Easter follies

I was charged with the task of acquiring candy for The Daughter's Easter basket, which was easy enough -- a box of those awful Peeps things, an egg-shaped plastic doodad filled with Hershey Kisses, and some jelly beans.

But not just any jelly beans, mind you. No, I had to indulge her enjoyment of All Things Harry Potter and get her the box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, which according to the box contain beans of flavors like grass, soap, bacon, rotten egg, vomit, and booger. "Never fear!" thought I. "I'm sure those are fake names for beans that taste like normal old jelly beans."

Not so.

"Alas, ear wax!" Dumbledore said once when trying a bean. Alas, ear wax, indeed.

The New Space Opera

The New Space Opera, originally uploaded by Jonathan Strahan.

That cover sets the bar pretty high, eh? I like my SF with BIG EFFIN' STARSHIPS. So that cover indicates BIG EFFIN' STARSHIPS. Therefore, bring on the tales about stuff that happens in and around BIG EFFIN' STARSHIPS!

That's quite the headscratcher....

As of this writing, we're watching the news on Channel 7 while we wait for the load of laundry to dry. They're reporting on a guy who brought a handgun with him into the Seneca Niagara Casino in Niagara Falls, which he then used right on the gaming floor to commit suicide. And the angle Channel 7 keeps using the angle on their coverage of "How could this man possibly bring a gun into the Casino!!!"

The Casino spokesperson indicates that they have security personnel stationed about the place [Duh! Show me a casino that has no security personnel on the gaming floor, anywhere!], they have surveillance cameras, and -- this cracked me up -- they have a sign prominently posted at all entrances indicating that firearms are not permitted!

Well, I'm baffled too, then, because once you put up a sign forbidding Behavior X, Behavior X is never a problem again. That's why nobody exceeds the speed limits on the highways! It all fits! I'll bet that the key to Peace in the Middle East would simply be to plaster the entire region with signage reading, "Blowing shit up is expressly forbidden by law."

All your egg are belong to us!

Here's something I didn't know: every year for the Annual White House Easter Egg Hunt, each state sends its own decorated egg for use in the event. Here are a few that amused or entranced:

Alaska:



Iowa:



Maine:



New York:



(Not wild about that one myself, but hey, that's my state.)

South Carolina:



(OK, maybe I'm dumb, but this one seems a little...Confederate-minded, in my eyes....)

And then there's Wyoming's egg, which wasn't even done by a person who lives in Wyoming:

I'm sorry, but with all due respect, this is the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree of Easter Eggs. I try, but all I can do is laugh as I look at it.

Anyhow, there are your 2007 State Easter Eggs, folks!

O for a problem that this solution would solve!

So I've been selling books on eBay lately (link to my auctions is over there in the sidebar). When I sell a book, I generally just slip it into a bubble-mailer, seal the envelope and tape it shut for good measure, and address it. Then I figure postage by weighing it on a kitchen scale (we have a nice digital one that does the job perfectly), and plug that weight into the form on USPS.com. Finally I simply slap on the number of stamps that will get the item there, and drop it in the mailbox at work.

Except apparently this will no longer work for heavier books, because I did not know that according to "heightened security measures", if you're mailing something that's more than sixteen ounces, you are required to hand it to a retail clerk at a Post Office. In other words, no dropping items into the mailbox anymore.

So today a package of mine with a single book in it was actually returned to me, with a note attached explaining all this. Now I have to take this package to the post office tomorrow and hand it to the clerk, whereupon we will have the following conversation:

CLERK: Is there anything liquid or perishable in here, sir?

ME: No. It's a book.

CLERK: Any insurance of verification of delivery?

ME: No, thank you.

CLERK: OK. [puts package onto the pile of outgoing stuff] Need any stamps?

ME: Got any of those Star Wars stamps?

CLERK: No, but we have the Great Moments in Frozen Food series.

ME: OK, fine.

CLERK: Have a nice day.

