brief interruption of my hiatus to note a few things:

why on god's green earth does floss cost so much? five dollars? SERIOUSLY?

MAN has it been busy. I'll spare you the boring details, but things have been a little rough. Working on a project where priorities are largely defined by the sponsoring organization's primary donor and his wife can be tiring. When wealthy Mrs. X asks for the website to be rose-scented, and intermediary Y decides he'd better hop to it or risk the collapse of the entire enterprise, humble web programmer Z has some long nights ahead of him.

But, with a minor milestone accomplished, I can return to the lovely internet for a little bit before attending to Crushingly Urgent Project #2 in a few hours. There's been a lot of good stuff that I've missed:

1. DCeiver's analysis of the Post Best Bets is predictably excellent. But I do have to give the GoGs credit for making their own picks. The merit of those selections aside (they seem fine), it's a shrewd move to point out the stupidity of WaPo poll participants before the rest of the internet can snarkily associate your paper with the Cheesecake Factory. I hereby suggest "blogproofing" as the technical term. Expect an RFC from the W3C shortly.
2. You might remember that AOL stupidly released a bunch of search data last week. It included the search query, the date, and a unique identifying number corresponding to the user who made the search. By tieing search queries together by those numbers, some users could be identified. The New York Times managed to positively identify an individual pretty quickly. But the real fun is coming now, as other organizations pore over the data to expose just what kind of creepy weirdos populate the internet. Something Awful has a pretty great collection of examples (text, but still probably NSFW).
3. George Allen got into trouble! This is fantastic, and not just because he appears to be a racist asshole who needs to be kept off the national stage. No, it's much more urgent than that: if his presidential ambitions aren't ended by these sorts of public displays of awfulness, I'd have to see Virginia political expert and UVA professor Larry Sab/ato on television for an entire electoral race. I'll do whatever it takes to prevent that grim, dystopian future from coming about.
4. Now for some geeky tech complaining: how did this make it to TUAW? For those who aren't interested enough to follow the link, it's a means of stripping iTunes copy protection by embedding an AAC file purchased from the iTunes Music Store into an iMovie project. You can then get it decompressed to an AIFF (like a WAV, but on the mac), which can be recompressed into a copy-protection-free MP3.

   But you can only do one song at a time. And because you're recompressing, it's a lossy process. In other words, this is a really stupid, inefficient way to remove DRM from ITMS songs. I haven't checked in on the HYMN Project recently, but if I wanted to un-DRM a bunch of songs, that's where I'd start. And if that no longer works, I'd see about writing an Applescript that methodically moves through an iTunes playlist, playing songs, capturing the output via Soundflower, then compressing to MP3. You could even have it automatically use the existing song metadata in the ID3 and filename. Alternately, you might look into burning to a virtual CD-ROM, which you could then rip (I'm not sure how feasible this is in OS X, but it's certainly doable in Windows).

   So the iMovie method: stupid. Don't bring that weak-ass shit in here, TUAW. That's right, I said it.

5. This hack walkthrough was linked off of the Slashdot frontpage. But it doesn't make any goddamn sense. If I understand correctly, step 1 is to fool the user into trying to log into the target website, except on your own server. This is called phishing, and it's not very complex — it's just tricking people.

   But instead of simply capturing the login and password before sending the user along, the author embeds some Javascript that eventually shows up on the target site (when the user's login request is sent in, via the phishing server). That Javascript sends the cookie that maintains the user's session back to the phishing computer, allowing the author to hop onto the user's session.

   The thing is, by that point he already has the user's login and password. He can make new session cookies whenever he wants — the cross-site-scripting stuff is completely and utterly pointless. Worse that pointless, it's stupid, since session cookies generally expire much faster than login credentials.

   From there he goes on to pwnz0rz the website, thanks to some security lapses that one would only find in high school CS classes. It's all kind of ludicrous. I'd really like to see an XSS attack example that does something useful. And hey, maybe I'm missing something here. But as far as I can tell, this article is kind of like writing up "How To Rob A Bank", with step 1 defined as "assume the security system is off and all the doors are unlocked."

life insurance commercial.

scene: quaint smalltown main strip. autumn. leaves falling. laughing grandmother, mother and daughter get out of car.

"grandma!" the little girl calls as she and the mother head into a shop. "come on!"

grandma smiles and makes her way to the parking meter.

"just one second, dear!"

she chuckles as the timer clicks to expire on the parking meter. "ahh," she smiles, patting the top of the meter. "wouldn't it be great if life were like this parking meter? if it were, i could just put a quarter in and stay here with my family. forever."

her face grows ominous.

"but IT'S NOT."

my daily jonesing for caffeine has led to the folks at both dunkin donuts and starbucks knowing my name and what my order is. which is nice, but the fabulously kind and wondeful guy at starbucks has gone from calling me "catherine" to "cathy," which....frankly, it's unacceptable. every time i get called "cathy" i shudder uncontrollably. it's not the name so much as it is me. ok, it's the name. i hate it, and i never have been or will be a cathy. throughout my ten years on the internet and participation in various mailing lists, IRC chat rooms, millions of IM sessions and blogging communities, i have become ok with "C," "cat" and "cath." but cathy simply WILL NOT STAND. at this point, though, it really just seems obnoxious to correct the starbucks guy. so each morning i suffer in silence. i know. i can feel your sympathy through the tubes of the internet. it's a difficult life.

UPDATE: relatedly, this article on a starbucks closing in new jersey is kind of hysterical. the starbucks is closing because the building it's in is slated to be replaced by condos and other retail, and the people talk talk wistfully about their starbucks memories like it is an old-timey store that's been around for a hundred years. just, like - did starbucks really influence the narrative of your life? are you really THAT sad? i find it hard to believe. exceprt:

Jeremy Bilas, 28, and his wife, Melanie, reminisced about going to the Morristown Starbucks for sandwiches and espressos before closing on their house, and about sipping hot chocolate at the coffee shop during Christmas season, before going to cut down their Christmas tree.

"We had to get one last coffee here today," Melanie Bilas said, as she shared an iced caramel macchiato with her husband. "We'll probably have to get our own coffee machine and make our own coffee from now on."

tommy and i have long made fun of that flomax ad, which ends with two older gentlemen toasting enormous bottles of water in the backseat of a car. because, see, they don't have to pee every two seconds now. and they can drink all the water. but i never paid attention to the copy of the ad until today, when i heard the voiceover say, "here's...TO MEN. here's to taking longer car rides with fewer pit stops."

it was just weird. why this emphasis on masculinity? i have never associated bladder control with manliness before, but perhaps that will have to change.

UPDATE: it seems especially weird as, upon seeing the commercial again, i caught that side effects include "a decrease in semen." that's not very manly.

i'm having a hard time deciding which subjects of recent nytimes articles are more reprehensible. by the way, this is a decision i am forced to make almost weekly. anyway, in one corner we have the nyc hipsters who are drinking rose by the bucketful. sample exceprts:

“A lot of younger people are buying rosés,” he said, adding that many men are no longer embarrassed to be seen drinking a pink wine. “Guys will bring it to rooftop parties and backyard barbecues. I’ve been putting rosé in an empty Gatorade bottle and drinking it in the park.”

...“I used to hate rosé,” said Alex Kapranos, the lead singer of the rock band Franz Ferdinand and a food columnist for The Guardian in London. “It was a Blue Nun-style secretary’s-night-out drink, and that put me off it. But a couple years ago I had a cold bottle on a hot night, and it was marvelous.”

Still, its old reputation was hard to shake. Jay McInerney, the wine columnist of House & Garden, compared rosé to Jackie Collins novels and Jerry Bruckheimer movies in his August column. “There was a sense that pink wine couldn’t be serious,” said Mr. McInerney, a rosé fan, who has been trying to lead a revival for years. “People were afraid of looking unsophisticated by drinking rosé. It wasn’t red. It wasn’t white. They didn’t know what to do with it.”

But now, among a certain group of global style setters ordering rosé is a sign of being in the know. Dropping the name of a Provençal rosé like Domaine Tempier can be code for having recently frolicked in St.-Tropez or Cap d’Antibes, where rosé accompanies leisurely seaside lunches. Even Pamela Anderson, in the days before she wed Kid Rock in St.-Tropez, was snapped by paparazzi on a yacht, a glass of rosé in hand.

EVEN pamela anderson?!? the height of class!

in the other corner, we have the "boat ravers" of chicago, making the waters of lake michigan even nastier:

In one undulating line of boats, several small to midsize yachts were bound together in the center of one cluster. Banners spelling out the name of local clubs hung from their sides, and coordinated sound systems blared music from local D.J.’s.

In the surrounding boats, bikini-clad women tried to stay upright as they danced on slippery runners or hopped from boat to boat looking for better drinks. Others tumbled onto giant floating trampolines or fired four-foot squirt guns at one another. On a few boats, grills were being fired up.

Fueled by wealthy boat owners and the young women they and their boats can attract, the daytime parties have become a magnet for local nightclub owners and promoters who use the scene to draw people to their clubs once the sun sets. Last year club owners upped the ante by ferrying D.J.’s out to spin during the day.

“It’s like maximum exposure,” Jason Kalendr, 28, better known in the club scene as DJ Kalendr, said during a break from spinning tracks one recent Saturday, his baseball cap turned slightly sideways. “Everyone who is in this business is out on the lake.” He, like any well-known Chicago D.J., spins for free on the lake.

it's almost impossible to choose! what's really amazing about these articles is that they overshadowed even the asshattery of the past couple of weeks' modern loves, a seriously amazing feat. anyway, in this case, i think i'm going to have to go with the rose-drinking hipsters. the boat ravers can't help being douchebags; they were practically born that way. it is sad they must take their activities out onto the water instead of remaining in their normal dens of terrible clubs that charge $20 for a cover; but this is america, after all. we cannot hold them back. but choosing to drink pink wine? because of its "cachet," because it won't get you as wasted as other drinks, because it's a code for the south of france? UNACCEPTABLE. especially unacceptable are those who have been "trying to lead a rose revival for years." in response i am going to go drink a bottle of red and 12 sparks.

check out this gorgeous ring my coworker k. made herself at a metalsmithing class. how awesome would it be to be able to make your own jewelry like that? i've been googling metalsmithing classes in the d.c. area, but can only find ones in the suburbs and a spectacularly expensive one at the corcoran that only meets in the AM. any tips?

wow, yesterday night was a SPECTACULAR evening. let me detail its events to you:

1. my italian tutor stood me up/forgot about our lesson

2. it was pouring rain like it can only pour rain it atlanta

3. this thunderstorm apparently caused all the traffic lights in all of atlanta to go out, which meant bumper to bumper gridlock as well as playing various games of chicken as i tried to dart my way through intersections where no one seemed to care that cars from the opposing lanes were trying to get through

4. i was desperately low on gas, so i made the grievous, grievous error of attempting to stop at the BP near my house, aka the Gas Station of Doom. i consider it a lucky trip to fill up the tank when a) i find a pump that is working b) i don't get hit up by some sketch dude for money to enable his multiple trips to the package store across the street. really, you need just exactly $3.89 to fill up the air in the tires of that car over there that you say is yours? funny how that's the same price as a small bottle of vodka.

