Category: Links

suggested reading at other sites

Reading Around on February 24th through February 25th

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A few interesting links collected February 24th through February 25th:

  • Obsidian Wings: In the only news worth hearing today ….. – It seems that Michael Cera has finally agreed to do an Arrested Development movie.The comment thread at the Onion’s AV Club is worth reading just to relive some of the classic lines from the show, like “I’m afraid I shot the wad on the dry run and now I’ve got a bit of a mess on my hands”; “She’s not that Mexican, mom, she’s *my* Mexican…and she’s Columbian or something”; and “I was the world’s first analyst/therapist [business card reads: ‘Analrapist’].”

  • The Godfather Wars | vanityfair.com – “In preparation for The Godfather, Lettieri took Brando to his relative’s house in New Jersey for a family dinner, “to get the flavor,” says Lettieri’s ex-wife, Jan. In addition, “Francis had sent a lot of tapes from the Kefauver Committee hearings, so Brando had been hearing how these real Mafia dons talked,” remembers Fred Roos. Soon Brando had the voice of Don Corleone. “Powerful people don’t need to shout,” he later explained.” … “What do you think this is, the army, where you shoot ’em a mile away? You gotta get up close, like this—and bada-bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” Bada-bing became a mantra for mobsters and aspiring mobsters. More recently, it served as the name of Tony Soprano’s strip club in The Sopranos. “‘Bada-bing? Bada-boom?’ I said that, didn’t I? Or did I just say ‘bada-bing’?” asks Caan. “It just came out of my mouth—I don’t know from where.”

Reading Around on February 21st

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Some additional reading February 21st from 09:24 to 11:36:

Reading Around on February 20th

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Some additional reading February 20th from 19:14 to 20:35:

  • So How Many Calories Are In That Beer Anyway? – A Good Beer Blog – * Guinness (4.1%) – 2000 ml equals a little under 840 calories. * Blue Moon (5.4%) – 2000 ml is around 1026 calories. * Anchor Porter (5.7%) – 2000ml equals 1180 calories. * Dragon Stout (6.8%) – 2000 ml equals 1240 calories. You can see where I am going with this. I feel like I am breaking some sort of guy rule. Some sort of unwritten law of the beer men. But we have to walk in this world in awareness. So you will not cringe when I note that one McDonalds Angus burger and medium fries is 950 calories or that the same number of calories in raw chopped red cabbage is found takes over 30 cups …which is like 3 bushels, right? You can handle this information. Because you are strong. Because you really prefer a six of Anchor Porter to 46 cups of raw chopped red cabbage.

  • Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA? – Last.FM might just be dead – I would stop using it

  • update: false! Good.

Reading Around on February 20th

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Some additional reading February 20th from 09:50 to 18:29:

  • Reviews: Companies Accuse Yelp Of Review Extortion, Yelp Says No Way – Some San Francisco companies have accused the review website Yelp of manipulating reviews, either in exchange for buying advertising or as punishment for refusing. Yelp flat out denies the charges. They say that the posting and removal of reviews are determined solely by an algorithm and that their sales staff has no access to the reviews. But in this detailed article published this week in the East Bay Express, several restaurants cite phone calls and emails that they say indicates otherwise.

  • 50 Greatest Guitar Albums – Guitar World – Highway 61 Revisited introduced Bloomfield…his next major recording, 1966’s East-West with the Butterfield Blues Band, … The tune “East-West,” a 13-minute exploratory fusion of blues and Indian modality that features Bloomfield’s and Bishop’s guitars, flipped the switch for long-form rock improvisation. His shimmering slide licks and shrieking, treble-toned lead on “Walking Shoes,” akin to Hubert Sumlin’s playing on Howlin’ Wolf classics like “Killing Floor,” are ghostly, needling, vicious and patently unforgettable. On the band’s showcase, “Work Song,” Bloomfield’s melodies climb through scales in a manner closer to free-jazz saxophonist John Coltrane than to B.B. King, balancing chromatic ascents and descents with radically slurred bends and off-the-beat accents. And Bloomfield’s linear single-note playing on “I Got a Mind to Give Up Living,” which acknowledges his debt to King with wrist-shaking vibrato, captures the soulful essence of simmering slow blues.
  • Media Matters – Austin American Stateman , unlike AP, others, notes Heartland Institute’s energy industry ties – Well, yesterday the Austin American Statesman came out with a story making reference to Heartland and what did they do?: He is “regarded with reverence,” said Dan Miller, a publisher at the Heartland Institute, which puts out a newsletter asserting no scientific consensus on global warming and gets money from energy corporations. […] Climate scientists, however, hold that carbon dioxide emissions have a significant effect on a changing climate. A 2007 climate change study by an international group of scientists found that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and said with “very high confidence” that the net impact of “human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.”Atmospheric and climate scientists at UT and Texas A&M University have said that temperatures will rise in Texas, coastal communities are at risk from rising sea levels in the Gulf, and weather conditions are likely to include more severe droughts and flooding.

