If you’re one of those people in Cleveland Browns Stadium on a Sunday watching the Browns play football, and you go to one of the 50-plus concession stands to buy a hot dog, and you see this giant, delicious picture of a hot dog, with relish, onions, and a squiggly, neon line of French’s Yellow, you can now think to yourself, “I read the guy’s blog who took that picture.”
It’s a damned fine hot dog, if I do say so myself. Enjoy.
Has blogging made Google not as effective?
(Jeremy Zawodny’s blog): The act of Google trying to ‘understand’ the web caused the web itself to change.
It’s ironic that real human input, i.e., blogs, are what pushed Google’s page rank system over the brink? Or maybe the Giant Collective Hive Mind That Is Google has just become infatuated with reading blogs. Sort of a “Know thy enemy” approach to understanding humans.
Everyone blathers on about our foreign dependency on oil. I say the more worrisome dependency is on coffee*. Without a steady supply of java, our GNP would plummet overnight. Whole factories could be shut down because of some weather oddity in Brazil. Is anybody protecting this precious, and imported natural resource? I mean, besides my secret, underground coffee cache?
(Commodity Trading Guide: coffee): The supply-demand situation for coffee is a little different than most others. The demand for coffee is relatively inelastic. This means that given even significant changes in price, people will still be hesitant to change their consumption habits to any great degree because coffee has no real substitute that the consumer finds comparable.
*artificial sleep, bean, bean soup, black gold, black horse, black juice from hell, bucket of black snakes, caffe, cafe express, caffeine sandwich, coffee, coffeine, cuppa, everlasting, evil black brew, fourth cushion on the sofa of pleasure, good morning America, go juice, healing elixir, insommnia in a cup, java, jet fuel, joe, jolt juice, jus de pipe, lifeblood, liquid death, liquid life, liquid love, low crank, magic elixir, Mrs. Olsen’s elixer, mud, nap suppressant, nerve oil, nut shake, Peruvian love drips, quick pick me up, Swedish gasoline, timeless good, Turkish black top, zoom.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what books have influenced my life. I’m not talking about graduate school reading list stuff. I’m talking about books from childhood that had a huge impact on my world view. I’ve settled on these: the Space Cat series by Ruthven Todd (amazon), Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton (amazon), and The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary (amazon).
What is interesting to me now are the degrees of anthropomorphism each of these books represents. While this is probably not unusual in children’s literature, I wonder how these books contributed to my affinity for cats and motorcycles. I guess it could be worse; I could have chosen mice and steam shovels, which could be problematic.
I am leaving out the set of science encyclopedias from the 1950s that I read at the dinner table in lieu of conversation from the age of 8 until I was 14 or so. I loved these books for their wonderful illustrations and their fresh optimism about the future, which was supposed to have been the world I was living in then. I, too, believed the transistor would make my world a better place. I guess in many ways, it has.
Nip/tuck continues to be the only redeeming reason to have cable. This episode guide (tvtome.com) outlines the first season. I like the show because of its obvious ironies: The shallowest profession in the world has to content with the deepest moral issues. What makes the show rise above this level is the way we are forced in each episode to re-evaluate who the “good guys” are. It’s like a fractal morality play: The closer you get to each character, the more complex their actions become. The actors seem to be having a whale of a time, too, but clearly the strength is in the plots, which are both irreverent and meaningful.
Strange, mutant rats have invaded the Kyrgyz region of Russia. Just when you think the world can’t get any closer to the edge of Armageddon, and suddenly you have Mutant Rats. Not sure about Kyrgyz, though. Sounds kinda “Weekly World News-y” to me.
(Interfax.ru): “These rats can climb trees and are destroying apples, pears and other fruit. . .The rats frequently attack people and young children are especially vulnerable. . . The rats are not susceptible to typical poisons. . . An Uzbek specialist bred the species by crossing an ordinary rat with a muskrat. . .
And who knew muskrats were such vicious beasts?
If advertising is our religion, it’s no wonder Blue Laws have been repealed/ignored.
(Wikipedia): In Texas, for example, blue laws prohibited selling housewares such as pots, pans, and washing machines on Sunday until 1985, and many southern states still prohibit selling alcohol on Sunday. Many unusual features of American culture — such as the fact that one can buy groceries, office supplies, and housewares from a drug store — are the result of blue laws, as drug stores were allowed to remain open on Sunday to accommodate emergency medical needs.