5. the trip to the Gas Station of Doom was, in this case, a mistake. the two pumps i tried weren't working. well enough, i thought. let's try the chevron down the road.

6. the chevron down the road had eight swat cars with screaming sirens flashing on top of them in front of it. i guess there was some sort of bust going on there. i don't know. i didn't care. i was like, fuck this. i need me some gas and it is probably safer than it's ever been with all these police around. bring it, chevron!

7. no pumps at the chevron with the swat bust going on worked.

8. i drove to a gas station 10 minutes out of my way. it always looked bright and welcoming when i passed it on my way. i soon realized that this was a facade, as EACH OF THE TWELVE PUMPS had signs taped to them that said either "out of order!" or "no gas!" with cheery exclamation points. which, what the fuck. WHY DO YOU EVEN EXIST?!?

9. i drove to another gas station (my fourth attempt, NOT THAT I WAS COUNTING) even further out of the way. at this point i was dead on the inside. if this works, i thought mechanically, i will not kill anyone. if it doesn't work, i will kill everyone, and it will be pleasing.

10. hallelujah, it worked! nobody has to die! but as i stood there pumping the gas in the sketchy shadows of the sketchy gas station in the sketchy neighborhood, an incredibly scary looking hobo noticed me and rode up to me on his bike. (wtf? when did hobos get bikes? hobos on wheels. a weird occurrence.)

"excuse me, miss?" he called.

now, i have a policy of never giving money to panhandlers, but i always try to be polite about it and brush them off with a curt smile and a "no, i'm sorry." but this hobo was unlucky. he did not know i had just been on a trip through gas station purgatory. he did not know that i was on the verge of sticking a gas nozzle up somebody's ass.

"hey there, miss!" he called again.

i turned around with my arms crossed and looked him straight in the eye. i shook my head very slowly, and i growled, low, "no."

the hobo stopped his bike, said quickly, "ok, sorry miss! have a nice night!" turned around, and hightailed it out of there.

11. i came home to find the power semi-out - that is, the lights sort of work at a weird half dimness, but my alarm clock, my fan, and the internet are not working. but my laptop (and thank goodness, my ability to watch episodes of the wire) is fine. i don't understand why, but tommy told me it has something to do with hertzes. megahertzes? voltage? laptops? i don't understand.

12. THE WORST PART OF ALL: i have no beer in the house.

i swear to god, i take back all the complaining about d.c. not being a bike-friendly city, or everything negative i ever said about the el or the metro. they are shining examples of public transporation that can do no wrong and smell very nice and are perfect. where as driving can go suck a big one.

i did the unthinkable today: i left something on top off my car and drove off with it still there. not that it's so unthinkable, i just thought stuff like that really only happened in the movies. it was especially sad because it was a delicious chicken sandwich i had bought after a four-mile run, and it was important because i have no food in the house except cheese and tortillas, and thus i was forced to make myself a cheese and tortilla sandwich for dinner tonight. it was delish. really. also, i'm lying.

anyway, as i was driving off, i must have been distracted by the TERRIFYING HORDES of mariah carey fans surrounding the philips arena, which is adjacent to the cnn center and where that unstoppable force of hair extensions, thighs and sparkles is apparently having a concert tonight. surprisingly, many of the female concert attendees seemed to be accompanied by their boyfriends. true love is going to a mariah carey concert with your special lady friend. also, many of the female concert attendees - in fact, most of them - were wearing astoundingly short miniskirts with astoundingly high heels. ladies. i am all for miniskirts, and i am all for heels, but when you wear them together, you know you can only look like a ho.

these shoes for fall: hideous or TOTALLY AWESOME?

sometimes it's a fine line. and i've been at work for 10 hours now so i'm not really clear in the head.

tommy's mom's accident is so terrible (though from talking to both him and beth they sound like they are handling it so remarkably well and capably), and i am so far away from charlottesville/d.c., and i feel so impotent, that i don't know what to do, except send their mom terrifying amounts of garish get-well balloons (since flowers aren't allowed. neither are latex balloons. as stanley said, "Anti-latex, anti-flowers... If these hospital folks are anti-Barry-White, I move to label them "anti-gettin'-it-on.").

...oh yeah, and talk about hemorrhoids.

remember a while back i posted about HEAD ON which you APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD, and which is slowly driving me down a path of insanity? i seriously think their strategy is to actaully cause seizures/headaches through their incessant commercials and drive the market for the product up that way.

well, it gets worse. a few days ago i noticed on tv an ad for activon, for arthritis pain, and you know what? you apply it directly where it hurts. of course.

AND THEN, even worse!!! the other day came on a commercial by the same people for, you guessed it, hemorrhoid cream. GAH!H!H!H! freedom from hemorrhoids? FREEdHEM hemorrhoid cream. freedom from hemorrhoids? FREEdHEM hemorrhoid cream. freedom from hemorrhoids? FREEdHEM hemorrhoid cream.

if you would like to join me on my trip to crazytown, you can see the whole series of commercials here.

okay, so, yeah. i am making a profile on match.com. BUT. i am doing it so i can see what profiles on match.com look like so i can help a friend create her sure-to-be-alluring profile. already, it's off to an auspicious start:

The username you selected is already in use.
Please enter another username, or choose one of the usernames we've suggested.

* catherinea531
* catherineapookie

just for the record, catherineapookie is going to be my new IM name.

UPDATE:
friend: um..yeah they suggested (name)bug for me
friend: i think i'll keep that one
pablohoney: hahah
friend: cause...just....yeah.
friend: that's me
pablohoney: wtf like those are the most stereotypically retarded names ever
pablohoney: POOKIE? BUG?!?!
friend: hhaaha
friend: how about qtpie
pablohoney: next it's going to be like, catherinea was not available, would you like catherineschmoopie

so the past couple of days, npr has had those great couple of pieces on foreign service officers and their day to day lives. today? a piece on stretching for the elderly and why some people can jump high, delivered by two of the most annoying-voiced npr correspondents ever.

seriously now. ah well. somebody on the itunes shared music network has a lot of lyle lovett albums, and that is washing away all the nasal-voiced bad memories.

the past two mornings npr has had a couple of interesting pieces on life in the foreign service. having heard stories growing up from my grandparents and mother (my grandfather was a career foreign service officer and ambassador, from tunisia to saudi arabia to colombia to kuwait), and being friends with KG, i know the work of a foreign service officer is not always as romantic as it may seem to outsiders. and it can be particularly hard on children and spouses. anyway, i recommend listening.

on the advice of tommy i downloaded adium to manage all of my many, many instant messaging accounts (well, three, really. gtalk and two AIMs). and i like it. but i have a question - for the life of me i can't figure out how to set up alerts on people. i use alerts on a number of folks - family, coworkers, friends i like knowing are online so i can chat with them - but i am adium dumb and can't find out how to do them. not even google or adium help is helping me. any suggestions?

UPDATE: nevermind! literally right after i posted this i figured it out. am dumb.

UPDATE II: i should mention that i've more or less been converted to macs. i use my own at work now as much if not more than the PC, and after abusing tommy's this past weekend, i like them a lot. now if cnn would just pay me and i would stop spending money on multiple plane tickets back to d.c., i'd have one in my hot little hands right now.

also while i'm at it, here are my firefox tabs:

MIGHT I BE ABOUT TO BUY A DRESS FROM FOREVER 21? i might be. and if so, i blame the governess. ask HER about it.

tommy's sister beth posts on the trials and tribulations of her retainer and subsequent visits to her orthodontist, which makes me want to ask gross retainer advice of the internet. who doesn't have that feeling from time to time?

anyway, my orthdontist owned my soul for nearly six years - yes, i had braces from fifth to nearly tenth grade, and there was fun stuff before and after that - teeth pullings, TMJ issues, all the basic hilarity. apparently i have an incredibly small mouth, so all my teeth were majorly effed up. i still have nightmares about rubber bands and metal palette expanders that my mother had insert a key into every day to, you know, expand my mouth. when i was let loose from his shiny metal grip, i was given a set of retainers that was plastic and served me well for a couple of years. i took care of them; they took care of me. my tiny teeth in my tiny mouth stayed beautifully straight.

of course, then came college, and boyfriends, and drinking. the combination of all three proved deadly for my teeth - i sure as hell wasn't going to stick in my retainer when i a) was drunk off my head b) was staying the night at my new boyfriend's that i was eager to impress and i certainly wasn't going to whip out my geeky retainer. and so, the retainer, it languished in its sad little bright pink case. where...it got kind of gross. i don't know what happened to it. i don't think it was mold. it was...something. tooth fairy dust. yes, that's it! or residual plaque and nastiness? maybe more likely.

anyway i still wore my retainer once in a while, but i can no longer ignore the fact that my bottom row of teeth are getting scarily more crooked. soon i will be back to the situation where two of my teeth actcually lived behind the rest of them. so i'm wearing my retainer pretty regularly. but it is the nast. and i am repulsed every time i put it in. as i well should be. does anybody have any suggestions that don't involve me going to a new orthodontist and getting an expensive new retainer made? perhaps voodoo magic? seducing a rogue dentist? anything? because i'm getting concerned my retainer will soon grow legs and walk away.

a couple of people have asked me about the design. well, i'm here to tell you: i was inspired by/ripped off the v/ox blog. sorry v/ox dudes. except for the green, which i picked at random and has the magical ability of looking like a different color on every monitor i view it on. the header font is poynter agate comp, which i used because i used that a lot when i was designing pages for last quarter's project (cause it's a startribune.com font) and i like it. i had wanted to use that for the post titles, too, but tommy didn't have it on his computer and he was the one who implemented it so i believe we're using minion myriad. the header is temporary until brilliance strikes us, which, seeing the rate we move on blog stuff, will be two years from now. which reminds me that the blog's four-year anniversary is coming up, which: whoa. there'll be candles and cake and stuff, don't you worry.

some small fireworks went off near reagan just as my plane touched down last night. besides the worry factor in people, uh, setting off fireworks near an airport, it was pretty awesome.

my favorite lede of the day, by far:

Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilised remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom".

the article goes on to reveal these interesting finds:

Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.

"Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines (fangs) like wolves," Archer told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

Vertebrate palaeontologist Sue Hand said modern kangaroos look almost nothing like their ferocious forebears, which lived between 10 million and 20 million years ago.

The species found at the dig had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh", Hand said.

The team also found prehistoric lungfish and large duck-like birds.

"Very big birds ... more like ducks, earned the name 'demon duck of doom', some at least may have been carnivorous as well," Hand told ABC radio.

awesome. via more patriotic than you, who's got a detailed illustration of the duck.

This is why I don't like Sudoku. It's a puzzle that isn't complex enough to hide its plodding, algorithmic nature. There's a discrete set of steps that one can employ to solve every one. Once that becomes clear, it ceases to be a brain teaser and simply becomes a mechanical routine you have to go through. Why not just use or build a machine to do it for you? Or better yet, not do it at all?

