editor's note: anyone who prefers to think that girls do not actually urinate, and instead have their bladder transform the pee into golden fluff, which is then extracted by angels while they sleep and sent to line the beds of newborn pups, had better not read this post.
dear medill newsroom bathroom,
hi. first off, i just wanted to let you know that i'm a big fan. it must be said that you are nicer than any other office-environment bathroom that i have ever used. you have four roomy stalls; you are decorated simply but elegantly (i especially admire the marble sink counters and the shade of beige on your walls); your lighting is perfection - none of the blaring flourescent nastiness for you - the dim glow of your sophisticated lightbulbs always makes me look wonderful in the mirror; you've got nice touches, like a close-up mirror for applying make up in the mornings and a never-ending supply of aveeno hand lotion to moisturize after washing with your pleasant-scented soap.
we have to talk.
you need to know that your toilets are the bane of the existence every single female in the newsroom. your commodes, while equipped with fairly modern-looking automatic flushing devices, actually hail from the backwaters of azerbaijin. or possibly rural communist china. i know, i was surprised too. they're nice, and clean, and the first time i used them, i thought, "what nice, clean toilets." i should have noticed the 52 signs plastered inside each stall that implored you to "PLEASE FLUSH!!!! DON'T FORGET!!!!" in some grating, squiggly microsoft font. "why ever would we need to be reminded to flush when there are such lovely automatic motion-sensor devices equipped here?" i queried myself innocently. but i thought no more of it.
until the toilet automatically flushed all its nasty toilet bowl water upwards with the force of a fire hose into my special area whilst i was in the middle of, well, you know. and it has continued to do so nearly every time i use the toilet. in fact, your motion sensor is an eager one. it flushes when i enter the stall; it flushes when i sit down; it flushes when i go. in fact, it flushes almost every time i so much blink an eye at it.
EXCEPT WHEN I ACTUALLY FINISH. YOU KNOW, THE ONLY TIME IT SHOULD BE FLUSHING AT ALL, YOU MOFO.
going to the bathroom has become a deadly game of mental tug-and-war between me and the toilets' sensors. i approach the entire act of peeing with dedicated stealth and thought-planning. i really shouldn't have to expand so much mental energy on peeing. i'm a journalist, people. i'm working here. except when i'm peeing. then i'm slipping in the door, closing it with the softness of patting a baby's head, attempting stuff like trying to sit down on the toilet from the side so the sensor doesn't, um, sense me, and holding so goddamn still while i pee that you could balance a freaking book on my head. it almost never works, but every once in a while it does, and then i go have a beer, because that is a serious accomplishemnt. every time the toilet doesn't flush on me is a victory for the entire goddamn gender.
of course, after the beer i need to pee again, and we're back at the beginning.
meanwhile, post-pee, i've tried everything in my right mind to get the sensor to work. i dodge. i weave. i do little up and down dances. i flick it with my thumb. but does the sensor see me? does it even ACKNOWLEDGE THAT I'M RIGHT THERE, trying to get it to flush? no. the sensor, it is a cold, unfeeling bastard. so on the rare occasions that i haven't already been flushed on, i must press the button on the sensor, therefore rendering the whole "automatic" thing moot.
i was in the bathroom the other day and a friend walked in. we were chatting to each other through the stalls, when, you guessed, i got flushed on. normally i would retain some decorum and pretend like it didn't happen, but that was, like, the 8th time it'd gone on that day, and i just could not take it any more.
"FUCK." i exclaimed. "this goddamn motherfucking toilet won't stop flushing on me."
"oh i know," my friend, a lovely, demure southern belle replied. "that middle stall is the worst. i almost always try to avoid it if possible."
we are now strategizing our toilet use. middle toilet? 88% chance you'll get flushed on. first stall? maaaaybe 70%, if you're lucky. and the handicapped stall. don't get me started on that dirty whore.
do you see what you have reduced us to, medill toilets? instead of writing meaningful, educational and revealing articles, i am now wondering how many times i'm going to get toilet water sprayed on me that day. it's a near obsession. i feel twinges of hyperventilation whenever i enter the bathroom. so, you need to stop. if not for me, then for the sake of the entire profession of journalism.
everyone knows the people behind 37signals are smart (who doesn't use backpackit, or writeboard, or any number of their easy-to-use online tools?). but who knew they were KINDA HOTT. ? not me.
It's been a few weeks, but I wouldn't be living up to this blog's titular mission statement if I didn't write something about the presents I got for my birthday. That's right: me me me.
Charles got me some instant-win scratchoff tickets. Partly this is because he's a nice guy, and partly it's because he enjoys gambling vicariously. As you can see, he selected "Blackout Bingo". I don't think he paid much attention to which game he was buying, but it's an accidentally perfect reflection of his personality.
My SMS project remains in limbo — the Gammu project maintainer and I have been emailing back and forth, but I'm not optimistic about getting the software working with my phone. Most likely I'll have to buy a cheap, old, maximally-compatible model off of Ebay. Oh well. I'll give him another week.
Other projects are also frustrating: my VGA to NTSC converter has mysteriously died, putting the planned Linux reinstall on hold until I collect a monitor. I owe everyone a final Python tutorial, but more for the sake of completeness than anything else — I think I underestimated the scope of the project. I'm not feeling up to it quite yet.
So, lacking anything immediate that I can work on (or, more accurately, that I want to work on), I'm thinking about learning ActionScript, Flash's built-in language. Mostly I just want to screw around with Flashr and write something that talks to Flickr — a little slideshow for the sidebar that automatically grabs new photos from Catherine & my photostreams, maybe? That'd be kind of neat.
Anyway, in the course of looking through other people's code I came across SimpleViewer. It's not what I want — it's a full-featured photo gallery, not a sidebar widget. Besides, what I'm after most is a learning exercise. But it is a pretty slick slideshow app. And it's free! Any photographers out there (I know there are at least a couple) could do worse than to use this on their portfolio sites. Those of us unconcerned with publication rights and hotlinking ought to eschew the razzle-dazzle and stick with permalink-able formats, of course.
For some reason I'm watching Deal or No Deal at the moment. As you might imagine, it's approximately the stupidest thing ever. That's fine; gambling is basically about dressing up random chance in as elaborate a wrapper as possible. If some TV executive wants to spend his production budget on a fancy set and Donald Trump cameos instead of paying someone a pittance to design a "game" with "entertainment value", well, that's his prerogative.
But here's the thing that really blows my mind: tonight's show, at least, centers around the contestant choosing numbers to open suitcases. Assuming that the show's not rigged, this exercise is completely random. Yet the audience is offering suggestions! And the guy's listening! Carefully!
Well, good luck, moron. I hope you're good at guessing who's good at guessing.
UPDATE: JESUS CHRIST, THAT'S HOWIE MANDEL!?! Terrifying. At least he's found a good niche for his unique brand of talentlessness.
this article is a couple of weeks old and probably many of you saw it already, but i just wanted to note it. it's about modern liquors, the liquor store a couple of blocks up from tommy and charles' apartment in shaw. and it is the best. the guy who works the counter there is the sweetest; they hold wine tastings every once in a while; and best of all, you don't feel like some shady, gross crack ho prostitute when you go in there to buy stuff. it's nice, and clean and well-lit. etc. a model liquor store!
but as the article shows, it didn't always used to be that way.
To make a living, Ed and Anna Fleming did whatever it took. When customers paid by pulling crumpled dollar bills out of their shoes, Ed and Anna would dip each buck into a big jug of green disinfectant. Half a dozen times a year, the place was held up. Anna had a gun pointed at her 15 times. Once, Ed was shot right through the groin. The bullet hole remains in the back wall.
Modern Liquors never generated the easy money associated with liquor stores. Not at Ninth and M streets NW. In the four decades since Ed Fleming bought the place, the city tore down blocks of rowhouses to build a college campus that never happened; homeless people were kept for years in trailers on a vast parking lot; the streets were closed off in the early 1990s to dig Metro tunnels; and the Flemings' block was turned into a construction site through the late '90s to put up the convention center.
Customers who managed to get to Modern tended to be winos and druggies. The bestsellers were 32-ounce bottles of King Cobra malt liquor, pints of Wild Irish Rose and half-pints of Velicoff vodka, Skid Row's finest.
