Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Did I miss the memo, or did parents stop teaching their children to allow people exiting (a building, room, elevator, bus, etc.) to finish exiting before attempting to enter? I don’t think I’m hallucinating here — it seems that people under the age of around 25 are completely unaware of basic (sensible, not arbitrary) etiquette. Feel like I’m continually wrestling with people trying to muscle their way in while on my way out.
On a positive note, journalists won’t be shut out of this war like they were during Gulf War I – hundreds of journalists are already being “embedded” into units as “adjunct soldiers.” Predictably, the journalists are already planning to treat the whole thing like a tailgate party writ large.
CNN … has a fleet of Hummer SUVs, equipped with satellite uplinks and other technical gear. ABC News television also has two specially equipped Hummers … Network technicians estimate that each specially equipped Hummer is worth close to half a million dollars … “We have everything you could want, except for the beer,” said Quincy Brown of El Dorado Hills near Sacramento, a technician on an ABC vehicle.
America has now been so primed for the upcoming spectacular — the TV entertainment aspect of the war — that Bush couldn’t pull out if he wanted to — middle America wants their international superbowl, their real-life Jean-Claude van Damme action flick. It’s now become an entertainment imperative that war go forward.
Miles has had bright red cheeks, tons of drool, and sudden inexplicable fussiness on and off for the past week or so, so we knew there was probably a tooth just under the gums with a fierce hankering to pop out. Last night we were feeling his gums and the hard little nub of the top of a tooth came poking out. Can you imagine going through that? Rock-hard calcium spires jutting up out of your tiny soft gums? No? Funny, you went through it too once upon a time :)
Author / artist Micah Wright has unearthed seemingly every WWII propaganda poster ever created and digitally “remixed” them to apply to current political and news climates. The naive and jingoistic sentiments of the original posters have been reworked to emphasize the hypocrisies of the modern war cry. All posters suitable for printing and gluing to protest placards.
Quite possibly the most aptly named animal on the planet, here is Monterey Bay Aquarium’s description of the truly foul hagfish.
Also known as slime eels, hagfish are primitive fishes. They have four hearts, no jaws, no true eyes and no stomach. They have poor vision but a very good sense of smell and touch.Hagfish live in burrows on the seafloor and locate their food by smelling and feeling as they swim. They prey on small invertebrates living in the mud, as well as scavenging dead and dying fish. They are noted for their unusual way of feeding—they slither into dead or dying fishes and eat them from the inside out, using their “rasping tongue” to carry food into their funnel-shaped mouth.
Hagfish are notorious for their defensive slime––a mucous fluid secreted from their pores. It’s different from slime that some other fish produce; millions of microscopic threads run through it, which makes it extremely sticky.
Why I love living in the East Bay, reason #367:
I subscribe to a couple of neighborhood mailing lists, one of which works in coop with local police officers. Most of the traffic consists of police reports, usually garden variety holdups and drug busts. An item today was a bit more, um, creative:
“FW34 was getting in her car to move it across the street, for the street sweepers. She noticed a loud noise coming from the muffler. Her husband came out and looked under the car. There was metal and wood shavings, a pipe sticking out and green plastic bag. It appears that someone had tried to rig it so the Carbon Monoxide would go into the cab of the car. There are no suspects at this time.”
The more I dig through these, the more our neighborhood sounds like a bad pulp fiction novel. Click More for more.
Continue reading “Green Plastic Bag”
One for the BeOS folks: Steve Sakoman has just made the round-robin from Apple to Be to Palm and back to Apple. Sakoman was always my favorite Be executive. Brilliant man and great programmer, but he also had a wonderfully kind, avuncular manner. He once told me that he bought a copy of every piece of shareware that emerged for BeOS, just to support the development community. How many high-level execs out there think that way? Question now is, will the next version of Mac OS include a port of the CodyCam?
Dude goes to a mall. Buys a “Give peace a chance” t-shirt. Security guards don’t like the sentiment and arrest him.
George didn’t have the huevos (or something) to take on Saddam in public debate (and we’re much the poorer for it) but it’s not hard to imagine how the debate might have gone.