This is also the reason that I no longer have much respect for Will Shortz. Computer-assisted though it may be, editing crossword puzzles requires knowledge, finesse, and cleverness — the clues don't write themselves, after all (although I imagine there's a database of frequently-used ones employed to flesh out the puzzle after the original clues have been entered and the computer has arranged them — any way you slice it, puzzle editor is probably a pretty cushy job). But by hitching his wagon to the Sudoku craze, he's pretty well surrendered any pretense of curatorial merit that he might have claimed before. Are we really supposed to believe that these Sudokus can help you unwind, but these Sudokus are optimized for the beach?

Give me a fucking break. There's no creative act here: to make one of these puzzles, one simply has to run a program and enter a weight value to determine how many squares remain blank (with that value lying in the range [solvable-solved)). It's as simple as that. I imagine there are other, more tedious ways to generate these puzzles — maybe Shortz uses those methods, although I have a hard time imagining that it affects the final product very much.

I suppose I wouldn't be able to resist attaching my name to a machine that prints free money, either. But I'd probably try to keep my name in a slightly more humble font size.

i wasn't going to link it out of respect to patient confidentiality and the troubles he had with his last blog, but it's too good to not. a good friend of tommy's and mine from college who must be close to being a real doctor by now (how does all that stuff work? surprisingly, my intake of scrubs and grey's anatomy has not really educated me on that whole process) is blogging again, and it's great. who else could write so hysterically on rectal exams? not me!

Perhaps the largest apology I owe is to the numerous people I have rectalized over the past two weeks. You know who you are. Even more deserving of my guilt are those I had to perform multiple rectal exams on because of errors I made in the initial process. To the woman with a history of gastric ulcer who presented with melena, I'm sorry I didn't go deep enough the first time. To the nursing home paraplegic patient with colitis, I'm sorry that I accidentally smeared the sample on the wrong side of the guaiac card. To the young man with a Dieulafoy's ulcer, I'm sorry I failed to realize that there were no cards in the room until after I performed the exam. And to myself, I'm sorry that I took off my glove prematurely after my very first exam, and was holding the guaiac card in my bare hands asking an attending to confirm the negative result before he pointed out to me that I should wash my hands twenty times over. Again, that's disgusting. Additionally, I apologize for the fact that I can never remain completely silent during a rectal exam and instead either make an incredibly awkward comment ("This is why I became a doctor" or "This is less fun for me than it is for you") or make oochy-ouchy noises reminiscent of everyone's favorite gynecological surgeon.

All it needs are some dancing hamsters. Warning: link will bring you to a page with sound and ridiculousness.

Via Mike via Carey.

we here are the #1 result for "too drunk at wedding."

it was actually a post about jason and corbin's wedding, though it could have applied to ryan and lisa's, or david and heather's. or, you know, ANY WEDDING I GO TO. two exceptions: tommy's cousin's wedding in vermont, because, you know, got to at least attempt to come off well for the relatives; and tommy's mormon friend's wedding. where there was a) no beer b) no dancing c) only rows and rows of bottled root beer. that was a fun one.

holy crap. there is very little that can make me laugh to tears at 6:30 in the morning, but i think official blogcrush fontana labs, in the greatest blog-return ever, might have hit upon it. may i present you with rapebear.

UPDATE: as an aside, you should go through and read that blogcrush link. i forgot that was the night somebody got "i heart pumping" written on his face, along with a borf tag on the arm. it was wonderful.

I went to the barbershop in the lobby of the office today. It was a weird departure from my normal national haircut franchise habits. The place was operated half by authentic-looking old coots and half by the sort of intense Asian women that tend to staff the low end of the haircut market. I got one of the latter.

But that wasn't the remarkable part. Rather, the bit that stuck out was the overpowering Republicanousity of the place. There was a picture of W on the wall; that was the first and most obvious sign. But once the haircut began, they started flooding forward:

• On the recent rain: When I timidly pushed the boring smalltalk about the weather forward by making a not-very-serious reference to global warming, the lady cutting my hair objected. "It's all God!" she insisted. "The rain, the wind, the water — we don't make any of that stuff. Whatever it is, it's God doing it." Okay.
• On Warren Buffett's Recent Charity: "There's something fishy. There's some gimmick, I just don't know what," observed the gentleman in the chair next to me.
• On the oil sands of Canada: There's a lot of them! It's going to be great.

Seriously, this all happened over the course of maybe, maybe twelve minutes. No mention of brutalizing detainees, but if I'd had the extra time afforded by using a credit card instead of cash, I'm sure I would've heard something.

huh. maybe i shouldn't buy a mac. TELL ME WHAT TO DO, INTERNETS!

(also: scroll down to the bottom of jake's post for some wonderful news about futurama. or, you know, just click that link. i like to think the fact that tommy and i have seen every rerun of that show at least three times on adult swim has played some small part in its resurrection.)

WE HAVE ARRIVED.

(we actually arrived several hours ago but have been hanging out and eating and viewing the down with our lovely hostess, jeanie, who is subletting me my lovely room in her lovely house for the summer.)

but, anyway! atlanta! seems pretty cool. much more to come, probably sunday.

and, before the clock strikes midnight: to tommy, and jeff, and jon, and charles, and all the other beer drinkin boys out there - i wish you a very happy beer day. i am too sad not to partake in a celebration this year.

"This group should not to be confused with the real-life band The Misfits, led by Glenn Danzig."

Words of wisdom.

I donno, man. I have misgivings. I know that it's my duty as an aspiring liberal elite to pledge my undying love for all things Garrison Keillor. Just look at my friends: Matt and Emily are both currently leaping to the guy's defense, and Charles was practically brought up with Garrisonianism as a secondary religion (complete with weekly Sunday observances). Keillor writes in magazines I wish I wanted to read, and A Prarie Home Companion is, obviously, one of dear NPR's biggest properties. It seems like Keillor's creative output should be right up my alley.

But it just isn't. I will grudgingly admit that his Mr. Blue persona is merely Salon's fourth-worst regular columnist, but that's more of a testament to Carey Tennis and Anne Lamott's staggering solipsism and King Kaufman's pugnacious irrelevance than anything else. And I'll also admit that I'm intrigued by the PHC movie. But that's just because Maya Rudolph is hilarious, the rest of the cast looks great, and Lindsay Lohan appears to play a wayward and impressionable young girl.

I should say that I'm not biased against PHC's central conceit: I actually like the idea of old-timey radio-ousity. Ask Catherine! I'm a big fan of The Big Broadcast on WAMU, where Ed Walker plays crackly serials from the golden age of radio (this is because I am a million years old). But PHC just isn't particularly remarkable, authentic or generally good. Okay, you've got some wry Wodehouse-ian banter, and some authentic-sounding musical performances, and various nods to the idea of an older, better time. That's all fine.

The problem is that this package comes wrapped in a masturbatory reverence for an imagined Midwestern cult of mediocrity. I get that the asceticism is part of the joke — except it isn't, not really. The overarching straight man routine is never tweaked or explored or used to anyone's advantage. God forbid that Keillor or anyone else be forced to sacrifice a drop of dignity. They can put on a good old-fashioned program of entertainment, by gum — it just can't be too entertaining, is all. That'd spoil the fun, you see.

And to top it off, this allegedly charming slice of Americana is perpetrated by exactly the sorts of liberal-minded folks that perpetually find themselves stymied by the country's appetite for rosy-hued nostalgic bullshit. I'm sure there's a gay married couple somewhere in Lake Wobegone who the neighbors have made some charmingly off-the-mark comments about. But let's get real — we come to bury Mayberry, not to praise it.

Perhaps I'm misjudging the appeal of Keillor and his Prarie Home Companion. I have to admit that I don't think I've ever made it through an entire episode — the only show on NPR that makes me change the channel faster is Michael Feldman's ponderous (and incorrectly phoneticized) Whad'Ya Know. I feel as though I've heard fragments of plenty of shows, however. And in my admittedly brief experience, the joke seems to be that the show isn't all that funny — or happy, or sad, or dramatic, or moving. Its only concern seems to be in promoting a sort of bovine stoicism. I really don't understand the appeal.

On the other hand, I don't have any relatives from the midwest, and I drink kind of a lot of coffee. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those is the source of my incomprehension.

i feel like a traitor somehow, but i thought i should let you all know...sometime this summer, i do believe i'm going to buy myself a mac.

a few factors have played into this decision by me, a lifelong PC user. 1. tommy thinks i should get one because i like pretty things and don't use a computer for much more beyond internet, email, photoshop and word processing (he says his reasoning is less simplistic than that but it's true, i do like pretty things). 2. i'll actually be making more money at cnn this summer than i've made at a job before, thereby allowing myself to actually purchase my own tech goodie instead of getting it as a gift from tommy. i might even get a new ipod. and/or a sidekick. 3. pretty much every single one of my friends has a mac and i am nothing if not a conformist. even my relatives are working on me. at dinner with the family last night my cousin brought out her laptop and let me play around with it while she talked about all its awesomeness.

so, yeah. sorry PC diehards. the transition won't be for a while, and i'll certainly keep the dell around, but it appears it's time for a change. scary!

remember when i pointed you towards the video of somebody putting a roll of mentos into a bottle of diet coke? well, somebody went on to do the next logical step: 200 LITERS OF DIET COKE AND 500 MENTOS. (via)

Man, what a tease. Tycho of Penny Arcade wrote a paragraph with a reference to HilariousInjuries.com. Imagine my excitement! Sadly, it doesn't exist. Not yet, anyway. What a tease.

Well, while we're waiting for someone to monetize that idea, placate yourself with these two videos that Justin showed me earlier today.

And with that, I'm headed to the beach. But, as previously discussed, I should still be online. Beachblogging to come! Possibly!

or, why i like my dunkin donuts cashier.

scene: 7:30am, monday morning, dunkin donuts kiosk inside of the davis el stop in evanston.

catherine: hi, can i have a large coffee with cream and sugar, please?
cashier: did you want cream and sugar or sugar and cream?
catherine: um. (pause) excuse me?
cashier: cream and sugar or sugar and cream?
catherine: um, oh. (believing in her early morning stupor that there is a difference) cream and sugar, i guess?
cashier: busts out laughing.
catherine: (lightbulb) dude. it is WAY too early for this kind of stuff.

tommy and the rest of the echoditto crew are celebrating their company anniversary by going up to annapolis and racing boats, i think, amongst other sailor-like activities. i believe eating crabs will be involved as well. and it looks like tommy is appropriately-dressed for the occasion, as emily has just documented:

heh.

good news! via julie, it appears that the red cross has loosened some of their restrictions regarding who can and cannot donate blood. i was informed a year or two ago that i could never donate blood again because i had lived in europe for a year and could potentially have teh mad cow. and i was sad. but it looks like now, unless i am mistaken, i can donate all the delicious blood that i want. more worrisome: even though i must have donated near ten times now, i can NEVER REMEMBER MY BLOOD TYPE. what's up with that?

This is kind of fascinating. How do you design a warning sign for a nuclear waste repository that will remain dangerous for ten thousand years? How can you make that warning remain comprehensible and credible for twice as long as human civilization has existed?

