Here is a silly personal mission of mine: to make June 30th an internet holiday, just like "Talk Like A Pirate Day" or "Blog Like It's The End Of The World Day." This mission, I suspect, is doomed to failure--I'm one tiny blogger with a handful of loyal readers and no real sway--but I'll make my quixotic stand and all that. Happy Tunguska Day. (Again.)
Over at BBC News, a 13-year-old British teen, Scott Campbell, reviews a stunning piece of portable music technology: the Sony Walkman, which he carried around for a week for the article.There's no doubt that Mark Sanford, like Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, John Edwards and a host of his political comrades before him, betrayed his vows to his wife and his duties to his people. What he did was stupid and selfish and hypocritical and weird and humiliating to his wife.
But somewhere in all of the schadenfreude, there's still a story of a man who fell into "impossible love" with another married person, a devout Christian who could awkwardly rhapsodize about his lover's "magnificently gentle kisses... the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of night’s light."
I have to hand it to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford: many Republican politicians talk about reducing the size of government, but Mr. Sanford may be the first one to reduce the size of a state's government by eliminating the position of governor for several days. Why, the man is such a believer in small government, he didn't even want the elected Governor of the state of South Carolina to use up any of the Palmetto State's precious air!
I have a peeve. That's a lie. I have many peeves.In the last few years, scores of applications that your operating system used to manage have migrated to the browser: word processors, IM clients, e-mail, games, music players, personal finance tools, and on and on. Which leads inevitably to the question: If the primary function of computers these days is to run a browser and connect to the Internet, do we really need Windows and its 50 million lines of code?
It's worth remembering, too, that Windows is more than just an interface for running programs. It also manages your hardware—the hard drive and video card as well as peripherals like webcams and external memory devices. Even if Firefox or Chrome takes over application management someday soon, we'll still need something to handle all of that under-the-hood stuff. One intriguing option is a piece of software called HyperSpace that debuted in late 2007. HyperSpace is essentially a bare-bones OS that can fire up some of your computer's resources right when it boots, long before Windows has burped and sputtered awake from its coma. (The company that makes HyperSpace, Phoenix, is a major supplier of BIOS software, the code that runs immediately when you turn on your machine and takes attendance for all your hardware.) The current version of the product, which works on certain laptops—specifications here—loads in a few seconds and can get online, run Firefox, and boot a handful of other programs. These days, you can get a lot done with just that tiny amount of software. (If you're curious to try HyperSpace, you can demo it for free for 21 days. After that, running the software requires an annual fee.)
Scifiwire reports that producer Tony Scott (brother of Ridley Scott who directed the original) confirmed that an Alien prequel will be going ahead with Carl Rinsch directing. He was speaking at a promotional event for The Taking of Pelham 123.
"Carl Rinsch is going to do the prequel to Alien," he said. "He's one of our directors at our company."
Scott said he hoped to start filming the Alien prequel by the end of the year for a possible 2011 release.
See, here's an example of the kind of thing I dislike about Microsoft, from their new IE8 as campaign:Myth #3: Firefox is a richer, more adaptable browser than Internet Explorer.
The Real Deal: Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, built in from the minute you open it.
Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you're able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.
Did you know that there are more than 1,700 Internet Explorer 8 add-ons available at the Add-ons Gallery, with more being added every day? Partners all over the world are building Accelerators, Web slices, and Visual Search plug-ins for your browser, including Facebook, Amazon, eBay, and much more.
Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.
Now that the brilliant Ursula Vernon has made Digger freely available online, I've been catching up (previously she had the site hosted on a webcomics site that was part-free/part-subscription, and I never quite had it in the budget to subscribe for one comic, however awesome). I've possibly recommended Digger before: the epic and comic tale of a very secular wombat who finds herself emerging from a hole in a temple of Ganesh, pursued by the servants of a buried-and-chained living dead god, Digger is far better read than described; it truly is a rich, smart, funny beautiful piece of work, one that's a ready example of how comics in general and webcomics in particular are an art and not just some kind of funnybook for people who can't handle novels (most of which lack the sophistication and depth of something like Digger, I might add).One demon is feared even by Satan. In Miami shelters, children know her by two names: Bloody Mary and La Llorona (the Crying Woman). She weeps blood or black tears from ghoulish empty sockets and feeds on children's terror. When a child is killed accidentally in gang crossfire or is murdered, she croons with joy. "If you wake at night and see her," a ten-year-old says softly, "her clothes be blowing back, even in a room where there is no wind. And you know she's marked you for killing."
The homeless children's chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. "The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name," says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. "If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: 'Hold on.'"
It occurred to me as I was washing it: "Wait a sec... it's been exactly one month since I washed this arm myself." No lie, no exaggeration: between Saturday morning, May 16th of the year 2009, anno Domini or Common Era (take your pick, you reactionary/revolutionary/"what is he talking about?", you) and June 16th of the same possibly misbegotten year, the only time my right arm had been cleaned (presumably) was on the same day it was operated on and a screw set into a crescent-shaped bone in my wrist to keep it from flopping around in exactly the sort of unfortunate and tissue-destroying way that æons of evolution have programmed most-or-all vertebrate wrist bones not to.
I have to confess a certain surprised giddiness, the kind of feeling you have when you're delighted to be wrong.But for those who claim that the post-American world is a fait accompli, there is one big problem: The English language is winning hearts and minds faster than politics ever can. With the June 10 addition of "noob" (a pejorative description of a newcomer to a particular task or group) to its lexicon, English will boast one million words - twice as many as Cantonese, four times as many as Spanish, and 10 times as many as French. Half the world's people are projected to be speaking English by 2015. And so long as English is on track to become the world's unofficial language, the United States will likely be center stage.
On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased "Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries" because she believed "crunchberries" were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said "berries" were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Genocide is a "systematic destruction of a people group."
It was one of the dumbest questions I'd ever been asked. I'm not faulting the woman who asked it--she was working from a script. And I understood why the question was being asked. They needed to know, though how the quantification would have helped, I don't know; it's not like they were setting a target number for a skill check.
It's probably safe to say that most Star Wars fans hate Ewoks. I don't think it's the cuteness that's so damn fatal, but the way the little bastards stripped the balls off the Empire: while it was always an old joke that Imperial Stormtroopers couldn't hit squat at close range, they were still an intimidating presence, and in The Empire Strikes Back they tore up a Rebel base in less than fifteen minutes. Maybe they couldn't hit a hero swinging across an absurdly-placed chasm inside a space station at fifteen feet, but they were a menace. Until Return Of The Jedi, when suddenly they're wiped out by teddy bears.Ewoks are not the naïve companionable canopy dwellers initially reported by Alliance military sources, but rather a singularly violent, cunning species, driven by perpetual internecine combat and territory acquisition.
Our first exposure to unvarnished Ewok behavior occurred at the victory celebration following the Battle of Endor. We were surprised to discover that the gathering was not just simply a boisterous feast-activity fostering communal bonds and egalitarian resource distribution, but also a ritualistic devouring of 34 captured Imperial storm troopers, who were spit-roasted alive in their armor for seli beli ("to seal in the flavor") and tanga tiru ("divine tang of mortal fear"), a delicacy to the Ewok palate.
C3QP also relayed that the Ewok celebratory phraseology has been grossly misrepresented in Alliance literature: The famous victory chant yub nub/yub nub eee chop yub nub translates not as "freedom/we have freedom" but rather as "eat them/we shall eat them"; elu mali ooloo/emi watu gravo is not "honor the fallen/toast their memory" but "defile their remains/pass water upon their graves"; and the oft-heard salutation yub jub actually translates to "devour the weak."
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