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To commemorate the weekend, a detail from Mark Ryden's great painting The Last Rabbit.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Good Friday & Easter Weekend
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To commemorate the weekend, a detail from Mark Ryden's great painting The Last Rabbit.
POTUS 29: Pres. Warren G. Harding - He Never Lived To Rue The Day
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A Democratic leader, William Gibbs McAdoo, called Harding's speeches "an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea."
President Harding is often considered the most corrupt President ever (check out "The Teapot Dome Scandal"), in a close horse race with POTUS 38, President Richard M. Nixon. Like Nixon, he was probably less an actual crook than a chronic and pathetically inept judge of associates. He was a machine politician and came to Washington with baggage: an army of wardheelers and bosses. Many were indicted and convicted and served prison time.
President Harding never had to face total ignominy, alas; he died on a west coast trip two years into the 29th presidency.
Some writers and historians believe he was poisoned by his wife, who was fed up with his infidelities. Some scholars give this credence since she would not agree to an autopsy.
President Harding was succeeded by his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge. Keep cool.
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Thursday, March 24, 2005
AN OPTICAL ILLUSION
click to enlarge - You have to see it larger for this to work.
Nothing is actually moving here. If you squint, it stops. Click the title for a link to the source. Or maybe a source. . .I couldn't tell if the person who posted was the creator or not... /jack
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Wednesday, March 23, 2005
POTUS 11: Pres. James Polk - The Man With The Mullet
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President Polk was possibly the first and last President to sport a mullet. He was the first "Dark Horse" candidate to become President. Nominated as an alternative candidate on the eighth ballot, he got the nod on the ninth.
There was no dancing, singing, or alcohol in the Polk White House. He had no children. Polk's wife Sarah sat in on cabinet meetings and was extremely influential in her husband's decisions. President Polk was another one-term President, which was probably just as well, since he died a few months after his term ended.
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Old School Corporate Software Scam
After my office recently received the third new release of some business software in a couple of weeks, I remembered how it went at **** ****.
In the mid-90s, I worked at a large and now defunct software company that made software named after well-known Latin dances.
Right before a new product hit the shelves or any customers had seen it, the first PTF (programmatic temporary fix) patches would be posted. We fixed the bugs we missed or didn't have time to tackle before we "went gold." First we fixed "known failures," bugs we knew about, and shipped with anyway. We ranked that list according to how users would howl when they were victims of the unexpected behavior. Fortune 500 firm's failures were escalated even further up the priority list).
At **** ****, we never called software errors bugs. They were failures. This was to remind us that we had failed our customer. Mostly, we failed the customer in order to book revenue for the quarter
Once the software was deployed "in the field," the bugs really started rolling in. We created new patches every day. These were collected every week into a cumulative PTF. Once a month, cumulative PTFs were collected into a "TMP" release, and once a quarter, all the TMPs were released as an "update."
The best part was that we received something like $250 per year per seat (many hundreds of thousands of dollars for some companies) to fix all the bugs we put in in the first place.
After a year or so, we tossed all the fixes in with some new features and then charged for an "upgrade." Is this a great country, or what? /jack
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Your Co-worker Could Be a Space Alien, Say Experts
from The National Enquirer, August, 1984
Here's How You Can Tell - By Michael Cassels
Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human -- but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. They listed 10 signs to watch for:
1. Odd or mismatched clothes. ``Often space aliens don't fully understand the different styles, so they wear combinations that are in bad taste, such as checked pants with a striped shirt or a tuxedo jacket with blue jeans or sneakers,'' noted Brad Steiger, a renowned UFO investigator and author.
2. Strange diet or unusual eating habits. Space aliens might eat French fries with a spoon or gobble down large amounts of pills, the experts say.
3. Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don't understand earthly humor may laugh during a company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger.
4. Takes frequent sick days. A space alien might need extra time off to ``rejuvenate its energy,'' said Dr. Thomas Easton, a theoretical biologist and futurist.
5. Keeps a written or tape-recorded diary. ``Aliens are constantly gathering information,'' said Steiger.
6. Misuses everyday items. ``A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails,'' said Steiger.
7. Constant questioning about customs of co-workers. Space aliens who are trying to learn about earth culture might ask questions that seem stupid, Easton said. ``For example, a co-worker may ask why so many Americans picnic on the Fourth of July,'' noted Steiger.
