting Marcus Giles to the Pirates. Never happen though.

Only one thing to say to this: NARF!!
Only one thing to say to this: same thing, really, NARF!!


Monday, July 22, 2002

Two pieces of weirdness as I type questions madly.

1. I have the game on the TV, and during a break they put an ad up showing celebrities and how they love their favorite team. Well, for some reason they couldn't get anyone to root for the Pirates (surprise!) so we get Frankie Muniz (who is REALLY turning into Fred Savage circa 1989), telling us how he used to follow the Mets, but now he follows the Brewers. Then they tack on an still shot urging us to buy tickets for Pirates-Giants. The hell? That was completely random.

2. Back circa 1985, Tim Kazurinsky had a sketch on SNL where he revealed that no two people in the world spell "Qaddafi" the same way. I'm not convinced that this premise isn't true regarding the pronunciation of "Vitaly Potapenko" Today I've heard it pronounced five different ways, including what I think has to be my favorite: "Vittle-y Popempko".
Like two men who can't swim locking arms to do a backstroke.
It's hard for me to be ambivalent about USAir. (I don't care they call themselves US Airways, don't make me start going real retro and calling them Allegheny Airlines.) It's really the last dinosaur in town, and it needs someone to give the entire operation, labor and management, a collective cold shower. Like the steel industry before it, it got fat and overpriced, and believed itself indispensible. Were it not for the $1B government loan would they be any better off than Midway? Probably not.

I have to ask a simple question about this...
On one trip to Johns Hopkins for a tournament, we stayed at a motel that was right next to what was termed the "Decoy Museum", a museum of duck decoys. Now I'm wondering if it was merely a clever ploy to keep this safe.

Friday, July 19, 2002

Shudder.
To misquote Keith Olbermann misquoting Winston Churchill: "There is nothing I can add here which is either relevant or true."

And now, since it's the end of my work week: "I know there's a tossup in here somewhere..."
1 Leave the gun, take the cannelloni.
2 If ever an article could tell me where I stand on advertisers' target demographics...
3 When reading this please remember the key component that is reduced is FUEL, not TIME, and not DISTANCE. Thank you.
With apologies to the Troggs...
Another Minor-ity Report

Tonight's adventure in minor league goofiness: The Washington (PA) Wild Things. Washington, my home town, got a Frontier League team this year, finally making it the minor league town I always thought it could be. Tonight, Doug and I took in a game, after having been unable to make it in to the July 5th, though the first 90 minutes were spent in a rain delay. The Wild Things are surprisingly rich in coaching support as the pitching coach was Pirate legend and human pencil, Kent Tekulve, and the hitting coach was Indians legend Joe Charbonneau. It was surprisingly good and relatively free of hokeyness, though I did catch two little bits of weirdness. First, the team honored one of its pitchers, who threw a no-hitter on Monday, with the announcer asking us to recognize "this prehistoric event in Washington Wild Things history". Apparently history hasn't begun for them yet. The other odd thing is the logo and the mascot. The logo is definitely some sort of feline, but the mascot has a bear head. However, in both cases, it wears sunglasses. Somehow something called a wild thing should be a little too feral to wear Ray-Bans.

Other key facts: Actually got to see a delayed double steal of home and second in action from the perfect angle. (viewing down the 1st-2nd base line) What races in Washington? Dudes in giant rubber racehorse costumes. Minor league food cost comparison: Chili Dog, Onion Rings, Pepsi, $2 each. The guy manning the sound board had too much fun. One guy named Simpson got a four second full-echo full-volume "DOH" on every strike he took. However, he did manage to lay down one of the harshest choices you could ever put on a guy for his introduction music: Dancing Queen by ABBA.

Thursday, July 18, 2002

One less crazy old coot to kick around.
I really will miss not having Jim Traficant around. Somehow it's just comforting to know when a politician can be bought, it's really only a rental. Also this reduces the list of public figures with worse hair than me, and really, they are an endangered species.