Apparently you start by commissioning a government study that considers hazards like psychotic mining robots and an Amazonian anti-male dystopia. Then you pour a lot of concrete.

first we have michael chiarello and his classic "hate is hard to fix" comment on zunta. now i find out that by bashing mischa barton's hellacious OC prom dress, i'm further driving the world towards a big, black abyss of doom.

um, sorry?

so some brave classmates and i attended a a milwaukee brewers game yesterday, where the following things happened: the brewers tied an MLB record for the most homeruns hit in one inning (five); we went on an epic hunt for wisconsin custard; and catherine drank 32 beers. the backhanded compliment of the day? from a 22-year-old: "you sure can hold your liquor for somebody who's been out of undergradute for so long!" yes, i'm cementing my reputation as the old lush, thanks very much. anyway, it was a rollicking good time. photos may be perused here.

for those of you who have been reading for a while, you may recall my invective against the evils of powerpoint. it's something i still sort of vaguely stand by, but mostly because i really suck at powerpoint, not because of any particular reason. however, in our media management class, we've been forced to create powerpoint presentations no less than four or five times already, and the application will be a major part of our final presentation to the star tribune. so, you know, you suck it up.

i've also already become a more skilled powerpointer in part thanks to my friend andrew, whose partner cliff is a powerpoint guru. he literally wrote the book on powerpoint. apparently, since this quarter started, cliff was getting a bit miffed at andrew all of the sudden asking millions of powerpoint questions when he had never showed a real interest in his work before. so andrew did what any loving boyfriend would do: he called up all his media contacts on a friday afternoon, and voila: yesterday, the la times wrote a major business section article on cliff and his skills (which have of late been shown off in the vioxx trial). pretty sweet, no? it's actually a pretty interesting read, no matter what you think of powerpoint. the article was also the most emailed one on the site yesterday, and get this as an additional bonus: cliff's book shot up to #4 on amazon. not too shabby!

Apparently businesses aren't allowed to require a minimum balance for Visa card purchases — it's a violation of the license terms that merchants must agree to when they begin to accept Visa payments. Iiiinteresting. It's tough to begrudge small businesses the right to ensure that they make a profit on every transaction, but still: good to know.

if that's your bag. three years ago i was celebrating easter in naples, where i saw the madonna dell'arco procession down via tribunali. here's a nice photo of this year's procession from mafaldablue.

As usual I waited until the last minute to do my taxes this year. I've just finished them a moment ago, and this year's experience was the smoothest yet. Allow me to share some of the sagacity that allows me to so effectively flit through the paperwork:

1. H&R Block's online tax prep thingy is pretty great, and gets progressively more great every year as more and more of your data collects in it. Well, except for this stellar moment in interface design:

   

   The original field? That contains sensitive financial data. We'd better keep it secret. But the confirmation field, where you're supposed to enter the exact same data? We'll just leave that un-obfuscated. It's like not accepting a xerox of a form, I guess.


2. If you have income that you don't know how to claim, it's probably best to just ignore it and pretend everything is fine.


3. Catherine learned last year that if you try to file part of your year in Virginia and part in DC, the city government will a) not let you file online and b) eventually present you with a bill for thousands of dollars that you pretty clearly don't owe. Moral: the DC tax office doesn't like to be bothered. They are like a hibernating bear, DO NOT DISTURB THEM. Just try to creep by quietly.


4. Most importantly, remember that your tax preparation will be easy and worry-free if you simply begin the process resigned to doing it incorrectly.

Worry-free for a while, anyway.

Dear, sweet IRS agents: the preceding should be considered a joke, and totally not admissible in court, I hope. Of course I conscientiously rounded up all of the forms surrounding the $5 in savings account interest I made this year, and the three days-or-so worth of work I did at my new job in 2005. And the apartment in DC? I'm just house-sitting for Charles. While he's home. Hey, shouldn't you be auditing poor people?

courtesy of npr, i think i have my weekend plans set. though i'm not going to do it IN MY MOUTH.

i think i kind of want to work for npr.

Becks is stumped about finding sandals that are comfortable. I sympathize, but my needs are humbler*: I'd just like some that leave me my dignity.

Men have no good sandal options. Flip-flops? Frat boy. Tevas? Hippie. Birkenstocks? California hippie. I like wearing all of these, but short of the classic Roman centurion sandal, it'd be hard to call any open-air male footwear respectable. And even if this last option was available, you'd still need to be sporting a cloak and crested helmet to really complete the look. That's just not practical for the beach.

The only solution may be surrender — that's right, the old man sandals-over-black-socks technique. I used to think it was an early sign of dementia, but now I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't just a big fuck you to fashion norms.

* Probably because, as a member of the podiatric patriarchy, there's no onus on me to wear shoes that are really really uncomfortable.

matt had the gross-funny post for last night, and this morning, kevin gives you the hysterically-funny-yet-sad one of today.

i'm just giddy with the quick hits tonight, aren't i? well, this one comes to you tonight courtesy of matt: an article (subscribers only) about competitive eating with what is, perhaps, the best paragraph ever:

Brian "Yellowcake" Subich, a top-twenty eater, tells a story about a baked-bean contest from the summer of 2004. The field included Sonya, Subich, and Cookie Jarvis. After just two and a half minutes, George Shea announced that Sonya was almost done with her 8.4 pounds of beans. "I said, 'You have to be freaking kidding me,'" Subich told me. "What does she do? Pour 'em down her shirt? Put 'em into a plastic bag?" At Shea's announcement, Jarvis lifted his head, glanced at Sonya, registered what Subich calls "the most crestfallen look you could ever imagine," and vomited beans through his nostrils.

indeed.

sometimes, it's just the little things that make me laugh. i'm a simple girl. and i'm really 26, not 12.

always fun, right? well, when you find out you are the number one result for "how to properly dispose of your girlfriend," maybe not so much. let's try a new word, buddy.

it's not like i expect college papers (or, hell, any papers) to be on top of any sort of trends or products, but, seriously, the daily northwestern...an article on evite.com in the year 2006 is what's known as a major travesty.

wow. i have been a bad, bad blogger lately (though tommy's been a mad blogging machine lately, hasn't he?) i have my excuses though: parents and little sister in town for the past few days; work; and, uh, more work. i think as the quarter gets into a better rhythm, i'll have more of the delicious blogging time. that said, here's a few thoughts, bullet-style:

From TUAW:

Did you catch The Simpsons on Fox last night? Grandpa Simpson decided that he had had enough of life, and sought out a doctor that would perform an assisted suicide for him. Once the arrangements had been made, Grandpa was wheeled into the execution room and connected to the diePOD, which was the device that would get the job done (while simultaneously providing the soundtrack). As grandpa lay on the table, awaiting the inevitable, the diePOD played "Instant Death" by Megadeath.

Now that's satire, folks.

Actually, no, it isn't. But you're sneaking up on irony.

The second funniest thing about this Onion article is that it's almost sort of true. If you include Japanese wrestlers, anyway.

It'd be the funniest thing if not for the graphic of the luchadores doing planchas over the fence.

ALSO: Has it really been a year since Wrestlemania? Apparently so, 'cuz this year's is happening on Sunday. Anyone interested/know what the hell is going on in the WWE these days? A quick glance reveals that Rey Mysterio is competing for the heavyweight championship. Times (and steroid regimens) have changed, apparently.

sometimes, random news articles brighten may day just a little bit. this piece about lewis, the crazy cat, is one of them.

FAIRFIELD, Conn. (AP) -- Residents of the neighborhood of Sunset Circle say they have been terrorized by a crazy cat named Lewis. Lewis for his part has been uniquely cited, personally issued a restraining order by the town's animal control officer.

"He looks like Felix the Cat and has six toes on each foot, each with a long claw," Janet Kettman, a neighbor said Monday. "They are formidable weapons."

The neighbors said those weapons, along with catlike stealth, have allowed Lewis to attack at least a half dozen people and ambush the Avon lady as she was getting out of her car.

i love the part about "the Avon lady." like, they don't even name her. she's just The one and only avon lady. who cats hate. awesome.

why feminism is still necessary. via amber.

reorganizing the shoe rack: never a good idea.

i got a little carried away with the note feature noting my shoes, so click through if you care. about shoes. and my reorganizing of them. and really, why wouldn't you?

how to be an awesome guest: even when your host-in-absence gives you the ENTIRELY WRONG SET OF KEYS to her apartment while she's in d.c., and you don't really have anywhere else to stay, or a hotel reservation, and don't necessarily know the city very well, and end up having to deal with your host-in-absence's weirdo russian building supervisor to extract a set of extra keys from him, you still leave your fully-panicked-and-embarrassed host-in-absence this loveliness:

thanks, emily. after a 6:30 am flight this morning back to chi-town and three hours of class in the new quarter today, i feel pretty certain that this evening will call for one-to-four mojitos.

scene: tommy and catherine sitting on the couch, sipping coffee and internet surfing while michael chiarello makes some sort of antipasti plate on the tv in the background.

catherine (being stupidly lovey-dovey to tommy): i love you!
tommy: i love you.
michael chiarello: i LOVE pickles.

tommy and i spent saturday eating lunch at pizzeria paradiso, taking in the dada exhibit at the national gallery and making fun of kids who can't fly kites good at the smithsonian kite festival. photos!

it's friday night, i've stayed in all evening and i'm feeling a little loopy, a sentiment only encouraged by brandon's captioning of ready.gov nuclear disaster images. i've seriously been giggling for, like, half an hour over here. terrorists make ninjas cry. bwahahahaha.

The quote Catherine excerpted below about 80,000 blogs launching per week reminded me of a story I read yesterday: the Register totalled up the societal costs claimed by various pop-economic doomsayers (e.g. the NCAA tournament costs $X billion in lost productivity; failing to recycle bottle caps costs us $Y billion every week). And guess what? It turns out that the sum is more than the total amount of money in the world.

To be fair, I don't think there's any solid economic reason why that can't be true — but it certainly seems doubtful. To think that spending half an hour watching an NCAA tournament game actually introduces real costs to an individual's employer requires a childlike naivete, wherein every workday contains exactly 8 hours of work, all of which must be completed and all of which is relevant to the company's bottom line. I can understand why one would think such aggregate measures are necessary and plausible at a large scale. But realistically, most of these cost estimates probably ignore a lot of naturally-occurring elasticity in order to make their advocates' pet causes seem more important than they actually are.

Unlike more diplomatic people, I'm not afraid to say it: I don't really like St. Patrick's Day.

Maybe it's inherited. My Anglo roots go back to England, not the Emerald Isle. St. Patrick's day just isn't in my blood. I'm genetically predisposed to spending March 17^th brewing a nice pot of darjeeling and discussing what new taxes to levy against the Papist Menace.