8. Secretive about personal life-style and home. ``An alien won't discuss details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends,'' said Steiger.
9. Frequently talks to himself. ``A space alien may not be used to speaking the way we do, so an alien may practice speaking,'' Steiger noted.
10. Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. ``An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on,'' said Steiger. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien.
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Here's How You Can Tell - By Michael Cassels
Many Americans work side by side with space aliens who look human -- but you can spot these visitors by looking for certain tip-offs, say experts. They listed 10 signs to watch for:
1. Odd or mismatched clothes. ``Often space aliens don't fully understand the different styles, so they wear combinations that are in bad taste, such as checked pants with a striped shirt or a tuxedo jacket with blue jeans or sneakers,'' noted Brad Steiger, a renowned UFO investigator and author.
2. Strange diet or unusual eating habits. Space aliens might eat French fries with a spoon or gobble down large amounts of pills, the experts say.
3. Bizarre sense of humor. Space aliens who don't understand earthly humor may laugh during a company training film or tell jokes that no one understands, said Steiger.
4. Takes frequent sick days. A space alien might need extra time off to ``rejuvenate its energy,'' said Dr. Thomas Easton, a theoretical biologist and futurist.
5. Keeps a written or tape-recorded diary. ``Aliens are constantly gathering information,'' said Steiger.
6. Misuses everyday items. ``A space alien may use correction fluid to paint its nails,'' said Steiger.
7. Constant questioning about customs of co-workers. Space aliens who are trying to learn about earth culture might ask questions that seem stupid, Easton said. ``For example, a co-worker may ask why so many Americans picnic on the Fourth of July,'' noted Steiger.
8. Secretive about personal life-style and home. ``An alien won't discuss details or talk about what it does at night or on weekends,'' said Steiger.
9. Frequently talks to himself. ``A space alien may not be used to speaking the way we do, so an alien may practice speaking,'' Steiger noted.
10. Displays a change of mood or physical reaction when near certain high-tech hardware. ``An alien may experience a mood change when a microwave oven is turned on,'' said Steiger. The experts pointed out that a co-worker would have to display most if not all of these traits before you can positively identify him as a space alien.
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POTUS 18: Pres. Ulysses Grant - The Man Inside Grant's Tomb
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Pres. Grant is often portrayed in history as a drunkard. Historians differ on this point; no one disagrees that he enjoyed whiskey. In the army, he served in the Mexican War and later became famous as President Abraham Lincoln's commander of the Union Armies (from 1864). After the war, he was elected to two terms as President and his administration was hit with numerous corruption scandals. He is buried in Manhattan. . .in the famous mausoleum, Grant's Tomb.
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
POTUS 16: Pres. Abraham Lincoln - The Most Beloved President?
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President Lincoln, or Lanky Link, as Lord Buckley called him.
He built the Republican Party into a strong national organization and brought the northern Democrats into the Union fold. He went to war against his own countrymen. He had little choice. In 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves in the Confederacy. In reality, that would take a while, and many people think we're still working at it.
He made a few jokes about his face, and truth be told, in many of those daguerreotypes he looks like he is carrying the weight of the world. The contemporary painter Mark Ryden often includes an image of Lincoln in his paintings.
He never got to fully preside over the peace, because he was killed on April 14, 1865, by a deranged actor.
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Monday, March 21, 2005
An unusual report of a UFO and a green-faced entity seen near an old U.S. Air Force Nike Missile Base in Redmond, Washington
By Jack Brummet, Alien Lore Ed.
From a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Report. This UFO and alien sighting occurred a couple of miles away from my office.
DATE: June 24, 1988
TIME: Sometime between 12:30 and 2:00 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time
LOCATION: Redmond, Washington
DURATION: Estimates vary, around 7 minutes for sighting of UFO; about 45 minutes total duration including sighting of face, possibly longer
SOURCE OF SIGHTING: UFO Information Service (Goudie)
INVESTIGATORS:
Donald A. Johnson, Ph.D., MUFON
Don Olson, MUFON
Rita Andreeva, MUFON
Four 11-year-old girls who had attended a private Christian elementary school together were having a slumber party reunion at the home of one of the girls on Education Hill in Redmond, Washington. At a few minutes after either 12:30 AM or 1:30 AM they were looking out the window to see if they could find the girl's dog. They were downstairs in the TV room, while the parents and brother and sister of the host were asleep upstairs. They witnessed a craft-like UFO, described as either a domed-disc or two plates put together edge-to- edge, hovering in the night sky. It had white and red lights and possibly faint green lights around the rim of the object. Of the two girls interviewed, both thought right away that it was a UFO (i.e. "spacecraft"), and not an aircraft because it was similar to a picture they had once seen in a book.
