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Today I had someone with nipple piercings explain to me that navel piercings are “gross”.

“The mutant phenotype that we saw when we crossed the two deletions … was an inability of [fruitfly] larvae to carry out vigorous, concerted head swinging to scrape their way out of the egg shell…” So they named the gene “amontillado”.  And a mutation causing learning defects is named “turnip”, because “vegetables are not well-known for their mental acuity.”

Call me a nature hater, if you must, but I’m not too thrilled about encouraging beetles and spiders to nest in my roof.

Well, now it’s official.  A whale cannot sue a person.

Niall, my boy who just turned one, was practicing spatial skills today. He likes to take objects and pack them in containers, and to unpack containers. There was an empty half-liter plastic water bottle on the coffee table and a large plastic iced tea glass, and he was holding on to the former and trying to fit it into the latter, but he was trying to put it in sideways. I worked with him on it for a while and showed him how to insert it so it fit. Then we tuurned it into a game. He would take the bottle out of the glass, turn it around 180 degrees, then reinsert it. Then we would clap together and I would praise him.

We did this probably twenty times, as I was calling to Jenn to come in and witness it. She did get to see it, and she started playing the game with him. He played successfully for a couple turns, then seemed to forget the trick and tried reinserting it sideways. One time he tried putting it in, then pressed really, really hard to get it to go in, then lost hold of it and it skittered across the table. He looked up at me expectantly and started clapping. It was the funniest thing, as it looked like he was trying to pull a fast one — “Now we clap, right?”

It was a lot of fun. For a while he was trying to hold both pieces to do the insertion, but his arms aren’t long enough to hold the glass away from his body sufficiently, so he looked at me and very clearly, through body language, asked me to hold the glass for him. It’s amazing how much can be communicated and learned without spoken language.

Virginia’s Alexandria Country Day School ran out of milk at lunch, so it served the “limeade” in the refrigerator to its elementary school students. Unfortunately it wasn’t “limeade”, it was “leftover margaritas”.

Checking [whether] standard error [closed in a Perl script], though, is a bit more problematic. After all, if STDERR fails to close, what are you planning to do about it? — The Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

They go on to suggest a couple of things, but it’s still a funny comment. By way of analogy, compare it to submitting a customer service request to a company saying that the customer service request system is not delivering any customer service requests.

On the very next page, it says “As of Perl v5.8 there is a way to mix [buffered and unbuffered I/O functions]: I/O layers. You can’t turn on buffering for the unbuffered functions, but you can turn off buffering for the unbuffered ones.” Great, really useful! I can turn off buffering on an unbuffered function and end up with: an unbuffered function! The presence of typos like this is really obnoxious, because when I find a confusing passage I have to wonder whether they are making a mistake or I’m just not understanding.

I’m thinking of writing a book called So Many Bunnies at the Scotch Whisky Distillery.  I’ve got the beginning worked out:

1 was named Ashton.  He slept in the mash tun.

2 was named Beryl.  She slept in a barrel.

3 was named Carol.  She slept in a barrel.

4 was named Darryl.  He slept in a barrel.

5 was named Errol.  He slept in a barrel.

There are a lot of barrels, you see.

OK, that’s a point-oh-one percenter.  The intersection of the set of scotch aficionados and the set of parents of infants.

We could go on. 16 could be Pete, who slept in the peat. 19 could be Sherry, whose butt slept in the sherry butt. And we could rewrite 4 to be “Daniel, who slept in the hogshead.”

OK, that’s a 1 x 10^-7 percenter.  I’ll stop now.

During a group visit to Mt. Rushmore … we encountered … a white-robed, shaven-headed Hari Krishna with his literature. This was not in patriotic keeping of the site and everyone of our 26-persons was offended. … I am not critical of other religions, but [Mt. Rushmore] is not a proper place for propaganda. (emphasis added)  — H. R. Fischer

I’ve come up with a new delicacy.  It consists of french fries, gravy, and Beluga caviar.

I’m calling it Vladimir Poutine.

“A tiny bottle of Scope is a lousy substitute for a real vagina, especially when you are traveling.” (safe for work)

The Big Bird Theory of Education: “It’s easier to remember a new idea if it’s attached to an eight-foot yellow bird.”