But there's another class of reasons why I don't really like the holiday. Reasons like the one I happened upon last weekend:

hah. check out this great picture over at becks' place. maybe men will finally start realizing that this is, in fact, an annoying, widespread reality and not some phantom blog meme made up by a few overly sensitive women. though i must say, not a single person has told me to smile since i moved to chicago.

after waiting seven years for them to do so, did anyone find josh and donna's kiss just a little bit repulsive looking?

grey's made me weepy. AGAIN. after a supbar episode last time, they are back on form. tommy and charles: my spring break mission is to make you love this show. i shall do it, even though i may need to drink several bottles of wine on my own to do so. i am willing to make this sacrifice. but the question is: ARE YOU?

if you need a godlike tiramisu recipe, may i suggest this one, with minor changes: you'll need 14 oz of ladyfingers, double the espresso, and i would recommend freezing it for several hours instead of merely refridgeratoring it. cannot spell refridgeratiatototoring.

am drunk.

how does one know one is getting old? may i submit that slathering on moisturizer on your hands and sleeping in cotton moisture-locking-in gloves is one symptom? because your hands are looking elderly? 26, this is going to be a great year. a year of sleeping in gloves. i can't wait. the year of the hand glove. sort of relatedly, i may be going in for my first manicure on wednesday. i'll make sure to report back. hold your breath.

and your final post for the night: behold the grossest lobster ever.

in doing research for an article about judicial elections i found out something interesting - judges in cook county, IL are something like two billion percent more likely to be elected if they're female and/or have a distinctly-irish sounding name. some wannabe judges even change their names to sound more irish.

i love this bit from an old chicago reporter article:

In the 2002 Democratic primary for Judge Thomas R. Rakowski's appellate court vacancy, James Fitzgerald Smith beat William D. O'Neal, Thomas H. Fegan and Roger G. Fein...

Smith received seven "not recommended" or "not qualified" marks among his evaluations from 12 Chicago-area bar associations. O'Neal received eight unfavorable marks. But Fein, who was slated by the Democratic Party, received one unfavorable rating and Fegan, who is Irish, got approving marks from every bar group.

Slated judicial candidates are supported by a committee of party leaders. Beating them is not an easy task, according to a Chicago Council of Lawyers' unpublished analysis of judicial candidates from 1988 to 2000, which shows slated candidates won elections for vacant judgeships 72 percent of the time.

In addition, Smith was reported by the Chicago Sun-Times to have run for judge in 1992 as "James G. Smith" but then ran as "James Fitzgerald Smith" in 1994, when he was elected to the bench in a subcircuit race. Smith did not return repeated phone calls from the Reporter.
...

In 1998, Bonnie Carol McGrath ran as a Republican candidate for a Cook County circuit court judgeship. Under the advice of her election lawyer, former Chicago Board of Election Commissioners Chairman Michael E. LaVelle, McGrath dropped "Carol" and replaced it with "Fitzgerald" even though it was neither part of her name nor that of anyone in her immediate family, she said.

She won the primary but lost in the general election to James Patrick McCarthy.

just in case you ever wanna be a judge in cook county.

i also find the fact that women have an easier time of being elected to judgeships interesting. tommy guessed it might be because people perceive them as fairer and more even-handed. what do you think?

sooo.....the internet hates me. this became an undeniable realization after my free stolen wifi crapped out on me for the second time - again at a critical juncture in the academic quarter. the time when i have 52 billion things to do that require internet research/writeboard usage/procrastination via IMing/blog reading/the usual suspects.

thanks, internet.

and so i find myself back at the log cabin vomitorium.

sigh.

but all is not lost! i'm making actual progress here. thanks to jodasm, dcsobloop and my brain, which has surprised itself with the fact that it is actually a BRILLIANT LEGAL MIND, i have completed the first major paper, a thrilling, THRILLING I TELL YOU, documentation of the details of Global Crossing Telecommunications, Inc. v. Metrophones Telecommunications, Inc. how thrilling is it, you ask? well, i reference carrot top in the first paragraph. i know. your minds are blown.

the rest of the week involves writing a lengthy story on judicial elections in cook county (if you know anything about that, or judicial elections in general, and if you might be of the opinion that said elections are becoming more political and special interest groups are playing more of a part and money is flowing in, give love an email) and building a super awesome web site on the neighborhood of andersonville. and maybe squeezing in on the closing arguments of the george ryan corruption trial because i am a little, just a little bit in love with the two hot federal prosecutors handling the case. mm. handling.

ahem. then on friday, dcsobloop and i will be at the riviera theater, absorbing the sweet, sweet sounds of the new pornographers and belle and sebastian. did you know people exist out there who do not like the new pron? not that i mean to judge - i am just surprised. i have surrounded myself with fellow carl newman fans for so long that my naive self nearly fell off the chair upon reading it. oh well. more carl for moi!

and then i will be drunk! wait, no. then i will be running 12 miles. having forgotten that i signed up for this little half marathon in d.c. a few months ago, i have also forgotten that i "need" to "train." the training, it is causing me pain. i ran 11 miles on saturday. and you know what? my toenail is going to fall off again. yup. you read it right. it fell off during marathon training in '04, and it's gonna fall off again. and it's just as pleasant as you might imagine. anyway, if you want to see toenail-less, sober, angry, brilliant legal mind catherine, you can catch me hobbling around the RFK stadium area on march 25. i can promise you fun times.

1. Scott sent me this video of Sims-creator Will Wright demonstrating his new project, Spore, at the Game Developers Conference. The video is 35 minutes long, but he's demonstrating new functionality throughout all of it. The game looks flat-out amazing. It revolves around guiding the evolution of a species from its existence as a single cell to colonizing the galaxy — all with complete flexibility and customization. The way your species walks, dances, develops a culture and builds structures are all emergent behavior that comes from algorithms examining your choices, rather than canned actions. This is the most excited I've been about a videogame in a while — if it were anyone but Wright, I'd think this was just a slick demo. But he seems likely to have actually pulled this off.


2. Catherine sent me this real-life Simpsons intro, via waxy. Awesome.


3. This and this are probably the clearest, simplest explanation of Fourier Series that I've ever seen (admittedly, that may not be saying much). Perhaps not everyone's cup of tea, but I find it kind of fascinating. This is the essential mathematical insight that allows digital compression of analog information. Without it MP3s, digital video, our modern phone system, JPEGs, and a whole bunch of other essential stuff wouldn't exist.

UPDATE: Fixed the Spore link.

Amanda takes on one of my pet peeves, and expresses her irritation with people who don't know that punctuation is generally supposed to go inside quotation marks. She's right to be irked: this is elementary school shit. Amanda, if it's any consolation, I know that this rule exists. I just ignore it.

File it under "ways computers have destroyed my brain", I guess (along with the rest of this blog). But when I'm writing I look at clauses as logical units, and punctuation as the modifiers, operators and delimiters that one applies to those units. In the first sentence of this paragraph I intended for ways computers have destroyed my brain to remain an atomic, whole unit that operates as a plural noun. A trailing comma isn't part of that unit — so why should it go inside the quotation marks, which function as the unit's delimiters?

I admit that this probably sounds like gibberish to people who aren't programmers, logicians or other varieties of weirdo. And I'll admit I'm somewhat inconsistent on this score: when dealing with dialogue I follow the rules. I've tried to break them, but it doesn't work. "Hmm," I'll think, "That just doesn't look right." I excuse this hypocrisy by arguing that the clause of which the quote is the object generally ought to be inserted into the quote at a point where a comma would naturally reside — thus making the comma a part of the quote-unit, and properly included within the quotes. But as you can probably tell from the length of the preceding sentence, I'm really just fooling myself.

It doesn't matter, though. At this point these are tics I can't help any more than I can avoid constant overuse of emdashes. My English-teacher grandmother would be crushed if she knew.

hanging out in my favorite cafe, i was waiting for my drink by the register while a man next to me was ordering what appeared to be several pints of ice cream. it appeared, by the expression of the lady helping him, that this had already been a long, arduous process. it was going something like this:

"uhhh, do you have quarts of ice cream?"

"yup, right here!"

dialing cell phone..."they've got quarts, okay? what do you want? okay, okay." hangs up. "i'll take a quart, of, uhh...vanilla, and....shit. hold on." dials cell phone. "what was the other one you wanted? okay, okay." hangs up. "and a quart of chocolate peanut butter."

the lady smiles and nods and goes to scoop the quarts, then comes to the realization that they don't actually have a flavor called chocolate peanut butter and informs the man as such.

"shit." dials cell phone. "they don't HAVE chocolate peanut butter...i DON'T KNOW, OKAY? they're OUT, or something."

and totally audible from the other end of the line, at least to me: "BUTJESUS, I WANT MY CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER!"

dude quickly hangs up. "i'll just get a quart of chocolate. plain chocolate. thanks."

in other news...if anyone is an expert, or, hell, even familiar with telecommunications law, i would greatly appreciate you contacting me. or if you even understand the following: Whether 47 U.S.C. § 201(b) of the Communications Act of 1934 creates a private right of action for a provider of payphone services to sue a long distance carrier for alleged violations of the FCC's regulations concerning compensation for coinless payphone calls.

seriously, what the fuck, law. what the fuck.

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.

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!!!

what say you?

that's what it is! and frankly, it is awesome.

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.

UPDATE: i made some other drugstore recs a while back.

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.

Via Make, an amazing collection of links to Halloween DIY projects. It's less than nine months away, you know.

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.

I can't help it, though. They're full of good stuff today:

• Banana Blog
• Cargo Cults: Islanders Worship Departed American Soldiers
• Willie Nelson gets on the Brokeback Bandwagon

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.

more vday goodness: OCD valentines from mcsweeny's. ie:

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.

anyway. happy valentine's day, all!

(hat tip the boy)

I'm not completely sure why this is great, but it is.

Check out this deeply weird music video full of slo-mo dog glamor shots. If Gap Doggy existed, this is what their ads would look like.

[hat tip clip tip]

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.)

also, aquarius is "ruled by uranus." heh heh.

just in case you thought i was a tad insane for my dating list of a while back, trust me: there are way worse people out there.

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.

Do you like the internet? Do you like your pet? Do you not hate the troops (too much)? Then this is for you.

Via Penny Arcade.

Next Python tutorial installment: forthcoming.

Super Bowl: delicious, but unprofitable.

Company-sponsored happy hours: pretty great, it turns out.

Softmodding Kriston & Matt's Xbox: easy and successful. Email me if I know you, you own an Xbox, and don't care about using Xbox Live.

Playing marble madness by tilting my powerbook: seemingly possible.

Mastercard commercial parodies: to be avoided at all costs.

Genuine content soon — as soon as it can be squozen out of my brain.

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.

congratulations to the happy couple!

northwestern has a craaaaazy tenured professor (electrical engineering faculty) who a) believes the holocaust never happened b) loves iran! i never knew.

AHHH!H!H!H! WTF!? zombie roaches!

(via jake)

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.

additionally, fontana labs noted this older new york times wedding profile in which the couple invented an entirely new last name upon marriage.

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.

none of you feel this way, do you?

Hummer's attempt at subversive advertising gets subverted. Seriously, guys — you're just making the adbust easier and better-looking.

It's not like me, but the siren song of the link roundup cannot be denied. Apologies to everyone I'm ripping off:

• The first thing I've heard about Google that genuinely worries me. Solution here.


• The second-best CafePress shirt I've seen.


• The third awesome crochet thing I've learned about (#1: multidimensional crochet branes, #2: Valerie talking about stabbing people last Tuesday).