That's all that will happen. Believe me, I've mailed enough books through the years that I know whereof I speak. So how is this in any way to help with "security"? It's not like the mail clerks are going to assess my package for its potential bad-stuff-containing possibilities right then and there; surely the package will be scanned at some point in the mail-handling process, but as all the mail ends up at the same place eventually before being redistributed again, who cares? How will any of this prevent someone from hollowing out the pages of a book, Andy Dufresne-style, and mailing nefarious items that way?

This is a stupid, stupid rule.

Let there be gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

On American Idol, Sanjaya Malakar just rendered mortal a song that had originally been renderred immortal by Fred Astaire. Not only did he make Astaire roll over in his grave, but he made Ginger Rogers wail in horror in hers.

Gods, this guy is B-A-D bad. If Sanjaya was a vampire, he'd be Count Suckula.

Cinematic wisdom

For no real reason, I think there should be a selection online of the greatest advice ever given in the movies or TV shows. Hence this post. I'll start listing some as they come to me, and feel free to add some in comments -- I'll update as needed.

(These will of necessity be in no particular order.)

1. "Try not! Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." (The Empire Strikes Back)

2. "Don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to." (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension)

3. "Don't drink it all at once, and try not to drink it all alone." (Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Family")

4. "Look eye! Always look eye." (The Karate Kid)

5. "People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come." (Field of Dreams)

6. "Your half-assed underparenting is a lot more fun than your half-assed overparenting." (The Simpsons)

7. "No matter where you go in life, always keep an eye for Johnny the tackling Alzheimer's patient." (Scrubs)

8. "It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." (A League of Their Own)

9. "Poise! Poise!" (Seinfeld, "The Chaperone")

10. "God doesn't cause car accidents, and you know it. Stop using me as an excuse." (The West Wing, "Two Cathedrals")

11. "Stay away from the mounds, or the termites will eat all the wood in your body." (BJ from The Amazing Race IX)

Fire away! I'll update as I think of more. (No need to keep it at one selection per film or show, either.)

The toughest of possible choices

If I were banished to a deserted island, and if I were given an iPod with an unlimited amount of power but which would only come with a single item on it and that item was the video of a single dance number from a movie, and I had to pick before my marooning the one and only one dance number which I would ever again be able to watch, and my choices came down to this number or this one...I'd just wait for the tide to go out and then swim out to let myself be taken with it.

Seriously, I couldn't do without either one.

Mall for sale?

According to the Syracuse Post-Standard, Robert Congel, the head of The Pyramid Companies, is considering selling his portfolio of malls and shopping centers except for Syracuse's own Carousel Center, which is the starting block of his Destiny USA dream/project. Pyramid's major local holding is the Walden Galleria.

Pyramid's complete portfolio can be reviewed here. They also own The Shops at West Seneca, which if you've been by that location, consists of a Tops grocery store, a K-Mart, and a wide expanse of fenced-off undeveloped land where the old Seneca Mall used to reside. It seems that Congel has put his properties up for sale before, in 1998, but removed them from the market when prices for shopping centers dropped.

(If you're not familiar with the Destiny USA project, go check it out. I've never been able to decide if it's "out there" in a good way or in an outlandish, "gimme a break" kind of way, but it's definitely "out there". The idea makes me imagine if they took a couple of city blocks from Coruscant and plunked it down on the west side of Syracuse.)

Hey! I know her! (Sort of!)

I saw this article linked by Jen, and I thought the person therein looked familiar, so I read a bit deeper. Hmmmm...Steph Waller...name sounds familiar. Hmmm..."composer-turned-writer"...and wouldn't you know it! She's been on my blogroll for several years now!

So go say hello to the Incurable Insomniac. You've made it in Buffalo, Steph!

The Eternal Nature of Motherhood

020508, originally uploaded by dboo.

I saw this photo at Flickr a bit ago (via), as part of a pretty amazing photoset. The way this young mother smiles at her child is entrancing -- especially since the photo was apparently taken in 1971. That kid is my age, and the mother is probably somewhere around 60 years old now. No matter how much time passes, some things are just ingrained in the human species, no?