Reading Around on February 19th

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A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:

  • CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)

    As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.

  • Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
  • TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
  • Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.

    This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.

  • An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

    I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."

    I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.

  • Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.

    Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.

  • Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
  • The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.

    In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

    "Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.

  • Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

    If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

  • Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
  • Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
  • George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

  • Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

    But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

Reading Around on February 17th

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Some additional reading February 17th from 01:12 to 15:32:

  • Galoscaves – The technology of building salt-iodine caves, patented in 108 countries, is based on the Black Sea salt, crystallized in natural conditions.

    The sea microclimate created inside the caves becomes an oasis of peace and relaxation for citizens of many countries.

    Since 2000, the Everet Company has been building Galos caves in Poland.

    This summer, the first salt-iodine cave in the U.S. was built according to very strict technological rules.

    Considering the low level of iodine found in the air in the middle-eastern part of the U.S., the cave was erected in the biggest city Chicago, IL. Thanks to the efforts of specialists from the Ukraine and Poland, two caves were built, in which healing attributes are being confirmed by testing.

  • Apple – Support – Apple Expert – Do you have questions or need technical support? Simply describe the issue and an Apple Expert will call you now. Or if you prefer to choose an exact time for the support phone call, schedule an appointment at your convenience. You’ll start at the front of the line—no waiting in the queue, no talking to a machine.

Reading Around on February 16th through February 17th

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A few interesting links collected February 16th through February 17th:

  • Kotori Magazine – The Master of Low Expectations: 666 Reasons Sentient Citizens are Still Celebrating the Long Overdue Departure of George W. Bush – 666 Reasons Sentient Citizens are Still Celebrating the Long Overdue Departure of George W. Bush

  • Talking Points Memo | Study Harder – In the late 1930s, of course, Great Britain didn’t have a Labour government with a principled Tory minority. It had conservative Tory government with a Labour minority. And Churchill was on the outs with both, although on some fronts he was beginning to make common cause with some Labourites on his key issue, which was foreign policy. When Churchill eventually came to power it was in a national coalition government for the purposes of fighting the war. And when he eventually went to the voters as head of the Tory party toward the end of the war they got crushed by Labour in a landslide.

    I say all this as a big Churchill fan. But, I mean, not only is Eric Cantor no Winston Churchill, I’m not even sure he’s read a book about Winston Churchill.

Reading Around on February 16th

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Some additional reading February 16th from 14:41 to 16:17:

  • U.S. Food Policy: Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition – found that fertilized plants contained larger absolute amounts of minerals than the unfertilized plants, but these amounts were sufficiently diluted by the increased dry matter that all mineral concentrations declined, except for phosphorus, which is the common fertilizer.

    Next, Davis looked at historical food composition data derived from three quantitative reports. While these studies are limited by their ability to be compared due to variation in methods, they found:

    apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results.

  • I’m Done With Facebook : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits – But the Facebook language clearly dictates that you are giving Facebook an irrevocable and perpetual right to distribute and make derivative copies of content you upload to Facebook for any purpose. ANY. Whether it be a book, a film, or whatever other options Facebook may have cooked up. … (If you’ve already granted Facebook the irrevocable right to give up your content and likeness, then how can you still have “all rights and permissions?” Perhaps an IP attorney can sort out this thorny language.) Since Facebook has demonstrated no reservations in sharing private data with developers, the company’s history suggests that this same recurring invasion of privacy will carry forth under the new Terms of Service. The only difference is that Facebook now intends to profit from the content you upload, and they can now use it in any way they want, because you’ve capitulated all your rights to it.