Also I misjudged TV Guide when I said it was a waltz time, it's actually a four step: Superlative, Collectable, Sci-Fi, some sort of attempt to be a general entertainment magazine (usually involving country music for some reason). Since at this point I only notice TV Guide when it's across the rubber belt from me at the checkout, I had forgotten about that.

More news after the game...

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

Following up on my completely rational response to Rational Software's general crappiness, I give all the future developers the tools to make themselves inexpendable, and make my life rather interesting.

I think we should realize that baseball's upcoming negotiations won't result in a good deal for anyone, least of all, those of us who remain fans. A triple threat of articles that tell me that you'll have more than three parties in the negotiations: The players, the owners, and the owners who can afford a strike. To these three, add a fourth, Chairman Bud, desperately trying to hold on to anything that will keep baseball's anti-trust exemption in place, and costs low. (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C) Enjoy it while it lasts folks, when the big one hits, it's going to be long, ugly, and toxic.

But I liked Sheriff Lobo!
The "50 Worst" series in television history. As much fun as this is to discuss (and expect a full slate of the ones mentioned here to show up at a trash tournament near you. Writers and players take note) I kind of long for the day when TV Guide wasn't doing the magazine equivalent of stunt casting. At this point I think the magazine's down to a cycle in waltz time: 50x (superlative) Television (clip/commercial/moment/series/episode), "COLLECT ALL THE COVERS", Sci-Fi, and repeat.
And for those of you playing at home: I've seen 25 of these, and I had never heard of #20 and #23. Off to research them.

Monday, July 15, 2002

I have a headline with a Q on it.

First before we get to the festivities: I have to give some extra props to Eric Bell, for getting another 83 names for the EF Contact list. I'll be putting those up tonight, assuming I stay awake.

I think Joe said it best, when he said we did a trip to Montreal, without spoiling for us the opportunity to take a trip to Montreal. Craig will probably have a more complete score later on tonight, but... (In fact he did) Here's some notes.

0. The schedule:
Thurs: Fly up, planned trip to Alouettes game scrubbed due to sellout of game. Watch game from a sports bar.
Fri: Drive to Quebec. Tour the city, see a Quebec Capitales game. (Damage: one hat, one shirt.)
Sat: Drive to Ottawa. Tour the stadium. Discover that the way into the stadium is a little too open, discover that beavers built the stadium's new section. Discover that Manitoba truly can collapse like no other province. Discover that you never know when the Vezina trophy can be fondled. Discover that I probably did have a shooting touch in high school, had I had more than 1 month of floor hockey a year. Discover that the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame is really a hallway. Discover that the Corel Centre lies next to the headquarters of the Lords of Entropy. Discover there's a reason lemonade in Canada is so crappy. Discover that one can divide magazine sections into four sections: general interest, special interest, local interest, prurient interest.
Sun: Go to Stade Olympique, become frightened by the enormity of it all. Bask in the glory that is Youppi!, Find out exactly how many amino acids my body could take. Ran a network into the ground.
All in all, a well rounded bit of insanity.

1 The 12 meats:
Smoked salmon
Beef Stew
Pork Stew
Pork Chop
Corn Dog
Chicken Kebab
Beef Kebab
Kielbasa
Roast Beef
Baked Ham
Smoked Ham
Smoked Turkey
(I'm racking my brain trying to determine if the 13th meat was real or merely a repeat of one of the first 8.)
2. I think I speak for many of us in that if you had a problem with a product that cost you two weeks of effective work, recieved both minimal help and maximum apathy from customer service, and you found yourself in my position, turning around to see their corporate office right next to you; you'd be screaming obscenities as well.
3. Youppi, man... What can you say, the guy is a class act all around. I didn't realize he had slight separatist sympathies, but what other reason can he give for giving the props to my Capitales hat. It's sad to think that if the Expos leave, he'd be out of work. How can we draft a "Youppi for Comissioner" petition?
4. Quebec has the bomb, and I have the pictures to prove it. More information forthcoming.
5. If Quebec didn't have chicken and fried potatoes, the entire province would starve.