• 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.

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.

UPDATE: kevin drum addressed this earlier.

this study says that men find women who are witty to be a total turn-off.

guys: is this true? i would suspect that many of the guys who read this blog would say no, simply because i think most of the male readers here are the kind that appreciate humor and wit in a woman because they aren't insecure ninnies. but maybe not.

the article interviews a lot of female comedians about the study, but i don't think they should count as i find most stand up comedians to be kind of repulsive whether they're male or female. but seriously - if you met a woman out at a bar who could keep up a stream of hysterical repartee don't you think most people would consider that to be a turn on? or would it be seriously offputting? i mean, i just dunno. i don't see anyone throwing sarah silverman out of bed.

(via amber)

you know what i really think iraq could use a little bit of now? no, not tender loving care. how about some bird flu? that's the ticket, i think.

i panty-blogged, and apparently it's an unstoppable journey downwards after you've done that. but i need your help, dear readers (surprise surprise - can i ever make up my mind about something without consulting the blog?). i know it's january, but dammit, it's 55 degrees out, and i've been running past the lakefront beaches, and thus i am inspired to get a new bathing suit. plus i need some sweet shopping relief after all the work i've put into python today. lordy. but i can't decide between two, and tommy is no help. so if you don't mind, cast a vote:

1

2

grazie.

first off, thank you for all your wonderful resume comments below. with your suggestions i was able to cut my resume down to a page and i think it is, to put it mildly, a LOT better. (though i am still conflicted as to whether i should stick in that agency internship. it is from 1999, but people find it fascinating for some reason, though i basically spent the entire summer a) hooking up with my co-intern b) copying departamental phonebooks).

anyway, i now have a cover letter question. a few sites i've been browsing recommend a newish form of cover letter - basically one tailored exactly to the job description. i mean, duh. but these say that you should create something akin to a table - in one column you would put the job requirements, and in the second corresponding slots you would put why you can handle that specific job requirement. make sense? it *sounds* interesting, and specific, and at least it would maybe catch somebody's eye, but i dunno...maybe too unconventional? what do you think?

something that has bugged me for, well, my entire life: why does ANYONE think it's EVER okay to disobey the sacred sidewalk/corridor rule and NOT walk on the right and pass on the left? i swear to god, it's getting out of control. coming home from my run today i was practically playing chicken with one guy who was walking towards me on the farthest right hand side (mine) and would not budge. i stuck to my guns, though, and he had to give way. that's right, motherfucker. don't mess with me when i'm strolling home.

my free wifi is back (for now, at least) and there's a new episode of veronica mars on in 45 minutes.

i think it quite possibly could be.

my standards may be low, people, but at least i'm easy to please.

awesome: george michael and maeby of arrested development will guest star on an episode of veronica mars.

not awesome: not having any time to blog due to a) lack of wifi b) crazycakes goings on at school/work. be back soon, hopefully. maybe this afternoon, if this article doesn't suck ass and you are lucky!

While Hemal was off galavanting around India, I took over DCist HR duties. This basically meant receiving a bunch of emails, replying to ask for writing samples, and gently letting people down when their proposed posts turned out to be thousand word screeds decrying political correctness (and not even political correctness in DC). Above all, I just had to keep track of everybody.

I managed to mostly not screw things up. Hemal, being a much sweeter and thoughtful person than is really necessary, brought me back some Indian candy as a thank-you. Specifically, stuff from Cadbury India.

The basic formulations were familiar — fruit-flavored hard candies; chewy toffees; chocolate bars — but the flavors were subtly weird. The pineapple was stronger, somehow. The toffee was more lactic. It was different, but good.

With one exception: the chocolate. Really, it's hard to convey how bad it was. One bite and you could taste the dismissive imperial prejudices of the original chocolatier. Clearly, Cadbury did not spend a lot of time fretting about quality control in its India division. I never knew that a candy bar could be so bad that it's actually racist.

But the rest was tasty. Thanks, Hemal!

this might be one of the most poorly-written modern love columns i've ever read. and that's saying something.

Sometimes I wonder what makes something funny. Back when I was reading and thinking about cognitive science all the time, I had decided comedy was based on your brain thinking it's figured out a pattern, then experiencing the completion of that pattern occur in an unexpected way. Sounds hilarious, right?

I still think that theory has some merit. But comic strips like this one make me think that the answer might be closer to "pointless cruelty."

Whatever it is, I think this clip from Strangers With Candy distills it pretty well.

I've got no particular reason for sharing this. I just thought of it the other day and felt like playing with video editing on the Mac. Go buy some Strangers With Candy DVDs, why dontcha?

BTW: video editing on the mac? Harder than I expected. Final Cut Pro is nice, and from what I can tell it seems easier than Premiere. But iMovie kind of sucks, and there doesn't seem to be a good, free, mid-level video converting tool like VirtualDub. I shouldn't have to download an entire pro-grade nonlinear editing suite just to extract a clip from a DVD and resize it. Bah!

It was nice to meet folks at the DCist happy hour last night. New blogger acquaintance A: Mari of In Shaw, who was very pleasant to talk to and whose blog I like a lot. I suspect she thinks I am a nice guy but also the type of person who's the problem with something. If so, she's probably right.

New blogger acquaintance B: Alex, who, at my prompting, explained to me what a NOP sled is. Awesome. If I'm going to have friends giving me irresponsibly large amounts of tech cred (terminologically, anyway), I'd better cultivate some contacts who actually know what the hell they're talking about. So I'm glad to have Alex in my RSS folder.

Also: Jacques newly-of-DCist, Wayan from DCMetblogs, and almost certainly a bunch of other new and charming and wonderful people whose names I can't remember. Plus, some usual suspects. Always nice to see you guys.

The night ended confusingly, as Kriston, the Nabob and I talked about the old drink-a-gallon-of-milk-in-an-hour thing. I know it's impossible. We've all seen that episode of Jackass, and the N had conducted the experimental work himself in college. Kriston seemed to think that we east-coast types just don't know how to drink milk hard enough. And I wondered whether Lactaid could help someone win that bet.

So somehow we're now all supposed to try drinking a gallon of Gatorade in half an hour, some time. It doesn't make much sense to me — I think it's to remove the problematic milk from the equation. Too many independent variables! Remove the lactose! We're testing the effect of volume on drinking stuff. Hypothesis: regret.

It isn't really about competion, except perhaps against the dreary world that gave man such a pathetically weak digestive system. But it must be done. I guess.

gawd.damn. you can make $10,000 in the tournament of beer pong. why the hell wasn't this around when i was still in college?

1. Amazon's Games You Should Play.


2. The Perry Bible Fellowship. I really, really feel like I should have known about it. I mean, jesus, look at this! Look!

The Penny Arcade guys gave a talk at MIT, if anyone's interested. Transcript here.

Weird — for the first time, I actually wish something was in an audio format instead of having been transcribed to text. Can vlogging be far behind?

It turns out that my lack of style is actually just responsible consumerism: Urban Outfitters is run by a bunch of goddamn thieves.

via preshrunk

the phrase "the laughter of squirrels" made me die of laughter earlier today, so i googled it. and who knew, there's a poem. about squirrels laughing. or a quote. or at the very least words strung together. i submit to you george arnold:

O sweet September, thy first breezes bring the dry leaf's rustle and the squirrel's laughter, the cool fresh air whence health and vigor spring and promise of exceeding joy hereafter.

beautiful.

and forrest stump:

you're welcome. again.

lucky you.

writing about stuff at the gym made me think of this post of tommy's, about the squat rack, and dudes, and it is funny, so you should go read it.

it also made me realize i have not gone to spinning classes in god knows how long (i have been concentrating on the running), so you're all deprived of the heeeeesterical stories about godawful spinning music and biking aimlessly in the total dark. unfortunately, solitary running on the treadmill for 45 minutes at a time does not really lend itself to such tales. frankly, i'm too busy trying not to crumple up and die to observe anything going on around me.

except in the locker room. okay, let's take a poll: who gets utterly freaked out by all the naked people walking around? i mean, i'm not a prude. i mean, i am the complete opposite of prude. IN THE PRIVACY OF MY OWN HOME. can't we all just face the corner, change quickly, put on underwear while wearing the towel, basically exposing as little as possible of our flabby freckled flesh to the general populace? the younger women i don't mind so much (and no, not because of that, you sicko), but frankly i get completely weirded out by all the old naked ladies walking around. probably because, oh god, i will look like that one day.

except, i will live in the future by then, so maybe not.

my god. i've gone almost two days without blogging. something must be done.

........
.................
um.

ok, i have a gym question. why do women spend hours upon pointless hours doing ab work at the gym? when i go to the back room with the mats to stretch after my runs, the whole place is pretty much filled with ladies doing ab stuff on those big rubber balls; ladies doing weird crunchy things where they bring their legs up to their chests and point their arms out straight and wave them up and down very quickly. or else they are just holding the V position - legs slightly up, head up, arms pointed out straight, balancing on their butt and concentrating very hard.

this is stupid. for many reasons, but i will state two.

1. it ain't ever going to make a difference, unless you are an olympic marathoner/swimmer/etc.
2. women have bellies! we always will! embrace the buddha!

re: 1, i mean, seriously. seriously? seriously. you are not going to get a six pack or even any noticeable definition by doing lots of crunches. i'm speaking from personal experience, but the best way to get a somewhat-flatter stomach is to run a lot, on an incline, and just do a lot of cardio in general. i mean, a LOT. no matter how amazing the abs underneath are, women just have more fat on their stomachs and you will have to go to bizarre lengths to make it disappear. and why would you want to? i think rock hard abs on a woman are rather gross. they're a bit better on a man, but any time i see a guy with an extremely defined six pack, i think a) huh, that's kind of hot, but then b) about how much time he must have to spend at the gym. and how little time he must spend drinking beer and eating barbeque.

and that, my friends, makes me think.

that's catherine's gym wisdom for the day. you're welcome.

kriston and i are concerned about the fate of one of our favorite sites, unfogged, after the revelation that ogged apparently reset the tivo:

pablohoney: dude did you read that ogged reset the tivo
Cappseus: yup
Cappseus: unfogged is over
pablohoney: totally

it was good while it lasted.

i'm not really the panty-blogging type of internet folk, but i recently have been consumed by a weird and all abiding bizarre love for a type of underwear, so much that so that i am actually motivated to write about it on the internets, because OTHER LADIES MUST KNOW ABOUT THE FABULOUSNESS of this underwear.

they are the ultra low pure cotton hipster from gap. they are comfy, flattering, low-rise enough such that they don't peek out over your jeans and, most importantly, cheap. so. yeah. there's my undewear recommendation of the day. go forth and purchase.

cannot believe am writing about underwear on the internet.

Wow. Let me register a ringing endorsement for Extreme Aerialists. THAT is the type of fluff I expect from the Discovery Channel — not that gastric bypass nonsense, or investigations into how aliens built the pyramids. When two separate videos of men falling to their deaths aren't the most memorable parts of a TV show, you know it's got to be pretty amazing.

you know you need more coffee (and you've been reading too much dooce.com) when you read the headline "man who shot pope freed" as "man who shot poop freed."

related (and very funny, via apostropher): the real reason alito should not be confirmed.