Reading Around on February 16th

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Some additional reading February 16th from 00:25 to 12:47:

  • WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT Tutorial – Test Page FireFox 3 Safari – FILES have embedded ICC profiles Photoshop ColorManagement – The above “Tagged WhackedRGB” example also will clearly show if your web browser is colormanaged or not — both Tagged and Untagged files are identical except the top image has an embedded ICC profile — the rollover is in essence stripping the profile. … FireFox 3 (Mac and Windows free download) Note: Color management in FireFox3 is off by default. TO ENABLE COLORMANAGEMENT: type about:config into the address bar. To turn it on, change the value of gfx.color_management.enabled to true and restart the Fire Fox browser. In addition to enabling color management in Firefox, you also should enter the name of the monitor profile – it’s next to the enable/disable parameter in the parameters list that you get to by entering about:config in the address field.

  • Chilly scenes of winter « STEVENHARTSITE – Movies don’t come any more hardboiled than Frozen River, even if virtually every scene of the film is is covered with snow and ice. Courtney Hunt’s refreshingly blunt and unsentimental storyline centers on Ray (Melissa Leo), a housewife abandoned by her husband and stranded with two young sons in a dead-end job at the Yankee Dollar. By chance she falls in with Lila (Misty Upham), a troubled young Mohawk woman who smuggles illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River via tribal lands overlapping Quebec and the New York state line.

Reading Around on February 15th

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Some additional reading February 15th from 09:57 to 21:10:

  • Having It Both Ways: Republicans Take Credit for ‘Pork’ – In Stimulus Bill They Opposed | Crooks and Liars – Rep. John Mica was gushing after the House of Representatives voted Friday to pass the big stimulus plan.

    “I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future,” the Florida Republican beamed in a press release.

    Yet Mica had just joined every other GOP House member in voting against the $787.2 billion economic recovery plan.

  • Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.” – Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

    Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

  • Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Michael Isikoff: Yoo Disbarment Proceedings Now Visible on the Horizon – Torture Report Could Be Trouble For Bush Lawyers: An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos “was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.” According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials—Jay Bybee and John Yoo—as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said.
  • Gutless Wonders: Specter Admits GOP’s Political Calculus On Stimulus Bill | Crooks and Liars – DCCC head Chris Van Hollen puts it into perspective (if only the media would actually frame it this way):

    “Americans will hold House Republicans accountable for just saying no to saving and creating three to four million jobs and the largest tax cut in American history.

    “House Republicans are fast becoming party of No-bama. Americans will hold Republicans accountable for being the party of no – no to President Obama’s economic recovery, no to children’s health care, and no to equal pay for women doing equal work.”

  • Talking Points Memo | The Big Disconnect – But there’s a very big problem with this strategy above and beyond the absurdity of the argument. “Congress” may be really unpopular. And the Democrats now control Congress. But politics is a zero sum game. At the end of the day, in almost every case, you’ve got to pick a Republican or a Democrat when you vote. And if you look at the numbers, congressional Democrats are pretty popular. And congressional Republicans are extremely unpopular. If you look at the number, the Dems are at about 50% or higher in most recent polls, while the GOP is down in the 30s.

    The city remains wired for the GOP. Not that it’s done them a great deal of good of late. But it remains a key part of understanding every part of what is happening today.

  • Google Jumps Into Organizing Smart Meter Energy Data « Earth2Tech – “Just as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt hinted over the past few months, Google is moving from managing the world’s information to managing your personal energy data. On Monday night Google tells us it is developing an online tool called “PowerMeter” that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. For now Google is testing the web-based software with Google employees, but the search engine giant is looking to partner with utilities and smart energy device makers and will eventually roll out the tool to consumers.”
  • Energy Information – “Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage. The graph below shows how someone could use this information to figure out how much energy is used by different household activites.”