Wednesday, July 10, 2002

Probably our last update until Monday. I go to the land of Youppi! tomorrow.

Question for you all: Entering Freshman Contact List got a hit for a student going to a school in TWO years. Okay, your assignment: how do you set this up for the kid? No established team there. And the better question, do we really want to get in the business of setting people up this far in advance. I sort of get an odd LeBron James vibe here.

New Ancient Human Skull Find in Chad
Ever since hearing about this on NPR, I've had David Byrne's The Gates of Paradise playing in my head.
"I am nothing like my sister
I am nothing like my mom
You can't see me in my father
Wonder where did I come from?"

Lucy is now looking at the Leakey Family, asking if she was adopted.

Bad sign or weirdly subliminal?
There's an Acuvue web ad which they stuff Flash down my throat (I tend to browse with images off) in which they are sponsoring Enrique Inglesias' world tour. Okay, all well and good. EXCEPT: the reason they justify jamming Flash is that they want a little roaming contact lens, while the words "click here" flashes behind it. Why is this worthy of inclusion here, you ask? Well, with the roving contact, I swear I saw this thing flashing with the first C missing. Sorry, Enrique.
Disturbing, but it's no discussion of Cyril Wecht's public record. (See the dateline: Pennsylvania)

I know there's a tossup in there somewhere...
1 Even in the world of opera, people delude themselves by setting their standards too narrowly.
2 My head hurts, they're charged as adults for a crime that only minors can be guilty of, but the law sends them to adult court so they're charged as adults...
3 Obscure joke here: Do you think she subscribes to Chicken Outlaw Biker? Less obscure joke: It's in the basement of the Alamo. Dumb surrealist joke: Why do you hypnotize a chicken? To get to the other side.

Think of this as a variation on googlewhacking.
I figured I had a good shot at a googlewhack with the combination platypus-lederhosen. (don't ask me how I come up with these. They just happen.) S'anyway, I tried it in google, and while I didn't hit a googlewhack, I did hit what I would have to say are the strangest combination of web page summary quotes(the lines which contain the search terms that google gives you as guidance.) Just look.

You see what happens when you go to bed early...

I admit it, I fell asleep early last night and thus missed out on all the fun. (Except for the first couple innings, and of course the National Anthem, which amazingly doesn't make the bottom five worst National Anthems, whiffing three words and all.) Don't know what happened except that I was dead tired for some reason, and though I had the TV on in the other room to the All-Star game, when I laid down on the bed I was out for 3 hours. Thus I missed out on actually bearing witness to what has to be the perfect ending to Selig's game.

I can't actually be angry at MLB for this, even if it does have the distinct feel of someone caving into Fox panicking that the game ran long. I have developed a small amount of sympathy for any organization that puts together such a big event when entropy happens to it. Having a cop come to try to shut down your event will give you a cold shot of perspective. But Bud, don't spin it like it was in the best interest of the players, and don't pass the buck on to the coaches! That's just bull and you know it, Bud. If you can't stand up for your own actions, how do you expect us to greet them with anything but skepticism?

This also changes my theory that the new Star Wars trilogy is based on major league baseball's labor trouble. Episode I with Darth Selig and Padme Schott, yes, but now the order has changed, and now Episode II seems to be ahead of baseball events.

The thing I'm thinking is that, had this been 1972, 1982, or even 1992, we as fans would have understood, or at least we would have not reacted as it has gone down. But we're post 1994-95 strike, and all the free passes baseball had earned long ago have been spent. Keep this in mind, folks, when you go in to negotiate. Clones of Barry Fett will be ready sooner than you think.

