Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Get it while it’s up: Voltaire’s The Sexy Data Tango is available from Fugly. I doubt it’s a legal copy. You can buy the real thing from Projeck: darkwave.

According to Wikipedia, today is Festivus; I prefer a February celebration myself. That will give me plenty of time to shop for the aluminum pole…

Latte link of the day: Latte Art via GeekPress

Not sure what to buy your favorite fan in this potlatch season? The Noble Collection has LotR and Harry Potter chachkas. Who could resist their own One Ring? (Personally, I think the engraved tengwar are too thick.)

Gmail RSS link of the day: Ask Yahoo answers the eternal question, What is the origin of the term “hands down”?

It’s that time of year again! Suffer with Seema as she wonders about another year of holiday shoes. Or celebrate the solstice with the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s holiday album, A Very Scary Solstice. They have three free Cthulhu Carols to download.

I was downloading some of Tom Smith’s free filks—I especially like “Callisto”—when I stumbled across his (text-only) Iron Chef parody, Iron Chef Human:

OTA: For the past few minutes, Dr. Lecter has been simmering a broth with parsley, sage, and rosemary, probably for a marinade or infusion of some sort and possibly to set up a really bad Simon & Garfunkel pun, while his personal assistant has been making steamed meatballs.

American Scientific has a nice history of sudoku which I found through the LJ sudoku community. The math is a little fishy, but it’s still worth the read.

And for my fellow nonomino addicts: check out the stairstep sudokus in the sudoku place archives.

Fandemonium Books is planning a series of Stargate: Atlantis novels which will, unlike their Stargate novels, be available in the US. Read more about it their site.

I’m thinking of expanding my Sudoku addiction to include nonomino sudoku, which has random shapes for the sub-grids instead of squares. There are zillions of free nonomino puzzles in PDF format at Hans Boldt’s web site.

I didn’t even have to cheat, though it did come down to a tiebreaker with BSG and the Matrix folks.

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? v1.0
created with QuizFarm.com

Another year, another NaNo, another graphic to prove my insanity:

The novel went pretty well, partly because I ignored everything else for most of the month. But looking over it now, I think I see a short story in there waiting to be freed from the mounds of manure with which I padded my word count nightly. I’ll save the plot and one subplot for a novella, and try to get the novel thing right next November…again.