Then, over the past few years, the storm surge of gentrification hit Shaw, just north of downtown Washington.
blah blah gentrificationcakes blah. anyway, modern liquors is awesome, so if you need to grab some booze while in that area (9th and M streets NW) i highly recommend it.
back and not really refreshed from a wonderful weekend in d.c. my flight left the district at 6:30 this morning, and as soon as i landed i headed to the newsroom for some fun and fabulous journalism work. as i'm sitting here brainstorming and tapping away, i had to take a blogging break to talk about what went on:
thursday night: unbuckled. dc9. olivia mancini and the housemates; the hard tomorrows. you saw the pictures here.
friday night: tommy and i decided kind of last minute to head to coppi's, a pizza and italian joint on U street. though dcist reviewed it back in november, we had never been there and in fact hadn't heard much about it otherwise. walking in at 7:30 on a friday night without a reservation, we weren't surprised at being sat at the bar, which turned out to be nice and cozy, with an excellent view of the wood-burning oven, and an attentive bartendress. we started off with some excellent calamari, a bottle of red and then two small pizzas - i forget what was on tommy's, but mine was prosciutto and funghi. though the crust was a little iffy, we both thought their pizza could easily place a very close 3rd in district pies, after two amy's and pizzeria paradiso. i can't believe we'd never dined there before. fairly reasonable, as well. (though that's always easy for me to say when tommy foots the bill, as he almost always insists on doing.) 1414 U street.
saturday: i hit up the glorious, glorious tyson's mall with my family. we ate at brio, which, for a chain restaurant in a mall, was actually pretty decent. then my mom bought me a pair of editors pants at express. discuss: editors pants from express, best pants ever? i own like six pairs.
for dinner that night, tommy and i went to queen of sheba, a recently-opened ethiopian restaurant. pluses: a block from the apartment; nice space; pretty great ethiopian food. minuses: no liquor license (though hardly their fault); about, oh, a FIVE HOUR WAIT for food. well, more like 40 minutes, which struck us as pretty ridiculous seeing that the restaurant wasn't even half full. maybe they're still just working out service kinks, but until they start getting their food out in a timely manner, i'd go to sodere or dukem.
UPDATE: man, MT fucked up the rest of this entry. i talked about the rest of saturday night and EVEN sunday, too, but it somehow ate it. quick recap: ellington party, fries at the saloon, sunday lunch at saint-ex, and attempting to convert tommy and charles to grey's anatom. which i don't think worked.
there's a quick piece in the reliable source column this sunday where tommy and i are interviewed about the Legend of the Butterstick. though tommy isn't given really proper credit (he came up with the name, but the article doesn't mention that), AND our blog URL is not mentioned (le sigh) it is still a nice article, and, hoorah! and it mentions dcist a lot, which is awesome. anyway, there we are: our names in the washington post. maybe one day i'll actually get mine in there for something non-zoo critter related.
These new VW "My Fast" commercials. Maybe I'm confused, but I think we're supposed to be clamoring for some kind of squat, unappealing plastic figurine all of a sudden. And this somehow induces me to buy... cars, I guess? Catherine reports seeing the campaign extended to fake Craigslist missed connections postings, which, if you know me, you know I find appalling. What happened, VW? Where's the Nick Drake & artful mysteriousness? It feels like you finished selling cars to hipsters who miss Suck.com and moved on to targeting their asshole younger brothers who spend all their time playing GTA and buying DVDs that star Vin Diesel.
The IT Crowd. I really want to like this series — the people at BoingBoing are nuts about it, the set's littered with EFF stickers, and the BBC is giving away episodes for free on the internet (hurrah for IP socialism!). The only problem: it's just not very funny. Like, at all. The first episode featured two jokes about a non-technical management type trying to use appliances when they weren't plugged in. Done properly, this would build in a way that makes the second time much funnier than the first. But in practice, it just seemed like the writers had forgotten that they'd already used that lame gag ten minutes earlier.
The Boondocks Cartoon.The IT Crowd is bad in a passive, hapless sort of way. The Boondocks is aggressive in its awfulness. That it's not remotely funny sort of goes without saying — I've always felt that, despite occasional signs of talent, Aaron McGruder's success owes more to liberal guilt than genuine comedic talent. But even his occasional humor is completely absent from the cartoon. It doesn't even try to be funny. What it does try to be is in-your-face. Mostly this just results in it not making any sense, and doing so in as unpleasant a way as possible. One episode ended with the grandfather killing a blind man, then getting left off the hook for some reason. They finished by throwing in a nice little coda about the pointlessness of the victim's life. Classy, guys.
Another had the grandfather open a soul food restaurant, then tried to use the premise to simultaneously score points about drug addiction and obesity in the black community, but succeeded only in producing an incoherent mess. Whatever they were trying to do, the episode ended with a woman ruining her life and debasing herself, begging for a cheeseburger in a way that was not at all funny. The mind behind the show seems to have no talent for anything but cruelty. Oh, and the voice acting for Huey and Riley is mind-bogglingly bad (this is more a casting than a performance issue, though). All in all, it's probably the least appealing cartoon I've ever seen — and I've seen Urotsukidoji.
food network: please stop making your female tv cooks, especially the barefoot contessa and giada de lalalawhatever, make sit down meals where they have to eat with their husbands. it is weird, and painful, and ugh. for all i know, the barefoot contessa likes to do this, because as charles and tommy and i have long speculated, her marriage has gone down the crapper and she keeps trying to lure her husband back in with food and prove to the world that they are rilly in luv. but it does not work! you could take the two most in love people in the world, sit them down with some delicious food, yell action, and all you'd get is 60 unnatural, awkward seconds of the woman laughing too hard at unfunny things her tv-shy husband burbles up, and lots of awkward silences, and the husband unconvincingly mmm-ing really hard. just make it stop.
my love for the tv show grey's anatomy has only recently been expounded about 10 billajillion times by the fact that it has got to be one of the most web-friendly shows out there. by now you all probably know about the writers' blog, which is fantasic. there the authors of each episode explain their motivations and ideas behind each episode, often delving into experiences from their own life that influenced them to write the show in one way or another. it's good reading. and they've got comments. and they READ the comments. and they answer them. it is, like, interactive and stuff.
there are also several other blogs, two of which are admittedly extremely retarded because they are "character" blogs, ie, blogs written from the point of view of a couple of minor characters on the show. they're extraordinarily stupid, as are all blogs written by fictional personas, so just skip over them. but the site also has a blog exploring the medical situations that take place on each show. they've got a blog listing all the songs used in every episode from the music supervisor of the show. and they have TEH PODCASTS as well. somewhere on itunes, apparently. i have to admit to not really ever having gotten into the big old podcasting scene so i haven't listened to them yet. but i am sure they are wonderful.
anyway. if only all tv shows employed the internets in this way. especially the writers' blog. if you could have a peek into the minds of the people behind your favorite show, it would clarify things in a way that is both revealing and interesting. grey's anatomy isn't going to change your life, but it's a funn, well-written comedy-drama, and its writers seem to realize one key to its success is a) realizing your fans are what drive the show b) engaging with them.
tommy's got a bunch of great photos up. unfortunately, my flight was delayed so i missed all of olivia mancini and the housemates' set. i would like to say i had an opinion of the hard tomorrows, but frankly, i was too busy being one of those annoying people who talks at concerts because i was so eager to catch up with everybody. so i didn't really pay attention. but everyone else thought they were excellent. hooray!
i'm back in d.c., and it is teh awesome and teh perfect all together. dcist's unbuckled concert was an unqualified success, and everybody, including myself, had a fabulous time. hoorah. that is all. cause i'm a little drunk. more d.c. updates to come.
i'm looking for people in chicago or illinois who have used match.com, eharmony.com, etc, for an article i'm writing. (really.) it's about a bill going to the senate about online dating safety regulations. if you know anyone, shoot me an email!
