Saturday, July 10, 2010

Another great Patton Oswalt quote du jour

Patton Oswalt's amazing:
"Pornography is Bristol Palin making in 1 abstinence speech what some TEACHERS make all year."

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Quote du jour

I've been reading a lot of lovely, elegant, pithy quotes lately. I'm hanging out in the right circles, I guess.  This one is thanks to Tim O'Reilly, who quotes William Blake:
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind."

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Friday, July 09, 2010

Crappy day in the office

My computer crapped out first thing this morning. I was worried that I'd lost Yet Another hard disk, a problem I've had far, far too much of this last twelvemonth. I spent the day without a computer and fretting occasionally.

But it worked out really well, you know? I had the idiot box on in the background and had lots of episodes of The Closer on while I debrided and swept and sorted and sifted.As a result of the enforced downtime, I was able to:
  • process a large stack of mail (mostly junk) that's come in over the last week
  • write checks and send payments on half a dozen bills
  • fill up my wastebasket and recycle bin, empty them, and half fill them again
  • dusted and swept (always an issue in this office)
  • boxed up some spare computer stuff
The office is much cleaner, better organized, and feels much more comfortable.

Best of all, the computer is now working again! Whatever was wrong with the hard disk was fixable using the RECOVER feature from the WinXP boot CD.  A few massaged sectors, a repair to the registry from the backup logs, and ~poof~ all is well again.

But the day did inspire a considerable amount of cursing, so it's significant that early this morning before the computer died on me, I saw the Periodic Table of Swearing. (Warning: This is so beyond the concept of "NSFW" you can't even see it from there.)

Addendum: I got a report of a link problem for the picture, so here's a copy. But try the source first, please: they deserve the credit.
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Dazzling quote du jour!

This quote is from Patton Oswalt, a comedian I'm very fond of. When he's talking about politics and religion, he's incisive enough to take over for the late Bill Hicks. (He's incredibly funny when he talks about other things too, mind you.)

"Let's not forget who killed Jesus -- ambitious politicians pandering to religious conservatives."
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Thursday, July 08, 2010

Federal ruling striking down part of DOMA

I'm very pleased about that part of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional today. There was a huge outcry on the boards about this, including lots of stuff from a substantial collection of idiots who were demonstrating a profound ignorance of the law, what judges do, Christianity, the history of marriage, what the Constitution says, and homosexuality. It was kind of a clean sweep. Almost disappointing, really, that none of the ones I saw seemed to be able to rally even a cogent argument against gay marriage. It was all canned drivel, badly spelled and very poorly presented.

In response to this, though, there was someone who posted a really lovely comment:
All of you against gay marriage, indulge me and explain one thing, Without using the words God, Bible, Christianity, Sin or any other theological notions, tell me why two people who love one another enough to make a commitment as serious as marriage should not be permitted to do so? And spare me the argument that gay marriage would ruin the "sanctity" of the institution. Heteros did that a long time ago.

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8-bit city maps, just like they used to be!

Brett Camper's 8-Bit Cities Project is an accurate map of a number of major cities (NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and London, just to name a few) done in classic 8-bit graphics just like the Good Ol' Bad Ol' Days on 8-bit microcomputers. You can search for addresses within the city just like any other map, so be sure to look up an address or two and see how it works.

They're adding more maps all the time, so be sure to check the dropdown list for the latest offerings.
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Wednesday, July 07, 2010

An airbender we can all enjoy


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Summer's hitting all at once

After months of no spring and little summer, we're throwing a party of some kind. It's going to be record highs here for the next few days (in the 90s), continuing hot through the weekend. Well, my tomatoes and squash shall enjoy the hot weather at last. The flowers out front are certainly doing nicely!

And here's a quote for today:
“Like everyone else who makes the mistake of getting older, I begin each day with coffee and obituaries.” --Bill Cosby

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Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Quote du jour

Every time I tune in to cable TV news to see what I'm missing, I keep having the same thought: "All my life, I've dreamed of being an intellectual. But not by default." --unknown
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Monday, July 05, 2010

I feel old :(

On July 5, 1985, Dr. Emmett Brown set the flux capacitor clock in the Delorean 25 years into the future. Today is that day.
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How to make a schadenfreude pie

John Scalzi is a wonderful writer, the newly elected president of SFWA, and the man behind one of the oldest blogs in existence, Whatever. (He even has a book of selected blog posts and some really great responses entitled Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded.) 

A friend of mine (cackling over how The Last Airbender seems to be going down in 3-D flames), pointed out John Scalzi's illustrated recipe for a schadenfreude pie.
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Repost: 7 untrue things most Americans believe

Here's an excellent article I enjoyed reading. 
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My brother's birthday

It's my brother Chris's birthday, today. Happy birthday, Chris!
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Quote du jour

"Little girls grow up to be women; little boys grow up to be big boys." -- folk saying

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Sunday, July 04, 2010

Music: Queen meets the Soggy Bottom Boys

Steve Lalor sent me this clip. It's a group called Hayseed Dixie, an odd bluegrass band from the UK. Their first album was entitled "A Hillbilly Tribute to AC/DC," a title that just seems to scream "No good can come of this!" The current album is "Killer Grass," with cuts such as "Alien Abduction Probe," "Eine Kleine Trinkmusik," and "Underneath the Bed." You can find a number of clips on YouTube. The video clip below is for their version of Bohemian Rhapsody.


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Zen vases

We saw this vendor yesterday at Art in the Vineyard. It's gorgeous stuff and we're considering one of the larger vases ourselves.

Other vendors there were Shopdog Woodworks ("Artisan Furniture Crafted in the Presence of Dogs") and a really good local hatmaker named Viki Neville who I am very disappointed to say has no website. We liked her hats very much.
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Totally NSFW

Mitzi Macintosh, a well-known drag performer in Sydney, does "Everybody's Fucking But Me." (Do I really have to say that this is just completely NSFW?)


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