September 2009
19 posts
Watch the video of our interview with political... →
Avedon is a fire-breathing progressive who blogs at The Sideshow, we talked about healthcare reform, politics, her career as a dancer in Second Life, and more.
As usual, this is the raw, unedited…
Avedon is a fire-breathing progressive who blogs at The Sideshow, we talked about healthcare reform, politics, her career as a dancer in Second Life, and more.
As usual, this is the raw, unedited video, so it’ll have a couple of hiccups in it. I’ll be working on fixing up the audio-only podcast this week.
Enjoy!
Embed code:
<embed flashvars="autoplay=false&vid=3143%2F1011759"...
The US Government's bizarre obsession with Janet... →
“This, in all sincerity, is what I expect in return for my taxes: a five-year-long absurdist theater performance about a magically, awesomely, mesmerizingly powerful nipple that was revealed for less than one second to millions of half-drunk spectators on a Sunday afternoon in 2004. The budget: Millions of dollars and rising.”
The Republican Party thinks the government should only...
Why my eyeglasses are annoying
They’re annoying because I only need to use them some of the time, and I don’t know what the heck to do with them when I don’t need them.
Ithink my condition is that I’m nearsighted. I’m not sure what you call it. I need my glasses to work at the computer, or to drive. They improve my vision pretty much anytime I’m outdoors.
However, the glasses make it hard...
The laws of Internet political discussion
1) Angry nutters who share your political beliefs define your belief system.
2) Angry nutters who share my belief system are regrettable, but incidental and unimportant. Even the best cause attracts its share of lunatics. It’s cheap of you to even mention them.
3) When angry nutters who agree with me disrupt the discussion, it’s regrettable. But it demonstrates how wrong you are,...
Coming up: Healthcare reform with political... →
I’m back from several weeks at a spa for copper robots. I got a new coat of polish, WD-40 for the joints, and rejuvenating treatments to restore the antennae to their youthful springiness. I’m…
Why the police came to our house just now
I got in the car in the driveway yesterday evening, on the way to pick up our take-out dinner order. I looked around, and got out my iPhone, and called Julie.
“Julie,” I said, “did you go into the car today and empty the glove compartment onto the front seat?”
The glove compartment was emptied onto the front passenger seat, as was the storage compartment between the...
We went to see "Spamalot"
I liked it but didn’t love it. It seemed to be a bunch of strung-together gags from the movie, with some middlin’-good song-and-dance numbers thrown in.
We saw the movie about a million times when I was a kid, and my friends Michael, Marc, John, Vincent and I quoted great swathes of the dialogue back and forth. I can still do it.
Julie saw the movie once or twice when she was an...
The Fast Food Industry's 7 Most Heinous... →
No. 7 — The Krispy Kreme Doughnut Sundae Two years ago, the brain trust at Krispy Kreme decided to answer the age-old question of how to make ice cream sundaes even less healthy. The solution, it turns out, is to remove bananas, strawberries or anything that looks remotely like it might contain nutrients, and replace it with a doughnut.
Also: “The KFC Double Down … was...
We just got word that a friend of a friend died
It was apparently some kind of fast-moving cancer.
We saw her a few times a year, at our friend’s Thanksgiving and parties. I didn’t know her well at all beyond that—she was a friend of a friend—but she was caustic and loud and funny and I liked her. She’ll leave a hole in our Thanksgiving celebration.
A 9/11 memory
For years, I kept my calendar page for 9/11/01. Of course, you fill out a calendar page before the day, so that page is a record of what I’d planned that day—not what actually happened.
The Networld + Interop conference was in Atlanta that day, I was not attending but I had a note on the calendar reminding me that two colleagues would be there. I also had two or three telephone...
When to Replace Walking Shoes →
Every three to six months, it says here. It’s been 18 months for me. I wasn’t a math major but I’m thinking that 18 is more than 3-6. Explains why my feet were hurting after my morning constitutional today.
Tor.com looks at George R.R. Martin's...
I would never want to pick a favorite novel out of all the thousands of novels I’d read. That would be silly. But if I had to pick just one, it might well be Fevre Dream, about a vampire on the 1850s Mississippi River who teams up with a hapless riverboat captain to end vampires’ preying on human beings.
The funny thing is I don’t really like vampire stories as a genre, but I...
WatchWhy the “Old Jews Telling Jokes” site is awesome
I think, when you watch Alma tell a story, you see that she characterizes many of the things that I have come to cherish in the joke tellers of this generation: a magnificent poise, a proud delight in laughter and the ability to bestow it, and a knowing gleam of mischievous spirit.
Also, so many of the people telling these jokes are...
Another guy I went to college with who went on to...
Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Boing Boing
I went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and was on the college paper, Statesman, with this book’s author, Mitch Horowitz.
This sounds like a fantastic book, it’s moving to the top of my to-be-read pile. Well, as soon as I have the book in my hands to add to the pile that is.
It...
Why we overeat →
But it’s not any one substance. Nicotine itself is only a moderate reinforcer. But add the smoke, throat scratch, crinkling of the cellophane pack, color of the pack, imagery that was created 40 years ago that it was cool to smoke, emotional gloss of advertising, and what did we end up with? We ended up with a deadly addictive product.
So I give you a package of sugar and say, “Go...
What it was like to attend my 30th high school...
I keep in touch with three or four people from high school. And of course after 30 years I’m a very different person from who I was then (fatter and with more hair in my ears). But I still think about high school now and then, and when I do it seems less and less like it actually happened to me, and more like it was a favorite book or TV show that I’d come to know so well that I...
Skype Sale Nears: Why eBay Shareholders Should Be... →
So back in 2005, eBay paid billions for Skype but didn’t get the crown jewels, aka the technology. I reported this oversight back in 2005. How then-CEO Meg Whitman signed off on the deal, I still can’t understand. I mean, even a lemonade stand owner who can’t tie his shoelaces wouldn’t overlook something as simple as that.
This is a major reason why I am lukewarm at the prospect of Meg Whitman...