UPDATE: how morally dubious would it be for me to create and post a profile, then interview anyone who contacts me in the next few hours?
the supreme court issued a few opinions today, one of which was one siding with a woman in a case against the postal service wherein she slipped and fell on a bunch of packages left on her doorstop. the merits of that case aside, i found this excerpt from a medill article on the case funny:
On Aug. 25, 2001, a postal worker deposited the mail on the porch of Barbara Dolan's Pennsylvania home. The pile left behind consisted of letters, packages and magazines.
Later, Dolan slipped and fell on the mail and suffered injuries as a result of the fall. She filed an administrative complaint with the U.S. Postal Service, which was denied on April 18, 2002.
Six months later, Dolan filed a complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the USPS with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Her husband, Michael Dolan, also filed an FTCA claim stating that his wife's injuries had precluded her from fully performing her spousal role.
let's hope dolan's idea of what duties comprise a spousal role aren't anything like this guy's.
me: omigod
jodi wilgoren who changed her name from the nytimes is in the newsroom
and she was just introduced as wilgoren
and she's all like, "actually, now it's RUDoren"
a question from a reader, michelle, that i am unable to answer! i thought you expert cultured folks might know better than i do in regards to this:
In one of your posts you mentioned Illy coffee. I am not sure if you brew it at home. If you do, I need some advice! I have a french press and am having major issues getting a cup that's just right. I'm usually dealing with a feeling that its too watery or too strong. Any advice would be so appreciated!!!
I've been meaning to write something quick about the state of console hacking, but kept getting sidetracked. Might as well do it now, before the news gets completely stale:
Xbox 360
Xplorer360 was released a little over a week ago. The app lets folks read and write to the Xbox 360's hard drive — but don't get too excited. The hard drive isn't encrypted, it's just in a mildly exotic format. This is a useful tool, but not a breakthrough in and of itself.
In other Xbox news, the "kiosk disc" was disabled by the latest Xbox Live update. You might remember me talking about it before — the disc was electronically distributed to retailers for them to play in display units. But recipients were expected to burn the disc image to a DVD-R, bypassing the console's usual prohibition on playing writeable media — this made it an intriguing means by which hackers could potentially inject their own code. The executable files were still encrypted, but the media assets (an in particular, Flash files) weren't and could be replaced. All of this looked like a promising, if less-than-surefire way to find an exploit on the 360. Sadly, that avenue is now closed for anyone with an up-to-date system.
Nintendo DS
But although the news for the 360 crowd isn't as encouraging as it might have first seemed, owners of the Nintendo DS now have more capabilities than they used to. Via BoingBoing I learned of the PassMe, a slick add-on for the DS. But BB got their facts slightly wrong — the PassMe isn't the only thing you need to hack up a DS.
Actually, all the PassMe does is transparently pass traffic back and forth to a genuine DS game (necessary because of the platform's encryption) — with one exception. When it sees a specific instruction — one that tells the DS to begin executing at an address corresponding to the beginning of the DS cartridge — it rewrites it, telling the console to go to the Gameboy slot instead... in which you presumably have a writeable flash cartridge (aka "flash cart") onto which you've loaded your hacked applications.
There are a lot of flash carts available for the Gameboy Advance, and they're all roughly compatible with the DS. But if you want to play "commercial backups" (aka pirated DS games), you'll need to use one of two specific brands, and you'll need to use some custom hacked ROMs that have been released by a group called Golden Sun. You can find details on all of this here.
So, sadly, the cost of modding your GBA isn't as cheap as the $20 PassMe, despite what BoingBoing thought. You also need one of those two brands of flash cart, which will run you another $125-150. For once, piracy doesn't come cheap.
And hey, while I'm at it...
PSP
It's cracked yet again. I can't afford a PSP, and don't really want one, so I haven't been tracking this particularly carefully. But last I checked, you can run homebrew apps, emulators and commercial backups on all firmware revisions.
this post over at jolienyc about allure's feature on cheap makeup thrills reminds me of a few bargain bin products i've been enjoying myself. not that i've ever enjoyed products from anywhere else but a drugstore; grad student budget doesn't exactly let you go shopping weekly at sephora. but anyways!
garnier fructis fortifying deep conditioner: this is supposed to be a once-a-week-or-so deep masque for your hair, but i love it so much, i use it every day. it's amazing mostly because i have fine, tending-to-oily hair, but it rinses super clean (as long as i just use it on the ends) and makes my hair all nice and soft and shiny. and the kicker: it smells yummy. one recommendation: the packaging - a plastic tub - sucks. it's difficult to open in the shower, and if you drop it, the top'll shatter everywhere.
clean and clear oil-free dual action moisturizer: perfect for those with skin like mine that tends to get super dry in the winter, but that will break out into nastiness if you even think about putting moisturizer on it. this gets rids of the dryness but doesn't make me break out.
curel ultra-healing lotion: i think curel must be undergoing a product redesign and shedding all of its old-looking tubes, because i came across a different-looking minitube of this lotion in osco's bargain bin. 25 cents. how could i pass it up. and i loved it so much i came back the next day and bought, i shit you, 10 more minitubes. it's a little bit greasy, but lightly so, and moisturizes really well. my hands are not disgusting and red and cracky any longer!
and thus ends the temporary transformation of the blog into beauty tips galore! but feel free to leave your own in comments. i very rarely buy a product unless recommended by friends, and i'm always looking for recs to help along my product obsession.
our lovely legal instructor loves us all so much that as we're all desperately struggling to finish our terrible 1200-word articles, she ordered us lunch - pizza from piece (her husband is an investor there). unfortunately for me, it's located somewhere in wicker park and not really accessible to my 'hood, but i'd highly recommended it. yummy thin crust.
Just over seven months after he made his first appearance at the National Zoo, giant panda cub Tai Shan, has apparently discovered that he and his mother are not alone.
Zoo officials say that over the weekend, he began staring into the outdoor enclosure next to the one where he has been playing over the past few weeks with his mother, Mei Xiang.
Consumerist brings news that TechCrunch (which appears to be down at the moment) has just reviewed the private beta of a service called FlySpy. It looks fairly neat — enter your origin and destination cities, and get back a graph of fare prices for the coming month. You can overlay graphs for different airports, adjust parameters, and generally short-circuit the airlines' confusing pricing schemes.
Or that's what it looks like, anyway (there's a screenshot on Consumerist). The site is still in closed beta. So, on the off chance that anyone has invite capabilities... yeah. Drop me a line.
Thriving in conditions that would turn most living things to Popsicles, these inch-long earthworm cousins inhabit glaciers and snowfields in the coastal ranges of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. They move through seemingly solid ice with ease and are at their liveliest near the freezing point of water. Warm them up slightly and they dissolve into goo.
Their life cycle remains a mystery.
But ice worms are beginning to yield their secrets to a few hardy scientists who see broad applications from understanding one of the planet's oddest inhabitants.
NASA anted up $200,000 last year to explore the worms' cold tolerance and what it might say about the possibility of life on Jupiter's icy moons and other planets. That work could also improve cold storage of organs and tissues for transplantation.
As glaciers shrink in the face of global warming, interest is growing in ice worms and other animals whose habitat could melt away within the next 50 years. National Geographic funded one of the first field surveys to focus on ice-worm ecosystems.