Tuesday, July 09, 2002

Notes from the Celebrity All-Star Game:
Winfield, Brett, Kruk, Ozzie Smith and Kenny Mayne in old unis.
Winfield: Old mustard and chocolate Padres Uni. The color brown was somehow drummed out of the league at about the same time the tan M&M got tossed (coincidence or causality?) It really should be brought back.
Brett: demonstrating the good and bad qualities of the old Royals uniforms. Good: light blue, Bad: light blue with white lettering. Looks like a T-ball jersey.
Kruk and Ozzie Smith: sorry, there's a reason the whole light blue jerseys with red lettering died out. I'm only sorry it took the burgundy Phillies color with them.
Mayne: Seattle Pilots Jersey. Excellent choice.

I don't care how old you are, I don't care if it's softball, I don't care if it's a Hall of Famer at the plate. You can't feel good giving up a homer to a relief pitcher. (in this case Rollie Fingers going yard, okay, outfield)

How to measure your addictions
A while back, when caffeinated water was released, you could measure your addiction to caffeine based on your reaction:
"Who would drink that?": No addiction.
"I'd drink it if I wasn't in the mood for something sweet.": Addiction.
"WHOA! I could make COFFEE with that!": Intervention Required (Switch to decaf, or switch out of engineering.)
I think the principle holds here.

A double barrelled shotgun for the Food&Drink category.
Nation's Restaurant News news about all sorts of franchise restaurants.
BevNet news and reviews about soft drinks of all manner.

Monday, July 08, 2002

Speaking for the engineering community, I have to say: "No. In fact it's quite different."

I went hunting for more stories in the "homicide giraffe" category (see item 2 from 7/5/02) Ran across this one. I don't know what is up with this newspaper.
In which our protagonist discovers poker to be more profitable than a yard sale.

I'm rather surprised by this, but we (Joe, Doug, and myself) weren't able to get into the Washington Wild Things game on Friday. Selling out a baseball game is such an alien concept to me that I was a little unraveled by that. Add to that Joe and I were about to go down to the last regular season game for the Ohio Valley Greyhounds on Saturday, but reread that the game was an away game just before we left. I'll toss this article in here. Here is why we love NIFL in a nutshell. No matter how weird you think the league can get, it will top itself.

The folks had a yard sale on Saturday. Being overstuffed with crap in my apartment, I offered up a large amount of books, several prizes won at trash tournaments, and a pair of tables which I had been using as a coffee table and stereo stand.

Here are the things that did not sell:
1984-era Macintosh. (I was tempted to hold back the two training tapes (casettes!))
Most of the curriculum of Cornell's History 242 and History 251 courses.
Anything I had previously won at a tournament, including:
A Yellow Submarine blue Meanie
Whatizit? the mascot of the '96 Olympics
Novelizations of the films Worth Winning and O Heavenly Dog
Multiple tasteless books (put in the sale only for the amusing embarassment my parents would have in selling it, of course they got me back
by noting that I should take it back since the leftovers were going to Washington City Mission.)

I did not put Jar Jar up for bid, he has already taken a header off of Architect's Leap at CMU, if my sources are correct.

I contemplated putting a Benet's in there, figuring, well, what more damage could another embittered Benet's memorizer do to the game? But I forgot to take it, and I forgot the sale wouldn't have been frequented by quiz bowlers.

Apparently my father was not clear on the concept, according to my mother, as he then traded most of his old computer parts for a set of old radio parts. This is especially ironic, folks, given that the main reason he was selling the stuff at the yard sale was to get rid of clutter in the garage. Now he's got a brand new set of clutter...

Anyway, since my cousin from Chicago was in for the fourth, we had to have Sunday dinner with poker following. I mention this only for the reason that my parents pretty much saw their yard sale profits get sucked into the game (I whipsawed from down $20 at one point back to even.), and for the reason that I finally landed a straight flush, AND kept the face straight enough to keep people in the game.

Finally, I'll throw in this article on lightning bugs (Pennsylvania's State Insect, mostly due to its resemblance to our state bird, the flasher-crested road barrel.). They're basically one of three natural phenomena I can use to tell the calendar, as they seem to start flying on July 1, and not one day earlier.