The UFO was hovering at about 30 degrees above the horizon when first sighted. It was described as smaller than a house in size, possibly 25 feet in diameter. The UFO moved to the right horizontally about 10 degrees, reversed direction abruptly and moved back in a straight line to the left 10 degrees, moved back to the right 5 degrees to a center position, and then moved really fast straight down. It moved down behind some tall evergreen trees and the girls thought that it probably came down in a clearing in Nike Park, about 3-4 blocks from the girl's home where they were staying. The UFO was reported to be visible through the window of the TV room for a total of between 2 and 7 minutes.
Sometime later, within 15 minutes to a half an hour, two of the girls witnessed a frightening face. The accounts of how the face appeared to them varies. In one account the girls thought they saw something like a shadow or a figure at the top of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. The became scared and hid in their sleeping bags; they zipped them over their heads and lay next to each other. They conversed through the bags and agreed to look at the same time, so that it would not be too scary. As they pulled the bags down from over their heads they saw a dark, mossy green face only about arm's length away. Really frightened, one of the girls pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and when she looked out again in a few minutes, the being was gone. The other girl's account said they were lying on their backs trying to get to sleep and staring up at the ceiling when all of a sudden they both saw this green face. She watched it for about 45 seconds, "and then it just, went away". Asked if it just vanished like it was a slide from a projector or something, she said, no, it wasn't like that. It was just like a real face, but it was green in color and it was looking at them. The second girl appears to be unclear about how the face appeared because she also reports she covered her head with the sleeping bag at one point but can't remember when.
The face was described as greenish in hue, with red, glowing eyes. Interviewed separately, both of the girls said there was something like a dent in one of the cheeks. One girl said it looked
like the "face on Mars" photograph she saw in the newspaper about a week later, while the other girl said it had pointy ears and bushy eyebrows. When asked a direct question later about the pointed ears, the second girl said she didn't remember any ears. If the face had indeed been attached to a body, one girl figures that the being must have been about 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall.
About 10 to 15 minutes later the second girl, who lived there, saw a clump of rainbow colored lights slowly revolving in her kitchen and flashing light all over the ceiling and refrigerator. The first girl made a vague reference to lights in the kitchen but apparently did not see the rainbow-colored clump of lights hovering in the kitchen (the kitchen is partially visible from the TV room, up half a flight of stairs).
The girls became noisy discussing what they had seen woke the mother. The mother came down and ordered them to go to sleep. Apparently nothing further happened that night.
Of the other two girls, they are certain that one saw what they saw but would not consent to be interviewed by UFO investigators. They are unsure what the fourth girl saw. The second girl, the one at whose home the events occurred, reported that she had had a precognitive experience during that previous day, recalling during a croquet match that she had dreamed those exact events some weeks before. She also reports that since the UFO incident she is no longer subject to nose bleeds, which she reports have occurred to her chronically throughout her life and also occur with her father. She also said that a soccer injury to her knee no longer gave her any pain after the encounter, and she attributes the healing to the event.
From a MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Report. This UFO and alien sighting occurred a couple of miles away from my office.
DATE: June 24, 1988
TIME: Sometime between 12:30 and 2:00 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time
LOCATION: Redmond, Washington
DURATION: Estimates vary, around 7 minutes for sighting of UFO; about 45 minutes total duration including sighting of face, possibly longer
SOURCE OF SIGHTING: UFO Information Service (Goudie)
INVESTIGATORS:
Donald A. Johnson, Ph.D., MUFON
Don Olson, MUFON
Rita Andreeva, MUFON
Four 11-year-old girls who had attended a private Christian elementary school together were having a slumber party reunion at the home of one of the girls on Education Hill in Redmond, Washington. At a few minutes after either 12:30 AM or 1:30 AM they were looking out the window to see if they could find the girl's dog. They were downstairs in the TV room, while the parents and brother and sister of the host were asleep upstairs. They witnessed a craft-like UFO, described as either a domed-disc or two plates put together edge-to- edge, hovering in the night sky. It had white and red lights and possibly faint green lights around the rim of the object. Of the two girls interviewed, both thought right away that it was a UFO (i.e. "spacecraft"), and not an aircraft because it was similar to a picture they had once seen in a book.
