Category: random

  • Those Were The Days

    My beautiful, talented daughter had some time to create original art on Sunday. While I was doing something (monumentally important, I’m sure) she brought me this picture of “Ima’s house when she was little.” Lovely, right? We’ve been to that neighborhood, and this ain’t a bad representation, actually, not that she was trying for realism.…

  • I did it!

    OK, in the grand scheme of things, and even in my own life, this doesn’t count as a HUGE deal, but it was an amusing distraction for a couple of days that kept my mind off much less fun things for at least a few minutes: In the middle of last week, I brought up…

  • Our civilization is doomed, reason #7080-175903

    I just got off the phone with a teller at my banking institution. I had to call in to transfer some money from our joint savings account into our joint checking account, and to my lovely wife’s checking account. I don’t need to tell you why, I just need you to understand that I’m talking…

  • Our civilization is doomed, reason #128,212

    I know I need to fix some stuff with my blog (apparently the comments link is broken, and I need to spiff up my theme and do a bunch of other things, like, you know, post and stuff), but sometimes stories jump out at me so much that I have to post them immediately. Linked…

  • Geeky, goofy goodness

    I am going to HAVE to experiment with some of our own pics (too few and far between, unfortunately, since I’m usually behind the camera, but they’re around), but ManBabies.com is a treasure trove of silliness. As is this collection of swapped grandparents and babies at SomethingAwful, dating way back to 2004. Also tremendous is…

  • I’m smitten

    With Twitter, and with Wil Wheaton. I got a Twitter account a few weeks ago, and started following some friends and strangers and sending my own updates when I remember (not often enough). After I met Wil at a reading & signing at Mysterious Galaxy last weekend, I started following him, and he’s just as…

  • If Rube Goldberg were working today…

    He’d be proud of the Dutch company HEMA: http://producten.hema.nl/ Thanks to MH

  • Interesting stuff I’ve read in the last couple of days

    1. A terrific profile of Melinda Gates from CNNMoney.com/Fortune. My favorite snarky moment: She made valedictorian and got into Notre Dame. But Notre Dame did not get her. When she and her dad visited, she recalls, officials at the university told them that “computers are a fad” and that they were shrinking the computer science…

  • It-could-be-worse news from Israel

    But seriously, folks, why, in 2007, are there not native English-speakers looking at this stuff? JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel’s national passport office could have done with a good spellchecker. First it stamped “Ministry of the Intrerior” in English in new batches of passports. Then it advised Israelis of the misspelling in a jumbled newspaper advertisement…

  • The law of averages

    It’s just a fact. When you make something like 800 over 1,000 movies a year, they’re not all going to be classics. And when you make music videos from the songs in some of those movies, some of them are going to be so laughably bad that they’ll provide untold oodles of entertainment (“untold oodles”?…