(What else strikes me is that very few of the fashions seen in this photoset strike me as absurd! I guess I am just a hippie, thirty years too late. Kind of like Jimmy Buffet's pirate....)

Huh-whuh?!

This will be a navel-gazing meta-blog "Inside Blogistan" kind of boring post, so scroll on if such topics bore you. Really.

That said, what the hell is Atrios's problem? This is just absolute crap. Here's the entirety of his post:

Things Which Make Me Want To Shoot People In The Face [That's the post title; Atrios has been making in-jokes about shooting people in the face ever since Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face. -Me.]

People who bitch about other peoples' blogrolls who don't even have a blogroll on their main page, but just a link to one.

Gee -- I do the same thing. I have a link to my main blogroll. Who the hell said that a blogroll has to be on the main page of a blog to be taken seriously? Note that I do the same thing: a while back I decided that my blogroll was taking up too much space in my sidebar, and further, that editing the actual blog template every time I wanted to edit the blogroll (which almost always either means adding a new blog, or deleting one that has fallen silent) was a pain-in-the-ass of editing the entire blog template. So I decided to move the blogroll to its own post in the archives. There it's nicely out-of-the-way, and editing it is a snap, as I simply edit it as I do any post. And the link is right there, reasonably close to the top of my sidebar, and I even made the link in bigger letters.

A surprising amount of testiness, it seems, coming from a person who can't even be bothered to alphabetize his blogroll, in order to make it an actually-useful resource.

Sentential Links #93 (The Neptunium Edition)

Ninety-three! And with that number, we have now produced one Sentential Links post for every one of the naturally-occurring elements, and are now into the ones that are generally produced only in nuclear experiments and such. Or something like that. I'm sure I have a chemistry or physics-minded reader who will correct me here, pronto.

Anyhow, the links:

:: Without us to care, the universe is nothing but a lot of empty accidents. But if humans care and remember, marvel at the shape of galaxies and the variety of butterflies, then those things do mean something.

:: Sometimes I think I've been alone so much in the last few years I've become fossilized, but so what.

:: The bottom line is that the kind of blogging I do, and the stuff that I'm passionate about, isn't a major draw as far as traffic is concerned, and I'm not willing to make the changes I'd have to make to have a shot at broader appeal and more traffic.

(OK, I actually have more to say about this one than usual. I feel the same way about eighty percent of the time. Maybe even more. Sometimes I get frustrated that my traffic remains firmly ensconced at around 225 hits a day -- with the commanding majority of those being Google hits, and the commanding majority of those being to ROWR! posts -- but generally, this is what it is, take it or leave it. I was never big at "blogwhoring" when I was newer at this, and now, five years down the road, I pretty much refuse to do any blogwhoring. I don't participate in comments threads elsewhere in hopes that people will click the link back here. I don't e-mail other bloggers with "Hey, I just posted on this". I figure I'm kind of like Crash Davis, who, when he finds out that Annie Savoy is interested in him and in Nuke LaLoosh, gets up to leave and says, "After twelve years in the minors, I don't try out."

Of course, it's easy to maintain that stance most of the time, but even Crash is visibly hurt when he gets brought into the office to be the recipient of the "This is a manager's hardest job" speech, which is why I think a bunch of people were annoyed at Atrios's "Blogroll Deletion Amnesty Day", or whatever it was that he called it.

I also don't really think that Blogistan is a "meritocracy"; in fact, I generally find that I don't believe much in meritocracies at all. I've seen too many people working for others less talented than they, and I've read of too many instances of people's work not being recognized for the quality work it was until well after they were gone. I generally don't think people give enough credit to the role luck plays in their lives.

A real example from my life: one thing that I've been doing a lot at The Store is learning basic carpentry skills. So I'm working hard to learn carpentry. But I wouldn't have realized I was actually interested in carpentry had I not been hired over three years ago not just to work at The Store, but to work in the specific position at The Store for which I was hired. And that was just by the pure luck that I happened to send in my application at right around the same time that my then-future managers were starting to get enormously frustrated with the guy already in that position. That guy doesn't get fired, I don't get hired for what I'm doing now. And then I'm not learning carpentry. And so on.

