A swishy, sexually-ambiguous priest is appointed the new bishop of the See of Tartuga in the thrilling epic tale of ecclesiastical adventure on the high seas. Don’t miss
Prelates of the Caribbean
Opening this fall in theatres everywhere…
Month: April 2004
This meme was vectored from the adorable ladysprite
On the theory that we could all use a hearty dose of positive energy and general warm fuzziness while we wait, none too patiently, for spring and better times; that *no* one I know is getting told often enough what a good job they’re doing just getting through this crazy, lovely world. Take a second, and mention something you like about me (if such a thing exists) in the comments. Then repost this to your own journal, and have some goodness for yourself.
From the April 9 issue of The Tech,. MIT’s online newspaper:
Jail Bill Watterson
by Amal DoraiI really liked “Calvin and Hobbes.” In fact, I’m pretty sure most of you did, too. It was like “The Simpsons”; not just funny, but warm and insightful, taking us back to the carefree days of childhood. Yet Bill Watterson cruelly stopped drawing “Calvin and Hobbes” in 1995, only ten years after it began, and well before it started to get old. It was still funny, still great, and he just stopped. If I were the president of the United States, I’d throw him in prison and force him to draw more strips.
Read the entire column.
Grab the nearest book. Find the 5th sentence on page 23. Append it to the paragraph below. Append your name to the list below of people who have contributed to the paragraph. Post the result to your LJ.
They also talk of our being guilty of injustice, and their being the victims of an unjustifiable war. Brandy, and Tom got increasingly close-mouthed and sour. Although a certain sense of tripartite society survived down to Christian times, the three classes described in the Eddic poem “Rigdthula” bear little resemblance to Dumezil’s three. It is often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong,it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practice. At its nearest point the wall was little more than one league from the City, and that was south-eastward. When he saw Jack Hare jump towards the fire, and the Practical Man brandishing the toasting-fork, Sir Isaac grabbed the strings of gravitational force that bound Jack to his destiny and PULLED— That’s a seventy-four gun privateer, besides. To honour a group of British nobles, treacherously slain at a conference by Hengist’s guards, Aurelius decides to erect a great monument near Amesbury. That being so, he did not chortle when he went upstairs. Let stand. This ensures that when the garbage collector runs, it has complete access to the memory in the heap and can perform its tasks safely without the threat of being preempted by another thread. And then you may begin to laugh. The data are stored in Column 1 and renamed “Age.” Pull your hand back. I don’t remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn’t supposed to–perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. You don’t remember how awful it is being normal.
1) Ranger Rick – 2) Rialian – 3) Elenbarathi – 4) Starsandfishes – 5) Echthros – 6) Doltaghey – 7) Ebonhost – 8) Tibicina 9) Browngirl 10) ceo 11) roozle 12) quietann 13) Dale (achinhibitor) 14) tigerbright 15) autographedcat
Just in time for the Holidays, John Scalzi reprints his classic interview with the Easter Bunny.
I don’t usually post about work, but this was too good not to share…
Toward the end of today, I got a message from one of my team members, asking about one of the old web servers, which had been slated for decommission..
Him: Is uuweb1 still there
Me: Uh, well, we turned it off, but it still exists
Him: Can we access it?
Me (suspicious): Why?
Well, it turns out that one of the customers who was hosted on that machine had not been properly transitioned over to the new web servers. This is an oversight, and entirely our fault, so I can understand the customer’s demand that we produce his content.
Luckily, we hadn’t yet recycled the hardware, and I drug it out of storage and set it up on my bench with the idea of temporarily putting it up on a test IP long enough to discover if the customers content was still there.
And it occurred to me…
This machine was turned off. It was off the network.
What kind of web customer doesn’t NOTICE that their website is down for two months????
Incredible.
(We were able to recover the customers data for them, so alls well that ends well, but I commented to my boss that if we didn’t have their stuff, it would serve ’em right. Sheesh!)
I have concluded that Jenna is insane.
I reported earlier about Jenna’s adventures with the fireplace. After finally giving her a bath and a couple of weeks of self-cleaning and shedding, she was starting to look almost normal again.
