Musings and rants about politics and geekery with a distinct Chicago flavor.
I have to admit, I enjoy the Cute Overload website. It’s like a palate cleanser, y’know? God knows the Internet is full of lots of sick imagery — we need a place that’s unabashedly innocent.
Yet, it’s a bit hard to keep your sense of machismo intact when you’re looking at a picture of a little baby kitty cat licking its paw. That’s why I had to laugh out loud at this message from their mailbag:
SUBJECT: Damn you to hell!
Thanks. Thanks a lot.
I spent years, possibly decades, honing my post-modern ironic cynicism to a fine point. I went to grad school. I wrote a thesis. I smoked, I drank straight whiskey, I guzzled coffee like there was no tomorrow. Confronted with “cute”, I would raise one eyebrow, sneer ever so slightly, and nod with a palpable sense of ennui. “Riiiiiight,” I would comment, “cute.”
Gone, now. All gone. All that work, ruined with a single “awwwwwwwwwww.” I want my money back.
Distraught,
JD Henry
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Best comment (from Slashdot): “Now we’ll finally be able to combine the security and ease of use of Windows with the flexibility and low cost of Apple hardware!”
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“Pressure and heat generated by rubbing stimulates pressure and temperature receptors, and the resulting nerve impulses outnumber the pain impulses (generated by inflammation from the bump) and are either transmitted preferentially, or percieved more stro
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I love the Dar Williams story the best.
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“It’s pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren’t in a namespace.”
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“The X-Ray extension for Firefox will let you see HTML tags without looking at the source code. This is a very handy tool!”
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“We only moved in about two weeks ago, but we’ve already cleared the curds from the office, guest bedroom and our master bedroom.”
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“‘Holoprosencephaly’ causes facial deformities, according to the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health. In the worst cases, a single eye is located where the nose should be, according to the in
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“With the announcement of the first Intel based Macs yesterday, many users have rejoiced in being able to dual-boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, this is not the case; due to Apple’s use of the extensible firmware interface (EFI) rather than B
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“Random House is offering refunds to readers who bought James Frey’s drug and alcohol memoir ‘A Million Little Pieces’ directly from the publisher.”
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Snopes tells us the true story behind ‘Viktor Navorski,’ and it doesn’t end as happily as the film does.
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And Blockbuster, amazingly enough, TURNED THEM DOWN.
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“The IRS has frozen refunds for hundreds of thousands of low-income taxpayers without telling them they’re being investigated for tax fraud or giving them a chance to defend themselves, the IRS taxpayer advocate said Tuesday.”
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And, amazingly enough, he does it not only with a complete lack of humor, but he manages to work in several shameless plugs, too.
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“The dock is hidden in a side pocket which is supposed to be almost ‘invisible’ so there is no telltale iPod bulge. The iPod is attached through a wire which will let the wearer pull out the iPod for viewing the screen, without losing the dock connection.
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Of course, with those of us WITHOUT the flat tummies, this might be a nice way to crush our iPods …
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“‘He hadn’t shown any signs of heat stress,’ said Derek Boyko, the Eagles’ director of football media services. ‘Who knows if, without the device, the training staff would have known he was in danger before it was too late.’”
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“I really like how it’s turned “press zero to talk to a human†into a selling point. Yeah, it may cost extra for Citibank to field these calls but it wisely views the added cost as an investment in good customer experiences and a compelling selling
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Gotta remember THIS site. There have a few times I’ve been desperately wanting an open source feature.
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“AppZapper is for people who want to confidently try new apps while knowing they can uninstall them easily. Drag one or more unwanted apps onto AppZapper and watch as it finds all the extra files and lets you delete them with a single click.”
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Unfortunately, not something I can use while I’m still on Panther …
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“What made you think it would be quicker to cut through the park?”
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“With AllPeers, I can share photos and home movies with my parents, songs (and anything else) with friends, and also access the files that they choose to share”
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Amazing story of a man who lost 230 pounds so that he could join the military.
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USB shrimp! USB Barbie!
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“I looooooooove you [gargling purr sound]“
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Redmond evidently DID just “start its copiers.” It’s amazing how much they ripped off from Apple.
