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Weight Watchers, 1974

On the heels of the death of diet guru Robert Atkins, let us bow our heads a moment in respect of other bizarre things dietetic.

Though I was too young to appreciate them for what they were at the time, I very clearly remember that my grandmother had the complete set of Mid-70s Weight Watchers Cards. My brother and I used to paw through the collection when bored while visiting her house. I think that in my mind, this was her parallel of our collecting baseball or Star Wars cards. From the site:

These cards mystify me. None of them have calorie or nutrition information of any kind, and in some instances it’s hard to tell what’s dietetic about the recipes at all, except that they’re unspeakably grim. And yet also, completely insane. They appear to be from a much kookier era of Weight Watchers.

While you’re in the mode, don’t miss James’ Gallery of Regrettable Food. Oh, and these reviews of 20 cheap beers is, um, mouth watering.

Music: Man or Astro-Man? :: Trapezoid
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The Anti-Car

Great parody of the original anti-drug site. In this version, cars and driving are cast as dangerous drugs threatening the emotional and physical health of modern teens.

I’ve been driving for 20 years. I wish I never started. It destroys your body little by little. If you’re a kid and reading this, start learning how to live car-free now, you’ll thank me later.

I work with some very pro-car people, which makes for some… interesting lunch conversations. One of my coworkers is so adamantly anti-bike that he feels they should be confined to sidewalks. I feel society should bend over backwards at every opportunity to accommodate bicycles. You can imagine how that discussion went. Let’s find out who’s right for once and for all by conducting a rigorous scientific poll, shall we?

Regarding Bicycles

View Results

Music: Freakwater :: Binding Twine
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Ron Jr. Speaks

Responding to suggestions that Dubya’s administration is more an extension of the Reagan cabinet than of his own daddy’s admin, Reagan’s son Ron Jr. says “My father crapped bigger ones than George Bush.” Such eloquence, such a lovely homage to history and family pride.

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What I hate about the thought of war being a permanent human condition is that it forces me to think of it as normal, and I don’t want to.

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A bit after the fact now, but the Iraqi Information Minister‘s spinning made Bill O’Reilly’s look like child’s play, and put Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field to shame.

Music: Mekons :: Abernant 84/87
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Lucky

How many of these pictures did you see on Fox or CNN?.

Was it worth it?

I have been trying to imagine what an embarrassment this whole thing would be for the administration if the bulk of Iraqis did not welcome their new freedom (even if it has been expressed primarily as chaos up till now). What would we have? ~1,700 dead innocents, no weapons of mass destruction, broken trust worldwide, and a $20 billion bill (+ $2 billion / month ongoing)…. Does the administration appreciate just how lucky it is they had the liberation card to play at the last minute? Without it, this would be the most unmitigated of disasters, on all fronts. With it, they are apparently emboldened.

Check out megnut’s Iraq War Justification flowchart.

Music: Captain Beefheart :: Telephone
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Ports and Paranoia

I run an intranet and a staging server on non-standard ports (8000 and 8080). This works great for our internal purposes, but every now and then a student will want to show a work-in-progress to an external organization. And every now and then, that organization lives behind one of those Stalinist corporate firewalls that blocks everything but port 80, which means they can’t access the content, which means the student comes to me baffled, I explain the situation, and no one understands what I’m talking about. Somehow it always comes off as if I’m the one blocking the traffic. Ports are hard to explain to non-tech people. If I ask them to ask their sysadmins to back off a bit and open up traffic on these ports, I always get the same “we don’t do that for security reasons.” Well, duh.

Does it really make security sense for organizations to blindly block everything but port 80? The internet runs on ports. It’s all about ports. There’s got to be a more sensible way to accomplish your security goals than to slam the door in the face of other services. Are they being paranoid or am I expecting too much?

Music: Bright Eyes :: Bowl Of Oranges
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Septicemia

Chris points out that 8x more Americans are killed by something called Septicemia every year than have been killed by terrorists since 1972, and rightly wonders why we are at war. Hmmm…

Music: Ramp :: Dragonspire
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Safari beta 2

New Safari beta out yesterday… maybe this will quiet all the tab freaks. I started using Safari as default browser with the first beta, so I’m not in the “is this good enough to switch for?” camp. Of course it is. One complaint about the tabs implementation though: Having trouble getting used to the fact that Cmd-click opens the link in a new tab but doesn’t bring the new tab to the front — Cmd-Shift-click does that. Cmd-click has always opened a link in a new window in IE, Chimera, Safari… so this seems like a departure, an unwelcome extra step. Is there a UI reason for this? Anyone else have trouble with it?

Update: Aha — in the prefs, turn on “Select new tabs as they are created.” Enabling this option changes both the behavior and the hotkey mapping, so all stays copacetic. Bril.

Music: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins :: Just Don’t Care
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Peter Palmquist Memorial

Last time we were in Arcata it was to meet Peter Palmquist, the patron who offered to publish Amy’s book just because he felt her work deserved to be seen. This time it was to attend the memorial service following his passing. An amazing afternoon – around 300 people gathered in a 1930’s theater in Northern California to discuss and herald and joke about and commemorate an obsessive life spent collecting and cataloguing early California photographers and women in photography. An incredible cat. We can all hope to leave such an impression on the world.

Rained almost the whole trip, but it felt appropriate and it felt great. Hiked in the glorious giant redwoods with Amy and Miles, ate sushi from Tomo, walked along the beach in the dense mist, splashed everywhere we went. After the insanity of the past six weeks (both in our personal lives and in the world) this was exactly the washing we needed.

Music: Mar-Keys :: Banana Juice
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Roomsprout

roomsprout.jpgYou know Spring has arrived with vigour when ivy crawling the outside of the house becomes overzealous and finds it way into your office. Don’t tell our landlord. This wouldn’t have happened if we had prevented the ivy from becoming enmeshed in the shingles to begin with. But we’re suckers for inflourescence. Amy found the creeper and truncated it outside the house. Life support pulled out from under it, the indoor tendril collapsed a few hours later.

Music: The Teenagers :: Why Do Fools Fall In Love
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Weblogs, Information, and Society

I know, the J-School should be all paneled out by now, not to mention weblogged out, but lo, another good webcast tonight:

Weblogs are mainstream, and they are changing the way we manage knowledge, work and communicate. On Thursday, April 10, join panelists Dan Gillmor, Scott Rosenberg, Donna Wentworth and others at the J-School in exploring how this change continues to affect academia, journalism, business, and society.

Just upgraded QuickTime Streaming Server to v4.1.3, and the initial load latency has been drastically reduced — no more 5-7 seconds of buffering before stream starts. Not quite sure how they accomplished that, but it’s impressive.

Music: Lou Reed, John Cale :: Hello It’s Me