It’s interesting how people will get fixated on a specific and forget the general. In the evenings, I’ll go in to check to see if the baby’s still breathing, a reflex the parents out there will probably understand. I’ll usually leave the light off so that I won’t disturb him. Just now I went in to check, feeling for him in the relative dark, but he was tossing and turning. I thought, geez, I wish he’d stop moving so that I could tell if he was still breathing or not.

New pictures of him are available.

The foreboding message on the answering machine was, “I’m with the Secret Service. Please call me at….” Since I created the problem, not my lovely wife, I agreed to call them back. They told me the bill was good, but they wanted to know where she got it. I fessed up and told her she got it from me, and that the reason it showed up as bad was because I had starched it. She asked me why I did that. I told her it was all wrinkly and I wanted it to be nice and crisp.

(Note added 14 June 2004: *sigh*  It’s not me, folks, that’s why it’s in a blockquote and why there’s a link to someone else’s site.  Note the hyperlink on the text “wanted it to be nice and crisp” — that will take you to the full story.)

On another topic, thanks for the people who have let me know that the menu of links is not working. For some reason SSI are not working on the new system; I haven’t figured it out yet. Any experts among my readers want to review my Apache 2.0 httpd.conf?

(Fixed.  Gee, it helps if I’m editing the right httpd.conf, doesn’t it?)

Could the Bush Administration stand up against the combined forces of Howard Dean, John Edwards, John Kerry, Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, Christopher Reeve, Howard Stern, Michael Moore, Rosie O’Donell, Jessica Lynch, Fat Ass He-Man, and Jesus Christ?  I didn’t think so.

The FCC Song (MP3), by Eric Idle:

Here’s a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge

quack

Fuck you very much the FCC

Fuck you very much for fining me

Five thousand bucks a fuck so I’m really out of luck

Thats more than Heidi Fliess was charging me.

So fuck you very much the FCC

For proving that free speech just isn’t free

Clear Channel’s a dear channel

So Howard Stern must go

Attorney General Ashcroft doesn’t like strong words and so

He’s charging twice as much as all the drugs for Rush Limbo

so Fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much dear Mr. Bush

For heroically sitting on your tush

For Halliburton, Enron, all the companies who fail

Lets send them a clear signal and stick Martha straight in jail

She’s an uppity rich bitch, but at least she isn’t male

So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you dickhead Mr. Cheney too.

Fuck you and fuck everything you do.

Your pace maker must be fake

You haven’t got a heart

As far as I’m concerned your just a pasty faced old fart

And as for Condolezza she an intellectual tart

So fuck you all so very much

So fuck you very much the EPA

For giving all Alaska’s oil away

It really is a bummer

When I can’t fill my Hummer

The ozone’s a no go zone now that Arnold’s here to say,

“The nuclear winter games are going to take place in LA”

So fuck you all so very much

So what the planet fails

Lets save the great white males

And fuck you all so very much

quack

Great print quality on any paper, even sandpaper (up to 300 grit) … Quick printing at up to 9 pages per millisecond in black and 7 pages per hour in color

At least Fahrenheit 911 has a reference to a very interesting movie…hope Moore did something as good as the original Fahrenheit 451 which I recommend, excellent movie. — elpapacito

Let’s just remember that Fahrenheit 451 was a book before a movie, k? — agregoli

And before that, it was a temperature. — soyjoy

Anton Chekov is a nicer guy than I would have expected. I have a couple of complaints with his supporting large chain bookstores rather than the independent booksellers that drove his early success, but at least he was nice enough to give a reading. A shame that B&N kicked him out. I’m not the only one upset: a woman in the audience was “shocked” and “outraged” that they would evict an author who was trying to give a reading. But it’s OK, after being thrown out he was considerate enough to hold a book signing in Union Square.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Read the page for details about the astute 11-year-old, as well as the student who apologizes to Chekov for missing his Central Park play last summer.

As someone with a fair amount of experience with tastings, I can assure you that the “New Cheerios” survey is completely plausible.

So many other bits to remark on.  Do you want to trade shoes?”  The time warp (“For the remaining five loops, I looked at my watch and said “5:25″ at the exact same moment; it was now part of our sequence.”) Could you keep a straight face during these stunts? I don’t think I could, and I have improv experience. And why do I find this wonderful and Tom Greene’s antics deplorable? (I think it’s because so many of Greene’s bits have a strong thread of inherent cruelty to them, and these don’t.)

