the best parody ever?

subtle enough that the slow wouldn't even know something was wrong.  (_i'd put a line in here, but my life would get very difficult for at least a medium amount of time._anyone who knows me, ask in person and i'll tell you._)

http://www.asiansart.org/

(and for westerners who don't follow asian culture -- which is to say damn near every whitey that doesn't live within a 75 mile radius of san francisco -- this is the reference site: http://www.asianart.org/.)

"where asian still means oriental"

snippet for the future?

"... artists who haven't even published their way to wikipedia standards
of notability."

a comment by "omnitarian" from shirt.woot ... a nice double-cutting
construction that i wouldn't be able to come up with on my own ... great
representation of a very geek-imbued self-important down-talker ...
scrapbooking it here for possible character use later.

quote of the moment

"i'd rather fist fight a manatee than buy this dull, unimaginative
shirt."

-- "whotookpowerstroke" on shirt.woot

quote of the moment

"causing an accident that puts human life at risk because you're drunk
is horrible.
leaving a woman to die submerged in a locked car in 8 feet of water;
going home to bed while she's still alive and calling the police only
after her lifeless asphyxiated body is found? that is pure gothic
horror.
btw: Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote a book about Chappaquiddick once upon
a time, had a piece in the Guardian today. she seems to be of the same
mind. (interesting that it ran in a UK paper -- I'd be surprised to
see anything like this in the U.S.)"
-- suttonhoo
(she already left this as a comment below, but it bears repeating in its
own right.)

quote of the moment

"had the pleasure to look at 901 times a saturn and that was almost as
terrible to see thousands finderdapper on it too"

-- google robot, translating a comment on a russian web page about
netbooks

quote of the moment

"a lifetime of service & only one corpse. guess he finished ahead."

-- suttonhoo, TXTing about ted kennedy

quote of the moment

"The great terror in the PC industry is that it's created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a "secondary buy"—the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it's also possible that the next time you're replacing an aging laptop, you'll walk into the store and wonder, "Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?" And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day."

 

-- clive thompson

my new travel 'blog

how can a few weeks go by without me starting yet another writing project?  the answer is, they can't.

i'm writing a travel 'blog that will be active when i take big(ger) trips and dormant nearly all the rest of the time.  first up are my experiences with jetblue's $600 all-you-can-jet (AYCJ) pass i'll be writing about it from now through october 8.  15 legs in 31 days, you'll see a lot of spew.

also, for all you web spiders and anyone else who may be interested, the birdhead and i have created the all-you-can-jet airport locker ... a place where you can get AYCJ clothes, mugs, and yes, bears.  100% of the profits will go to carbonfund.org, jetblue's carbon-offset partner. 

pax.

quote of the moment

"Only after I have spent every spare hour on craigslist—browsing the ads, tracking the spam, reading the help forums, contacting users—do I finally begin to grasp something of [Jim Buckmaster's - CEO of craigslist] situation. The truth is that a lot of people complain about craigslist. Buckmaster is correct that few of them complain about the design. They complain about spam, they complain about fraud, they complain about the posting rules, they complain about the search, they complain about uploading images. They complain about every way a classified transaction can go wrong. They seldom complain about amazing new features they imagine they might possibly want to use, because they are too busy complaining about the simple features they depend on that don't work as well as they'd like. By eliminating marketing, sales, and business development, craigslist's programmers have cut out all the cushioning layers that separate them from the users they serve, and any right they have to teach lessons in public service comes from the odd situation of running a company that is directly subservient only to the public. Here's the lesson: The public is a motherfucker."

 

-- gary wolf

quote of the moment

"The long-running tech-industry war between engineers and marketers has been ended at craigslist by the simple expedient of having no marketers. Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings."

 

-- gary wolf

quote / trivium of the moment

"Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon .com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30."

 

-- gary wolf, wired magazine

quote of the moment

"i've been eating like i'm still employed."
-- feistync on twitter

quote of the moment

"believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter
if i have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own
common sense."

-- buddha

quote of the moment

"How did I come to the point where I'm doing a threesome with a 27 year
old roller derby queen a and a woman with a masters degree in
psycholinguistics?"

-- a friend, who is in fact, doing just that

door

-- palo alto, CA

(this to the "american institute of mathematics" [attached to the local
super-electronics store]. funny, i always thought it would be bigger.)

quote of the moment

"it's not the number of guns that a person has that matters, it's the
amount of ammunition."

-- the birdhead

quote of the moment

"bacon is meat candy."

-- t-shirt online

trivium of the moment

CDs are responsible for 60% of the music sales in the US for the 1st
half of the year.

quote of the moment

"the truly rich never burn their candles for the same reasons as do the
truly poor."

-- mikkel grüner

need *your* opinion

any/all readers,

jetblue has an "all you can fly" pass for $600 that's good for 9/8 -
10/8 inclusive. i'm going to take a rare step and 'blog about it
extensively.

my question to you:

should i keep that information here (as i did with "norway is your pal
week" -- do a G search on that phrase if you weren't here for the good
old days)?

= OR =

should i have it independent and encapsulated like i did with "24 hours
of TV" (see 24HoursofTV.com)?

i'm leaning toward encapsulation, but am interested in what any/all
think. please comment here or tell me in person.

thanks.

haiku of the moment

man yells on cell phone
writing texts, watching TV
virtual presence

quote of the moment

"for any of the kids in the audience, you may be wondering who i am ...
well, i was your mother's 'n synch."

