dynagirl

Max McGee died this weekend, in typical Max McGee fashion — he was up on his roof, with a leaf-blower, and fell. The dumb dummy! Can you imagine what his wife was thinking? Mostly distraught, I suppose, but there HAD to be a part of her thinking, I fucking told him that would happen. He was a great character and a good man, and we’ll miss him.

Here are some choice quotes, which text really can’t do justice to –
“So, where do does dew come from? The ground, or the sky?”
“When it’s third-and-10, you can take the milk drinkers and I’ll take the whiskey drinkers every time.”
“I waddled in about 7:30 in the morning, and I could barely stand up for the kickoff.”
“What’d happen if I put my microphone in my beer?”

Some people think Matt Lauer’s hot shizz, I guess this lady thought that airing her pudenda for him would win him forever. Instead, he appears to be be giving her a slow clap. No, actually, she got yelled at by the Dress Code Police of Southwest Airlines and almost kicked off of her flight. If it were thirty years ago, they’d have hired her on the spot. Oooh, I want those boots. Remember what it was like? When Southwest Airlines didn’t have hostesses in hot pants? Remember?

amazing slideshow of 35W
.
d00d.
fuck.

We went to the Brewers-Giants game last night, and had a great time. Hats, bratwursts, expensive beer, and omg, the Brewers won. However… the amount, volume, and vitriol of the boos and taunts delivered to Barry Bonds (we were in the third-base bleachers) was so nasty that now I’m rooting for the guy! Don’t be mean.

The banners that just had * on them were pretty clever, though…

A Chinese court has jailed two officials after they let a blind contractor build a bridge which collapsed during construction and injured 12 people, the official Xinhua news agency said Monday…. “After the blind contractor changed the blueprint, he carried out the work only using a roughly drawn draft of the plan, which caused the bridge to collapse,” the report said. Xinhua did not explain how the contractor was able to run the project considering his inability to see.

Via Tha Bryzzzah

Smuggled Bushmeat Poses U.S. Health Threat

This country’s fucked. I think my favorite is the guy who couldn’t tell the questioner what state KFC comes from.

One man’s quest to find out how many people really speak Gaelic:

In Galway, I went out busking on the streets, singing the filthiest, most debauched lyrics I could think of to see if anyone would understand. No one did – old women smiled, tapping their feet merrily, as I serenaded them with filth.

Are certain words creeping into his conversation? Words like… swell? (trouble!) And… ‘so’s your old man?

TV news is a joke.
UPDATE! I really am dangerous geeky, check out my last Subversion commit tonight:

via Geekologie

Hooray WonderWoman:

WONDER WOMAN – SOCIALIST Wonder Woman was raised in an all-female society, a monarchist utopia with strong socialist overtones and plenty of hot girl-on-girl action. Wonder Woman came to “Patriarch’s World” with a clear liberal agenda but a willingness to crack skulls if need be. She’s heavily into social justice, environmental issues, and sisterhood. Wonder Woman is not beyond sticking a high-heeled red boot up your ass if you get in the way of her Sapphic Socialism.

Madison pharmacies that do not provide emergency contraception medication would need to display a notice saying so, and also stating the nearest location where the medication is available under an ordinance that Ald. Zach Brandon plans to introduce at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

Frisco outs art teacher after museum trip:

Frisco school trustees aren’t renewing the contract of a veteran art teacher who was reprimanded because a student saw a nude sculpture during a museum visit… McGee’s attorney says the teacher’s troubles started after taking 89 students on a school field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art in April. The principal later admonished McGee about the trip, telling her a parent complained about a student seeing nude art.

When we have kids, it would be really nice to be able to send the kids to public school, because seriously, public schools are hugely important to the future of the country (and the world) and I support the idea 100%. However, between the repeated funding cuts, the bullshit of “No Child Left Behind,” and teachers getting canned for taking kids to a museum where they might OMG NOES! see a nude breast or for showing them an opera video that OMG NOES! had “demons” in it, I’m pretty sure we’ll be sticking with the Montesorris and the Catholic schools. Sheesh.

Next I went to the belt, where I emptied my pockets, emptied my bag, took off my watch, and took off my shoes. The only thing they didn’t ask me to empty was my intestines, but that’s next year. Just before I went through the gate, the portly young woman on the other side, who I thought might find the stunt funny, was replaced by a surly old guy who looked like an ex-Marine. “Oh no,” I said to the vibrator.

