Friday, January 30, 2004

I'm pretty sure that the subhead for this story could very easily be: "Judge calls 'Fraught!' on even a possible meeting"

I was directed to this site by MetaFilter, and it's quality. (With a K.) Mostly because of this particular article, which manages to combine bad flashbacks to the Halloween movies, the notion that adding an ending like "-ique" makes it trendy, and the phrase "like doing 8 sit-ups a second on your face."

This story has a couple nice layers to it, and also rings quite true. The layer that rings truest to me is the notion of a gopher eating through the line. Back when satellite television meant a 10-foot dish and no scrambled channels, my family popped for a dish (we were so far back in the country that no cable system will touch us.) All goes well for about 2 years, we enjoy such oddities as the Satellite Bingo Channel and the feed of Alex Trebek saying "at seven on channel 5...at seven on channel 6..." One day, however, the entire system goes dead. Can't get a signal in, can't signal out to move the dish. So after a couple months of figuring, my dad calls in a backhoe to dig the line out. When we get the line out of the ground, we find it's got bite marks and a leak, and a set of groundhog holes all around it. Between this, finding one setting up shop in our crawlspace, and watching one teethe on our siding, we know the groundhog is not to be trusted, and would do things like blow up your house.

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