"They're kind of hot right now," Lee said as he and roommate Dave Eiriksson strapped on their gear and headed up the slopes above Paradise.
i should feel shame at seeing people fall and potentially hurt themselves very seriously, but when they are wearing the outfits that these ice dancers are wearing, i can only feel utter glee and manic laughter. check out the blow-by-blow photo gallery here.
y'all, one of the things you are lucky about is the fact that you get to read this here blog, and you get to see the intimate workings of a Real Live Journalist. not THAT intimate, sicko. but you know, thought process, research, super interview tips (hint: super interview tips do not include dropping contents of purse on interviewee's floor including, ahem, lady things, and inadvertently yelling, "shit!", not that i do that kind of stuff).
i thought as, you know, an extra special treat for you all, i would document my inner monologue as i attempt to complete a 1200-word article that is due, uh, tomorrow.
start: sit down to computer, full of two homemade cappucinos, buzzed, elated, ready to CHANGE THE WORLD with my story because i am a Journalist and we can change the world and shit.
write lede.
word count: 42 words. shit.
think: hmm. most heinous lede ever? well, what am i going to do about it? it's already there. jeez.
add quote. wow. adding a quote adds, like, a lot of words. hmm.
cut and paste about 17 unrelated quotes from pages of typed-up interviews. word count: a lot more! jeez, i'm practically done! now all i have to do is construct some sort of coherent narrative, with flow and wisdom and insight. easy peasy. totally rocking the espresso. you can totally do this, Reporter Catherine!
hmm.
i really hope george didn't sleep with meredith. lordy. that would be bordering on, like, nasty incestuous, also, i would have to kill meredith. with a pointy stick. that had been rubbed with chili powder.
espresso really, really...starts to kick in. in a bad way. goddamn. write two or three paragraphs very quickly with laser-like intensity. no matter they barely make sense and, uh, could potentially be incorrect. libel schmibel! the editing comes later! hey, i think the computer screen is starting to shake for some reason.
beer would be good way to counter espresso buzz, no? yes, yes i think it would.
word count. has not change since the 37th time i've word counted. microsoft should really do something about that. i should also really do something about only having miller lite in my midget fridge.
write a couple of seriously lame sentences.
fuck.
fuckity fuck fuck.
give up to chat on IM and rewatch some veronica mars. story isn't due till 5pm tomorrow; only 800 words to go. totally doable, no?
see, y'all don't need to be worried about the future of journalism! you have bright young things like me to carry the torch forward!
I've got a feeling that I might just be the last person on the internet to see it — but if you haven't watched Muppets Overtime, you really ought to. It's a beautifully-made and surprisingly sad five minute animated short.
But for the record, I still think that a Muppet retelling of the New Testament would be the ultimate application for the franchise.
The Governess says she feels like the Jenny Lewis album is a retread. I can't really speak to that, having not heard the album (although I haven't heard anyone say they really love it, aside from RCR). But I, too, have been trying and failing to find a new album to love.
The Subways? Too hard a sell. It's The Killers all over again. Also, there's the fact that the album is just OK.
How about the much-hyped Arctic Monkeys? I'd like to think that I'm past the point in my life where I have to dump on Next Big Things in order to make myself feel better about my own occasionally deeply suspect musical taste. Maybe I'm not. But the AM album just doesn't do it for me. It sounds like Dischord-influenced high school bands. If I lived in the UK and had an email address ending in @nme.com, I could see why that'd sound like the fifth best English album of all time to me.
Okay, actually, no. I can't possibly conceive of that. But I can understand the enthusiasm. And I've only listened through the thing once. Maybe it's a grower. It seemed pretty boring on the first listen. It struck me as a less-catchy Bloc Party done in self-satisfied keys. To be fair, I said similar things about the Wolf Parade album after the first couple of listens, and now I'm deeply, deeply sorry. But for now: pass.
Yet! I'm hopeful that salvation is at hand. The Islands album drops in not too long (or, here on the internets, not too long ago), and not only features prominent ex-Unicorns, but also cameos from Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire members. Canadag, yo.
Anyway, I've secured through the (in)appropriate channels. So far, not an Abominable Snow level of catchiness. But it's definitely interesting and definitely good. And Nick Diamond has earned multiple listens on the strength of this alone. March 9, people. With Metric, who I am assured are good, or at least attractive.
Among the many things I like about my new job is that it's given me the opportunity to learn a bunch of new technologies. Email triggers, .htaccess files, SVN repositories, XML, and of course the power to raise the dead (from the command line!) — lots of good stuff.
And useful stuff. For instance, this morning I finally fixed out broken archive URLs. Movable Type 2.66whatever built entries in the format
/blog/archives/000001.php
/blog/archives/000002.php
etc.
But since the upgrade to 3.2, we've switched to a more useful format, oriented around a value that MT generates called the basename (which is basically an abbreviated, URL-safe version of the title). The new URLs look like this:
/blog/archives/2004/01/22/round_the_world/
/blog/archives/2005/12/16/sweet_nostalgia/
The problem is that there are still lots of links to the old URLs, both within entries on this site and elsewhere. That's no good, since they don't get rebuilt when new comments are added, or when their entries are updated, or when we redesign, or when anything else happens on the site.
But now I can do something about it. And since it took me a few hours, and since it might help someone else, I thought I'd post my solution.
Today's Post has a an interesting profile of a botnet operator — one of those jerks who remotely infects computers, amassing swarms of enslaved machines that are then used to send spam, extort websites, steal information and generally do nasty things. The subject remains anonymous, only identifying himself as a high school dropout living in a small midwestern town. The three businesses closest to his house are also mentioned, but not named.
Except — whoops! It looks like the Post failed to scrub its photos very carefully. Within thirty minutes of the story being picked up by Slashdot, a user had noticed that the Post's photos contained metadata saying "Location: Roland, OK". Which, as you may have deduced, is a small midwestern town (pop. 3000). Another slashdot commenter googled for the businesses mentioned and was able to take a guess at the intersection where the guy lives.
Pride goeth before the fall and all that, I suppose. Have fun in jail, asshole.
i'm going to go out on a limb here and say, in response to this paragraph:
It's O.K. to fall deeply for one loser after another. It's O.K. to show up at a guy's house with a dozen roses and declare your undying affection. It's O.K. to have too much to drink and call your ex 20 times and then to be mortally embarrassed when you realize your number must have shown up on his caller ID. It's O.K. to stand at a phone booth in Times Square on New Year's Eve, drenched like a sewer cat in the pouring rain, crying your eyes out because the man you are infatuated with has decided that he needs some space.
i was out the other night with a friend of the male persuasion (who shall remain unnamed and unlinked for purposes of discussion, though many of you in DC in the LOOP will know him; ha ha, make note to remind self to pat self on back for being so clever) and we were grabbing a few drinks at a bar. this friend is an engaging conversationalist, so as we were sitting at our little table we were having a good time, laughing, chatting and drinking it up. the bar was fairly crowded, but we didn't really know anyone else there very well and weren't making an extroverted overtures towards anyone else or anything. partway through the evening, i excused myself to go to the bathroom.
when i returned, said male friend was bemusedly holding a scrap of paper in his hand. he told me that while i had been in the bathroom, a woman had dashed over to the table as he was sipping at his beer, handed him this scrap of paper, said, "here, i think you dropped this," and dashed away so quickly that he almost wasn't even sure what she looked like.
the scrap of paper? a name and a number. the next 15 minutes? we spent pondering whether someone else had actually dropped this scrap of paper, or whether this was a very roundabout way of picking up said male friend.
emboldened by beer, and the fact that though we had been staring pointedly at the woman for several minutes while she studiously avoided even glancing our way, said male friend walked over and chatted the lady up.
turns out, it was a pickup strategy. any results that might be forthcoming aside, my questions are thus: 1. is this a smart or stupid method? would everyone involved not have been better served if she had been a little more direct? 2. THE HELL? WE VERY WELL COULD HAVE BEEN ON A DATE. in fact, i think she thought we were. if i remember correctly she said something to said male friend along the lines of "....well, i wanted you to have my number just in case your date wasn't going well..." let's leave aside the fact that a) i am enormously cute and witty and no date with me could ever go badly b) uh, we weren't actually on a date so i have no right to be offended, am i wrong to, um, feel a little bit offended? that's an awfully ballsy move, considering a guy could be out with a date or girlfriend. i simply can't decide if it was good ballsy or bad ballsy. i guess if they get married and have little ballsy babies, it will have been a good one.
i give FTD and its already-renowned shitty service no respect whatsoever in this matter, but i will say that the local flowershop they used for the somewhat-imperfect valentine's day order came through today. they called while i was at a friend's house for directions (this was apparently the fourth time they had gotten lost trying to deliver the rest of tommy's order; granted, my apartment is pretty difficult to find) and when i came home this evening, i had a box of delicious chocolates and an extra arrangement of three roses and baby's breath waiting for me by the mailbox, along with a note apologizing for the delay.
i know. poor me. i got my valentine's day chocolates from my wonderful boyfriend THREE GODDAMN DAYS LATE. mother of god...what kind of sick, deprived life do i live?
anyway, props to mai flowers & gifts, their sweet delivery man and their sweet owner. the chocolate is tasty and the roses (both the first and second bouquets) beautiful.
