---o0o---
Friday, April 11, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Poem: When the devil comes knocking
"It's for you. I think it's The Devil."
I always wondered when
And how he would come knocking—
Maybe in a two-button Armani suit
Or clad in a red unitard
With a baffle for his tail—
And ask me why I blame him
For the ills in our hearts and world.
Will he flip open a dusty,
Bartleby-scriven ledger
And call me to account
For my good deeds,
Or did he come to claim me
For the accumulation
Of a succession of transgressions?
Does he realize I have a problem
With authority figures?
When The Devil comes knocking
Will he show up half-drunk
And reeking of sulphur
Or will he come in stealth
Looking polished and rakish
Like George Clooney or George Raft?
Will he proffer a Faustian deal?
Or is he coming because I earned
My passage into the underworld
The hard way, sin by sin
And he's nearly an innocent bystander
Just collecting the bill?
---o0o---
TBTL --- Too Beautiful To Live? Luke Burbank's Talk Show On Seattle's Kiro 710 AM
Luke Burbank's TBTL is a bit [extreme understatement] of a departure from "typical" AM radio — "I'm going to hang out with my friend and talk about things," Burbank says — and that's the whole point of these three hours a night. The show spits in the face of talk radio conventions, and they are fatalistic about it. But, I have heard people on the street, at work, and at parties mention the show. That's never happened before with a local show. People write in from around the world and all over the U.S. "There's something happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear..."
Luke is vain, funny, often a smart-ass, and always sharp. His partner in crime, Jen, is also funny, and extremely bright. She has a wicked sense of humor along with a heart of gold. Their engineer Sean, is an amusing knucklehead who sometimes talks about making eight bucks stretch the last four days before payday. TBTL is like sitting around with some funny friends, friendos. And the strangest and best part: they almost never take calls. Unlike most talk shows, you're glad. Unlike most talk shows, you actually want to hear the host.
"You have to treat it [the show] like it's a firefly and you've put it in a jar and it's flickering," said Luke in an interview.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Charlton Heston, R.I.P.
I actually liked Charlton Heston, aside from his stint with the NRA advocating firepower, self-defense, and the one useless amendment to the constitution. Most of the post-Baby boom generation remembers him from his work in the Planet of the Apes series. And Ben Hur.
In his best movie roles, he had this populist heroism going into head-to-head combat with ignorance and oppression. Yeah some of his movies were jokes. But don't forget, despite his later bad rug and ranting about guns, that he was marching with the civil rights people back in 1963.
---o0o---
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
FDA Orders Massive Cow Head Recall
Linked out of LinkedIn...Jack Brummet resigns from the insanity
click to enlarge
I don't know if you've been sucked in yourselves, or if you've resisted, but a year or two ago, I succumbed to LinkedIn. If you are in "business" you find people constantly pinging you to become their linked in buddies a/k/a connections. It's similar to Facebook, but about 1/20th as fun. And there seemed--to me at least--to be no point at all. All I ever did on linked in was approve new friends and connections. And occasionally, a salesman from some company would tunnel in and hound me to set up a meeting or a lunch or drinks...all over the map.
So I decided to Link Out. That wasn't easy. It's easy to link in, but not link out. Kind of like the Roach Motel. After begging the customer service department, and spamming them for a week, they finally killed my account. After all, if you want to track me down, just do a GIS, and you'll see numerous other avenues to find me.
---o0o---
Monday, April 07, 2008
The Ruthless Gene
click to enlarge
Could a gene be partly responsible for the behaviour of some of the world's most savage dictators? Jump here, to Nature News, to find out. Has the ruthlessness gene been uncovered? The study suggests dictatorial behaviour is partly genetic.
---o0o---
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Barbara Bush (senior) on the beach...and speculations on Bikinis
click Mrs. George H.W. Bush to enlarge
I brought this up at a dinner party last night and everyone scoffed. Yes, there does indeed exist a picture of a comely Barbara Bush [Senior] in a swimsuit (I was wrong about the Bikini part...they hadn't even been invented yet[1]). There you are, Friendos.
[1] Well, they kind of had been invented, according to the wikipedia, but they didn't become popular until after 1943, when swimwear was under a restriction to use 10% less fabric. The wikipedia also has a great definition of a bikini: A bikini or two-piece is a type of women's swimsuit, characterized by two separate parts — one covering the breasts, the other the groin (and optionally the buttocks).
Here is a photo of one of the very first bikinis modeled by Micheline Bernardini.
:
In our more modern, Idiocracy, world, the bikini was finally reduced to the microkini (really, a glorified Band-aid®:
---o0o---
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Locked out of your car? Have a tennis ball?
---o0o---
Friday, April 04, 2008
GraphJam
Nano-Plasm by Stephen Clarke-Willson--a very good read
I have no idea whether what he writes about nano-machines is real or pure confection. I suppose I could look it up, but come on. . .it's a novel; a work of fiction. And in a work of fiction, all things are permitted--at least in my world.
I have been baffled by the people who demanded refunds from the publishers for the book by James Frey (remember the bogus autobiography Oprah annointed, which was exposed as fake?) or Margaret Seltzer's recent fake memoir Love and Consequences: A Memoir for Hope and Survival. How that last book even got published is beyond me--I remember Keelin Curran and I read excerpts in the New York Times before the scandal broke, and we both thought it sounded totally bogus. But what do you expect? Isn't a memoir just a work of fiction told with a patina of truth? So, I have now completely digressed.