FORWARD Governor Mark Warner is going to hold a virtual Town Hall meeting in Second Life. “When we all quit laughing, we kind of looked around and said, ‘Hey, that’s not a bad idea.”
Wow.
via BoingBoing

Yesterday’s airport security lines and hassles from the travellers’ perspectives on Flickr. Oh, and a Russian dude slamming a bottle of champagne on Yahoo.

I have to fly to New York in a few weeks* and I hope this settles down a bit by then. I was going to be travelling light anyway; I’m just helping my brother drive a uHaul back here. It would be nice, though, if I can just pack a backpack with clean undies (no shampoo**!) and a book (no knitting! sad.) and my cell phone and not have to check anything.

* [OMG why is a one-way flight TWICE as much as a round trip?!]
**Some BoingBoing readers ask the obvious question, if these liquids are so potentially deadly, why are they being dumped out in large receptacles in crowded public areas?!

Wikipedia blocklog: Block log – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
04:59, 1 August 2006 Tawker (Talk | contribs) blocked “Stephencolbert (contribs)” with an expiry time of indefinite (please confirm ownership of this account per the email I sent before I unblock. That, and mention me on the show… (put me on notice!!!))

Tawker’s post
YouTube video of the August 1 Colbert Report that got him blocked
screen capture of the page Colbert changed

Did you know that the number of elephants in Africa has tripled in the last six months? I didn’t either!

We, uh, got some rain yesterday.

TheStar.com – Why suburbs will never have tall trees:

Now consider what’s happened at the subdivision. Once the topsoil is removed, you’re left with the rock and clay underneath, which hasn’t seen the light of day for thousands of years. Landscapers call it “hardpan,” and from an engineering point of view it’s an ideal material to mould into the site’s drainage plan.

Run heavy equipment over material like that, and it quickly gets compacted into something with much the same consistency as concrete.

Once the houses are in place, the topsoil gets put back, but usually to a depth of only 20 cm., which is the typical municipal standard and enough to support healthy turf.

The rest of the stockpiled topsoil is usually sold off and eventually ends up in nurseries, but only after it’s been rehabilitated by adding manure or peat moss or sand. That’s because the soil became anaerobic after sitting in a pile for so long. “There’s no oxygen within that pile anymore, and eventually all the living microbes and organisms in that soil die,” says Ubbens.

So you end up with less-than-ideal topsoil spread thinly over a layer of clay hardpan that often includes pieces of brick and other debris. “In our business, we call it `builder’s loam,’” says Ubbens. “It’s unfortunate that it’s so bad that it’s even got a name.”

Planting trees in that is like sticking them in a clay pot. “We bore a hole in that heavily compacted clay, put the tree in with a certain amount of soil, but the tree will eventually start to decline,” says Andy Kenney, senior lecturer in urban and community forestry at the University of Toronto.

Follow the Tour de France 2006 in Google Earth. “It’s a network link, so any refinements will get updated automatically, so save it in your “My Places” if you plan to follow the race.” Nifty!

Ranking the rudeness: I bet you they won’t play this list on the radio…

Hey, hey! I think the economy might be turning around soon, or at least Web 2.0 is going to be big.

I finally got past the nauseating first three pages of this article from New York that’s making the rounds, and by the last two pages, I realized I’ve already read this article ten years ago, when the first round of bitchy, labelling articles about Gen X and what a bunch of slackers they are. After the b(r)and-name dropping and thinly disguised jealousy, it’s the same old saw (truth?): Gen X doesn’t want to work in the same “Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” model that we watched our parents struggle with.

“If I had spent the last six years working at that job and progressed, I would have made a lot of money,” Nathanson told me from San Juan Capistrano, California, where his surfwear company is based. “But honestly, there have been very few days in the past six years where I’ve gotten in my car to go to work and thought, Fuck, I’m going to work. When I was at the investment bank, that was happening 50 percent of the days. And now I can go snowboarding at Mammoth in the middle of the week if there’s a good storm, rather than worrying about being at work at six in the morning. And there’s another upside as well: I have a total and complete passion for this business.”
…
Which brings me back to my father: the one who wore suits, not jeans; the one who, when he was my age, already had four kids; the one who logged a lifetime at exactly the kind of middle-management jobs that no one wakes up excited about going to in the morning, and who then found himself sandbagged by the late-eighties recession, laid off in what must have felt like the worst kind of double whammy. All the adult trade-offs he’d made turned out to be a brutal bait-and-switch. Is it any wonder that the Grups have looked at that brand of adulthood and said, “No thanks, you can keep your carrot and your stick.” Especially once we saw just how easily that stick can be turned around to whap your ass as you’re ushered out the door, suit and all. Just how easily a bona fide, by-the-book adult can be made to wonder where it all went wrong, and why you ever bothered to grow up in the first place.

