When my niece was a couple-three years old, she went through this engaging stretch of weeks, maybe months, during which she improvised neverending stories. For some reason these tended to involve creatures like the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and so on. (That may have been attributable to my sister’s macabre sensibilities.)
For instance, a story (told, and [...]

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I was working on the weekly whisky river-driven rumination — which I’ll deliver a little later — when I came across something I just can’t keep to myself. Actually three somethings. And *WARNING*WARNING*: these are spit-take funny.
Most recently, and the item which led me to the other two, we have this: an Open Letter to [...]

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Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that [...]

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The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I [...]

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Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn’t that be “the average blogger’s“? Does “81% shorter than” mean “81% as long as” or does it mean “19% as long as”? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his/her posts)? Surely it can’t mean [...]

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[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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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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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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There’s a particular category of human experience unlike any other. It’s got nothing to do with personality or intelligence; it crosses geographic and linguistic borders as if they didn’t exist (because they don’t, except in our minds and on the paper where we record the products of those faulty machines). Such an experience comes and [...]

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As of this moment, this (from Maggie, as it happens) is the one inarguably interesting (albeit inarguably geekoid) item I’ve found among the Twitterings I’ve seen so far: the first page posted on the infant World Wide Web.
The page was last updated Thursday, December 3, 1992, at 3:37:20 a.m. EST.
The Web was originally a project [...]

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