My interview with the Shmoo Group is up on DCist, if anyone's interested in reading it. Their DC-based convention kicks off on Friday. I would've loved to have gone (esp. after they offered me a press pass so I wouldn't have to shell out hundreds of dollars). But this weekend I'll be in Chicago instead, having an even better time (albeit a slightly less nerdy one). Oh well — next year, I guess.

somebody should take this nyt article about the dynamics and lives of the transient inhabitants of a nyc apartment building and apply it to an internet community, like the commenters over at unfogged or making light or an IRC channel. i participated once in an IRC channel that had twice the drama of these people. they like to party? they sleep with each other? they live above a cupcake shop?! PSHAW. you weren't seein nuthin until you were spending four hours a day on the dalnet radiohead channel (not the "official" radiohead channel; the supercool secretish one) that i was when i was 17. the drama was beyond belief: deep and, i assure you, seriously intellectual conversations; rampant flirting; backstabbing when ops stole control from other ops and banning was raging. all set to the sounds of "ok computer" and "the bends." MADNESS, PEOPLE. madness.

and thus my nerd roots are revealed. as if they hadn't been multiple times before.

over at unfogged, some comments in this thread are talking about undue pressures that kids as as young as 5 and 6 are facing. i don't have anything particularly enlightening to say about that, but it reminded me of a period when i was teaching at ASM (i taught 5-8 year olds, and, as another note, i did teach in milan, where most children wore armani for kids for picture day at school, and yes, i am being literal). i know you're not supposed to have favorites as a teacher, but, hell, i was only there for a year, and i was pretty much in love with florentia, a five-year-old from argentina who hadn't yet lived in once place for more than one year of her short life (her father was a diplomat of some sort). she spoke spanish, russian (her family's previous stint had been in moscow), english, and was rapidly picking up italian. at 5 she was already a near-fluent reader, and making up totally awesome stories about magical dolphins. being kind and funny and open, she was very popular amongst her classmates.

then one day at lunch, i noticed she wasn't eating anything, and i asked if she was feeling well.

"i'm fine," she said, pushing around her food. i didn't believe her (a bug had been going around in class and basically i was afraid she was about to vomit up a storm) so i pushed her to tell me what was going on. she said that her mother had told her she had needed to lose weight, so she couldn't eat her lunch.

i about blew a gasket (not in front of her) and went to talk about it with my much wiser and more experienced supervisor, who ended up speaking both with florentia and her mother about the situation. it was towards the end of the school year, and i left italy in july, so i'm not sure what the outcome ever was.

anyway, one piece of advice i took away from my much wiser and more experienced supervisor, who really was a brilliant teacher of young children, was to never, NEVER comment on a child's appearance. i thought that was obvious when it came to things like weight or odd features or glasses, but she meant absolutely nothing. not even if the child looks pretty/handsome. it seems innocuous and even encouraging at the time to tell a little girl that she looks very pretty that day, or that you love her shirt/skirt/hairstyle, but at such a young age it merely enforces weirdness about a) fashion b) appearances and c) teaches children that you can get positive reinforcement for something so stupid as what you're wearing - which, of course you can. but it's entirely freaky to think that there are five-year-olds out there realizing and exploiting that fact.

i generally think it's pretty hysterical when children are mistakenly served alcohol, but this particular article takes the cake:

An Applebee's restaurant in New York City gave a 5-year-old boy a beverage he won't be able to drink legally for another 16 years. The boy's mother is taking Applebee's to court.

Cynthia Pereles can't understand how someone put Long Island iced tea into her son Seth's kiddie cup instead of the apple juice he ordered.

Seth took two sips and immediately spit it out, but then he couldn't stop laughing and started licking bread baskets.

funny, when tommy gets drunk, that's exactly what he does too!

Awesome.

i guess the mental punishment of graduate school isn't really enough for the sadomasochistic likes of me, because i, for whatever reason, just registered for the 2006 national half-marathon taking place in d.c. on march 25 (i'll be home from school from the 18th to the 26th, and it's not like i'd rather spend time with my loved ones or relaxing or anything. i'd much rather be turning my feet into bloody stumps).

the race is the first half-marathon in the area, i believe, so i'm excited about that. i'm also excited that i was able to register at all, because, in a weird move, they actually have qualifying times. i thought at first i wouldn't be able to do it because you needed to have run a marathon in 4:30, and when i did the marine corps marathon in 2004, i ran something like 4:34. but, lo and behold, you can also qualify by having run under 2:10 in a previous half-marathon or under 1:40 in a 10 miler race, both of which i've done. so. yay.

my last official race was the 2004 marine corps marathon so i am, how do you say, woefully fat and out of shape and terrified by the fact that i will have to self-train for this stupid race. previously i've always had friends to train with or an official program. the past couple of months i've been running four miles a few times a week pretty regularly, just to work out, but training for this will obviously have to go beyond that.

additionally, any chicagoans who have insights about race training/running paths, please fill me in - i can train to a certain point up on a treadmill, but i can't exactly see the staff at the gym being thrilled with me running on a treadmill for two hours at a time. oh my god. i just realized my main training will have to take place in january and february, outside, IN CHICAGO. PROBABLY ALONG THE LAKEFRONT. I AM MENTAL.

excuse me while i go run five miles to quell the rising self-doubt.

not having received any redskins games on my crappy broadcast tv since i moved to chicago (except their very first one of the season when they played the bears), i neglected to even think about the possibility that i might get the tampa playoff game. so even though i knew when the game started today, i didn't think twice about making plans to go see "match point" this evening instead. of course, as soon as i get out of the shower, i flip on the tv, and what do i see except the redskins kicking ass and taking names (at least in this quarter; god, please let that continue, i will, like, go to church and help old people cross streets and save kitties if you let them keep this up). so i'm about to head out to the movie, but i'm wearing my red and gold pumas. and chanting "hail to the redskins" in my head for the next few hours.

digging through my wallet today, i noticed a funny-looking penny (i've started paying closer attention to my change since i keep getting screwed over by somehow amassing a large amount of canadian quarter-looking coins that don't work in my laundry machines and force me to run back to my apartment every time i do a load to get a real quarter). the penny is from 1944 and is what the internet says is a "wheat-backed" penny.

it's probably a pretty common coin, but i thought i'd ask the blogosphere: could this penny actually be worth something, or is it just a neat old coin?

...like this, who needs enemies?

i mean, kicking in the groin? *WHO* does that?!?!

*

you know what somebody should invent?

a waterproof laptop. seriously. i really could have used that while taking a bath tonight. could have done some work, could have done some blog commenting...instead, i suppose i made do with a beer and a crossword and my ipod speakers dragged to the door of the bathroom (and a few drops of this in the water, which makes your skin SO AWESOME SOFT). but, really. this is an untapped market.

get on it. i will pay you a gazillion dolllars. or the two dollars i currently have in my wallet.

Wow. I don't watch a huge amount of college football, but that was one hell of a game. I bet Kriston wasn't feeling any pain around 1AM. In fact, I know he wasn't.

Also entertaining: hearing, through my bedroom wall, Charles wake up to answer his cellphone. You've gotta turn that shit off on bowl night, my friend.

For those interested: the billion tutorials are right. Skype + SoundFlower + SoundFlowerBed + Audacity = ability to record phone calls (on the Mac -- it ought to be easier on the PC, actually). Finding and getting the LAME MP3 library installed is surprisingly confusing on OS X, though. Here's the link you need.

Belatedly going through some predictions for 2006, I realized that *I* had stupidly made some predictions last year. And hey, they turned out pretty well (although my batting average in the "science" category was weak). But this year, I got nothing. Well, okay, there's this: total entropy in the closed system of your choice will not — I repeat, not — decrease.

There. I've put myself out on a limb. Anybody else got guesses about what aught-six will bring?

Susan amuses with tales of the personals section of the London Review of Books. It sounds pretty sad, alright, but there's just no competing with the personals section in 2600. Seven listings; seven requests from prison inmates for letters.

Computer crime: an even worse way to meet girls than you thought.

so, obviously, i've had a lot of time over this winter break thing. it's been great. to be honest, i've spent a lot of it on the internet (my new media advisor would be so proud), and much of that internet time going back through fun blogs' archives to see things i haven't read before. (believe it or not, the fresh stuff on the internet runs out after approximately four browsing hours per day). i especially recommend susan's archives, and unfogged's, where i found ogged's list of women he won't date.

lists are great, and i find a list of who you won't date more or less reasonable. after all, i once upon a time had a list of 100 Things I'm Looking for in a Man. it was done a little tongue in cheek, but with a glimmer of naive hope. also, i was 19, and probably drunk on wine coolers with my dormmates when i did it. i can't find the list, but i can remember a few traits, and i think they'd probably still hold: must love radiohead was, at the time, number one. athletic was another. tolerant of high amounts of bullshit wasn't on there, but probably should have been.

anyway i'm alone in the apartment (tommy is down in cville and charles is working) and i've had two glasses of white wine, and apparently that is my cue to a) start stealing year-and-a-half-old ideas from other people's blogs and b) make my own list (all hypothetical, of course, because i'm obviously very happy in current situation. but you never know when you might have to, uh, cut and run!).

men i would not date:

1. those who do not like the generally same kind of music that i like, and by that, i do mean the dreaded indie rock. i'm not asking that you're all up in largehearted boy's shit or whatever, but a general knowledge and appreciation of the music i love is a good thing. i do like to go to concerts, after all, and having to go to a show with somebody who didn't like or know anything about the band would grate.

2. fatties. sorry, i'm fattist. you've got to be in good shape and like working out or playing a sport or SOMETHING. a running or tennis partner is preferable.

3. shorties. just not physically attracted. i'm near 5'9", and a guy has to be at least 6'1".

4. somebody who does not understand blogging. can you even IMAGINE trying to have to explain all of this crap?

5. people who think they are too good for a) television b) pop culture. i understand that tv is evil and rots your brain, and pop culture is throwaway trash for the intellectually unable, but. come. on. if there aren't at least a couple of tv shows and pop-culturey things you enjoy, then you probably take yourself too seriously.

6. those without a college degree. does this make me evil? i'm not quite sure. anyway i'm sure there are exceptions.

7. teetotalers

8. conservatives (though i have to admit i'd probably be willing to bend on this a little bit if the person in question were an extremely moderate conservative)

9. religious people. not saying it's bad; it's just not my thing.

10. vegetarians (stolen from apo's list in the comment's of ogged's post)

and you?

Catherine has been nice enough to lend me her car for my trip down to Charlottesville to see my mom (for Christmas 2: Son Of). Last night we picked it up and brought it here, into the land of two hour parking. So all day I've been playing hide and seek with the parking enforcement people.

But when I set out for my last trip, I found feathers — feathers! — all over our front door and stoop. I have no idea how they got there, and there's no bird in evidence. But I was immediately reminded of this, and thought I might as well link to it. If you, too, were once a young and cruel freshman with a high-speed internet connection, you've probably already seen it.

