the number "2"

the letter "u"

meaningless book recommendations

from personal experience, i'd recommend that you don't read books about quantum physics right after reading ecclesiastes...

finally, i get it

No, not a promotion. Today I realized that for many years, I have been misunderstanding one particular word.

When reading the sentence "Promotions are performance-based" in our company's policy statement, I assumed that the word "performance" referred to job performance, as in the proficiency in performing the duties and tasks of the position. But the recent promotion of an under-performing suck-up made me realize that in this context, the word "performance" must obviously refer to an acting performance, such as a charade, a patent-medicine sales pitch, or a dog-and-pony show.

it's a conspiracy

IMAO in Pajamas:

"Saying that man didn’t land on the moon, that Bush caused 9/11, or that Obama knows what he’s doing aren’t simply other opinions — they’re false and destructive ideas, and the people who cling to them border on mental illness."

read it all

the persistence of mysticism

via the Jungle Hut:

"If myth is a view of reality invented exclusively by the human mind, then by definition, atheism is a myth."

price gouging?

investigations probably aren't necessary, but if they happen, oil companies shouldn't be first...

forever lame

(i made this free to share. copy it as much as you like, just please don't claim it's your own work)

"april showers bring may flowers"

...but around here, may showers bring tornadic hook echoes on radar. One of those hooks passed directly over my house in north Fort Worth a little before 8pm this evening.

There was no tornado or hail at my house, just some weird start-stop-start rain and winds, and a great opportunity to video several layers of clouds going in every direction simultaneously.

Others were not so lucky; some nearby, some farther away.

"after a while he began to go mad"

lileks:

It’s said that the problems of humanity can be traced by the inability of man to sit alone in a room with his own thoughts; in my case it’s always been my inability to sit in an office for any protracted period of time, particularly if there’s a poster on the wall of a kitten depending from a branch: Hang In There ‘Til Friday. No! I will not! I reject your calendrical bromides intended to give the worker drones a cheap palliative and make them concentrate their life towards the moment when the obligation to produce ceases.

!!

unfortunate

at the restaurant yesterday, my cookie should have read "if incense is the only thing you smell here, suspect a cover-up."

let them eat arugula!

it's funny because it's true

Mike Rowe calls 'em

getting America back to work

(and maybe some of his words will not go ignored inside the beltway...)

transparency in government

...equals opacity as usual

offensive to moose limbs

(very very nsfw)

so i pulled down my post about the death of osama bin laden, thinking it might have been to offensive. iowahawk more than made up for that with these three posts.

unreasonable search and seizure

updates via makezine blog:

sony's database was hacked, again.

tomtom sells gps data to cops.

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michigan police can scan your phone without your consent.

iphones & ipads track you automatically.

two more reasons i will never own any of those products.

"king of the world!"

not in the dicaprio sense, but in the cagney sense...

compare and contrast

something i have in common with lileks sr.:

"he’d rather drive. Really: he’s never happier. A wheel, an engine, a road..."

something i do not have in common with lileks sr.

"There’s not a moment in his day he thinks “I could be on a computer, doing things.” Because he’s out, doing things."

dreamland 2

last night i dreamed i had to go back in time to rescue some artifacts from the early history of electronic music, including an analog sequencer and a laserdisc of wendy carlos' soundtrack to tron.

when i got to work today, bill and ted's excellent adventure was on tv, and an amazon order had been delivered to my desk, which included a dvd of both tron movies.

coincidence?
.
.
.
.
yes.

not stuck in an closet with vanna white*

I try not to dream-blog much, and I wouldn't have blogged last night's dream except for the way it... ended... you'll see...

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At the beginning of last night's dream, my sister called me to explain that she and her husband had needed to fly to England suddenly for some emergency. She was in too much of a hurry to explain; she just wanted me to take her minivan to go pick up my nieces and drive to meet them there.

So I drove my car over to their house, but their van wasn't there. It also wasn't at any of the other usual places like their office, church, or anywhere else I could think of. After looking around town a little more, I stopped at a convenience store to use a pay phone. Just as I got out, their minivan pulled up beside the building and honked. My nieces and another girl were in the back, and Zooey Deschanel* was driving.

She had already picked up my nieces from school, so I got in the front passenger's side. As she drove, she told me that my sister had called and explained the situation: an anonymous call had been made to my sister pleading with her to mediate a crisis at a Unitarian church in Hirtshireville (not a real town as far as i know), England.

We drove for a long long time - through Bryan TX, Houston TX, Memphis TN, and Washington DC. The kids got very restless on the way, and we had to stop often.

(Of course, all of you know as I do that it would be impossible to get from north Texas to central England only by driving. My subconscious placed the town in an imaginary England vaguely in the vicinity of Newfoundland.)

When we arrived in the cathedral parking lot, my sister was just leaving, so my nieces went with her while Zooey and I walked in to meet with the assistant bishop. In a small office in the back, he explained to us that the previous bishop had retired, and one particular bishop wanted to take over the cathedral without any discussion, but the assistant wanted to confront him and force him to call for an election. Somehow, Zooey knew of a legal loophole to fix everybody's problems, but couldn't explain it to us (for our own safety) - we just had to hide out in the back while she fixed the problem. She walked out and the assistant locked the door and blocked it with a chair.


Then I woke up...


and went back to sleep...


and dreamed the entire trip again...


except...


...at various moments during the second trip, we discussed ways for us to improve the course of events for everyone involved. We remembered to pick up more games for the kids, we avoided a traffic jam in Memphis, we helped the assistant maintain his anonymity better, etc...

?!?!?!?!

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* Weird Al is partially to blame for the title of this post. Dustbury's Zooeypaloozas are partially to blame for the dream ;)

p.s. the whole thing was g-rated

hijacked email

update: i just set up another email for comments from here. so i'm un-top-posting this.

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somebody has been sending out spam using the email address i use for comments here, and hotmail has now blocked the account (frustrating but understandable).

1) i apologize if you get a spam with my address.

2) i won't be reopening that address, so if you sent anything since march i probably didn't receive it. please use comments here until i set up another address for hatless in hattiesburg.

3) this is not near as frustrating as a previous hijacking...