And a related topic came up elsewhere

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999.

Video of the event (forty one hours compressed to under three minutes) here in a YouTube clip.

It has a theme.

All YouTube links:

A heartwarming message for an important book.
Pharmaceutical ad for Elder Sign.
Casting Call of Cthulhu.

Diana Moon Glampers.

I have to say that despite the one major and one minor reservations I had about the series, I'm enjoying it a lot. They didn't go for the easy solutions in most cases. Unlike some shows, they are learning that blowing things up real good doesn't necessarily lead to an optimal outcome.

(Very quick background summary: The crew of the Big Horn sees a strange UFO appear. It generates a signal that does strange things to them (killing most); a investigating team has found that the ones that survived seem to want to change us.)

( Read more... )
Hmm, a lot of typing for a one-season show that got canceled five years ago. I put this on my netfix queue a while ago, barely remembering that it existed. I haven't come across the DVD extra yet that was my original reason for looking it up.

I suddenly want to see the Threshold team meet the Torchwood team.

You can set a potato afire in a microwave oven.

William Tenn has passed away at the age of 89.

Everyone should go to the library now, find an anthology or collection, and read a story of his.

You will find it was worth the trip.

(think_galactic readers, I especially recommend The Masculinist Revolt. If you are not helplessly giggling at the end, you are dead to me.)

Yes, I know, no one reads newspapers anymore.

Definitely not if they treat their readership this way. I do like how they spin this as a way to get the comic strip sizes larger.

Oh well, that's what the web is for: not pronography [sic], but reading comics. Finding "Sylvia" et al. isn't hard, I just wish there was a way to get my eye tracks to be a real source of revenue, instead of through dodgy sources like google ads. Even comic strip artists need to earn a living.

It does strike me that the Tribune probably knows its audience: keeping "Shoe", "For Better or Worse", and "Hagar the Horrible" just shows that they're more comfortable with the bland and that they'd rather have an audience of people who like the same thing. Add in the conservatism of the creepy amoral sort found the Tribune's editorial columns, and you know that the Trib has it's preferred demographic.

Poll #1522261 What's The Super Bowl For?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

What's The Super Bowl For?

I hadn't posted much about the plant life in 2009, partly because I didn't buy a single plant: I wanted to see what the state of the plant life was, and whether I should dig up more lawn.

Plant-wise 2009 was unexpectedly successful, but not so much as far as actual flowers go. The unseasonably cool weather didn't help, and I was lucky just to get the plants more established.

So this year, I'm making up for it. The catalogues come fast and furious, and in January it's mostly the seed catalogues. Paradoxically, seeds are more work than live plants, since some of them require special treatment (usually having to do with cold), and all of them require space, since I'm sprouting them indoors to get a leg up on Spring and to avoid the hungry birds.

Which means that what I ordered is bordering on the insane. Even if there's a method in my madness, that doesn't change the fact that there's an element of madness.

From John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds:
     Atomic Red Carrots
     Red Wonder Alpine Strawberries
     Yellow Wonder Alpine Strawberries

From Pinetree Garden Seeds:
     Alpine Strawberry – Ruegen
     Alpine Strawberry – White Soul
     Alma Paprika
     Hopi Red Dye Amaranth

From Select Seeds:
     Alpine Strawberry – Alexandria
     Tobacco Crimson Bedder
     Pink – Clove 'Old Vermont'

You may see a pattern here.

Obey

There doesn't seem to be any originality in Fairey's work. And the fact that he takes radical artwork to alter and colorize, to sell to wannabe radicals, says "mercenary" to me, not "activist".

Josh MacPhee (a guest of honor at Thinkgalacticon 2009) also weighs in.

The only good thing that came out of the Amazon -- Macmillan dispute is that tacithydra pointed out the existence of http://www.indiebound.org/, which, like Amazon, allows you to make wishlists and link to specific books.

Presumably it won't be as quick to de-list books. I'd been avoiding using Amazon links for book references in general anyway, but now I have a positive alternative.