So, of course, I came home today to find that she had gotten into the fireplace again and was as grey as before, if not more. Of course, this time I had the necessary stuff on hand, so I got undressed and, with a helping hand from telynor‘s son, G., we gave the poor dear another bath.
She’s hiding under the bed and refusing to talk to me now. I don’t know when she’ll ever be white again. And this weekend, I have to go and spend some time figuring out how to close off the fireplace.
Meanwhile, the cat is insane.
Now this looks like a fun meme for Wednesday (vectored from filkerdave and katyhh:
Pick one person on my friends list, and tell me something good about them that you don’t think I know.
Figuring that someone on my friends list might either know this sort of information or have access to someone who does, I thought I’d pass along this query from my friend Jeff. If anyone can help him, please contact him at the address below. Thanks!
My name is Jeff Williams, and I am an English instructor at Wayne Community College in North Carolina. One of the classes I teach involves business writing, and I always try to provide both realistic and interesting writing situations for my students. This fall, I am introducing a new project. The students are going to design a new mall. However, there are problems that I need to address, most importantly my lack of knowledge in this area, and I am hoping some of you might be able to help. In order to build this project, I need general information about a number of subjects:
- Average construction costs for regional and super-regional malls. I do not need specific costs for specific malls.
- Average utility costs for regional and super-regional malls.
- Average operational costs (security, maintenance, upkeep, and other expenses).
- Rent ranges for stores, kiosks, carts, and outparcels.
- Criteria businesses, particularly national chains, use for determining whether or not to locate in a particular mall.
- Hidden items found in a typical mall (office space, security, delivery areas, and physical plants).
I’m also looking for stories about unique items found in malls around the country as well as any public access documents about operating expenses, bond issues for mall construction, etc. Any information any of you could provide would be most appreciated.
I can be reached at jeffwill@waynecc.edu. Thank you once again for any help you can offer!
Almost entirely fiction this week, although I have been dipping in and out of Harlan Ellison’s Watching, a collection of film essays. More on that when I actually finish it.
- Newton’s Cannon by J. Gregory Keyes
This is a book I’ve been trying to read for quite some time, but odd circumstances always seemed to keep me from it. I’m glad I finally got a chance to make it through. Keyes has imagined a rather bizzare alternate history, where Isaac Newton has discovered the secret of alchemy, Louis XIV has achieved immortality through a strange Persian elixir, and young Ben Franklin stumbles upon an international plot of intrigue that threatens to destroy England. There are odd historical and literary figures dropped here and there throughout the novel, and an ending that I absolutely did not expect. There are three more books in the series, and the first installment makes no pretense to standing alone, so I suppose I’ll have to wait until I read the next three to truly evaluate the story. It’s a page turner though, and I enjoyed Keyes’s imaginings a great deal. - Coraline by Neil Gaiman
One of the problems with having fallen out of the habit of reading on a regular basis is that books I would have normally read the moment I bought them lay untouched for months. Such was the case with Neil Gaiman’s delightfully spooky young adult novel Coraline.Coraline is a bright, bored young girl with a broad imagination and loving if inattentive parents and an assortment of weird neighbors. But something mysterious is lurking on the other side of the big door in the living room that opens on a blank wall…or does it? She soon discovers a mirror world on the other side of the door, populated by beings claiming to be her Other Mother and Other Father, and it will take her ingenuity and perseverance to set her life back the way it was.
This is just as wonderful quirky as Gaiman’s best work always did, and my enjoyment of the book was doubled by the fact that, with her peculiar combination of contrary whimsy and earnest practicality, I couldn’t help but picture our heroine as a young nrivkis. 🙂 Highly recommended. Read it to your kids.
- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Another book I had been neglecting, Paladin of Souls is the sequel to Bujold’s fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion. I love the setting and the characters of this world, and I grew to quickly like Ista, the reluctant recipient of the gods’ favours. Bujold’s talent for breathing life into her three dimensional characters is in great evidence here, the dialog is crisp and the plot is a page turner. Of course, the centerpiece of the book, as it was in the previous, is the odd, intricate cosmology of Chalion’s gods. Paladin of Souls is, ultimately, that rarest of all novels: a sequel that is at least the equal of it’s original. I am looking forward to Bujold’s continued efforts on this series.