This is, I think, the third week in a row that I've managed to fuck something up in the DCist Morning Roundup. Disheartened by my recent sucky performance at this seemingly simple task, I thought I had been extra careful last night. Not so. A search for 'cropp' on the front page inexplicably failed, and the City Paper's website mislabeled an article's date as a week more recent than it is. The result: a duplicate item and a stale one. Well, at least I didn't slander anyone.
"A dramatic day for team USA, with flamboyance in men's figure skating from an uninhibited talent."
That seems more, um, forthcoming than is usual for figure skating coverage. Aren't they supposed to be trying to convince me that the American favorite is the Bad Boy of the ice dancing world? You know, like they do every four years?
fun stalkable moment: i (along with dcsobloop) will be at chicagoist's first local concert event, ctrl-alt-rock, on thursday evening. the assembly, may or may not and the alphabet will be playing. 8 p.m., $8, schuba's. if you all remember correctly, i was involved in dcist's concert last year, unbuckled, so i'm all about supporting this show.
and guess what? i'll be at the second coming of unbuckled as well! you should be there. thursday, february 23, dc9. excellent d.c. groups the hard tomorrows and olivia mancini and the housemates will be playing. come on out!
just a note to mark the launching of beepcentral, a web site aimed at young chicago surburbanites published by the daily herald, a newspaper serving the areas northwest of chicago. beepcentral grew out of a recent medill media management project, one of the reasons i applied to medill in the first place.
every year, a group of students who select to do the project basically spend a full quarter working as a consulting group to a local newspaper or publishing company. essentially, the company says "we want _____"; the students design, build and market a product from the ground up to suit the company's needs. generally the companies want a) something designed to bring in younger readers and b) an online component.
i'll be doing the project this spring quarter. i've heard rumblings that the partner this time around will be the minneapolis star tribune. i'm really excited about it, even though i have no clue as to what the project could be this time around, but i'll keep you informed!
don't know if anyone else subscribes to email tipster service daily candy - i do for both chicago and d.c., and while i often find their tips to be a) more geared to people earning $80,000/yr and up b) too cutesy, every once in a while they know what they're talking about.
well, i guess those folks knew what they were doing - they could soon be sold for more than $100 million, says the WSJ:
Mr. Pittman bought a controlling stake in the site for about $3.5 million in 2003. With traditional and electronic publishers keen to get their hands on Internet-advertising properties, Daily Candy could fetch more than $100 million, people familiar with the matter say.
While a relatively small transaction, a Daily Candy auction will be an important barometer for the pace and valuation of Web deal making. During the past 18 months, Internet media transactions have attracted top valuations, as publishers worry that advertising dollars are migrating online and away from newspapers, magazines and television. Big media players such as News Corp.; Dow Jones & Co. Inc., which publishes The Wall Street Journal; and E.W. Scripps Co. all have made Internet-related acquisitions.
Daily Candy's business is a simple one: It produces urbane email newsletters that make daily recommendations on shopping, entertainment, food and media. Originally written for a clutch of trend-obsessed New York City women, the site produces 11 electronic newsletters, including editions for Chicago, San Francisco and London. Advertisers pay for access to the newsletter subscribers.
Without costs for printing or the need for much editorial product, Daily Candy boasts margins of nearly 60%, say people familiar with the matter. The hope for 2006 is that the business will produce revenue somewhere less than $20 million, with earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the low-teen millions, these people say.
anyone interested can read an old but good interview with founder dany levy here.
I'm glad that Catherine got her flowers, but I'm not very happy about how she got them: at 9:30 at night. She had to cancel plans to go out in order to guide the FTD guy in by cell phone. And then he forgot to give her the chocolates I'd ordered.
I guess it'd be tacky to complain about how much money I had to drop to get such stellar service, so I'll just call it a racket and leave it at that. Bah!
you know how tommy described that weirdly giddy feeling of something awful and uncontrollable starting to happen, but you're powerless to prevent it, like when you crest the top of a rollercoaster? except he was talking about major and scary privacy issues?
well, this is how i feel about the inevitable decline of tom cruise. we are on the verge of watching some monumental breakdown, people, the likes of which has rarely been seen before in celebrity history. mark my words, folks, it won't be long before he's peeing into stored milk bottles and putting on three hundred pounds. all we can do is grab some popcorn, sit back and blog it all.
i promise, i never make a big deal out of valentine's day, but how can i not enjoy getting something like this?:
what i DO make a big deal out of is tommy's 26th birthday, which is, of right now, tomorrow (ie wednesday the 15th). so make sure to wish him a happy one! he now joins my ancient ranks! mwahaha. you never stood a chance, young'un.
I've got an idea for what I think would be a fairly neat DC-centric SMS application. I don't want to tip my hand just yet, but once the serial cable that I just ordered for my old t39 wings its way to me, I'll provide some more info. For now, though, some things I've figured out about sending text messages from your Linux computer:
Asterisk is neat (and likely to make knowledgeable techs a lot of money in the near future), but not really necessary for SMS. Most of the docs for it deal with using FastSMS, a custom SMS gateway that requires no hardware but costs about five cents/message. That's overkill for little guys like myself, though. I think it might make more sense to just run one of the programs mentioned below externally to Asterisk if you need less-than-heavy duty SMS capabilities. In my case, that means I won't be running Asterisk at all.
A cheaper alternative is to buy an old GSM phone off of Ebay and hook it up to your computer's serial port with an appropriate cable. It should then be able to act like a modem. Figure out what software you're going to use before deciding on a model. Avoid connecting to the phone with Bluetooth or USB — they just confuse the situation. Also, think about T-Mobile's Sidekick Data Only plan, which only runs $30/month and offers unlimited text messages.
I've got some links to relevant software here. Of these, Gnokii currently appears to be the most impressive (but is poorly documented). Also, don't miss this list, which links to a lot of SMS software for Linux.
Teleflip can't help you receive SMSes, so it's not quite what I want. But it does look neat. yourphonenumber@teleflip.com will automatically figure out your wireless carrier and send an email to their email-to-SMS gateway. For example, phonenumber@tmomail.net lets you SMS T-Mobile customers. The format/address is different for every carrier, though — Teleflip just figures this out for you and forwards your email along. It's free, but only works for North American numbers.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention MoLoGoGo, which has nothing to do with SMS, but lets you track your GPS position by remote using a free app loaded onto a $80 Boost Mobile phone. And it now exports your location information to XML! I'm pretty desperate to figure out a way to do something useful with this. So far, no dice.
I was pretty wary when Mike pointed me to ob/eybuttersti/ck.com (googleproofing to avoid encouraging them). WHOIS revealed that John Hl/inko owned the domain. He's a PR guy, and had bought ads for it on Atrios and DailyKos. That's a serious amount of money for something this stupid. He responded to emails asking what he was up to with too-cute dodges. I was afraid something nastily commercial was coming.
Well, as of today the seemingly-random countdown timer has reached zero, and the site has officially launched. It looks like the threat is overblown. T-shirts rehashing various well-tread "underground" memes are being sold, and there's a "posse" functionality that appears to run a technorati or similar search on butterstick and rank the sites that come back. The site's also using CafePress, and claims to be donating "a portion of the proceeds" to panda-related charities. All in all, not the commercial juggernaut I'd feared.
