Link of the day: Kill Enterprise: the four-year reign of error is over. Join their campaign to thank UPN for ending the nightmare.
Here’s a fine collection of quizzes like True art or a fake?, Famous or unknown?, and Great prose or crap?
A baby had its parasitic twin amputated in Cairo Sunday. The baby’s doing fine; no one seems to care about the twin, who apparently could smile and blink. How much of a brain was in that second head, anyway, and did it love its mother, too?
Apology of the Day: The management apologizes for having a life.
While I was off having a life, the spam trackbacks kept coming in. Most of them get moderated, but I’m tired of the zillion trackback spam moderation emails which have replaced my zillion comment spam moderation emails. So I tried some advice from the wordpress wiki - the SQL to close trackbacks on all old posts:
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status="closed";
Trackbacks are open on this post and the last. I so rarely get trackbacked that I don’t expect this change to affect anyone.
Apology of the Day: The management apologizes for the lack of blog yesterday. WordPress was 404 for unknown reasons.
I’m thinking that the folks from the Sellafield plant should check Boston for their missing plutonium. Maybe it’s powering our Amazing Blizzard Snow that won’t go away no matter how warm it gets. I think the remaining snow has reached the density of plutonium.
It’s rare that a new newsreader comes out, since newsgroups are so 1995. But there’s a beta out of OSXnews so I’m trying it out. It’s looking very beta so far. I think I’ll stick with MT-NewsReader.
For those of you with stranger tastes (Veronica), there’s Shivering Kittens, a cross between Tetris and Hello, Kitty.
You’re getting a cheap mac link tonight: iMac Relaxation Station. It’s just a bit of over-compensation for the lack of a cool swingy arm on the new iMacs.
I’m behind on my bloglist, so I must wish Rocky a happy but belated birthday, full of fun food but not this wacky shrimp pasta invented by a Manhattan chef. I’ll wait for the carb-free cake, thanks.
I usually disapprove of food-free foods, but these transglutaminase inventions sound interesting in their own right. The scary shrimp thing wasn’t necessary, but chicken pasta made out of Real Chickens™ would be pretty cool.
For reasons I like to pretend are writing-related, I’ve been looking at the International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s fun to compare the sounds of various languages. Who knew that Portuguese has almost as many vowels as English? That’s going up against some pretty stiff competition.
My favorite Portuguese letter is /R/, uvular r. I can’t trill an /r/ to save my life, but I can pronounce /R/. We all have our skills…
When your radioactive materials go missing, instead of twiddling your thumbs wondering where they are, you really ought to come look for them in the most likely spot: check Boston first.
Two BU students were struck and killed in Allston by a passing commuter rail train late Tuesday night while strolling on the tracks. Headlines to the effect of “Train kills 2 BU students” or any mention of “tragedy” are exaggerated. “Terminal Stupidity Strikes Again” would be more like it.
Let me remind all residents of Eastern Massachusetts one more time: the wooden ties with long steel rods laid across them are train tracks. Trains run on them. If you are on the tracks when the train comes, you get squished. Surly T employees will have to scrape you off the rails, and that only makes them surlier.
Please save my tax dollars and T fare money and keep off the tracks. This public service announcement has been brought to you by the letter T.