The UFO was hovering at about 30 degrees above the horizon when first sighted. It was described as smaller than a house in size, possibly 25 feet in diameter. The UFO moved to the right horizontally about 10 degrees, reversed direction abruptly and moved back in a straight line to the left 10 degrees, moved back to the right 5 degrees to a center position, and then moved really fast straight down. It moved down behind some tall evergreen trees and the girls thought that it probably came down in a clearing in Nike Park, about 3-4 blocks from the girl's home where they were staying. The UFO was reported to be visible through the window of the TV room for a total of between 2 and 7 minutes.
Sometime later, within 15 minutes to a half an hour, two of the girls witnessed a frightening face. The accounts of how the face appeared to them varies. In one account the girls thought they saw something like a shadow or a figure at the top of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. The became scared and hid in their sleeping bags; they zipped them over their heads and lay next to each other. They conversed through the bags and agreed to look at the same time, so that it would not be too scary. As they pulled the bags down from over their heads they saw a dark, mossy green face only about arm's length away. Really frightened, one of the girls pulled the sleeping bag over her head, and when she looked out again in a few minutes, the being was gone. The other girl's account said they were lying on their backs trying to get to sleep and staring up at the ceiling when all of a sudden they both saw this green face. She watched it for about 45 seconds, "and then it just, went away". Asked if it just vanished like it was a slide from a projector or something, she said, no, it wasn't like that. It was just like a real face, but it was green in color and it was looking at them. The second girl appears to be unclear about how the face appeared because she also reports she covered her head with the sleeping bag at one point but can't remember when.
like the "face on Mars" photograph she saw in the newspaper about a week later, while the other girl said it had pointy ears and bushy eyebrows. When asked a direct question later about the pointed ears, the second girl said she didn't remember any ears. If the face had indeed been attached to a body, one girl figures that the being must have been about 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall.
About 10 to 15 minutes later the second girl, who lived there, saw a clump of rainbow colored lights slowly revolving in her kitchen and flashing light all over the ceiling and refrigerator. The first girl made a vague reference to lights in the kitchen but apparently did not see the rainbow-colored clump of lights hovering in the kitchen (the kitchen is partially visible from the TV room, up half a flight of stairs).
The girls became noisy discussing what they had seen woke the mother. The mother came down and ordered them to go to sleep. Apparently nothing further happened that night.
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Sunday, March 20, 2005
POTUS 42: Pres. William Jefferson Clinton - The Comeback Kid
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In 1997, Bill Clinton's penis became the first penis in White House history to have a formal statement issued on its behalf - in terms of its "size, shape, direction, whatever", as Clinton's lawyer Bob Bennett put it. It was also the first to be photographed by a naval surgeon as Exhibit A in a sexual harassment case.
President Clinton was a well-loved president, despite his reputation as a womanizer. He was an intelligent man, and a Rhodes scholar. He could work a room. So far, the democrats have been unable to field another candidate with even a fraction of his charm and charisma and ability to win elections. In his two terms of office, the economy was gangbusters, and we largely avoided any war at all.
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POTUS 7: Pres. Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson - The Star Of The $20 Dollar Bill
click to enlargePresident Jackson is probably best known for his mug that stars on the Twenty Dollar Bill. He was a hero in the War of 1812, where he took the British for a ride. He was the first populist president who did not come from the aristocracy, the first to have his vice-president ( John C. Calhoun) resign, and he was the first to marry a divorcee.
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Saturday, March 19, 2005
POTUS 35: Pres. Jack Kennedy - Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
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President John F. "Jack" Kennedy was only President for 1,000 days. He got into two hairy situations with Cuba. He was another President who liked to party, and despite having a good looking, intelligent wife, he had numerous girlfriends, including Judith Exner, Angie Dickinson, and Marilyn Monroe. He was killed under still mysterious circumstances in November, 1963.
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