(Are you allowed to do things like “quote of the day” for a site as irregularly updated as mine?)
From the Talking Mirror comes this Word on Internet Commenters:
Turns out, the overwhelming majority of people with internet access are inarticulate, misanthropic pricks with a surplus of time but a deficit of brain activity.
Not to be confused with eigenvalue.
And The New Yorker was born:
The Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
I am of course being unfair here to the New Yorker, which is a fine magazine to which I subscribe. However, I do feel that they sometimes stray into this territory, especially when it comes to writing about current events that are outside their normal purview; good examples are the financial crisis or in a recent article about UAVs when they attempted to provide context on the laws of war.
Traffic tickets are always irritating, especially now that they’re so expensive. For those inclined to fight their ticket, here’s an excellent free website for fighting California traffic tickets. They have a very easy to follow tutorial that gives you all the documents you need. Another good site can be found here.
I recently received a speeding ticket while heading southbound on I-5 to go to Disneyland in Anaheim. As I get time I’ll post status information on my case as well as copies of the documents I use in fighting this.
I love star gazing, but I live in the city where most of the time it’s too bright or the sky it too obscured to have much fun finding constellations. Or perhaps more importantly, I never have a star chart and don’t know what I’m looking at. That’s why I was extremely excited to discover that the iPhone has a very nice set of astronomy/star-gazing applications (click through for a very thorough review).
I still haven’t figured out which one I want to buy.
Anna Fricke, over at the NY Times’ Proof blog, explains what she misses about drinking:
So it’s not the alcohol I miss. It’s the immaturity. The selfishness. The wasted days frittered away recuperating from the wasted nights. It all turned around so quickly. I wasn’t prepared to be this person. A person who can clearly recall all the events of the night before. Who can be the designated driver. Who can go to a work party without apologizing the next day. This must be parenthood. I would toast this milestone, but I have pears to puree.
This arrived in my email inbox. It’s not terribly PC to laugh at such situations, but it’s quite fun. If I’m violating somebody’s copyright by posting this, please let me know so I can take it down.
Have you visited the site Stuff White People Like.com? If you haven’t you should. Right now.
I’m only half white but I grew up in Northern California, which is the gooey center for the type of urban, liberal, economically comfortable, and “progressive” white person this site derives so much humor from. One of my favorite entries is on the joy of being offended.