Same thing with blogging. It's not just that the best rise to the top. If Atrios had launched his blog a year later than he did, I doubt very much he'd be one of the top dogs in Left Blogistan. And I've never been either on his blogroll, or linked in a post of his.

OK, where was I? Oh yeah, Sentential Links. Sorry about that.)

:: Absolution requires a commitment not to repeat the sin.

:: You my have heard of a term called "white skin privilege". (I'd look up a reference but I don't have Internet access - see below). Whether you do or don't, and I'll contend that there is something to it, the greeting you see, I suspect, is an acknowledgement of a people looking after their own.

:: I've been impressed by the quality of Get Fuzzy for a while now, but in recent weeks, it seems that it has really hit its stride. (Goodness, has it ever. The whole storyline with all the extraneous animals showing up in Rob's house has been absolute gold.)

OK, that's all for this week.

The "Straight Talk Express"?!

Senator John McCain goes to Iraq and comes back saying all the standard right-wing stuff about how safe things really are over there, and how hyped up the reports of violence are, yada yada yada. You know, "we're just not getting the whole picture".

So I'm perfectly happy to get the "full picture" from a guy who went for his stroll around Baghdad while wearing a bullet-proof vest, surrounded by a hundred armed US soldiers, and overflown by three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships.

Matthew Yglesias also makes an interesting point about McCain and war-related pork spending for Arizona:

War, in short, is good for business in Arizona. And yet, Saint John McCain's strident militarism never gets discussed on these terms -- is never seen as something on a par with how Carl Levin loves cars and Joe Biden loves credits cards.

John McCain has become an absolute joke who will say anything in hopes of being President. It's almost sad to behold, really.

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

A couple items:

:: Here in Buffalo, we're always cautioning ourselves against trying to use "silver bullet" projects to revive our community fortunes. This means that we can't expect a single giant project to jump-start our economy. But of course, this is total nonsense; all we need is the right single giant project, and then the entire world will be coming to see what we just did.

All this is by way of saying that Buffalo could have been the place to build a thirteen-mile long dragon, but no, they're doing in in China. Stupid China.

(via)

:: A nifty take on the "Powers of Ten" theme.

Oh yeah, April fool's....

Every year I think I should do something on the blog to honor April Fool's Day, and every year I either can't think of anything or I forget or both.

So...I'll just shrug my shoulders and move on.

What is it with Cleveland?

First, Bill Watterson, and now Joe Eszterhas. What is about the Cleveland area that attracts people who want to chuck their successful creative careers? It can't be the Browns.

JLB for President!

Jayme Lynn Blaschke has announced his candidacy for the SFWA. His platform seems interesting, but I must acknowledge that I have no dog in this fight, since I'm not a member of the SFWA and I doubt I'll bother joining if and/or when I become a published writer.

Consider yourself warned, John Scalzi!

UPDATE: Having read JLB's platform again, I declare myself solidly behind him. Now to start making campaign posters, and lining up hands for him to kiss and babies for him to shake...or is that the other way around...hmmm....

A query for techies....

I've been experimenting a bit with this newfangled BitTorrent thingie, and I have a question for the techno-inclined:

What do I do with KVCD files, and how to I convert them into something that is, er, watchable? (Yes, I have Googled this, but none of what I've found makes sense to me. I need someone to spell it out. Slowly. Maybe even with pictures. In crayon.)

UPDATE: After some info thrown my way by Mary, and after some subsequent tinkering around based on that info, I figured out what to do. Thanks, Mary!

Mysteries!

You know, at the rate new developments seem to be churning out for old mysteries, we're gonna run out stuff for Indiana Jones to figure out.

:: A French architect has a new hypothesis for the construction of the Great Pyramid. Basically, he thinks they built it from the inside out.

:: An old diary has surfaced that may yield clues to what happened to Amelia Earhart.