I apologize for my misgivings, John. Welcome to the exciting and dynamic world of unprofitable panda websites.
since my special gentleman friend isn't around this evening to celebrate that most retarded of holidays, i thought i might go off on a Great Adventure and do something i've never done before. no, not whatever you're thinking of, sicko. i want to get a manicure!
the truth is that i have been biting my nails since i emerged from the womb. i don't do it explicitly because i'm nervous and anxious all the time (though it is a fact that i bite my nails the most when i am a) anxious b) writing an english paper on victorian literature...man, it was a brutal scene after that dickens paper on rosa dartle). i am fully aware it's a gross habit, and frankly, i thought i would magically grow out of it as soon as i became An Adult. like, adults just don't bite their nails. because they are super human. but i'm 26 now, and really, it wasn't like that.
anyway, for the past few weeks i have appeared to break the habit and thanks to my super special friend mr. nasty tasting nail polish designed to help me stop chewing, i now have nails of a normal human length. i know it's only temporary - it always is - but i'm determined to keep it up as long as possible. and i thought maybe getting a manicure, actually spending a chunk of money to stop myself from biting off parts of my own body, might prolong the experience.
but i've never done it before! and i don't know what to expect! and frankly, i'm kind of scared. how much should a normal manicure cost? what color should i get? do i tip? will i be infected by nail tool gross fungus stuff? how long will it last? will i become addicted if i go just once?
girlier UN readers: help me out here. walk me through the manicure experience. you'll be helping me become a better person, i promise.
i'm doing an article on the lawyers for the creative arts, an organization where lawyers donate their time and services to artists and creative entities in chicago to help them with contracts, intellectual property, tax exemptions, etc. i have an interview today with the head of the organization, but i'm also looking for people who might have used their services and i'm having a bit of a hard time. i'm sure the head of the org. will point me towards the right folks, but i was hoping someone out there might know somebody, too! so if you do, shoot me an email.
BE MINE. Wait. That has six letters. Six letters is so unlucky. It's like YOU DIE. That's exactly what it's like. Now you're going to die and it's all my fault.
i love this washington post article on private investigators and valentine's day, if only for this totally awesome photo of two PIs trying to look about as badass as two PIs who chase down unfaithful husbands can. they can, and they WILL, stalk you to your cheap motel and take photographs of you from far away while eating cheetos. watch out, mofos.
It was a nice idea — the Metblogs folks approached Ryan and Martin about it a few weeks ago. Loser gives $50 to charity, just like actual celebrities do. Wayan of Metblogs is the trivia night MC, but they're honorable folks and we knew he wouldn't share the questions beforehand.
And yeah, they beat us fair and square. We led most of the night, but Hemal, Martin and Scott had to take off early, leaving me and Ryan. The later rounds were unkind. And we had already learned a painful lesson about not trusting Ryan's instincts — he's unassuming, but that guy is trivia night gold. We lost at least two points second guessing him about the number of USSR republics and what was the oldest noncontinuous parliament in the world. Trust your editors, people!
But here comes the venting: those were the worst trivia night questions I've ever encountered. First and foremost, the entire last round was devoted to blogs, and a large portion to DCist versus Metblogs. Way to make us feel like dicks for wasting everyone else's night, guy. Second, the questions were date-heavy. That's fine and good for the DC history round — it was painful but understandable. But asking what date DCist first wrote about Borf?! That's just terrible. Considering that it was asked shortly after "How many cities is Metblogs in?", it came off as a transparent attempt to job us. Fortunately, we knew the latter but not the former, making it a wash.
But here's the thing: if the people who are in the best position of anyone on the planet to know the answer to a question can't answer it... Well, maybe it isn't such a great question. Asking "Has DCist or Metblogs used the word 'penis' more?" is a great way to prove how clever the question-writer is (clever enough to use the word penis, apparently), but not actually fun for anyone else. At all.
The beauty of trivia nights — aside from having an excuse to sit still and drink heavily — is the sensation that SHIT I should know this. It's on the tip of my tongue, I saw a terrible movie on TBS that mentioned it once, crap, what's the name of that actress? Man, before that last beer I would have gotten this in a second. Shit. I really wish I was allowed to text message my buddy. He would totally know this.
To be fair, there were a few questions that fit this bill. The celebrity suicide round? Inspired. But when most rounds of ten questions end with teams getting less than four points, something is wrong. You're turning it into a crapshoot. And making an impossible question true or false doesn't make the situation any better — it just makes me wonder why I'm wasting my time trying to guess an answer.
But in the end, Metblogs legitimately claimed their triumph. I certainly won't begrudge them that — I truly believe the questions were just as terrible for them as they were for us. And I don't mind losing; I kind of expected to. I just wish I didn't somehow feel implicated in ruining the evening of everyone else in that bar via involuntary internarcissism.
Next time: an impartial arena. And, hopefully, a less masturbatory one.
UPDATE: Now that I've had time to let the bitter tastes of beer and defeat fade from my mouth, maybe I should temper my remarks. Although harder than I considered optimal for fun, the first six rounds were well-themed and not, say, the type of thing that could be used to justify their author's indefinite detention and torture in Cuba (it's to protect us all!). That seventh round, though...
Back to Python! Our previous installments involved installing Python and variables, control structures and functions. I know that the control structure entry might have been intimidating to the non-programmers who are reading this. All I can suggest is that you ask questions — and not worry about it too much. Programming languages are meant to be readable by humans; with enough exposure to them, they do eventually begin to make an intuitive sort of sense. In the short term, I'd suggest that you just try to figure out what this (intentionally inefficient) code does:
i = 1
while(i<10):
if((i%2)==0):
print i
i = i + 1
(remember: % is the modulus sign — x % y gives you the remainder from dividing x by y)
If you feel comfortable reading that code, I'd say we can proceed. If not, ask me some questions via comments or email.
Via Slashdot: a Cincinatti company is requiring that its employees receive injected RFID chips in order to gain access to the corporate datacenter. Workers won't get fired if they say no, but one has to wonder what effect declining the injection might have on a person's career. Not a good one, I'm guessing.
I should work myself up into a righteous dudgeon, throw around some inflammatory superlatives and send everyone to the EFF's donation page. But honestly, I just feel a sort of giddy thrill about this. It's the same feeling as in the moment when a rollercoaster crests its first hill: we're on the verge of something bad, and completely powerless to stop it.
And, on that dogmatic pro-privacy note, allow me to inform you that we're now tracking you in new and terrifying ways. Well, okay, not that terrifying — we just put our RSS feed into Feedburner. Look! It's all pretty now!
I set up a forwarder so that you shouldn't have to change any settings in your newsreader. But I thought I'd mention the change, lest anyone freak out over the newly omnipresent Feedburner URLs in our RSS.
i don't mean to be cynical (she said, smirking evilly, because she almost always does). the chi-town daily news seems like a good organization, intent on focusing on citizen journalism, which i, as a new media person, should totally be behind (though i must say that sites that think they can exist solely on the efforts of citizens' articles, without any work or input or guidance or pieces by editors, are doomed to fail - though it doesn't appear as if this site isn't trying to do that).
but i just find it funny that, without fail, almost every news story published on the site every day is written by somebody from the medill news service. (we're a free wire service that sends out stories to several local newspaper clients.) that doesn't seem very citizen-journalism-y to me...
retarded articles about love and the modern condition abound: must be near valentine's day! the ny times gets in on it with insipid thoughts about love from the "modern love" editor and an article about chemistry.com, a new counterpart to match.com wherein people submit answers to a questionnaire designed by an anthropologist who says your perfect mate can be determined on a basis of biology and chemistry.
my favorite thus far, though, is this love match database provided by the washington post that tells you if you and your "potential mate" are destined for love or heartbreak based on your signs. mostly i just like it because this analysis of capricorn+aquarius (mine and tommy's signs, respectively) says that tommy has a "desultory, mystical mind" without a "stitch of logic." (this will frustrate me, apparently, because i am stubborn and regimented and extraordinarily anal, basically, which i guess i cannot disagree with.)
please, do me a favor: if you live in the lakeview area, stop in at cafe latakia at 3204 belmont. it is my favorite little wifi coffee shop in the world, and yet, i am generally almost always THE ONLY PERSON IN HERE and i'm terrified it will go under if the owner doesn't start getting some business soon.
the place is a charmer. it's beautifully decorated, with plenty of small tables, comfy chairs and sage-green paint on the walls. the owner is middle eastern or eastern european - somehow i haven't quite figured that out yet - so he's always got delicious mediterranean pastries in his glass counter. you can get delicious turkish coffee, or a wonderful affogato (vanilla ice cream drowned in espresso), and when it gets warmer, he'll have a selection of ice cream and gelato available. the rest of the coffee choices are pretty basic, and not any cheaper than starbucks, but it is illy coffee, and therefore pure goodness. plus free wifi abounds, and the owner is just the nicest man ever. usually i am a mean, rushed, cynical person - i hate exchanging pleasantries with anyone outside of friends or people i am sucking up to - but somehow i don't mind having a 5-10 minute chat with him every time i come in and get settled down at my table to work. he remembers everything about me - asks how tommy is doing, asks how northwestern is treating me, asks jokingly if i've scored a job at the washington post yet.
there are a few drawbacks - the owner is the only employee, and can often take an agonizingly long time to make your drink if you order anything more complicated than a basic cup of coffee. the bathroom is weird and behind the counter, through the dank, messy back room and is very small and kind of creepy. but i figure that's just a result of the rehabbing process not being done yet.
anyway, i just learned today that his one-year anniversary of owning the cafe is coming up, and i would LOVE to start seeing more people in here. (i may be making this sound more dire than it is; i only come here on saturday mornings and the occasional weeknight, and he probably does better at different times of the week). so, all three-to-four of my chicago readers, i command you: come visit cafe latakia, near broadway and belmont. you'll enjoy it, i promise!