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“Proving that carbs never went out of style, this lil’ dude can’t open his hamster mouth wide enough. But he’s gonna try.”
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How to get an operator at tons of different services …
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“Palestinian gunmen who burst into a house, apparently to kidnap the parents of Rachel Corrie, left without them after learning their daughter was the woman killed in 2003 as she protested the demolition of a house in the southern Gaza town, according to
Oh, joy! Now that Cory Doctorow’s blogging “full-time” again, we can look forward to more poorly considered bursts of hasty disinformation and big, long, page-consuming diatribes about his personal business.
As an author, Cory blows me away with his perceptions of the near and far future, his creativity, his imagination. I love nearly any fiction he writes.
As a blogger, Cory has become a blowhard in every sense of the word, and pulls Boing Boing down almost every time the foam starts appearing around the corners of his mouth.
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I had an interesting occurrence happen to me at HDE earlier this week — they sent me home! No, I didn’t get fired, thankfully — evidently, all the firm’s secretaries were in that day, and they didn’t want all of the floaters hanging out in the Document Production area.
So they made the offer to split the day with us — give us a half-day free, and we’d take the other half of it out of our “bank time.” Considering that I wouldn’t qualify to use any other sick or vacation time until the end of February, it was a good (and rare) opportunity, one I took.
As I walked by the Rock Bottom Brewery towards the Bed, Bath & Beyond on State & Grand (to pick up a new bath mat), I saw a long line of people circling the block. I began to get a little interested, and asked a lady in line what the line was for.
“Oh, they’re doing an open casting call for The Biggest Loser,” she replied.
Open calls for “The Biggest Loser” were also held Tuesday in Boston, Dallas and Seattle. NBC representatives were impressed by the response in Chicago, which last week was dubbed America’s fattest city by Men’s Fitness magazine.
“We’re really excited about the turnout,” said Jason Guy, a casting director for “The Biggest Loser.” “It shows the impact that our show has had on people. And that’s really encouraging.”
Temptation briefly beckoned.
Wait a minute, I thought. Do I really want to bring my weight issues onto national television?
“Good luck,” I cheerfully wished her as I continued down the street.
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Gentlemen, start your drooling … (MAN, that MacBook Pro looks nice.)
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Take a look at these photographs of people looking at it for the first time. The sheer look of “ICCCCKKKKKK!” is hilarious.
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RajinCajun: “Couldn’t we just go with some new-age circle-of-life thing and skip the crucifixion?”
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“Early US records (eg Brunswick Records, who released, among others, Robert Johnson) had “Not for play on Radio†stamped on them, for fear that radio play might harm Sheet Music sales.”
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Schwarzenegger! Your hometown thinks you are a girlie-man! When it comes to the muscle tone of your compassion, you look like a flabalanche!
Sometime over the Christmas holidays, the authorities of Graz, a classically pretty Austrian town, took down the sign that for the past seven years has identified the local 15,000-seat sports arena as the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium, and as they did so, a rare combination of local hero worship, European indignation at the death penalty, and provincial Austrian politics came to a climax.
The stadium had been named after Schwarzenegger in 1997 as an act of a kind of fealty toward the poor farmer’s son and international celebrity who, though born in a little village nearby, was educated in Graz and has always readily identified it as his native place.
But when Schwarzenegger, now governor of California, declined to commute the death sentence for Stanley Tookie Williams, the former Los Angeles gang leader who was executed in California two weeks ago, the reaction in Graz, where the death penalty is seen as a medieval atrocity, was swift and angry.
“I submitted a petition to the City Council to remove his name from the stadium, and to take away his status as an honorary citizen,” Sigrid Binder, the leader of the Green Party said in an interview in Graz’s stately City Hall, describing the first step in the chain of events that led to the renaming of the stadium. “The petition was accepted by a majority on the Council.”
Hah. (Via Diane Duane.)
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I would like to extend my deepest of thanks to Bruce Kroeze, who managed to debug an error which WordPress 2.0 shipped with, in which DIV and IMG tags (as well as a plethora of other tags) had their data automatically stripped from them. This caused, for example, my Del.Icio.Us posts to look rather funky.
Read more about Bruce’s solution here if you’re suffering through the same problem.
