Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Seema alerted me about the reptile virgin birth coming this Christmas. Life will find a way…

Sudoku has come to the iPod! You can pick it up in the iTunes store, if you have a 5th-generation iPod. Those of us with nanos are out of luck.

It doesn’t do nonomino sudokus anyway, so I’m not bitter. Really.

Charlie has infected the MBTA to the point where they are now refusing to sell T tokens—as if the Charlified subway stations were the only places tokens came in handy. There are plenty of situations where it’s easier to use a token ($1.25 at the size of a pfennig, as discovered by an exchange student who dropped the latter into turnstiles until she got caught), for example when you need to get $1.25 into a Charlie card reader on an overpriced bus with no Charlie ticket-selling machines for miles around—one coin at a time, because the slot only takes one coin at a time.

That’s what I used tokens for until they stopped selling them to me at Government Center. Despite their party over the last token, they haven’t actually installed any vending machines there yet, and the Charlie-style turnstiles aren’t plugged in for some unknown reason. So you have to pay them in cash (or tokens, if you stocked up) if you don’t have a pass. Charile only knows what they do to commuters who actually have CharlieCards or non-pass CharlieTickets.

Probably they wave them through. Fare collection is at an all-time low across the system. Of course it’s always been nominal on the Green Line, but I’ve only paid in full for about half my pricey bus rides to the ‘burbs this month. Mostly the driver waved us past Charlie because he’s slower than a traffic jam on 93 (when he’s not completely toast from the Rainbow Screen of Death).

Then there’s this one driver who never sets the machine to the right price, so I’ve gotten a few 25 or 35 cent bonuses on those runs. He even tried to give me a 35 cent CharileTicket as a refund for my last token. I looked at the poor guy like he was trying to sell me a squid. What would I do with it? Save up four of them and run them through Charlie one at a time? The other commuters would lynch me.

I want an invisible fridge! See other transparent appliances at gizmodo (via GeekPress).

GeekPress warns me that my kitchen may soon be raided by the Sushi Police. I don’t think I’ll do too well; although I make no Korean food I do have a lot of Mediterranean fusion going on right next to the sushi roller…

It’s a microwave egg boiler, guaranteed to prevent explosions!

I could spend all of November just researching my NaNo novel, and now that I’ve discovered the Boston Public Library has online JSTOR access I may do just that. I think JSTOR will let you search and read the first page of articles even without access.

And yes, I really do need to know about A Sequence of Vowel Shifts in Phoenician and Other Languages in order to meet today’s NaNo quota. Really.

I followed a NaNo forum post to this article on inventing your own naming language, and discovered to my surprise that the origin of the name “Boston” is Botwulf’s Stone. Who knew?

See BoingBoing or go straight to the close-up for the year’s best Halloween costume.

No, not here at Jemima’s Chevron. After our migrant summer, ficml.org is back up for good. No, it’s NaNoWriMo difficulties that have the spinning Safari spinner (not the rainbow pizza pie, but the daisy spinner on the tab) spinning in vain.

The load of new novelists is always an early-November stress on the NaNo back end. Maybe Google will buy them out and devote some high-powered servers to the cause of updating one’s word count every 15 minutes…