    Oooh, I want one of these so-called smartmeters

  • MyDD :: The Beltway Games Don’t Really Matter – “Perhaps more than ever, there is a real divide between what the chattering class inside the Beltway is saying and what the people of this country are saying. We saw the beginnings of this during the campaign, when despite the fact that John McCain was deemed to be winning the news cycles — indeed, his campaign seemed to care more about winning “Hardball” than it did about reaching 270 electoral votes — Barack Obama nevertheless continued to lead in the polls, both nationwide and in the key states. Now we’re seeing it again, as the establishment media focuses on the less meaningful back and forth while at the same time overlooking the larger picture being grasped by the public — that is that President Obama is succeeding, in terms of both moving forward his policy agenda and bringing two-thirds of the country along with him in his effort.”

Reading Around on February 12th through February 13th

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A few interesting links collected February 12th through February 13th:

  • RIAA’s need for discovery was not so urgent : Internet law – Evan Brown – Internet Cases – Photo courtesy Flickr user swanksalot under this Creative Commons license.
  • Barking Mad by digby Chris Hayes has a… – "I've spent the past few months trying to sort out why the Blue Dogs get so much attention. The best I can tell, there are two main reasons. One has to do with the organizational mechanics of the Blue Dog caucus, which is more unified and cohesive than any other in the House. The other has to do with the ongoing Beltway love affair with "fiscal conservatism."

    Yep. And until we kill that phony meme, and put the Blue Dogs down, it will continue to make it nearly impossible to enact liberal legislation. The Republicans start unnecessary, hugely expensive wars and enact massive tax cuts, thus starving the beast, and then posture and preen like a bunch of fastidious schoolmarms when they are out of power."

Reading Around on February 10th

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Some additional reading February 10th from 19:19 to 21:03:

  • Cursebird: What the f#@! is everyone swearing about? – real time twitter feed of curse words. Not everything shows up, but still amusing

  • Ukulelia: Your Passport to Four Stringed Paradise – Performance artists Roger Geenawalt and David Barratt recorded and performed all 185 Beatles songs with 185 guest artists…on ukulele, natch.

    The performance was then cast as a benefit for Warren Buffett. (Head about to explode. Must. Keep. Blogging.) And they’ve now just delivered the cash to him in person. (Following is the BEST interview with Warren Buffett evar.)

Reading Around on February 8th through February 9th

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A few interesting links collected February 8th through February 9th:

  • The Kaplan Daguerreotype of Abraham Lincoln – The Forensic Evidence – Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis {6}. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight
  • Breaking Down the 2009 Trade Deadline | Dabullz – Photo by swanksalot on Flickr

Reading Around on January 31st

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Some additional reading January 31st from 08:49 to 22:46:

  • When I was seventeen, it was a very good year – Cristgau usually has tastes similar to mine, 1984 was no exception (though at the time, there was a lot more thrash metal on my playlist; I hadn’t discovered mind-and-ear expanding drugs yet). Plus I only turned 17 in 1986.

  • Harper’s Index: A retrospective of the Bush era (Harper’s Magazine) – Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU: 50

    Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069
    …
    Number of vehicles in the motorcade that transports Bush to his regular bike ride in Maryland: 6

    Estimated total miles he has ridden his bike as president: 5,400

    Portion of his presidency he has spent at or en route to vacation spots: 1/3

Reading Around on January 30th

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Some additional reading January 30th from 08:30 to 22:05:

  • Job Love | Fevered Mutterings – Scene: printing shop. Reception.
    ME: Hi, can I help?
    Them: Ah, thank you, yes. Can I print something here?
    No. Not the merest shred of a chance. We put “print” in the name of our business, and above the door you’ve just passed through, because we’re fickle and misleading. If there’s anywhere in this city that’s the least likely venue for any of your actual printing, this is it. Don’t be fooled by the shelves of paper receding into the distance like the iconic final scene of Raiders of The Lost Ark, or the enormous whirring behemoths with “Xerox” emblazoned on their sides that are making the very floor groan under your feet as they spit out reams of foolscap into waiting boxes labeled “Print Job”. No, it’s all a wretched lie. You took the wrongest of wrong turns, my friend.
    …
    image, swanksalot
  • the undead are in Austin — and are city employees! – "A couple pranksters changed the message on two portable road-traffic signs in Austin, TX recently. They were warning drivers, and rightfully so, of the impending zombie attack."