My brother and I were very lucky in this regard — our parents (and both sets of grandparents were) entrepreneurs, and we have no qualms about following our interests, working for ourselves, and saying, “take this job and…” when things get too stupid at workplaces.*
*Did I mention that today is my last day at this glacial, inefficient, wasteful insurance behemoth? w00+.

Besides the fact that the stereotypical stock images are teh g3y, this quiz is for amateurs. Viz…

1: How many functioning computers are in your house?

Available answers stop at four, and don’t include, “I can’t remember, hang on while I go down to the server room and count them.”

2: What kind of computer do you use?

The answers reference operating systems, not computers. Also, there is no option for “OSX, Windows (but only for testing and himself’s work), at least 2 flavors of Linux and THERE IS NO MENTION OF BSD.

4: Do you text-message or e-mail from your cell phone or BlackBerry?

Hello?! Treos are much more awesome, I am in IRC right this minute on mine, and himself got into his AS/400 box on his on the way to work this morning. Blackberries are for corporate hacks.

8: Which of these do you have attached to your television?

OK, props for mentioning Slingbox, which we don’t have but really want. (Mentioned in our podcast a couple weeks back. And no, there were no bonus points awarded for podcasting.)

9: Which game system are you playing most often today?

Hacked Xbox with MAMEs not an available option. (Not that I hacked it, but still.)

17: When you need driving directions you…

No option for “use internet in car, either wardriving or on Treo.”

My score was 79, Seriously Nerdy (out of a possible 102); however, the quiz didn’t give me an extra ten bonus dork points for blogging a complaint about it. Meh.

Holy crap, I just looked at the other results. Out of 16948 people taking the quiz, nearly 60% were under 30, or “stuck in the last century.” Only four percent are as geektastic as I am, which is is scary, considering that of the tech people I know, I would consider myself on the low end of the totem pole (being a web designer, not a programmer). No wonder we have to translate ourselves so much.

A retiring doctor reminisces about the good old days. JFC-in-a-chicken-basket.
Via Day of the Deadly

Halliburton was awarded a $385 million dollar contract…

to build U.S. prisons for immigrants and disaster victims.

“The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention and Removal Operations Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” Halliburton announced in a Jan. 24 press release.

Just what sort of “new programs” would require jailing immigrants and disaster victims has not been made public.

But in 2002, attorney general John Ashcroft announced his intention to build “enemy combatant” camps for U.S. citizens.

“Ashcroft’s plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

  secret prisons on US soil
+ Halliburton
+ Bush administration’s general shitting on the constitution

… what’s in your go-bag?? I think it’s time to sew some of these lovely Canadian flag patches on all of our bags!

Goddamn it. Fuck the New York Times. Those assholes have known for over a year that Bush has been taping our phone calls and we’re just finding out about it now? Good thing we weren’t making any important decisions fourteen months ago. The next person who starts bitching about how hard the so-called “liberal media� is on the President is gonna get a jackboot upside the head. And don’t get all excited that the Times finally did get around to telling us about this little caper. They only printed it because they found out they were about to get scooped by their own reporter. All the news that’s fit to print. . . on my ass.

It continues….
Thanks for the link, Stacey!

Richard Pryor died yesterday. My favorite related story is the time I was out for dinner with a man I had started dating, and a friend of his. Somehow Blazing Saddles came up, and they started going on and on aboutwhat a racist and nasty movie that was… and when I finally got my jaw picked up from the floor and pointed out that Richard Fucking Pryor wrote it, they didn’t know who he was. There were no following dates.

Also. Former Senator Eugene McCarthy died.

I’m giving Aveda the benefit of the doubt on the reasoning here: last night, I needed moisturizer* and stopped at a local salon. Check it out:
150mL bottle, $30
500 mL bottle, $62
Math-retard as I may be, even I could figure that’s almost half the per-ounce price, so now I’ve got a year-plus supply. My face will be so moist.

For many years, I’ve been using Cetaphil lotion, but then I added their cream for night – which totally made me break out and now my face is hot and itchy and flaky, DAMN YOU CETAPHIL MOISTURINZING CREAM!!!

In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans.

At least, that’s the only thing you can surmise, if you refuse medical treatment and say it’s up to god, and it happens twice.

You need not be paranoid to fear RFID: “…the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns of individual consumers.” Yikes.
Via BoingBoing