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Entries from October 2008

Seeing Things

October 31st, 2008 · 4 Comments

From whiskey river:
Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.
(Mark Twain, The [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · Movies · Poetry · Ruminations · Television · The Missus

Democracy 101: Great Apolitical PSA

October 30th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.

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Tags: Advertising/Packaging · Celebrities · In the News · Movies · Politics

Oblig Region-of-Birth-Loyalty Post

October 30th, 2008 · 2 Comments

I don’t pay much — well, all right, any — attention to baseball. In practice, this means for example that in the photograph at the left, if you masked the team names and logos, for all I knew I’d be looking at… gee, what are those other teams with red in their uniforms? Cardinals? (I [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · Family · In the Blood · In the News

The Flames. The Smoke. The Highway. The Terror.

October 29th, 2008 · 20 Comments

[Today's post is my contribution to travel writer Angela Nickerson's Blogapalooza blog party. The theme of Angela's Halloween Blogapalooza is "What a Strange Trip It's Been," for which her instructions are:
...put a photo of a pumpkin at the top of your post and tell us the story of your strangest or scariest trip ever.
Be sure [...]

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Tags: In the News · Looking Backward · The Missus

Placeholder Post: Defeating the Aliens

October 28th, 2008 · 2 Comments

[Working today on tomorrow's post -- my contribution to tomorrow's Halloween Blogapalooza blog party, hosted by travel writer Angela Nickerson.
In the meantime, I thought you might find this useful. For, y'know, when They land and we have to, like, fight our way out of impending intergalactic apocalypse and stuff. Dude, these people know.]

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Tags: Cartoons · Celebrities · Movies · The Online World

Has John Cusack Ever Made a Bad Movie?

October 27th, 2008 · 3 Comments

Kidding. Sort of.
I mean, look, the guy’s made almost 60 movies, in a career spanning more than 25 years (per his Wikipedia filmography, at least). It’s pretty much impossible to make that many films and have nary a stinker in the bunch.
Granted, I haven’t seen all or even most of those five dozen films. (Which [...]

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Tags: Celebrities · Movies · Politics

The Sunday-Morning Debate: Sweet or Savory?

October 26th, 2008 · 9 Comments

When I was a kid, the family habit was to stop on the way home from church at the L&M Bakery. (I’m so happy to see they’re* still in business and still getting rave reviews.) For the six of us, a reasonable guess might be that we’d get, say, a dozen doughnuts and be happy, [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · Family · In the Blood · Looking Backward

Software I’d Like to See: Fotōpic

October 25th, 2008 · 2 Comments

It makes no difference that I’ve been a computer programmer for nearly 30 years now. There are computer programmers and there are computer programmers. If your assignments (actual or potential) don’t require you to use a given technology, chances are you’ll never learn that technology. Meanwhile, the world passes you by in the form of [...]

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Tags: GPS · Merry-Go-Round · Programming, Web Design, Databases · Science & Medicine · Writing

Salvaging the Honey at Heaven’s Edge

October 24th, 2008 · 10 Comments

You know how in the Warner Brothers “Road Runner” cartoons, the coyote is forever running (or riding a rocket, or pogo-sticking, or being launched by an ACME Giant Slingshot) off a cliff? and at some moment he realizes that he’s done so, and as soon as he realizes it he loses all forward motion, waves [...]

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Tags: Music · Poetry · Ruminations · The Online World

As Good as Jesus in a Slice of Toast

October 23rd, 2008 · 7 Comments

From the New York Daily News:
Elephant-shaped Ganesh growth cured my ills, Queens man says
To most people, the purple flower that sprouted between two concrete slabs in a Queens backyard would be just a hardy vestige of summer.
Sam Lal sees something more.
The Jamaica [neighborhood in Queens] man is convinced the mysterious blossom is an incarnation of [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · In the News · Ruminations