The WordPress Support forums were (originally) of absolutely no help. Things seemed to get moving, however, when I filed a bug with the WordPress bug tracking system.
Gawd bless ya, Bruce. Thank you!
EDIT: I received an e-mail from a member of the WordPress development team who tells me that the bug will almost certainly be fixed in 2.0.1, but that messing with core files can be a tad iffish. I suggest that if you do, be sure to backup, and to restore the original before any upgrade. However, he says that this here is the root of the problem:
If you have the unfiltered_html capability (editor or administrator role) KSES should not be filtering your posts. When you post via the web interface this works properly but the XMLRPC interface has this bug where KSES is initialized without regard to the username and password in the XMLRPC post data.
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“A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Penta
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You can listen to the sound file youself — Elmo urges you to beat him up and shoot his foot out.
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“Just a kitten and his will to surviiiiiiiive!”
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“While some marketers would certainly explode with glee if every human being on the planet wore the brand’s logo somewhere on their body but we just can’t understand why any sane human would affix logoed fingernails to their fingers.”
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I remarked to my sister that it would have been more creative for Apple to call it “Charlotte.”
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The blog excerpts some of the responses, as well as makes its own response.
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“The anti-choice brigade sees a future where they’ve got a chance to criminalize a woman’s right to choose, and so they’re gunning for it, laying the groundwork for a challenge as soon as the court swings in their favor.”
For two months now, and an exchange of 67 messages as of today, I have been banging my head with technical support staff at Yahoo! Domains. I have described more of my experience here on Consumerist, and strongly urge you to go read it, even if you have no plans to purchase a domain any time soon.
I am now trying to transfer handling of my domain name to the company that hosts this website, which is called LivingDot. However, Yahoo informs me that in order for me to transfer the domain, my domain name must be actually be deactivated for a period of time. (For all of you domain name prospectors out there, don’t get any ideas. We’re just talking about an already-initiated handoff from one company to another — my domain name won’t be available for you to grab.)
I am fairly confident I need not actually do this, and am trying to confirm this with LivingDot. But it is possible that this domain may disappear for a length of time so that I can finally escape Yahoo! Domains.
I can only urge you this: you and I, Dear Reader, are strangers. But if I saw a stranger stepping out into the street where he or she was about to get run over by a truck, I would do what I could to save them. In the same manner of simple concern for fellow humans’ welfare, I can only urge you to never do business with Yahoo! Domains. It has been, without a doubt, the absolute worst customer experience of my life.
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Larry C. Johnson: “At first I thought this was a blog parody. I mean, really, no one could be this clueless. Right? Boy, was I wrong. Here’s what President Bush had to say at Brooke Army Medical Center the other day.
“As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a Cedar. I eventually won. The Cedar gave me a little scratch. As a matter of fact, the Colonel asked if I needed first aid when she first saw me. I was able to avoid any major surgical operations here, but thanks for your compassion, Colonel.”
“Remember, he is visiting U.S. soldiers who are missing arms, legs, and eyes. Some soldiers are horribly mutilated from wounds suffered in Iraq. Most of the soldiers Bush visited were not “injured”, they were “wounded”. You get wounds in combat. You get injured while playing football or cutting brush. This is not just mindless nitpicking on my part. This demonstrates a Commander-in-Chief out of touch with the reality of combat.”
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Is it reasonable to automatically have an expectation of nondisclosure and privacy in today’s e-mail world?
(more…)
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Last year, I yoinked a meme going around the Internet from my sister that let you do a sort of “year in review” commentary for the year that had just passed. I really liked the questions, and so I’m going to go ahead and do it for 2005 as well.
(more…)
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I was a bit darkly amused by Jack Chick’s latest offering, The Chaplain. Chick definitely understands — either purposefully or subconciously — how to appeal to his audience’s already extant persecution complexes:
If you don’t know who Jack Chick is, the long and the short of it is that he is a fundamentalist who is pretty much solely responsible for all the various pamphlets of religious cartoons that you have been given or found in a toilet stall or in various odd places. The Wikipedia entry on him will illuminate you further.
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“A discussion on MetaFilter prompted this rundown by a native of Portugal of all the various types of sex that are accepted, everyday parts of their culture. I honestly think that many people in the US would benefit a lot from introducing some or all of
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“The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery.”