I have a feeling that it should really bother me that I think this stunt would have been more impressive if the cupcakes were poisoned. I mean, OK, not really, but in a fictional story, say. No? OK, well, forget I said anything.

“He has attempted to purchase seven million hydrogen-powered doctors, and the Western wall of the Pentagon … And tonight I have a message for the people of Iraq: ‘Go home and die.’“

I love electric power.  I don’t sing its praises frequently enough.

Jenn is out of town. As I pulled up at the house at one o’clock in the morning, home from work, the porch light and entry light were both dark. I specifically remembered having turned the lights on as I left this morning.

“Oh, man, please let me just be dumb enough to have specifically turned the lights on then switched them off as I left.”  I didn’t want a power outage.  I didn’t want to have to fiddle with the breaker box in the dark. I didn’t want robbers to have cut the house power to rob the place in the dark.

Fortunately, I was just stupid.  The lights were off.

As a side note, I thought the dumbest thing as I came in, fearing the power to be off. “Damn,” I thought, “I’ll have to watch TV in the dark. If the power’s off, I’ll be sure to go to the computer and write a web post about how bummed I am.”

MISYS GIVES PECKER HEAD JOB

You know, I went to school with guys like this.  Everyone wanted to kill them, not just the military.

[Vinnie] Jones, who achieved widespread fame in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels … reckons that he could have an entire aeroplane’s cabin crew bumped off for a mere £3000.  This was his claim, somewhere between Tokyo and Heathrow, sometime last May, when a member of said cabin crew attempted to remonstrate with him for slapping a fellow passenger in the face, 10 times.  And this was not a shonky, under-manned CheapyJet Air Van.  This was a Virgin Atlantic A340-600, the longest commercial aeroplane in the world, with an on-board staff of 19. That’s less than £158 each.  Cheap for a stewardess, and a downright bargain for the pilot.

                    – Hugo Rifkind, “Keeping up with the Joneses”, The Herald, 15 December 2003.

Scottish salmon, having a particularly hard time climbing a certain waterfall in Perthshire, were given a helping hand by conservationists: they were driven upstream in a van.

Used to spam messages claiming “A special offer just for you,” I was vaguely amused by the subject of a message trapped by my filter, namely “We are sending this hot recommendation to millions“.  At last they had the decency to come right out and admit it.

According to Oregon Peaceworks, the following signs were seen at various war protests:

1. Don’t blame me, I voted with the majority
2. Don’t do it, George, Dad will still love you
3. The last time we listened to a Bush, we wandered in the desert for 40 years

I found these on my own, screwing around, but it seems other people have found them too:
tinyurl.com/dick takes you to the White House homepage of Dick Cheney, and tinyurl.com/cunt takes you to the page of his wife.  (Yes, it’s somewhat embarrassing that I found these.)

My Google search, run after I had found these sure-to-be Easter eggs, found Evan Hunt’s blog, where he points out these as well as three more that are probably just accidents: tinyurl.com/lazy takes you to an Amazon page for the book How To Make Money In Stocks, tinyurl.com/dork takes you to a job posting for a Quality Assurance Engineer, and tinyurl.com/head takes you to a picture of bright red hair.  And while nowhere good as most of these, tinyurl.com/acts takes you to a news story entitled “U.S. moves for single Iraq resolution”.

Can you find any more?  Before you try it, ‘fuck’ is empty.

All three Sic! entries from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words column this week are priceless.  The first had me cracking up when it arrived in my inbox at work:

From Jonathan Spencer: “Your piece on Murphy’s Law reminded this
transplanted Brit living in New York of being temporarily taken
aback by the sign on a local highway after the median had been
returfed. KEEP OFF SOD, it said”.

This note in the Daily Telegraph’s television guide last Wednesday
was presumably the result of a unconscious mental association and
not an ill-judged attempt at a joke: “With the Pope’s health fast
failing, critics argue that this is not the time for the BBC to
pontificate”.

Dermod Quirke mentioned a letter from Professor Yiannis Gabriel,
which appeared in the Guardian on 24 September (see the Web page
http://www.guardian.co.uk/letters/story/0,3604,1048372,00.html):
“Why should childless parents pay taxes to fund schools?”