UPDATE: of course, in the process of writing this entry like 10 people have come in. he's fine. but still, come on by! it's a delightful little place.
As Ben pointed out, I promised an alternate solution to the programming task I gave at the end of the last installment of this little tutorial series. Now that I've been properly goaded, here it is.
CHICAGO -- Scheduled motion hearing for singer R. Kelly on child pornography charges. Judge Vincent Gaughan presides. 10 a.m. Criminal courthouse, 26th and California.
i would be there in a hot minute if i didn't have class. damn.
So the G gets an HDTV in her office. We have an HDTV here in the temporary office space, too, but it's kind of a letdown — it's out by the "CyberCafe" (= barstools and a Flavia machine) and is always tuned to CNN. Aside from sipping coffee while pondering what psychological defect could make a normal-seeming woman like Daryn Kagan volunteer to see Rush Limbaugh naked, there's not much entertainment to be had.
Still, the job is not without perks. Today we had to scan some user-submitted letters for objectionable content, which mean we had to make a list of stuff to flag. It's pretty great to be able to say "What about 'cocksucker'?" and have it be greeted as a valuable contribution to the meeting.
Dates with bad grammar. Yankees fans. Actors. Indecisive dates. ("Where do you want to go?" "I dunno, you?") A man who wears a backpack, or socks with his sandals. A woman who can't give good directions to her house. A man who likes pink drinks. A woman who drives a black Pontiac Grand Am with gold rims. A man who kisses you and says, "Yummy!" A woman who wears a tight leopard-print top.
"Any girl that orders a salad as her meal at dinner," says Koonal Gandhi, 27, who shares a place with Joe Peters in upper Northwest Washington. That's an indication she is "very self-conscious about either how she looks or eating in front of other people."
"I do have one guy who I actually stopped dating 'cause he didn't know what paella was," says Jenn Lee, a pediatrician who used to live in New York and now lives in Sterling. The gap in knowledge was a sign to her, she says, "that the guy wasn't cultured. How could you live in New York for 10 years and not experience paella?"
Denisa Canales has had a number of breakups; one because a guy was allergic to her cats, and one because she didn't trust a guy's pit bull. More recently, she left a guy over a crucial difference of opinion concerning her shoes.
(trust me, the shoes sound hideous.)
nothing really add to the article, except i found it pretty entertaining. that, and there's an anecdote in there about a guy who can't stand people who love mayonnaise. which i find telling, because approximately 80% of guys i've ever dated/liked cannot. stand. mayonnaise. they will visibly shudder at the mention of it. but me? i'm a mayo kind of gal. i'll slather it on anything remotely appropriate. it makes a sandwich that much tastier. you can even make delicious chocolate cakes with it. tommy is one of the people i've dated who hate the stuff, but yet, he manages to put up with me.
jeff's uncle made the AP wire, simply by getting married! how is that possible, you ask? because he is none other than the illustrious bill nye, the science guy. naturally:
Cellist Yo Yo Ma, accompanied by MIT Media Lab Professor Michael Hawley on the piano, performed a wedding march.
as noted in comments below, i stayed home sick today and have been using my ass-on-couch time to actually be productive and work on a number of assignments i have due for next week. unfortunately, my plan has been somewhat thwarted by, you guessed it, the Noisy Upstairs Neighbor. apparently he holds a job wherein he is required to a) stay at home all day b) do jumping jacks to a soundtrack of third eye blind for 7 hours straight.
my retaliation plan, put in effect 15 minutes ago?
playing belle and sebastian, really, really loud.
that's right, don't fuck with the motherfucking stuart murdoch. he will blow your ears out with pure cuteness.
looking for a new, fun, web-based calendar? give 30 boxes a try. it's more interesting than other web-based calendar apps out there in my opinion because of the social networking feature in which you can keep track of your buddies' schedules and vice versa. you can read a review of it here. let me know if you join so i can add you as a buddy!
UPDATE: actually, the more i browse this program the more i realize i probably won't use it that much unless it really gets a lot of other users that are my friends. the ajax stuff is neat but unless the social networking stuff (and yes i realize what a retarded buzzword that is) really pans out, it's not really better than any other calendar app out there...anyway, we'll see!
turns out abc was glad to have put a five-second delay on the rolling stone's performance tonight, because...
In "Start Me Up," ABC's editors silenced one word, a reference to a woman's sexual sway over a dead man. The lyrics for "Rough Justice" included a synonym for rooster that the network also deemed worth cutting out.
that is some creative rewriting by the AP reporter right there. i had no idea what in the world they could be talking about when they cited the "sexual sway over a dead man." turns out the lyric is actually (and i did not know this myself) "you make a dead man come."
thank god abc was thinking of the children!
anyway, both the rolling stones and the game sucked. on the other hand, how awesome was grey's anatomy?!
sad update from the bikini front: i stopped by the gap today and tried on the cute blue-and-white striped bathing suit top, and really, it just did not work. additionally, after hearing reports of poor quality from VS suits, i've decided not to go with that one, either. i know, it's tragic. surely i'll keep you updated if a new suit presents itself as a possibility.
but all was not lost! i came out of the gap with a cute new pair of flats (in black, not horrid pink), and an obsession with this tote, which was out of my price range. but i'll be keeping my eye on the sale page.
i know, now you all can rest easy, having been briefed on my saturday shopping activities. you're welcome.
merge points me towards the story of jodi wilgoren (the bureau chief of the nytimes in chicago, i think) and her name change. it's not just any old name change - she and her husband, unable to reconciles themselves with her taking on a new name or joining their names, combined their two last names to come up with an entirely new one. wilgoren+ruderman=rudoren.
Tradition hardly seemed enough reason for me to take his name, and I didn't want to have a different name from my future children. I imagined them asking why and realized the only possible answer was patriarchy. I didn't want my family founded on that principle. When I suggested that Gary put himself in my place — in the place of most women — facing the choice of abandoning his family name or of not having the same name as his kids, he eventually became a convert to combination.
is it just me, or is this ABSOLUTELY EFFING INSANE? first off, your progeny will have a lot more trouble finding out about you. i might not have known that my great-great grandfather was a chinese immigrant to san francisco who ended his life under a horse-drawn cart if he had changed "hoy" to, uh, "hoysomething else." second off, don't yall have ancestral pride? go andrews. it might not be the most original last name ever, but i like it. however, frankly, whenever the time comes for the scary marriage thing, i have no idea what i'm going to do. i can't see dropping my last name off into some void of never-to-be-seen-againness. the hyphenation thing just seems too cumbersome. and there is no way in hell i am making up a new last name. unless it is "awesome." but really, that is already implied.
sigh. i am sick, it is flurrying here in chicago, and i'm feeling a bit of travel wanderlust (or, more accurately, extreme nostalgia for italy) that i get from time to time. reading this post article on searching for truffles at restaurants in alba didn't help too much.
the post is doing a rather good job of informing readers about the magic of the piemonte region, the part of italy where turin is located and where the 2006 winter olympics will be taking place. they've got a blog going, and have had several articles and chats about the area. though piemonte is a fairly overlooked region amongst italy fanatics, it is one of the places not to be missed for food and wine, as i discovered during my year in milan through adolfo, the former librarian at the american school of milan.
ahh, adolfo. how to describe. physically, the best way i can think to conjure him up is have you picture bilbo baggins from the lord of the rings movie, except darker, with a round belly the size of a volkswagen beetle and an odd, hurky-jerky style of walking on his pencil-thin legs that was the result of serious back problems and some sort of disability. he was also perpetually cranky, with good due - he had been pushed out of his job as the school librarian by caroline, a perky-yet-psychotically-terrifying blond-frosted woman from arizona whose favorite thing to hiss was "AH-TEN-SHEE-OWN-AY" and "SEE-LENS-EE-OH, PER FAH-VOR-AY" to terrified children who spoke above a whisper while reading books. adolfo became the school's printer, responsible for making stacks of copies of lesson plans and math homework. his small, cramped printing room was in the hallway adjacent to the library, and always smelled faintly of cigar smoke. everybody, except caroline, who constantly looked at him as if he might off her one day with his cane (with good reason), adored adolfo.
