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- Wednesday, August 24, 2011:
Aftermath Day In the aftermath of the 5.9 magnitude earthquake which tore through our simple town like a dotted line on Tuesday afternoon, I thought it best to capture some of the destruction on my camera, just in case I have problems with insurance agents later on. Thankfully, everyone is okay, but the amount of structural damage caused by this event is obscene. A sinkhole to hell, or possibly Petropavlovsk, has opened up in the kitchen: Sewage has backed up into the basement, and looting is rampant in the neighbourhood: Rebecca lost her right leg and eye from falling debris, which is severely impacting her study habits. In addition, Andy Richter has inexplicably arrived in our livin... - Wednesday, May 04, 2011:
Osama Analogy (Osamanalogy) Day reaping the benefits of Google search trends while the reaping is good The news that Osama bin Laden was finally killed in a military raid in Pakistan is not unlike the series finale to LOST -- more punchline than epic wrap-up, it lends itself to a brief, satisfied moment of closure before gnawing doubts creep in to highlight the lingering unresolved questions and sense of futility and waste surrounding the entire venture. In the beginning , a compelling case for action unifies everyone with a fervor to see things through to the end. People are energized and sharing their thoughts around the watercooler constantly. Around Season Three , plot holes start ... - Tuesday, April 27, 2010:
Newsday Tuesday Plans to allow women and gays, ban smoking shake world of Navy submarines Imagine 150 fraternity brothers packed into a container the size of a three-bedroom house. Announce you are breaking hallowed traditions by taking away their cigarettes and admitting women. Then lock the doors and push the container deep into the sea, for months at a time. That's what the Navy, after decades of contemplation and controversy, has decided to do with its Submarine Force [...] Not every sailor was buying into the controversy though, since many were aware from their junior college years just how rank a fraternity house can get. Said one petty officer, "I heard that c... - Tuesday, September 08, 2009:
Newsday Tuesday Your Brain Is Organized Like a City A big city might seem chaotic, but somehow everything gets where it needs to go and the whole thing manages to function on most days, even if it all seems a little worse for the wear at the end of the day. Sound a bit like your brain? Neurobiologist Mark Changizi sees strikingly real similarities between the two. This article was written by the LiveScience staff, whose news site has brought us such hard-hitting Newsday Tuesday fodder as People are Too Dumb To Understand a Weather Forecast and Some People Are Happier But Other People Are Sadder Now . If scientific reporting were any softer it w... - Tuesday, July 21, 2009:
Newsday Tuesday To Be or Not to Be Fairfax County? Fairfax County has long been viewed as the ultimate burb, where Washington goes to walk the dog and water the lawn. But the more residents look around, the more they see what many have tried to avoid: high-rise offices, blight, crime and housing that's more likely to have a balcony than a back yard. That changing reality came into focus last week when County Executive Anthony H. Griffin raised the possibility of officially making Fairfax a city [...] For the uninitiated, a county generally has a larger land area but a smaller population than a city, and more roads that meet at oblique angles (or not at all, i... - Tuesday, April 14, 2009:
Newsday Tuesday Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming — a radical idea once dismissed out of hand — is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said Wednesday. That's because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press. In fact, global warming is occurring so rapidly that the current administration is also investigating its use as a distribution mechanism for the federal stimulus package, as many states are complaining that the money is not arriving fast enough. "We have a very fortuitous over... - Thursday, March 26, 2009:
List Day: Ten Rejected Wedding Ideas 1) Save-the-Date announcements will take the form of one hundred individually tattooed gerbils, boxed and delivered by First Class Mail. We take no responsibility for the (permanent) settling which may occur in boxes delivered to a destination more than two days away. 2) Invitations will be printed on 100% recycled post-consumer content, taken directly from the nearest Loudoun County septic tank. 3) We will be registered at Popeyes, BMW of Fairfax, Long & Foster Realtors - Fiji Listings, and your attic. You may also make a donation in our name to the decaying urban jungle that is Detroit, Michigan. 4) Ceremony music will be provided by a... - Tuesday, February 17, 2009:
Newsday Tuesday HOV Cheaters Run the Numbers HOV cheaters have a special, and dark, place in the hearts of area commuters. As motorists sit in stop-and-go traffic or pick up strangers to meet the minimum number of riders to use the free-flowing HOV lanes, cheaters blithely fly by in the restricted lanes. Alone. "Sometimes when you commute, you do some crazy, crazy things when you see all those red lights in front of you," said Aleta Joy Williams, a daily cheater who has racked up 10 HOV violations [...] "You need to be at a certain place at a certain time, and you are willing to do whatever it takes to get to where you need to." Whe... - Thursday, February 05, 2009:
Review Day: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull there is nothing worth spoiling in this movie This movie did not need to be made. I never had a compelling urge to watch it, but after borrowing it for free from my parents and leaving it on my shelf, unwatched, for two months, I finally put it on in the background while I worked on my Wiki. I'm still not exactly sure what the plot of this movie was, because it jumps from inexplicable situation to inexplicable situation like a Choose Your Own Adventure book without page numbers. What I walked away with was that Indy stumbles across a crystal skull while searching for an old colleague, but only because said colleague had left it there (akin to finding the Holy Grail on the ... - Wednesday, January 21, 2009:
LOST Recap Day this post contains spoilers from last season's LOST finale The fifth season of LOST begins tonight at 8, and it's hard to believe that almost eight months have passed since the last one ended. If you find yourself blurry on the details of the fourth season, you should start with my old LOLLOST feature, before catching up on the final two-hour episode below. As a tribute to Charlie Pace, Jin and Michael blow up all the remaining heroin on the island. Sayid shows off other fighting techniques learned in the Republican Guard, such as the Gopher Surprise. The writers take advantage o... - Wednesday, January 14, 2009:
Caption Day recent highlights from rounds of The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Game "Your husband said you never did the laundry and you were kind of a slut." "Sorry Snoop, I just don't think the new desk is me." "Cancel the next diversity meeting!" "I think they misunderstood me when I said I wanted to be one of the gang." "This just in -- my coanchor is a gigantic pussy." "And in local news, I ate my poop." "As you can tell from the radar, it's really raining us outside." Luckily, the name "Robin" worked both before and... - Tuesday, November 11, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday T-Pain Cranks Out Hits Thanks to Auto-Tune Software T -Pain is tired of hearing the sound of his own, heavily processed voice. Actually, the Tallahassee hip-hop star is tired of hearing everybody else simulating the sound of his synthesized voice -- the one that's run through a software program called Auto-Tune for a giddy effect that makes him (and them) sound like a singing cyborg. I have always been of the opinion that the increased popularity of the Auto-Tune effect was one of the worst things to happen to music since they gave TATU microphones. The effect first gained notoriety with Cher's dance hit from the 90s where she asks the audience if they believe i... - Monday, October 06, 2008:
Weekend Wrap-up Saturday, October 4th, was Poker Night. Early in the game, a four-of-a-kind appeared on the table. This was followed by a straight flush -- Seven of Hearts through Jack of Hearts (and someone else also had the Six of Hearts). This is the sort of magic that happens when I move poker upstairs into the kitchen for the winter months when the basement is chilly. Hearts was pretty much the only suit to appear on the board after that. After three people were out (myself, Rebecca, and Anna), the consolation prize of mini eclairs came out, because if you've just lost $10, the best remedy is to eat yourself into oblivion. While opening the tin, Rebecca remarked that it "felt very light", and then noticed that... - Tuesday, September 30, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Mama's milk ice cream cone, anyone? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is asking [Ben & Jerry's] to begin using breast milk in its products instead of cow's milk, saying it would reduce the suffering of cows and calves and give ice cream lovers a healthier product. Old readers might also remember the time PETA tried to convince the Boy Scouts to ban the Fishing merit badge because it results in mutilated fish who are in tremendous amounts of pain. That campaign fell apart when it was discovered that the interviewed fish was "just a little emo" and a cutter. (Soon after, the Boy Scouts of America reaffirmed their patriotic mandate to onl... - Tuesday, September 09, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Spies get social network as CIA, FBI promote their version of Facebook At long last, US intelligence agencies have created a new system of sharing their information with one another to prevent another terrorist attack. And it's a lot like Facebook. Developers were quick to point out that their network would be based on the useful "classic" Facebook, and not the usability-inhibited patchwork of coloured squares and advertisements pinked together to form the New Facebook, which many users still have difficulty accepting as canon (see also, New Coke and The New Testament). Not to be left out of the social networking action, the FBI, C... - Tuesday, July 29, 2008:
