Aug232006

Logic? What Logic?

I get a kick out of UTA (that’s the Utah Transit Authority for you out-of-towners). After observing their actions on a more-or-less daily basis for just over a year — I’ve been riding Salt Lake’s light-rail system to work throughout that time — I can only conclude that some evil genius has used his psychotronic disassociation ray to reverse the polarity of the organization’s institutional brain, so that every decision it makes is exactly the opposite of what it ought to be. Case in point: all summer long, the trains have been running with four cars during the morning rush hour, and they’ve been far below capacity. Plenty of seating for all the downtown cubicle-monkeys like myself. Now, today, classes are back in session at the University of Utah and a whole bunch of new riders are using this nifty light-rail system to get to campus… and for some reason the trains have dropped one car. Which means all the unwashed masses were cozier than flakes of dolphin-free tuna in light oil this morning.

So, let’s review: summertime, fewer riders, lots of cars; schooltime, more riders, fewer cars. Can anyone explain the logic process here? Anyone? Anyone at all? Yeah, that’s what I thought…

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Aug202006

Rock of Ages

We weren’t even through the gates yet when we saw the fight. Two guys in baggy shorts and tent-sized white t-shirts seemed to fall inexorably into each other, as if drawn together by the gravitational force of their own beer-bellies. The three of us — myself, The Girlfriend, and our friend Amber — stood there in shock as the battle raged on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Truth be told, it wasn’t much of a battle. The word “battle” implies something epic, and this wasn’t even particularly exciting. It was just two guys bear-hugging each other, turning around and around like fat, drunken binary planets circling a common point in space, grunting and shouting unintelligibly at each other. One of them eventually got the better of his opponent. A nose was broken, blood and tears began to flow, security arrived, and it was over. Two grown men, fast approaching middle age, who were behaving like jackass teenagers and would probably never speak to each other again. It was pathetic. And I found myself wondering if I was, too, attending a Def Leppard concert at my age.

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Aug172006

The Campaign Against CAPS LOCK

Proving yet again that people can get their knickers in a knot over the silliest things (and that the Internet enables them to share their pet peeves with a far vaster audience than they probably deserve), I see that a guy named Pieter Hintjens has launched a campaign to rid the world’s keyboards of that pesky CAPS LOCK key. From his blog manifesto:

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Aug172006

More on the Apollo Tapes

The word about those missing Apollo 11 tapes that I wrote about the other day has hit the streets, and more information about what they are and where they may have gotten to is coming out. Here are a couple of worthy follow-up articles:

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Aug162006

Not So Much

Here’s a kick in the metaphorical shorts: according to this doohickey, which generates a dollar value for your blog based on how frequently people link to you and the amount per link that AOL paid when it acquired Weblogs, Inc., Simple Tricks and Nonsense ain’t exactly in the big-time:


My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?

 

By contrast, Brian Greenberg’s blog, from which I learned of this little exercise in humility, is valued at $1,1289.08, and Scalzi’s Whatever (from which Brian learned of the doohickey in question) is worth just over $500K.

Man, I suck…

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Aug162006

Bruno Kirby

Well, this sucks: character actor Bruno Kirby has died of leukemia at the tender age of 57. Way too young for someone who still had so much to offer.

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Aug162006

Yummy, Part 2

As long as we’re looking at pretty girls today, here’s another photo I’ve had kicking around the old PC for awhile. That’s the charming Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in Sofia Coppola’s movie of the same name, which is due out in October.

Kirsten as Marie

I find that I don’t have much to say about this. What is there to say, really? Sigh…

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Aug162006

Yummy…

The image below is from an upcoming movie called DOA: Dead or Alive. (No doubt they had to spell out the name to avoid confusion with this D.O.A. and its remake; ah, who am I kidding? Nobody remembers those, they just spelled it out because it looked cool…)

I have no idea what this film is about and there’s every chance that it will stink like week-old salmon, but based on this one photo I’m probably going to see it anyway. What can I say, I’m a sucker for a pretty girl with a katana in her hand. Five pretty girls with katanas? Oooh, baby…

Probably going to suck, but oooh, baby!

The usual instruction applies: click to enlarge. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t enlarge much, but you can get a little more of a view…)

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Aug152006

Space News Round-up

Have you ever had a vivid dream of being at work, and then your alarm sounds and you end up all disoriented and bummed out because you thought you were already at work but now you realize you have to get up and actually go to work? Yeah, that’s how my day started, and it hasn’t gotten much better since then.

Luckily, I’ve had the InterWeb to provide me with some distraction: I’ve been catching up on my spaceflight-related news. Here are some highlights for any loyal readers who may be interested:

Continue Reading…

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