I had three different people ask me what this shirt meant at Cue Bar tonight. Normally I'd spin this into a generic "kids these days" sort of complaint, but one of the questioners was a fucking bartender. Really now — bartenders should be able to do better than that. It's only been, what, half a year?
My HDTV hopes have, thus far, been foiled. I headed to Microcenter without calling to check availability — I've made the mistake of doing so in the past, and accidentally tipped off store employees to a great internet deal, prompting them to buy all the stock up before I can arrive. Sadly, it wouldn't have mattered this time: they were sold out. Even worse, there was a weird little guy there also looking for the deal who wanted to bond over our shared LCD lust. No thanks, guy. Don't you realize we're competitors?
I'll try again on Saturday, but I'd say my odds aren't good. But that's alright; Matt's actual HDTV is nicer than my theoretical one, anyway. Besides, there's only one purchase I really want to make for the Superbowl:
Behold! A menu item so large and indulgent that it actually has to be cross-referenced with two other parts of the menu. It's meta-gluttony. I really, really hope this wing place is still in business. I'd say it's even money that a wrongful death suit forced them to close shop since I got this menu.
But although my refreshment strategy is pretty well mapped, I'm still not sure who to root for in the actual game. As previously mentioned, Charles makes a compelling case for Seattle. On the other hand, I suddenly find myself a fan of Ben Roethlisblogger ("had to do media it sux lol"). I'm seriously considering betting some money with a yet-to-be-determined disreputable internet gambling operation, just so I know who I want to win. Fantasy football was enough to get me interested in non-Redskins football; wasting $50 on the Seahawks might be enough to make me actually pay attention to parts of the telecast that aren't commercials.
Four: the bullet entry where I abandon this stupid numbering scheme. But check it out: $560, well-reviewed 30" LCD HDTV, Microcenter (B&M only). Who am I to resist? So much for the new austerity.
Verizon FiOS service blocks more ports than regular DSL. This is done to keep you from running a webserver on your home connection — the link is fast enough that you could get away with it for small sites, and Verizon doesn't want to supply that much bandwidth unless you're paying for business-class service. Fair enough, but it puts a damper on my hopes of fiber service — I like to run SSH over 443, since it provides a nice mixture of accessibility-from-behind-firewalls and not-getting-attacked-by-chinese-hackers-every-night. Dreams, shattered, etc. Sigh.
Last night's Hold Steady show: good! Also, blog-heavy — it was fun hanging out with the Pygmalii, Leafblower and DCeiver*. The actual show was very good, if not quite the religious experience I'd been hoping for. But if you wish that Springsteen was actually relevant for your generation (and you should — I'm looking at you, Capps), you probably ought to check out a HS tour date.
UPDATE 2: * and Drew! Shit. Sorry about that, man. Without a pre-show gmail correspondence to prime me for it, my beer-soaked neurons simply aren't up to the task of composing an accurate roll call. Also, I'm a jerk.
I'm planning to go to the Hold Steady show tonight, which has gotten me thinking about the band, which has gotten me thinking about its music, which has made me realize that it's a real tragedy that their latest album's final track didn't exist when the title for this article was being composed.
Yeah, I know. I can't believe I'm this immature, either.
one of the moments that really struck me as absurdly bizarre in last night's SOTU (not that i watched it; just read the transcript) was bush's claim that we need to " to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research -- human cloning in all its forms -- creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos."
yes, those pesky half-cats-half-men. for anyone who was as confused as i was when i read that, there's more info on the phenomenon (chimeras) here and here.
The Post has a pretty slick Flash app that allows you to listen to the finalists in the competition to be the new voice of our subway system. It's a neat idea for a contest, but the finalists are pretty uninspired (why does that sound familiar?).
Jill Apple
Telemarketers are told to smile when they speak; you can hear the difference. You can tell that Jill knows this. But really, who the fuck likes happy people? Typical metro scenario: it's 9AM, and you have just literally descended into the underworld in order to exchange eight more hours of your life for the gift of your family not starving. You aren't going to want to be smiled at.
Steve Broide
Steve sounds like he got bored halfway through the 5 second recitation task, and consequently defaulted to a weird, unbecoming valley-girl lilt. I want someone with a little more focus. Eyes on the prize, Steve.
Linda Carducci
Linda has a pleasantly artificial tone that reminds me of the voice of the computer on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Which, I should mention, I've been watching a lot of since G4 started showing it. It's never very entertaining (dilemma dilemma, WOW let's bask in the humanistic glow of our deus ex machina) and never very original (energy being, energy being, holodeck gone awry, energy being, wesley fucks something up, wesley fucks something up and becomes an energy being, etc.). Yet I cannot turn away. So thumbs up to Majel Linda. ST:TNG perpetually disappoints, but I somehow can't avoid it. This makes it a perfect touchstone for Metro.
Sarah Fraser
Yikes. Listening to Sarah makes me immediately want to find her boyfriend, who I've never met, and complain that he never hangs out anymore, and is he really sure Sarah is right for him? Don't get me wrong, she's a great girl, I just think you shouldn't limit yourself to one person right now. I bet she could make some other transit system really happy. Okay, fine, you're right, it's none of my business. But seriously dude, don't bring her to St. Patrick's Day. That totally sucked last time.
Jon Garcia
This guy's sample sounds spliced together. Could he really not produce more than two usable words per take? How many studio hours are you prepared to book, WMATA?
John Howell
NOW we're fucking talking. I'll ruin the suspense now and tell you that this guy is the closest to a cowboy of anyone in the contest, and therefore the best. "The doors are closin'... well sir, I reckon every man has seen a few doors close in his day. Ain't nothin much t'be done about it, 'cept to cinch your saddle, lift your head and keep on movin' to the center of that train we call America."
Randi Miller
Randi gets a little exasperated when it's time to ask me to move to the center of the car. I can't say that I blame her. She's probably seen me; she knows I'm a perennial offender. She's tried being nice, but if this keeps up there are going to have to be consequences, buster.
Carol Rabel
Carol sounds like the computerized countdown voice that's used in movies to heighten tension when it looks like something terrible is about to happen but then WHEW it turns out it doesn't. When I close my eyes and listen to her, I see Keifer Sutherland furiously wiping sweat from his brow, intently manipulating an impossible nest of wires and cursing the countdown voice under his breath. "The doors are closing, Mr. President!" Yeah, I could live with that.
Angela Stevens
This woman is clearly insane.
Mary Whittington
Despite being totally unrelated to the Old West, I think I might like Mary's take the best. It sounds like she thought of something funny in the middle of saying it. I don't know what (someone getting caught in the door?), but I like it. She's definitely trying to sell me something, but not in an unpleasant way. And I imagine that as soon as she finishes saying her piece, she steps away with arms spread and the camera pans out to reveal a vast panorama of buffet tables, or biomedical researchers, or cruise ship. Maybe all three! Whatever it is, sign me up.
definitely worst part so far of reporting: going to a press conference about a big federal indictment, finding one of the defendant's phone number through some random internet research, calling him up and discovering he didn't even know he was being indicted by patrick effing fitzgerald. then having to tell him he was being indicted by patrick effing fitzgerald.
surprisingly, the response was "no comment."
that really sucked.
UPDATE: the case had to do with online piracy. you can read the tribune's account (they are speedy motherfuckers) here. if i'm lucky and they want it, my story will be appearing in the glorious nw indiana times tomorrow.