In other news, I think YouTube is pulling away from the other video Flickr wannabes. There's a creepy MySpace-ish undercurrent going on there, but there's no denying that their tech is fairly slick.

The fact that I have multiple friends who will probably be interested in this link is completely dumbfounding to me.

• Typographica's Best Fonts of 2005

question: i recall hearing somewhere that eating lots of rich food before your bed time can cause much vivider dreams than if you were just eating a regular dinner. i think it must be true, because the past four nights i've had very large, very heavy, very celebratory meals (all finished off with various numbers of slices of pie) and i've had TERRIBLE TERRIBLE dreams. nightmares, really. but why would this be? this site says heavy food can "cause gas, and, in turn, nightmares." but why would gas give you nightmares?? is your body really like, oh, toot, oops, NIGHTMARE!

the mystery of the human body.

maybe it's grapefruit. i've been eating approximately four per day.

or maybe, in the case of last night's nightmares, it was an afternoon viewing of king kong. there's enough disgusting, squiggly creatures and freaky tribal natives in that film to give you nightmares for weeks.

okay, this claim that santa is actually from iceland? is total bullshit. it's totally obviously he lives above the arctic circle in either finland, sweden or norway. take a look at this washington post travel article and gorgeous photo gallery about a trip to lapland. if you were santa, wouldn't you choose to live there instead? plus, in lapland, REINDEERS OUTNUMBER PEOPLE. hello.

iceland. bullshit.

See!? I'm NOT the only blogger who's an awful, awful person.

For the record, pigeon = squab with worse branding. Nothing wrong with that (except the creepy little feet, if you ask Catherine, which you probably shouldn't).

ps: for anyone looking to get into the holiday spirit by being terrified by animatronic, horrible, children-blinding christmas displays, i suggest you check out this post over at PIB.

i'm trying to put off wrapping my christmas presents. you would think this might be something i look forward to, but since i have all the wrapping talent of a limbless orangutan, and my presents always end up looking like something that came out of the Children's Home for Retarded Woodchippers, well, i don't.

so i'm going to copy the meme kevin drum put up today:

Four jobs you've had in your life: real jobs, relatively few. so i'll include a couple of internships. CIA intern, intern at washingtonpost.com, elementary teaching assistant, editorial assistant.

Four movies you could watch over and over: pride & prejudice the six hour version. pride & prejudice the new two hour version. princess bride, the sound of music (well, the first half anyway) (also i realize these answers make me thoroughly detestable but, uh, fuck off)
UPDATE OHMIGOD forgot bring it on. that is actually at least probably #2 for me on the rewatchable movie meme.

Four places you've lived: washington, d.c., milan, italy, charlottesville, va, chicago, il.

Four TV shows you love to watch: veronica mars (well documented here), lost, grey's anatomy, america's next top model. (ack. have to make it five. forgot futurama)

Four places you've been on vacation: i won't count italy since i've been all over the place there, so: wyoming, cape ann, ma., scotland, slovenia

Four websites you visit daily: washingtonpost.com, dcist.com, gmail.com, bloglines.com (sorry, but if you've got bloglines, what else do you need? i admit sometimes i'll visit unfogged.com outside of reading its entries in bloglines to see what is going on the comments, but i can rarely keep up, so usually not)

Four of your favorite foods: pizza, cheese, grapefruit, chocolate

Four places you'd rather be: i could give four locations in italy as an answer, or i could say, at this moment: at a bar, in a pool (in 85 degree weather), on a train (i love riding trains) or back in bed.

driving back from a fairly successful christmas shopping journey in the wilds of the 'burbs (well, successful for me. tommy came back with: nothing), tommy and i were stopped at the intersection in arlington near harris teeter. not having been back there in a while, i was checking out the strip mall sign to see if any new stores or restaurants had moved in. and lo and behold, something had! but it was confusing. it was ugly. it was a place called...PIE-TANZA!

pie-tanza, tommy and i muttered under our breath, looking at each other. pie-tanza? pie-tanza! piiiiiiiiiiiie-tanza.

what the fuck.

who names their restaurant pie-tanza? (it's a pizza place, for the record, not that we had to look it up on the internet or anything to figure that out. i thought initially it was a pie store). TANZA is not a word. it is not attached to any word. it makes no sense. it has nothing to do with anything related to pizza. it has nothing to do with anything related to the fabulousness of pizza (ie, pie-tastic would make a smidgen of sense). pie-tanza. pie-tanza. pie-tanza.

the word is, less than 24 hours after our realization that it existed, now legend in tommy's and my vocbaulary. i plan on saying it when "what the fuck" would suffice. "you got me THIS for christmas? pie-tanza?!"

but how could somebody have thought of so terribly awful of a name? what is the motivation behind it? WHY GOD WHY PIE-TANZA?!?! and so i turn to the internets, as i so often do, to try to figure out what madness could have been in play behind this insane decision. why, internets, would you ever name your pizza place pie-tanza? help out a girl who has spent a large chunk of the morning puzzling over this inanity.

pie-tanza.

Strangely enough, I came across the following in the middle of a Slashdot bitchfest about the merits of various programming languages. This can't possibly be true, can it?

You thought fashion fads just happened? It's much more organized than that. The "in" colors for US fashion are chosen 22 months in advance, by the little-known Color Association of the United States [colorassociation.com]. Color forecasts are issued to subscribers, and the textile mills, dye manufacturers, and clothiers start to gear up for the coming seasons. Because there are some long manufacturing lead times to produce fabrics in huge volume, the style decisions have to be organized.

"Pinks and fuchsia were everywhere in spring 2003; CAUS members knew this in spring of 2001."

Here's the activewear color plan for 2006-2007:

• Colors are anchored by light and dark neutrals in addition to the ever important white.


• Red will return as a leading bright, in coral and raspberry shades. - In color combinations, tonalities of one shade look new and dynamic.


• Cool colors like Apple Green, Indigo and teals are soothing, and especially attractive when matched with brown-influenced neutrals like Wheat and Terracotta. Finishes such as metallicizing add dimension and interest to color and fabrications.

Color changes in fashion do not happen by accident.

You're Virginia!
Part of the old school, you like both historical sites and crazy amusement parks. You like saying the word Commonwealth but couldn't really explain the concept or how it applies to your life. You like five-sided shapes, five-cent pieces, and possibly anything else having to do with the number five. Every now and then, you discard chaff from yourself that you just don't feel you need. And since you've been wondering... yes, there is a Santa Claus.
Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

if tommy, descended straight from general lee himself, takes this quiz and doesn't get virginia, robert e. is going to be rolling over in his grave.

if anyone tries this with the 'stick, you are dead. DEAD DO YOU HEAR ME? (unless you are going to give him to me, shh)

and also, uhhh........why is it called a jackass penguin? is that, like, a scientific name? that stuff about the braying just does not jibe.

i don't know if it's just this sunday source article that prompted me to think about it or the fact that 89% of my male friends currently have/recently have had beards, but, really, what is going on? is growing a beard a thing a mid-20s male must do to, like...get to the next level of maleness? is it a result of laziness? boredom with your hygiene routine? an expression of your SOUL?

not that i mind beards. on some people they do actually look quite good. but aren't they itchy? i mean, it's a LOT OF HAIR on your FACE.

oh well. all i do know is that there apparently people out there concerned about beard fluffiness and how to deal with beard-intolerant people. so close-minded!

This is pretty great.

Also: this.

both via bb

Awesome.

(via make)

I'll admit that the tech stuff I do is dorky — but to truly understand the depths of my lameness, you'd have to know how excited I get about stuff like this.

It's all pretty basic, but brings back fond memories. Now let's see a bowline on a bite, suckers. That's a serious-ass knot.

(via make:blog)

this nytimes fluff article on how more people are gravitating towards non-gadget gifts this holiday season reveals the true one must-have present that everybody will no doubt be buying this season: "At Barneys, such indulgences include a $50 ceramic night-stand condom jar from Jonathan Adler with an intricate pattern of sperm wriggling on its lid."

Scientology's secret texts are being stored in a New Mexico bunker designed to withstand a nuclear holocaust.

This actually sort of makes me like them more. There's nothing innately evil about this project (other than how the money was raised to fund it, of course). And the idea of trying to construct something that will outlive humanity has a certain romance for me.

Nevertheless, I hope hordes of anti-cultists, ironists and burnt-out hippies descend on Trementina, NM and turn it into a fucking zoo. I want to see Xenu bobbleheads, goddammit.

UPDATE: Via boingboing, check out this image of the earthen constructs that mark the site.

Someone just give Susan a book deal already. I'm starting to feel guilty about reading stuff this good for free.

...but this blog has helped me in stranger ways before, so i thought i'd try it out.

my lovely, talented and handsome younger brother peter (check out his drill team photos here, or graduation photos here) is moving to saratoga springs, ny, this winter, after the first part of his crazy navy nuclear sub training is over in charleston. he's having a hell of a time finding an apartment - SS, i guess, is a pretty small/resorty town, so it's not like they've got a craigslist. does anyone have any way of finding a realtor or some listings that could help him out? if so, shoot me an email. much thanks.

sigh. i knew it had to happen soon. after nearly two and a half years of constant wearage, the only jeans that ever looked good on me are dying. they're developing tiny holes that, if they become much larger, will soon be quite indecent.

every girl knows the journey that is finding the perfect pair of jeans, and i thought my life-long search had ended that day in nordstrom when i picked up this pair for only $50 (which seems incredibly and laughably low considering what most jeans cost these days). i should have known better. i should have bought six pairs. because i was a fool and thought that particular brand would always be carried by nordstorm. or somebody. anybody.

but they're not. in my crazed internet searches the past few weeks, as my jeans were falling apart before my eyes, i have found nothing. apparently this brand is italian (of course) and generally makes more mens jeans than womens. sigh. so if anybody knows where i can get a pair of boot cut low rise size 5 energie jeans, let me know. otherwise, please pity me with suggestions of jeans that look good on you and don't cost $300. cause i need a new pair.

via amber, i see that a blog has been started in nyc wherein women take cameraphone pics of men who harass them on the street and write about the experience (they've got a wiki, too). who's telling who to smile now, biatch?

this measurement of caffeine (via amanda) cannot be near correct, right? because i just had a venti starbucks coffee and i am feeling quite good, thanks very much. whereas when i have one red bull, i basically collapse on the floor in a quivering, jabbering heap.

Skateboard x Rollerblades = this. Neat.

Still, if I'm gonna kill myself on a recreational device, I think I'd prefer to do it on a pair of these things.

oh. mah. god. most disgusting story you'll read on the internets today.

this is what i spend time doing when i'm supposed to be finishing up an article, writing a huge research paper and starting work on a 1,000 word profile. this and reading hysterical stories about public masturbators on the CTA red line, which i ride quite often, and taking mental notes on how to deal with them when the situation inevitably, uh, arises. yup.

Kriston doesn't like Penny-Arcade. I disagree with him about the comic's merits, but I guess I can understand where he's coming from. Tycho — the strip's writer and chief blogger — has a prose style that can be gratingly pretentious; the comic's gags lean heavily on non-sequiturs and in-jokes; and Gabe,