While we're here, we'll put one of those plugs in for this page: for all those questions about state birds, flowers, and other burnt legislation time. Trite perhaps, but useful.

Saturday, July 06, 2002

"I will NOT be out-oldied by ANYONE who goes by L'il Timmy." -- Joe relating his experience with a particularly dweeby/perky Arby's employee.

Friday, July 05, 2002

I know there's a tossup in here somewhere...

1 I now have this image of Niles calling out Vince McMahon. (Note: while spell checking this, I accidentally ran across a google entry for Vince McMahon fan fiction.... SHUDDER)
2 The hell? I think what really makes this is the related articles, makes it feel like there's an entire section of the paper, and that this sort of thing is as common as the police blotter.
3 (stolen from Craig's) I think all headlines should read like this. Where if you don't know the story in advance, it makes it sound like all articles should have that sort of disclaimer. "Mideast experts say violence not octopus-related." (UPDATE: Joe noted the really bizarre part of this is that if you don't know the story in advance, the weirdest word in it is say.

Wednesday, July 03, 2002

Bill Simmons, have we got a series for you.
After Simmons mentioned the possibility of the Hundred Club wing, this pops up. Apparently Bill has the same power to summon television programming that Mike (Trap Door->Russian Roulette), and I (I'll Eat That->The Glutton Bowl) apparently possess. His just works faster. Remember to use it for good, Bill, never for evil.

Despite the best efforts of Godwin's Law, Rik Mayall has a career.
Let's face it, this is no way to run a political ad, but more importantly, didn't you think between him and Phoebe Cates, her career would survive Drop Dead Fred? Thought so. (Incidentally, I'm pro-euro, because it's provided an upturn in question production about it.)

Tuesday, July 02, 2002

Yankees get Mondesi
I understand it's not as quite as simple as "The Yankees are a big market team, and the Pirates are a small market team" One has good management, and the other, until recently was managed by man playing liar's poker with himself and losing. But I think this pretty much sums up the situation:

As the trading deadline approaches, different teams are looking for different things:
The Pirates: anyone who can hit.
The Yankees: the Sudetenland, because they heard it was a calming clubhouse presence.

In other news, am I the only one looking at the ads for Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, going "Wait a second, they stuck a plot in this thing?"
Despite the fact that I'm probably the most cube-domesticated person you know, I'm kind of hoping this starts showing up on the "things you can get for having been with the company XX years" lists.

Is it too much for me to hope that somehow the Frontier League and the Atlantic League could get a series together? I just want to go to a game where I can hear it over and over again. Incidentally, I'm betting that the mascot is little more than the Warren Z. Vaughn with something other than the Lord Mayor's hat on.

Monday, July 01, 2002

It's Monday, and nothing interesting happened over the weekend, as I spent it refurbishing an old laptop and bringing it up to speed for my needs. I'm now up to Windows 98 at home, which I see as a step down from 95. I'm turning into my father in a way. Considering he spent most of the 1980's and 90's building PC's out of individual components, and I basically built mine the same way, moving to any sort of prefab system where I can't field strip, diagnose, replace and reassemble blindfolded is alien territory for me.

And what is it with the Samoan?
Hunter S. Thompson vs Jerry Seinfeld.... This ought to be good. Reading this fax kinda makes me wonder if absolutely everything the Good Doctor writes comes off like this. I'm imagining shopping lists for Home Depot still wet with venom. "Few things terrify a man more than a halfwit unable to determine the difference between matte finish and semi-gloss, and the lobotomized, orange-aproned deritus will provide no guidance."

Chairman Yao
You figured something like this was going to happen eventually, but boy was this perfect. Could we possibly find one more way to asymptotically approach an international incident with this guy?

Now some stuff for writing:
Looking for old school basketball questions? A website that's got the funk.
Remember the ABA, one of the best sites abandoned league sites out there.

A ridiculous listing of symphonies
For filling that always tricky Symphonic Music subcategory.