Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

OK, just a quick "Grab Bag" of stuff today, and then more substantive (!) stuff tomorrow. Or not.

:: On the "Geek Test", Caledon Hockley beat my score, and suggests some of his own additions to the list. Here they are, with my answers:

-- You know what the only improvised line in The Empire Strikes Back is and who said it. YES
-- You know what the original line was supposed to be. YES
-- You know how many times Buffy has died in the series. NO
-- You know the real name of the 'Six Million Dollar Man' YES
-- You have calculated, with inflation, what that amount is today. NO
-- You know what K.I.T.T. stands for. YES
-- You have attempted to synchronize the CD soundtrack to the movie scene at home. NO
-- You become aggrivated when someone misquotes from a movie you know by heart. YES
-- You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars movies whose names aren't actually spoken in the movies. YES
-- You can name at least 5 characters from the Star Wars books that don't appear in the movies. YES
-- You know who "Q" is in at least two long-running series. YES
-- You can hum the theme to "Superman" in a moment's notice YES
-- You know what kind of a gun James Bond has to give up in Dr. No to get his Walther. YES
-- You have uttered, at least once in your life, "I HAVE THE POWER!!!" YES
-- You know who the original Green Lantern is. NO
-- You have used the phrase 'cunning linguist' with a straight face. NO
-- You have used physics skills in real life situations. NO (I'm not sure what would qualify, here.)

:: Speaking of the Geek Test, these guys are officially granted an automatic score of 100%. They don't have to answer a single question. They're a lock.

:: Sometimes I wish I knew the first thing about economics, if only so I could tell Jane Galt she's wrong without the intellectual content of my argument consisting of variants of "Nanny nanny boo boo!"

:: It's a beautiful thing when a guy in Dallas embraces his inner postal worker.

:: Atrios recently revealed himself as a Philadelphia gym teacher. For some reason, I am picturing him as Coach Cutlip from The Wonder Years.

:: Open letter to Barnes&Noble: The Southtowns area in Buffalo constitutes a perfect location. Buffalo has two B&N's, and both are in the northern suburbs. And there's a shopping plaza less than half a mile down the street which hasn't achieved full occupancy yet. And I just the other day found a back way there: an abandoned service road for the airstrip that used to exist behind my apartment complex, but exists no longer.

:: On second thought, a B&N or Borders within walking distance of my home would not be a good thing.

:: On third thought, I want one anyway.

:: Snopes.com is an invaluable resource, really and truly. Right now they have a post up about "noodling", a questionable means of catching catfish. I have a problem with something they write in this post, though: "Although tales of giant catfish as big as grown men are the stuff of urban legendry, some varieties of catfish can indeed grow quite large (such as the Mekong giant catfish, which can weigh as much as 650 pounds and measure up to 10 feet in length)...[snip]" Maybe I'm parsing this incorrectly, but are they saying that catfish as big as a man don't exist, but catfish way bigger than a man do exist? Huh?

:: Six or seven years ago, Buffalo's NHL team, the Sabres, moved into a new arena. Since then, the old arena -- Memorial Auditorium -- has sat vacant. The building itself is still quite viable, and people here are always talking about what to do with it. Now, it appears that two main possibilities exist: converting it into a casino which would be run by the Seneca Nation of Indians (which I think would be a staggeringly bad idea), and converting it into retail space anchored by something called a "Bass Pro Outdoor World" store, which as I understand it is a Borders for fishermen, but even better (imagine Borders outlets the size of Wal-Marts, and only in select cities nationwide). So, we can have a lame knockoff casino, when there are casinos in easy reach of most people in the country; or we can have a store that would have sport-fishermen flocking to Buffalo. Gee whiz, what to do? (The Buffalo News has a good editorial on the store today. I'm not a fisherman, so I wouldn't get too much out of it. But apparently these stores are big.)

:: Maintenance notes: 1. That supplementary blogroll ("The Common Room") I added is not powered by Blogrolling, so the blogs there won't be demarked when they are freshly updated. So don't avoid them on that basis. 2. Sometime this week I plan to add one more section to the sidebar, which will hold links to reviews and articles I write for Green Man Review, as well as adding a few new permalinks to "Other Shores". 3. I may be joining a webring. More details as they become available.