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“Driving at nearly the speed of light? Impossible in real life,
but feasible in a computer simulation: A tour through the city centre
of TÂbingen illustrates what we should see when moving at
such a high speed.”
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“One girl in bright purple-red hair looked straight at her and said, ‘Gracias!’”
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“‘After conducting a thorough investigation . it has been determined that . the transaction activity in question was authorized and posted correctly to your account. Therefore, the temporary credit for $2,020.50 that was previously applied to your acc
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“While we can’t elaborate, we can tell you that an evil iPod Zepto sometimes mimics the Amazonian candir£ fish.”
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Thanks to Wikipedia, I know what my church used to use to make bulletins. (Looking at Google Images, it was definitely this.)
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“Also, the constant slew of cable mergers will result in the creation of CinePax, a channel that’s just very confused about its morals.”
One of the sadder comics I’ve ever seen:
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Remember, mythological elves should carry handguns, so nobody blows up Jesus:
![[XmasElf]](http://www.windycitymike.com/images/2006-01-02-xmas-elf.jpg)
Some of the more exotic viewpoints of Mel Gibson, in his own words.
And it’s patriotic to honor our war dead, you know, but evidently not patriotic to honor them in specific number. I thought this MetaFilter user’s comment was very apt:
There is definitely a message from the current administration and other Iraq War supporters that mentioning, photographing, or speaking for the dead soldiers is unpatriotic. If evidence of dead soldiers is embarrassing what does that say about the war itself?
I am reminded of the gold stars that families were given to put in their windows that signaled the loss of a son or husband in WWII. In that war it became a source of pride to have made “the greatest sacrifice.” If we can no longer find honor in dead soldiers– if their very numbers have become a shameful secret– then it should be crystal clear to everyone that we are not engaged in an honorable war.
But, to lighten the mood, here’s “Lone-Star Reviews,” one-star Amazon reviews of Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present. My favorite is the one of The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe:
I bought these books to have something nice to read to my grandkids. I had to stop, however, because the books are nothing more than advertisements for “Turkish Delight,” a candy popular in the U.K. The whole point of buying books for my grandkids was to give them a break from advertising, and here (throughout) are ads for this “Turkish Delight”! How much money is this Mr. Lewis getting from the Cadbury’s chocolate company anyway? This man must be laughing to the bank.
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I always wondered why the Lake to Jackson section of Chicago’s subway platform was so long, with such huge unused chunks of space. Now I find out, in a comment on a LiveJournal entry, from chi_thirdrail:
Initially, the State Street Subway had an alternate stopping pattern from Lake to Van Buren. It remains the longest subway platform in the world, according to the Guiness Book, at about 3/4 of a mile long (although it’s about to be severed to create a two-track connection to the Milwaukee-Dearborn subway with an intermediate station under 108 N State).
Basically, there are eight platforms, with trains stopping in only four places. This was actually the initial arrangement, except northbound and southbound wouldn’t stop in the same places. Because of how high ridership was in that era (mind you, they had service running, I believe, to Ravenswood, Evanston, Howard, Wilson, Englewood, Jackson Park, and Normal Park at the time), and this way you would never have people waiting for northbound and southbound riders waiting on the same section of platform. Trains throughout much of the day I think were about a minute apart.
How did people figure it out with all those entrances? The beauty of it, except at Lake-Randolph and Van Buren-Congress entrances (now closed), was that no matter where you entered, you would get to the mezzanine level, and you could go down steps that would lead you right to either a platform segment for northbound trains or a platform segment for southbound trains.
Today, they are totally barren. I think there might be a couple of spots where ads exist because the end of a train covers that area. Anything else I’m pretty sure would just be something that was never taken down.
CTA doesn’t maintain the advertising–Viacom Outdoor does. Wherever you see normal ads presently, I think it’s because someone at Viacom just decided it was a good spot to stick an ad. Stuff like a “station blitz,” however, I’m sure CTA is more involved in the decision making to prevent ads from potentially interfering with things like lighting and signage and station operations.
