Phone's ringin', dude

My car got broken into for a second time last night. Someone applied a screwdriver to my already-violated driver's side door lock.



Fortunately, there was nothing worth taking.

Blowback

Well, it only took 2 1/2 months, but the outcry has finally started to build over the Case of the Outed CIA Agent.



I like the Administration's denial strategy. "No way was it Karl Rove! That's ridiculous." Ok, not Karl, got it. Who, then. Is it time to start guessing initials?

Scavenger

Letterboxing is a particular type of scavenger hunt in which the goal is to decipher a clue leading to a box. The box contains a logbook and a rubber stamp. When you find the box, you stamp the box's book and use its stamp to stamp your own.



So: clue -> box -> stamp & stamp.



Apparently, this all started in Dartmoor, England when a guy left his business card in a bottle. Hobbies have a funny way of getting out of hand. Now there are between 10 and 40 thousand letterboxes hidden in Dartmoor alone and a published catalog listing the clues. Letterboxers have a scoring code to indicate how many boxes they've found and left. And there are funny variants of letterboxes like the Hitchhiker box - a letterbox placed inside another letterbox and moved from place to place when it is found.



Recreation is serious business.

Gyroscopic

I am ready for the future.

History will call us dorks

Do you see what happens when you read Dune as Primary Colors. It's like the Bible Code:

"If we want to solve this riddle, we need to find out who is playing the role of the Baron. When I saw that Monkey Mail post today that said Cheney had urged Clark to run, the bells went off. Is this true? Did Cheney urge him to run? Have you heard anything more about this? If he did, then I'd say we have our fat man. Maybe Cheney's undisclosed location is Geidi Prime."

(via Superelectric)

Abby Singer

It's like Cecil B. Demented, but, you know, real and unterrible:

"Ryan has emailed me about an impending highly secret action he has planned, which he has codenamed Operation Night Hawk. I am invited to join him. He says he cannot tell me much about it for fear of jeopardising its security, but convinces me that, by the end of the President's Day holiday weekend, every studio executive in LA will know about Abby Singer. What's more, they will each have a trailer on their desk."

Nature forges a deal / To raise wonderful hell

The Yanks and O's attempted to play ball today in Charm City despite the oncoming hurricane. It didn't work out so well and the game was called in a tie. Derek Jeter on the situation:

"They're canceling everything around here -- schools are canceled, the government left, the Navy's pulling out, and the Orioles and Yankees are playing baseball."

The Etymology of K-rad

The debate still rages. My favorite theory:

"K" is short for "Thousand", as in Kilobyte, and therefore "K-Rad" means "A Thousand Times As Rad".

St. Louis Spiral

My hometown has seen better days. First, a school board member called down a curse upon the mayor for allowing a corporate turnaround firm to close down 16 schools ... which, you know, fair enough, sometimes cursing's all that's left.



But now, they've got digital bugles playing Taps at our military funerals and clearly it's only a matter of time until one of them's accidentally set to Reveille.

Chiquita Crisis

I've been warning people about the impending demise of the banana for weeks. Most are dubious in a "that asteriod's not really gonna hit us" sort of way. But really, as the Guardian explains, it's all a matter of time.



The bananas we enjoy today are mutants and susceptible to fungi like yellow Sigatoka. In fact, such a fungus would have completely wiped out bananas in the 1950s if not for the heroic Cavendish variant. But now! there's a new form of Sigatoka ... black Sigatoka. And the Cavendish is imperiled.



There is some hope that a new hybrid may save the day. But only if we get the world's best deep core driller mutant fruit hybridizer and his ragtag crew of misfits to head on down to Honduras and show those boys at FHIA what real cross-breeding is all about!

Death of Socialism

A kid at my Mom's school, when asked if he knew what Labor Day meant:

"That's the end of the Jeep Grand Cherokee Summer Sale!"

Shake

Steve via voicemail at 6:39:54 pm last night: "...I'll send you email about that, too - Holy Jesus Christ there's an earthquake! Wow this is a big one. Uh ... ... yeah .. um, ok, as soon as the earthquake finishes I'll give you a call."

Big

The whole Omnimax v. IMAX thing has confused me for a while. The Metreon in SF has an IMAX theatre, but it's not of the domed, planetarium style. It's more of the "WHOA! That sucker's HUGE!" style. After seeing so many movies projected on tiny multiplex screens, it's really something to see Matrix Reloaded on a 80' x 100' megasurface.



Basically, you end up seeing a lot more detail. Laurence Fishburne's face is quite bumpy, for example.



The side effect is that if a small gnat happens to settle on the projection glass, you end up with a 25' killer bug stuck on the side of Keanu's face.