-- KC (front man for the sunshine band); las vegas, NV

when strangers attack

got this email this morning on my hiptop from a high school principal in
NM.

wanted to catch the conversation for posterity.

***

>> B1,
>> I am serving breakfast at 7:00 on Monday.  As you know it is not a
>> mandatory day but I would like for you to come so you can meet the new
>> people and I can introduce you.  We will be working with computers and
>> new equipment. 
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Bev

***

> hi bev,
>
> thanks for your kind invitation. there are only a few problems here.
>
> 1. you've got me confused with someone else. i'm am quick to admit
> that this usually doesn't let me get in the way of free food of any
> type.
>
> 2. 07:00 is too bloody early for me. just the *thought* of getting up
> at that time is stomach churning, but being out the door and
> presentable at that time is unthinkable. and, unfortunately, that's a
> little too late to stay up. i know, i know, you have to do this as
> part of being a high school principal; but i view it *exactly* the same
> as military service ... a bold few do it so the rest of us don't have
> to. (and i thank you for that. sincerely.)
>
> 3. ever since my 7-year stint at apple i try to work with computers as
> little as possible. it's nearly impossible to do here in the silicon
> valley, but in NM, you have a decent fighting chance to keep them at
> bay. my advice: consider that possibility.
>
> hope you have a good meeting and a wonderful school year,
> b1

quote of the moment

"if no one's going anywhere, it's better if everyone's in a good mood."

-- chelsea handler

haiku of the moment

as the reverb ends
we feel the buzz of les paul
harmony in grit

trivium of the moment

malarial mosquitoes are thought to be responsible for more than half of
all human deaths due to predator since the stone age.

quote of the moment

"i thought the plane was falling, just like a big earthquake, but in the
air."

-- thiago candido wielding both similies and metaphors while talking
about aircraft turbulence

craigslist rideshare flakes be gone

i tend to do a LOT of driving (i'm averaging 2k miles per month on the continual car over the last 20 months) and i use craiglist's ride share a LOT. it gives me both company as well as gas money for the ride (nothing doubles your mileage like someone paying for half a tank). the problem is that about one in three people flake on their "commitment" to ride along. it irritates me to no end so i've decided to do something about it ... i'm going to start tagging them here (this is the blog that easily has the most search engine hits of all the ones i'm involved with, so it'll get paid attention to by the engines). my hope is that when people want to google potential riders they'll know what they could be in for.

because all of this is mildly "exposing," i'll put as much absolute truth and attention to detail in here that i can. i want to be very clear about my feelings: yes people's plans change, i understand that. and yes, people can have (sometimes terrible) things come up. but in all cases i've experienced (and those described here), these people did nothing to indicate to me that i should not be picking them up -- i was left hanging, sometimes at literally the last minute.

i'm also sorry that i'm focusing on the negative and not putting my great experiences on here. there have been some really good ones. unfortunately evil 'net robots would probably help undo those people with any information i left, so i have to just let them be.

almost needless to say, my advice if you're giving a ride to anyone on this list is say "no thanks" and go with the next possibility.

if you happen to see this posting, you're on this list and you're pissed about it, you and i need to have a little phone conversation ... because before anything else happens, guess what? you caused me hardship and never apologized for it -- you had me scrambling without even a second thought from your side. all you had to do was call or TXT and say things had changed. a word to anyone here or in the future because it apparently isn't obvious: when things fall apart, you need to inform the people that are depending on you.

i use quotes around the names i was given because, as bo3b johnson so rightly says, "assume everything you read in the internet is a lie unless you have strong reason to believe otherwise."


"Wendee Ayers"
wendeeayers@yahoo.com
619-807-2579
(note: this is NOT her number, but her using the cell of a friend ... he was very reasonable and fine to me which is why i don't mention him by name here.)

i had responded to an older CL ad of hers wanting to take her and her daughter from san diego to las vegas, NV. we traded several emails and TXT, but had agreed that i would pick her up in san diego. in our last batch of communications i said to be sure to give me an address because i was driving to LA at the time and wouldn't be able to talk on the phone. she left a voice mail sometime during that drive saying she was trying to reach me but i was unsuccessful (which, ahem, was what i had already told her).

i sent her an email just past midnight on the day i was to pick her up saying i still needed an address and i was planning on leaving at noon.

at 09:00 that morning i hadn't received a return email or TXT so i called the number i'd been communicating with and got the cell's owner. i let him know i was planning on leaving SD at noon, he said he'd relay the information (and certainly didn't seem surprised by it -- i'm guessing wendee had already informed him).

at 11:45 i hadn't heard anything, i called and he said that wendee had gone to pick up her daughter from fishing and was surprised she hadn't called me. i said i'd be leaving in about 20 minutes.

at 12:15 i called and said i was leaving in 15 minutes. he was still surprised that we hadn't spoken and said, "that may not work for her since she's not in cell phone coverage." i never heard anything from her again.

oh yeah, and this day i'm talking about here? it just happened to be my birthday.


"Jennifer"
i removed this post 2/3/10 due to comment (and self-constraint) below.

do it yourself ...

... paternity test.

sent to me by my sharp-eyed brother.