You know, I think a lot of people have this idea that CTA just sticks some guys on some trains and buses and sends them out and hopes for the best. But if you pay attention, you can see that there’s tons that goes into like every little aspect of running the second largest and most heavily used system in the country. I don’t think anyone really even comes close after us, except maybe SEPTA.
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2006 may yield some Democratic wins, I hope, given a rather intelligent strategy (that obviously was not born with the Democratic National Committee):
More than 30 Iraq and Persian Gulf War veterans have entered congressional races across the country as Democrats, hoping to capitalize on their military experience to topple the incumbent Republican majority [...]
On Dec. 20, Fawcett and Winter joined 35 Democratic veterans running for Congress at a strategy session in Washington, D.C.
The veterans voted on a name for their emerging caucuslike campaign coalition: Veterans for a Secure America. They also agreed that their military backgrounds should be promoted as credentials for leadership across the full spectrum of public policy, said Fawcett, an Air Force veteran of the 1991 Gulf War who has taught at the Air Force Academy and now works as a consultant to Northern Command in Colorado Springs.
The group will reconvene in Washington in February to respond to President Bush’s State of the Union address in a news conference on the steps of the Capitol, Winter said. An attorney and the former president of the grassroots liberal organizing group Be The Change, Winter spent 10 peacetime years in the Marine Corps and the Navy.
Very, very intelligent. Daily Kos explains why forming a coalition of Democratic veterans is going to make it awfully tough for the Republicans this November.
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As you can tell, the weblog looks a litle different. There were two major changes performed on Saturday: I upgraded the software that runs this weblog, WordPress, to version 2.0, and I changed the theme from Kubrick to K2, by the same author.
Basically, aside from the new look (which I think looks rather spiffy), this affects you only in that there may be a few cosmetic changes I’ve not yet learned to replicate. An example: I had used a “hack” to make the posting of links appear with the title “Links,” and not “links from 2006-01-01.”
However, in the long run, there are supposedly some funkily neat things that will come down the pike eventually that will run only on 2.0, and I think in the end run, this will mean a few neat things for the weblog.
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“Has anybody Down There even said thank you for iPods? Or ‘Googling yourself?’ Frankly, I deserve some kind of award for ‘Googling yourself.’”
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“Most importantly, though: I’m going to write. More blog posts, and longer ones.” Oh, joy.
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“The ball now weighs 1,700lbs, measures 119′ around, and sports 19,100 coats of paint.”
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“The story claimed Narnia had walked out of the World Trade
Organisation talks in Hong Kong because it was fed up with being
bullied by the US and Europe.”
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As if I needed another reason to hate Coldplay …
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Kill da WAHbit, kill da *WAH*bit, kill da _*WAH*_bit …
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A really fuggin’ funny commercial with a couple of … familiar faces. Behaving oddly.
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“You pussy!” (No, seriously, someone from an Alaska Airlines IP address posted this!)
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“You’ve died, you’ve gone to heaven (God let you slide on that shoplifting incident) and you’re sitting in the grass near your Heaven House, with a perfectly mixed Long Island Iced Tea, and this beautiful little pup comes trotting up to you.”
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“Each week the Magazine picks out snippets from the news, and compiles them into 10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week. Here’s an end of year almanac.”
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“Mr. Davis never knew happiness outside of how he felt for other people. Material possessions never occurred to Conner to mean anything. He lived, and he loved with the best of his ability and compromised nothing. Conner Davis dies tomorrow.”
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GET OFF MY TRAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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YIP! YIP! YIP! YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP Y
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“Beautiful hand-drawn sign at the Argyle stop on the CTA Red Line. Someone spent some serious time on this, and it’s amazing I like how it’s floating on the clouds with the sun behind it, so much going on here!”
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“We’ve got the barbarians from the north with their tree decorations and their fire rituals. And the weirdos from Gaul, cutting mistletoe with a golden sickle. And the Mithraists, the Zoroastrians, the Isis cults, and, of course, those characters who ha
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Yeah, you guessed it. They’re getting cheap on the anesthestic when they stick a camera where the sun don’t shine.
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“I figured if one girl in one window had been so fascinating to look at, it would be incredible to see someone dancing in every single window in the building.”
One of the better blonde jokes I’ve read. (Sorry it’s not a direct link — I’m feeling lazy tonight.)
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