Posts tagged as mock mock
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- Friday, November 09, 2012:
2012 Election Recap In case you missed my live-blogging of the 2012 Election on Facebook last Tuesday, here is a transcript. I tried to include a little something for everyone, regardless of their politics: div.fbBox { background-color: #ffffff; border-color: #ced6e7; border-style: solid; border-width: 1px; font-family: 'Tahoma'; font-size: 10pt; margin: 4px; padding: 5px; -moz-border-radius: 6px; border-radius: 6px; } div.fbTime { color: #999999; margin-bottom: 5px; text-decoration: underline; } div.fbLikes { background-color: #edeff4; font-size: 8pt; padding: 2px; margin-top: 5px; } 7:00 PM Breaking News: Voter fraud suspected as irate Hunting... - Friday, October 19, 2012:
Mashup Day: Doogie Howsereen, M.D. Have you ever been sifting through your extensive music collection in search of Halloween music and stumbled across the theme from the Halloween movies? Did you then lament the fact that no one had ever made a mashup combining it with the theme from Doogie Howser, M.D.? Happens to me all of the time. Listen to Doogie Howsereen, M.D. (2:00 MP3) This is why people with otherwise useless music degrees are an integral slipknot in the weave of today's society. - 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... - Tuesday, April 21, 2009:
Newsday Tuesday Rainy Weather Forecasts Misunderstood by Many To bring an umbrella or not to bring an umbrella? That's the perennial question on those days where the chance of rain is less than 100 percent. But only half the population understands what a precipitation forecast means well enough to make a fully informed answer, a new study finds. If, for example, a forecast calls for a 20 percent chance of rain, many people think it means that it will rain over 20 percent of the area covered by the forecast. Others think it will rain for 20 percent of the time, said Susan Joslyn, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Washington. ... - 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... - Thursday, November 20, 2008:
Silly Ratings Day In an effort to provide some transparency in the game-rating process, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has started including brief overviews of each reviewed game on its website. You can now see why games were given a particular rating, and just what exactly the term "comic mischief" means. To assist parents in their search for kid-safe games, the website also allows you to search for games by game content. Although their hearts are in the right place, this search engine of naughty behaviours is more useful as a time-wasting tool for the immature (such as myself), or as a free advertisement to a teenager who reads about the latest zombie game where "Enemies' heads and limbs are ... - 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... - Wednesday, August 27, 2008:
Audience Participation Day I've posted in the past about how bad the Family Circus has become over the course of forty-eight years worth of cartoons. It's not its fault, necessarily -- if I ever make it to fifty years of daily updates on my website, I'm sure I'll be just as bad as Family Circus, relying on repetitive jokes about how cool the Internet is or how Daddy might be a pedophile. In fifty years, I'll be seventy-eight with hands crippled by Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the remnants of my mental acuity puddled in my sinuses, having melted away from the daily grind of finding new ways to print HELLO WORLD on my screen. Like Bil Keane, my posts will be dictated to my son, Thor, who will do the inking and the typing himself. Roug... - Wednesday, August 20, 2008:
Game Day There seems to be a recent makeover frenzy surrounding classic board games deemed too slow-paced or spiffy for modern audiences. The latest casualty of this is everyone's favourite game, Clue . From the cosmetic side, the staid British guests are replaced with a movie star and a football player among others, while the lead pipe has been dropped for the equally logical "set of dumbbells" (which is apparently easier to find in a spa or a home theatre). Because kids today have the attention spans of fruit flies with cancer, Clue is now shorter, with the guests having special superhero powers to help solve the murder faster. Other cards have the possibility of eliminating players as suspects com... - 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... - Tuesday, July 22, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday A dash of lime -- a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere... Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. There's nothing like the backing of a gigantic oil company that posted a $9 billion net income in the first quarter of 2008 to convince the world that your environmental idea is a good one. Not only does Shell think it's a great idea, they're act... - Tuesday, June 17, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday When a wimpy bird turns into a stud Rebecca Safran has fooled Mother Nature. The evolutionary biologist from the University of Colorado figured out a way to give male barn swallows a makeover that makes less popular males much more desirable to females. Ms. Safran has already sold the results of her research to ABC, who will market it in the Fall 2008 television line-up starring Ty Pennington. The FOX Network is rumoured to be developing their own show in tandem, Who Wants To Get Humped By This Bird? , which they say was independently inspired and produced. About eight years ago, Safran expected to find that the length of a male barn swa... - Wednesday, June 04, 2008:
Poetry Day a line analysis of classic poetry Waiting for Christmas by BU (age 5) I cicles hang at Christmas. The author is metaphorically referring to the silver tinsel which adorns the tree. Real icicles are not cost-effective for indoor tree decoration, given their tendency to melt. They are L ovely to. Some scholars argue that this line is incomplete, and believe that the missing words are either "eat" or "poop on". Detractors of the theory suggest that the author was a horrible speller. Proponents of incompleteness notes that every misspelling the author has ever made has been intentional, for satirical purposes.... - 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, May 06, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday The Silver Line, which provides Northern Virginia with its own brand of Ross-and-Rachel drama, is back on the table again after yet another reversal of federal funding . The goal of this project is to connect the region's only major International airport 1 with its inadequate Metro system so travelers don't have to use the inappropriately-named Washington Flyer taxi monopoly, which never travels at more than 45 miles per hour when the meter is running. With all of their resources devoted to getting this built, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has spent surprisingly little time figuring out how to make it profitable in the coming years. Instead of targeting penny-pinching fore... - Tuesday, March 11, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday When Mom or Dad Asks To Be a Facebook 'Friend' More and more moms and dads are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their sons and daughters, they're friending their sons' and daughters' friends. Apparently "friending" is a legitimate dictionary gerund now, and for Facebook neophytes who are unaware of its meaning, this paragraph might be seen in a more menacing light, suggesting that the parents of America are a bunch of perverts. Some, like Matt, take the requests in stride. He ultimately friended his dad. Others are less sanguine, voicing their dismay via online groups that ... - 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, January 29, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday The Dulles Rail Death Knell Travelers, shoppers and office workers -- interviewed at the airport, in parking lots and in Tysons area strip malls -- said they were stunned by the Federal Transit Administration's announcement Thursday that the $5 billion rail line would not qualify for federal dollars without drastic changes in price and management. Dulles rail was counting on $900 million from the FTA, and state officials have said all along that without that money, the project would die. Even a public-schooler such as myself could have told them that something like this would happen. Especially in an election year, why would a Republican-controll... - Thursday, October 04, 2007:
Out of Ideas Day Don't worry, I'm not out of ideas, because as a last resort I can always string some vaguely rhyming words together and suffix them with DAY (see also, Museday Tuesday, Newsday Tuesday, Manic Monday, and Dave Day). It's actually Hollywood that's out of ideas, something that's been painfully obvious every since they released The Second To Last Karate Kid and Bewitched . The most recent example of OOI Syndrome (pronounced OO-wee) is the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie coming out in December. Apparently it wasn't enough to make 120 minute versions of every 30 minute sitcom from the 1950s -- now they have to make a movie based on an animated cartoon from the 80s ... - 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, May 21, 2007:
Sequel Injection This summer, the theatres have been, or will be, graced with such works of art as Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Shrek 3, The Bourne Ultimatum, and (I'm not kidding about this one) "Live Free or Die Hard" starring a 52-year-old Bruce Willis. Just last week, Blizzard Entertainment announced that their new blockbuster game would be Starcraft II -- not Diablo 3 as some people expected (or Warcraft IV or World of Warcraft II for that matter). There's something very comforting about a sequel: people are happy that they can return to a world or story that they loved without too much heavy thinking, and studios are assured that they can break even on their investment, even if the entire movie is a ... - Tuesday, May 08, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday Delaware Energy Debate Could Turn on the Wind " Two hundred towering windmills, each so tall that its blades would loom over the U.S. Capitol Dome, could be built in the Atlantic Ocean near one of Washingtonians' favorite beach retreats, under a plan being considered in Delaware. " This article in yesterday's Post discusses the possibility of erecting turbines six miles offshore of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. With New Jersey being the armpit of the U.S., Delaware is the spot on its back that can't be scratched without major contortions, and which can't even be seen without multiple angled mirrors. People should be actively advocating the placement of these turbines in t... - Tuesday, March 27, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday School prohibits use of Myspace site ...students were informed recently that under a new school policy, Think First, Stay Safe, the use of MySpace.com will be prohibited at school and at home. The policy states that students enrolled in the school can't have a MySpace.com account or any similar type of personal site... I support this ruling wholeheartedly, but not for the reasons you might expect. It's not because of the fear of cyberbullying, or the dangers children face from online predators like sexual molesters and tech-savvy velociraptors -- simply put, Myspace is one of the most poorly designed sites on the Internet, and to subject kids to it at young ages mea... - 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... - Thursday, December 07, 2006:
Untitled Post div.civil { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Times New Roman; } The Civil War Gets Me Hot The Virginia Tech Alumni Association is hosting a weekend for Hokie Sweethearts. Make plans for a Valentine's getaway weekend with your special someone. Friday, February 16 Arrive at the Inn at Virginia Tech to a romantic welcome gift in your room! Registration Welcome Wine Tasting Reception: Join local alumni at the Inn at Virginia Tech as you taste a variety of wonderful wines, delight in sumptuous hors d'oeuvres and enjoy live music with that special someone inside the warm and cozy Inn at... - Monday, September 11, 2006:
March of the December Decorations Christmas is coming to this end of suburbia, announced with the annual overstocking of garish decorations now available at Costco. As I stepped through the Gates of Consumerism on Saturday morning, I waved my membership card at the disinterested greeter, fended off the coupon book they routinely dump into your cart, and wended through the yuppies and slow-movers to do my weekly shopping. Even from the entrance I could see it: a massive display nestled between the $500 air hockey table and the Casio keyboard autolooping on Popcorn. The letters were familiar, N O E L, but this year the price tag didn't just say "NOEL Christmas Decoration". This year, the sign loudly proclaimed, "NOEL Christmas Decoration with Penguins".... - Tuesday, September 05, 2006:
Newsday Tuesday U.S. Intercepter Missile Hits Target After eight other tests and over one hundred billion dollars in funding (which would buy 22,935,779,816 two-piece meals from Popeyes), one of the United States' Intercepter missiles completed another successful test this past week, raising its success rate from 50% to 55% and effectively removing the program from the No Missile Left Behind blacklist. Although the naysayers may disagree, the Intercepter program has proven its worth against any enemy missiles meeting the following criteria: The missile launcher must call ahead seventeen minutes in advance to provide the make, model, and location of the incoming missile. The m... - Tuesday, August 08, 2006:
How-To Day: Composing a Baby Announcement To: Everyone@Work.com Baby announcements shouldn't just go to the people who work directly with the new mother and father -- the entire company deserves to hear about the inner workings of the womb. This is why e-mail is the new mode of choice for publishing what came out of your body today. From: NotTheMomma If you are the parents, you probably won't have enough time or energy to announce the birth to everyone, so you'll have to hire one of your work friends as a town crier of sorts. The parents' job will be to present the baby in person once it's several months old so all the socially awkward people in your company can make banal smalltalk about their own baby experiences. Subject: W... - Monday, March 20, 2006:
Untitled Post While listening to a CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at my parents' house last night, I was struck by the plethora of nonsecular music that has accumulated over the last thousand years. We have millions of songs and hymns about Jesus and dreidles, angels flying high, and chariots swinging low. It seems like there's a piece composed or invented for virtually every important religious scene or feeling and every religion has a few ditties that you can sing on the street which everyone will join in on. However, there is one religion that, sadly, does not have any uplifting music to go along with it. What is that religion? Scientology! I thought at first I must be mistaken, because every religion has some va... - Thursday, March 16, 2006:
Untitled Post From IMDb : uri! is the latest in a line of high production value biopics from the studio that brought you Ray and Walk the Line , documenting the life and times of musician-blogger, Brian Uri!. From his early days as a small Asian boy to his later years as an older Asian man, you will laugh and cry at the fecundity of human spirit. The talent slated to be in this movie include: The Family Young Brian . . . . . . . . Ke Huy Quan Adult Brian . . . . . . . . Daniel Dae Kim Old Brian . . . . . . . . . Pat Morita (through CGI) Mom . . . . . . . . . . . . Sally Fields Dad . . . . . . . .... - 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... - Wednesday, September 21, 2005:
Untitled Post Yesterday evening, someone from my hometown of Alexandria found my site by Googling "winkler botanical preserve" sex . The Mark Winkler Botanical Preserve is a small wildlife area nestled in the shadow of I-395 where I played one summer (as previously reported in an August update ). I did not have sex there, being an elementary school kid at the time (sixth graders did not begin having sex on school buses and in nature preserves until over a decade after I'd grown up). Although this particular search phrase has a considerable ick factor (what if the searcher was a familiar face like the mayor or my old next-door neighbours?), I figured I would provide a FAQ for future visitors who are also interested... - Thursday, September 08, 2005:
Appropriate Use of Katrina for PR Purposes: The Red Cross has been given a station on XM Radio to help coordinate their Katrina relief efforts . I think this is a great use of the technology, though I hope the signal won't disappear whenever the aid workers go behind buildings. There's a spot on the Fairfax County Parkway where my XM radio fades out momentarily every day I drive by. I think it has something to do with top secret military grade sonar weapons. We'll know when the beached whales show up in the Potomac (real ones, not just fatty yuppy sunbathers). Walmart has donated over $20 million in cash and merchandise throughout the affected region in an effort to polish their image. I used to shop at Walmart all the time un... - Thursday, September 01, 2005:
Untitled Post A Tribute to Jerry Fletcher The Endgame Hurricane Katrina was staged by a mad scientist / evil entrepreneur as a way to humiliate the Corp of Engineers and end the war in Iraq. The Facts The Warrior Group is a women-owned company in DeSoto, Texas, which creates modular office furniture. A few years ago, they had twelve million dollars worth of contracts to create modular barracks for the Corp of Engineers. The employee who was the contact for this particular contract was named Bob Vanhorn. Bob Vanhorn is currently the operating systems manager for The Thriller, a high speed catamaran which can hold 40 passengers in George T... - Wednesday, August 17, 2005:
Untitled Post John Basedow is easily the scariest-looking self-proclaimed "fitness celebrity" of them all. John is the promoter of the Fitness Made Simple workout program that regularly advertises during syndicated television shows. He's the guy with the scrawny (yet still out of proportion) head on top of a leathery-chicken-breast body who looks eerily like a friend I had in eighth grade named Ian. If John is the living example of what the fitness program can do for average Joe America, I'm not particularly impressed. Based solely on the pictures and customer testimonials, here is an unscientific list of what you can expect when you use this program: 1) All the veins in your body will be swapped out and put in your h... - Tuesday, August 02, 2005:
Untitled Post An ominous plague has been incubating in America's moist spots over the past ten years. It's not contagious and it probably won't kill you, but it will add a certain obnoxious je ne sais quoi to your daily routine. What is this plague? Why it's the boogerspawn of all the laissez faire parents of the 1990s! These parents eschewed the standard guidelines of reinforcement and punishment, out of fear of being labelled an abusive parent, choosing instead to maximize their childrens' empowerment, creativity and joie de vivre . The end result is an enfant terrible who expects to get what they want, with little understanding of how their actions affect the world around them, incapable of realizin... - Tuesday, July 19, 2005:
Untitled Post Life hasn't been good to NASA since I last reported on their craterization of a comet (see my entry from July 6, 2005). Apparently their P.R. department has decided that instead of performing a successful mission and having a grand news conference upon completion, it's better to Harry-Pottercize the next shuttle mission into hype oblivion (In other news, NASA obtained a temporary injunction against Scaled Composites LLC , who wanted to fly up a day early and spoil the end of space for everyone patiently waiting on the Discovery). They are parents, as well as sons and daughters; triathletes, nature-lovers and rock 'n' rollers; pilots, scholars and engineers; seasoned space explorers and first-timers ... - Friday, July 15, 2005:
Untitled Post It was funny enough when Blizzard's World of Warcraft gave you the option of owning pets, including Maine Coon cats, and players discovered that talking about their pets in Chat Channels filtered "Coon" as profanity. On Tuesday, they quietly changed the name of the cat without announcing it, regardless of the fact that Maine Coon is a real type of cat, and the state cat of Maine. (Maine Coons are giant cats once thought to have been mated with raccoons. Kitty is a Maine Coon). People quickly noticed that their pets had changed and complained. The official Blizzard response included: This non-combat pet name was changed as there were a number of concerns expressed by players that had... - 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 ... - Wednesday, July 06, 2005:
Facets of Space: Insight Into Today's Headlines Space Invaders Being fat is now a matter of National Security. Military officials worry because too many recruits are now too fat to join the services (although they note that "'Large and in charge' makes soldiers look more formidable to the enemy" . Farther down in the article is a chart of weight-loss methods, with 21% of soldiers trying laxatives (apparently forgetting that they're grown adults and not high school rowers in the Lightweight 8 at Stotesbury). My feeling on the matter is that they should let them all in. Since I don't plan on joining voluntarily, someone's got to be out there fighting for vague, indeterminate causes. Is it really a big deal if the helicopter ha... - Friday, June 24, 2005:
Untitled Post Following America's obsession with obesity comes the "fat house in a skinny lot" syndrome. This occurs when homeowners can't quite afford to move out of their overinflated housing market so they renovate their existing houses to maximize indoor space at the expense of lawn and aesthetics. The homeowners with amenable houses add a new floor, preserving the balance between indoor and outdoor space, while those with houses that would collapse with added weight allow their homes to bulge at the seams like five pounds of cow manure in a three pound bag. You can see many examples of this ugliness throughout northern Virginia. On Pegram Street in Alexandria is a ridiculous looking fathouse, dressed up in garish faux stone f... - Thursday, February 12, 2004:
Untitled Post I remember a time when the Family Circus used to be "aw shucks" cute, even if it was never hilarious. Nowadays, it's either hip Internet throwaway jokes or it has a personality crisis and wants to be a boxed strip rather than a single frame. Yesterday's comic is a prime example -- having a caption and also a balloon text just doesn't work if they're sequential. It just says that the cartoonist ran out of space and had no better place to jam the text in. A comic that tries this and succeeds is Close to Home, since either the balloon or the caption can be read out of order and the humour is preserved. I think it's about time for Family Circus and Dennis the Menace to finish off and get replaced by Classic versions of t... - Wednesday, February 04, 2004:
Untitled Post As most people probably know by now, Bush is interested in establishing a moon colony to facilitate the exploration of deep space . Over the next five years, he'd like to redirect $12 billion dollars towards ensuring that the next round of moon landing photos are less fake than the previous ones . Insider sources suggest that half of that amount is earmarked for licensing stock planetary footage from recent space documentaries, such as Independence Day and Third Rock from the Sun . Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that NASA spends $86 billion dollars a year to launch broken things into space (or launch things into space and break them) and to take pictures... - Tuesday, January 20, 2004:
Untitled Post If you were wondering why I left such a diminutive update on Monday, I'll tell you now. I posted that I was running a little late. While that wasn't exactly a lie, I feel somewhat duty-bound to explain the whole story... As you may well be aware, I typically awake at 4am to get ready for work. Since I went to bed extra early the night before (6pm) I woke up before my alarm went off. At 3:26am I got out of bed and made a simple breakfast. By 3:32am I had finished eating my Belgian waffles, eggs benedict and papaya smoothie (made fresh from the papaya trees I had planted in the greenhouse [which I had built from matchsticks, dental floss, some old 2-liter sprite containers and gum] the day after I moved in). From 3:33-3:34 ... - Thursday, September 25, 2003:
Untitled Post This has got to be the stupidest thing I've heard this week: Junior Achievement is projecting that the lesson, which will be taught both in school and after school, will be used in 36,000 classrooms nationwide and has the potential of reaching 900,000 students in grades five through nine, or about 10 percent of all students in those grade levels. In the role-playing activity Starving Artist, for example, groups of students are encouraged to come up with an idea for a musical act, write lyrics and design a CD cover only to be told by a volunteer teacher their work can be downloaded free. According to the lesson, the volunteer would then "ask them how they felt when they realized that their work was st... - Wednesday, January 29, 2003:
Untitled Post From last night's State of the Union address, I learned that the representatives of our country are excellent clappers, although there was no occasion for them to demonstrate their "two and four" clap. There was one guy about three rows back who cheated -- he stood up with the crowd at every standing ovation, but kept his hands in his coat pockets. The clapping even came in a variety of styles, ranging from a broad low rumble to a more raucous pub-style, punctuated by jolly 'attaboys whenever the Pee Wee Herman word of the day was heard up front. It's a shame that none of the billions of dollars was directed towards congressional skin-care, as such voracious clapping is bound to chafe and be detrimental to the epidermis. ... - Saturday, January 11, 2003:
Untitled Post Tallahassee has the wackiest commercial selections I've ever seen, and not in a good way. First, we get the trial runs of those obnoxiously offensive "truth." commercials, like last year's floating eyeball cartoons which apparently never made it to a wider venue up north. Then come the horribly low-budget efforts from local merchants like Bill Well's Chevrolet and REX, and last month's welder school ad. There was also a notable, if tasteless, plug where Santa gets stuck in a chimney with the silent caption, "Not sure when your diarrhea will hit?", before a fade-out. As a final sign of intelligent programming, there was primetime on January 4th when someone forgot to play the proper tapes. Ads for the Rose Bowl and New Year's Da... - Monday, January 21, 2002:
Untitled Post There's no classes today, so I'll probably spend some time catching up on my composing, which slipped a little in productivity this week. This is actually the only federal holiday FSU allocates this semester, so I may as well enjoy it while I can. This three article series that we had to read for pedagogy is a ridiculous waste of pontification. The original article, which I read on Saturday, was a rational comparision of three solmization systems: one fixed syllable and two movable syllable. By the end of his supposedly unbiased comparison, he was obviously advocating the movable systems over the fixed systems, with one system getting more adulation than the other. The next article was jointly written by two ad... - Friday, January 18, 2002:
Untitled Post It's Rush Week here on the campus of Florida State, so you see khaki clones with visors and ties everywhere you go. I've never understood the urgent need to belong to a fraternity -- paying annual fees to associate with a group of people and add a line to a resumé. When I was an undergrad, I never even bothered joining the various Honour Societies, and the only one I've even been associated with is Delta Mu, the non-service music fraternity coined on a whim by three anti-establishment performance majors to mock Delta Omnicron. Speaking of Delta Mu, one of the three original members (the "Triumvirate") has an MP3 site containing several of his original guitar & vocal songs. They're all good stuff, and I've e...
