October 6, 2009
The Guild, Season 3 Episode 6: Newbtastic
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October 3, 2009
Why Chicago didn’t get the 2016 Olympics
Robert Bentley gives the top ten reasons why Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games was rejected:
10. Dead people can’t vote at IOC meetings.
9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with Gen. McChrystal.
8. Who cares if Obama couldn’t talk the IOC into Chicago? He’ll be able to talk Iran out of nukes.
7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements.
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September 29, 2009
The Guild, Season 3 Episode 5
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September 25, 2009
QotD: CanLit
Canadian literature (or CanLit, as some insist) has gradually become a genre of its own- one of books that are bleak, desperate, *meaningful*, and above all, dull.
Jesse Brown, “You and the Pirates”, Boing Boing, 2009-09-25
September 22, 2009
The Guild, Season 3 Episode 4
And try to imagine the horror . . . or just go to http://finnsmulders.com/.
If you can’t get enough, here are some bloopers.
September 16, 2009
The Guild, Season 3 Episode 3
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September 15, 2009
NFL or NBA?
A.X. Perez passes on a link he got from some anonymous person. I found it quite interesting, although I can’t vouch for the numbers.
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September 12, 2009
QotD: The Muse of Booze
It’s reasonably well known that the arts of brewing and fermenting arose in nice time for the dawn of human civilization (there are ancient poems and mosaics and that sort of thing, dedicated to the celebration of the fact), but it’s at least as notorious that an open flask of alcohol is a mouth that can lead to hell as well as heaven. This being the case — and one day we shall work out the etymology that leads us to use the simple Italian word for a bottle, fiasco, in the way that we do — then it is as well to have a true Virgil to be our guide through the regions infernal as well as paradisiac.
The late Sir Kingsley Amis (who wrote these slender but thoughtful volumes before receiving his knighthood and who was also the expert to consult on things like the derivation of fiasco) was what the Irish call “your man” when it came to the subject of drink.
Christopher Hitchens, “The Muse of Booze”, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008
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September 10, 2009
I guess they can update RFC1149 now
I guess that this story means they’ll have to update the old RFC 1149: Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avia:
Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery — but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.
Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles — in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.
Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds.
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September 4, 2009
Yesterday, the wine. Today, it’s the candy label.
After yesterday’s indecent-in-Alabama wine label, today’s outrage is a German candy wrapper that has raised someone’s ire in Britain. Here’s the Telegraph report:
Simon Simpkins, a father of two, said he was shocked at the “pornographic” poses when he bought the sour candy for his children Benjamin and Ofelia.
Mr Simpkins, of Pontefract, West Yorks, told The Sun: “The lemon and lime are locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter.
“The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face. I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park.”
H/T to Christian T. for the link. Roger Henry quickly commented:
I can understand why his wife became distressed and had to sit down in the car-park. Probably overcome with hysterics after watching her husband make an absolute public prat of himself.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
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September 3, 2009
That’d better be a really, really good concert
Colby Cosh reposts a very odd craigslist posting (well, I’m assuming that it’s not representative of typical craigslist postings . . .)
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September 1, 2009
The suffering . . . the suffering
Dark Water Muse has a terrible weekend:
Offline nobody can hear you scream
Like, Oh My God! WTF!? You so totally won’t believe what I’m going to tell you.
I lost my 5mbs DSL home internet connection sometime after 14:43 and before 15:00 on Friday August 28, 2009.
Now, it’s 19:29 Monday August 31, 2009. Still nothing. I’ve had a high speed DSL connection since the mid-90’s. I was among Bell Sympatico’s earliest subscribers. I shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of thing now. It’s unnatural. It’s the 21st century.
I’ve been forced to endure this for over three days. Can you imagine?
The horror.
The inhumanity.
The uncertainty of where to rest my thumbs if not on the space bar.
I only just managed to survive throughout the weekend. I ate fresh grubs and tender bamboo shoots until my fourth floor apartment condo neighbors caught me and forced me back into my apartment by whacking me with a broomstick. So, at least part of my weekend was normal.
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August 30, 2009
Always remember to RTFM . . . or else
If you’re not already reading xkcd, why the hell not?
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August 27, 2009
Now it’s Star Trek‘s turn
John Scalzi returns to the well of nerd bile (see last week’s geek-disturbing here), this time he’s aiming at Star Trek:
Me: Star Wars design is so bad that people have to come up with elaborate and contrived rationales to explain it.
Star Wars Fanboy: YOU ARE SO VERY WRONG AND I WILL SHOW YOU WHY WITH THESE ELABORATE AND CONTRIVED RATIONALES.
It’s a little much to hope for (or fear) the same result two weeks in a row, but nevertheless I promised everyone I’d point and laugh at Star Trek design, so here we go. I’ll confine myself to things in the movies. There are eleven of those, so it’s not like this will be a problem.
V’Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.
August 25, 2009
Now I have seen everything
Visited the local outlet mall north of Zelienople today. In one of the stores was this fascinating wine:
Yep. It’s a Pennsylvania “Burgundy” — made of hybrid grapes — in a “Bordeux” style (the image doesn’t quite let me determine if Bordeaux was actually misspelled, but I thought it was).
For the vast majority of you who are not wine snobs, “Burgundy” is a reserved term for wine made exclusively with the Pinot Noir grape, and grown, pressed, and vinified in the French region of Bourgogne (aka Burgundy in English). “Bordeaux” is also a reserved term for wines grown in the region around the city of Bordeaux in southwestern France, using a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, and/or Malbec grapes. None of these grapes are considered “hybrid”.
I didn’t dare taste it.