Ethics Day As part of an annual recertification at work, every employee must take an online course in Business Ethics. Because the denizens of the URI! Zone are a shady bunch, these highlights might be helpful in your own lives. Socially aware customers are generally white, blonde, female, and braless (which raises two other ethical points, but only when it's cold outside). Mimi is obviously more concerned with the fact that her coworker is a total tool-face. In the corporate culture, the secret handshake generally requires you to slip exactly $427 in bribes as suavely as possible. In this example, Marty wonders w... - Thursday, May 29, 2008:
LOST Recap Day this post contains spoilers from previously-aired episodes of LOST (season four) With so many complex timelines and unsolved mysteries, it's often difficult to keep track of everything that has happened so far on LOST. As a public service, here is a summary of the most important plot developments from this season so you are prepared for the upcoming season finale. A special LOLCAT format has been used for ease of understanding. Episode 1: The Beginning of the End Episode 2: Confirmed Dead Episode 3: The Economist Episode 4: Eggtown Episode 5: The Constant&nb... - Tuesday, May 20, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Robot digger set to land Sunday at Martian pole Like a miner prospecting for gold, NASA hopes its latest robot to Mars hits pay dirt when it lands Sunday near the red planet's north pole to conduct a 90-day digging mission. The three-legged Phoenix Mars lander . . . is zeroing in on the unexplored arctic region where a reservoir of ice is believed to lie beneath the Martian surface. To be clear, the article is not saying Phoenix is a gold digger, but it's not messing around in a region where it won't find anything. This type of colourful simile is common in stories that NASA wants to excite the public mind. Phoenix lacks the tools to detect signs of alien life... - Tuesday, February 26, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Plan for Telescopes on Moon's Far Side Is Revived With NASA planning to send astronauts back to the moon sometime after 2019, those dreams of a radio telescope looking out through the galaxies from the protected side of the moon have been revived. The agency recently awarded two planning grants for research on the necessary technologies and on how to put them in place. Long time readers of the URI! Zone will recall that I'm not a big fan of my taxes going to fund NASA , because I'm all about cost-effective ventures. I personally believe that it would be more cost-effective to purchase twelve tons of pure Columbian cocaine and dump it all on ... - Tuesday, August 14, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday Facebook pages concern parents of college freshmen As housing officials at colleges around the country send out roommate assignments to freshmen this summer, a growing number of schools say they're getting more requests for changes -- from parents who don't like the roommates' Facebook profiles. It looks like the "helicopter parents" have gained one more weapon in their quest to completely envelope their offspring in a protective Teflon bubble, which means that the day is not far off when the world will be filled with young twenty-somethings incapable of changing a tire or making a reservation. It won't be long until you'll see someone in the check-out line at the grocery... - Tuesday, July 10, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday An Underwater Fence to Stop Invasive Species Engineers are attempting to block the spread of invasive exotic fish by establishing an electrical barrier on the canal linking Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. Four species of Asian carp are spreading north up the river; a non-indigenous goby is attempting a move south down the canal. It seems like every contemporary environmental fix-it program is just a weak band-aid for something we did earlier in history that failed. Engineers made the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal a century ago, and now everyone's surprised that fish are swimming through it. I'll admit that I am overly cynical though -- Operation Fishy Fence could e... - Tuesday, June 26, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday Dust Settled, Drivers Still Get Dizzy in Mixing Bowl An article in yesterday's Post reported that major construction work on the $676 million Mixing Bowl project in northern Virginia has been completed. The treacherous throbbing ulcer where Interstates 95, 395, and 495, and numerous local roads converge now flows much more freely than before. However, there are early indications that all is not well in the land of poorly chosen cooking analogies -- some drivers are getting lost! Drivers complain of counterintuitive highway splits where they must head to the left to ultimately go right and head to the right to go left. They worry about staying in the left lane of the Beltw... - Monday, February 26, 2007:
Sign Day After many years of loyal service, the ubiquitous Radiation Warning Sign (seen on everything from Doc Brown's stolen Plutonium to the small print on Hot Pockets sleeves) has been updated. Five years of focus groups in eleven different countries led the International Atomic Energy Agency to the underwhelming design shown below. Of particular note was their preschooler focus group that said yellow was for caution and red was for dead . Apparently, people thought the original sign just meant "radiation is here", much like the "George Washington slept here" signs that dot the Virginia landscape. Scientists really felt that they needed a more intimidating sign so people would take the tooth-losing, gonad-s... - Thursday, February 01, 2007:
Musical Patriotism Day There was an article in the Post yesterday about Virginia's revived interest in picking a new state song that doesn't offensively talk about darkies . The last time they tried to pick one, the committee could not reach a consensus on any of the finalists' songs -- and now our poor state has been tuneless for almost seven years. We at the URI! Zone consider this to be a travesty of the second highest order, and hypothesize that it could not possibly take almost a decade to come up with a song that everyone can love. To prove this, I sat down at my keyboard after dinner last night and allowed the creative energies of this blue-ridged state to course through me like the James River, but with less pollutants a... - Wednesday, November 02, 2005:
Untitled Post In an effort to muddle up the more salient issues by introducing several new ones, President Bush has requested $7.1 billion in emergency funding to combat the possible bird flu pandemic which has been rumoured to be lurking in the shadows for several years now. After ten minutes of giving shout-outs to his dogs (but no nominations this time around), Bush gave a doomsday speech at the NIH which sounded vaguely familiar . Some conspiracy theorists note that the speech is identical to the one kicking off his war on terrorism, replacing the words "terrorism", "Iraq", and "insurgency" with "pandemic influenza", "China", and "outbreak". I'm always amused when Bush tries to talk in technical jargon, but luckily there... - Tuesday, October 25, 2005:
Untitled Post Like four sticks of dynamite in a placid Oklahoma pond, the music world was rocked on its foundations on October 25, 1981, with the birth of Anna Marie Spellerberg. In her formative years, this future Grammy-winning diva was best known for being a part-time music major at Virginia Tech and performed various unplugged duets with cats on the Vaudeville circuit (2MB WMV). As a child, she often dreamed of making it big, and possibly transitioning from music into showbiz, starring in a critical box office success with visionaries like Bruce Willis or Frankie Muniz. But it wasn't until she met Booty that these dreams became more than a passing whimsy. Athena Hornsboot, born on October 25, 2002, and now known by her ... - Wednesday, August 10, 2005:
Untitled Post In my lifetime, a new type of store has gained prominence: the store with everything you never needed. You walk into one of these bazaars to discover things you never knew existed but which you can't possibly live without. A case in point is the squat metal box currently anchored to the side of my cabinet which I found at Bed, Bath, and Beyond for a mere ten dollars. You can stuff it full of plastic bags after you're done unpacking groceries, and then you take them out the side whenever you need a bag in the future. I'm not sure which is sadder, the fact that I have a store-bought container to hold containers mounted on a container, or the fact that there's a smaller variety hanging over the litter box specifically t... - Thursday, July 14, 2005:
Untitled Post I read a story in the Washington Post a couple days ago that mentioned Herndon's continued efforts to regulate or do away with the sites where day laborers meet for jobs . Herndon and the proposed sites are literally right down the street from me. While I can see where the opponents are coming from, I think I see a few flaws in their logic: "At the 7-Eleven, it's an eyesore [...] Not too many people go to that 7-Eleven anymore . . . and now they want to put that in a residential part of town." Several people said in public comments that they worried that the day workers would lower property values and would bring gang violence and diseases. First, does anyone ...