Pagans get worship space at academy. Given the number of fundamentalist religious organizations that call Colorado Springs home, this just amuses me to no end. Just how many tops were blown at Focus on the Family headquarters, I wonder.

Speaking of Colorado Springs, it seems it is also an example of a perfect Libertarian society. So we now know what we can strive for.

I returned in time to vote in the primary. For such a low turn-out (although, they tell us, still not as low as the late 1980s), we have some hotly contested races here.

Still, it was disconcerting to feed in my ballot to the ballot reader and see the number go from "53" to "54", especially since I had uncharacteristically gone to the polls in the late afternoon (usually I arrive early). I can only hope that the other vote-counter (for people who wanted to vote electronically) had seen higher use.

There are near dead-heat results for both the Democratic and Republican runs for governor (looks like the guy I voted for isn't going to make it). The Senate races aren't nearly as close, and the woman I voted for wasn't near the top (although approximately 20% of the vote isn't bad).

The other elections actually made me a little hopeful.

Today is the last day for opting out of the Google Book Settlement.

Ursula K. Le Guin launched a petition (with an interesting list of authors) against the settlement.

Her letter of resignation from the Authors Guild is here.

There must be plenty of people with surnames like "Savage" or "Cannon" or "Gunn" who have gone on to lead normal, productive, lives.

Most of my searches for the Levitated Dipole Experiment lead to PDF files or subscription-only sites, so here's a link to the Register article about a potentially better way to do it.

According to Jay Kesner, MIT's LDX honcho, the difference between his baby and a regular tokamak is simple: with the tokamak the plasma is inside the magnet, whereas in the LDX the magnet is inside the plasma.

The second page of the first Iron Man comic book features Stark showing off a new invention to a bewildered general as he beams, "Now do you believe that the transistors I've invented are capable of solving your problem in Vietnam?"

Hmm. "Radio Flyer"; "Laser... " anything, really; I have to remember that technologies had to be new at some point in history, and using the cool new name in another name, or as a macguffin in fiction, has a long, long history.

I still blinked a bit.

Bonerama, a New Orleans band with trombones making up the majority of it instruments, is finally making it to Chicago. They play at Martyrs' February 19th and 20th.

I heard them at the Detroit Jazz Festival year before last, and they were terrific. It'll be interesting to hear what they sound like in an enclosed space.

But a certain subset of the people on my friends list will know why I'm linking to this:

David Itzkoff wrote an article in the New York Times, stating that the Sherlock Holmes canon is still copyrighted. He is probably not correct.

Yes, it matters who you use as your expert source.

Via mobylives_feed.

Tomorrow it's Twelve Drummers Drumming

Some people wait for New Year's, others the weekend after Christmas (which is occasionally the same thing). I've been doing it on the twelfth day of Christmas for some years now. So tomorrow, I wait for midnight to roll around, and unplug the lights.

Tone of voice? What tone of voice?

The guy who was happy to let Sun acquire MySQL is all upset that it might be bought by Oracle. Because after all MySQL is The Chosen One, the M in the LAMP acronym.

Larry Alston of PostgreSQL politely disagrees.

I don't know why Fearon's, a pub that doesn't normally have music, hosted the front man for the Smithereens (I suspect that he was visiting family), but I'm glad I caught them.

They were actually a quartet. At one point a young teen joined them (this is why I suspect it was a family visit), and he played the lead guitar on "The Joker". And yes, many Smithereens songs were played.

Important cliche-busting news: Nineteen-year-old chess geniuses do not have to channel Fischer.

This came via guardian_chess, which I normally read from the feed directly. This time I happened to click on the link (the article wasn't written by the regular columnists), and found something I'd never seen before, a "ChessFlash" object, which runs through the moves in a nice graphical manner. Apparently this is a standard for showing game play.

Which is wonderful for me, because I grew up learning chess with English descriptive system, and I keep screwing up my mental image with the Algebraic notation.

There are instructions on how to use ChessFlash for yourself here; it basically involves pasting in your moves in PGN format.

Edit: "Fischer" is spelled with a "c".