The situation isn't as dire as its frontpage headline suggested ("Space storm heads toward Earth" - I was about to start building a shelter), but the pictures are way cool. Make sure you check out the galleries.

posted at 9:17 AM | link |

Well, Whadya Know

Why do we call uproar "pandemonium?"

Some years ago, when China made a gift to the Washington D.C.
zoo of a pair of pandas, newspaper headline writers had a
field day playing off this word to describe the hullabaloo
caused by the creatures. The sound of the word, for me,
conjures up an image of people banging on pots and other hard
surfaces to make a racket. Maybe that occurred as well to the
17th century poet John Milton when he invented the word.

Speaking of Washington, Milton needed a name for the devil's
capitol city in his epic poem, Paradise Lost. So he played
around with Latin and Greek and came up with "pandemonium."
If you look at the middle of the word, beginning with the 4th
letter, you'll see an appropriate word within the word.

[source: The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology]

posted at 11:00 PM | link |

I'm sure this is just what God had in mind.

posted at 1:40 PM | link |

I'm sorry but... No freakin' way!

"Good evening everyone. I just got in from Peru and boy are my arms tired."

Badump bump.

posted at 1:37 PM | link |

Well, Whadya Know

People who ran illegal dice games in England three centuries
ago weren't taking any chance on going to jail. They employed
a man whose sole job was to swallow the dice in the event of
a raid. Maybe that's why they called playing dice "shooting
cr...," uh, never mind.

The ancient Greeks made dice from the shoulder blades of
sheep. Losers in crooked dice games might thus truly feel
that they had been fleeced.

[source: 2201 FASCINATING FACTS by David Louis]

posted at 1:31 PM | link |

The man behind the curtain, blogger, was unavailable for the past 16 hours due to some system upgrades. Hence the lack of posts from moi.

Looks like things are back up and running, though. Thanks, Ev!

posted at 1:29 PM | link |

Oh, MAN. Makes me think of the scene in A Fish Called Wanda, when Otto opens the safe to steal the diamonds, finds it empty and yells, "DisaPPOINTED!"

posted at 2:55 PM | link |

Bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire...

I've never been to Vegas and have very little desire to do so any time in the near future. The place just never really appealed to me - I don't gamble and I am not a shopper (at least not in the recreational sense). Despite the city's declarations that Vegas is now a family vacation destination, it seems its dark underbelly is thriving. The Salon article "Bright Lights, Big Weirdness" chronicles a couple of wild murder cases that have come out of Vegas in the past couple of years:

"The myriad connections -- innocent as they may be -- between the Rudin and Murphy cases do nothing to dispel the notion of Vegas as the glittering capital of inbred thuggery, a hot, cheap burg where amoral yahoos party with mobsters while the town's behemoth gambling factories trick hardworking saps out of their vacation money. "

I bet the Las Vegas Tourist Board is gonna love that.

posted at 2:34 PM | link |

After much procrastination I finally set myself down and spent about 3 hours updating this site tonight. I made some small changes to the about me page and the I like page. I've also decided to keep an archive of my X-Files episode commentary here. You can find it at ex post facto. I've also linked to it through the I like page.

I have other updates in mind (such as getting rid of "the latest" - who was I kidding?) for the future. I'll let you know when they happen. Give me a holler if you find any bad links, content errors and the like. I am quite googly right now and don't trust my proof-reading skills.

Have a good night!

posted at 12:14 AM | link |

I get a daily trivia e-mail from Mailbits.com, and I thought I'd start posting some of these tidbits here, with due credit, of course. Some of them are really pretty interesting. I even have a title for these posts.

Well, Whadya Know

Why is an easy mark a "sucker?"

Do you like fish tails . . . uh, tales? Bear with me. It
begins with the bottom-scavenging fish known as the sucker,
from the way it purses its "lips" to draw in the garbage it
eats (how low can you sink?). The early settlers of America
saw lots of these fish and soon they were indiscriminately
using the name as well for other fish that made the same
motion with their mouths. Eventually so many kinds of fish
bore this name that if you baited a hook you were likely to
haul in a sucker.

Suckers, being so easy to catch, became synonymous with an
easy mark. Any person who would figuratively go for the bait
was also labeled a sucker.

[source: Why You Say It by Webb Garrison]

posted at 7:35 PM | link |

Overhead on the car radio tonight:

"No sense in being pessimistic. It probably wouldn't work anyway."

posted at 6:19 PM | link |

Finally!! How to Dance Properly a site that demonstrates 10 different dance "steps" in hysterical fashion, including video and a brief description. I'm sorry, but this is LOL funny.

posted at 4:49 PM | link |

Hmm, can you say, "over-zealous prosecution"?

posted at 1:46 PM | link |

Pretty cool:

"I ordered 10,000 tubes last week. I usually order a few hundred. My distributor called and said, 'Hey, doc, are you sure there isn't a comma in the wrong place?'"

-- Julia Roberts' hometown dentist, Dr. Ted Aspes, who's making good on his 26-year-old promise that he would give every kid in town a tube of toothpaste if she (or any of his other young patients) won an Oscar. [from salon.com]

posted at 1:27 PM | link |

Oh come on! This is like asking me which is my favorite soft drink, Diet Coke or Diet Coke. Decisions, decisions. I think maybe I need to review the photo evidence one more time...

posted at 1:37 PM | link |

As Homer Simpson would say, D'oh!

posted at 10:38 AM | link |

Um, "not gruesome to look at"??

posted at 10:29 AM | link |

Okay, where's the logic in this? The animal rights group PETA has petitioned Indiana prison officials asking that Timothy McVeigh not be allowed to have meat in his last meal because, "McVeigh should not be allowed to 'take even one more life'". So, McVeigh should not be allowed to eat a steak from a cow that is most likely already dead as a last wish before he himself is killed? I'm not presenting an argument for or against capital punishment. I'm just suggesting that maybe PETA choose their battles a little more carefully.

posted at 10:04 AM | link |

I guess you can't keep a good conspiracy theory down.

posted at 9:37 AM | link |

It is snowing. Again. Has been since before I woke this morning. Talk about a winter of discontent.

posted at 1:55 PM | link |

I don't know which is more pathetic, the reason for the assault described in this police report or the writing skills of the officer who filled out the report form.

posted at 1:47 PM | link |

When I went to take a shower yesterday morning, I opened the shower curtain to find about 2 inches of water still in the tub from the night before. I had filled it the previous night to shave my legs before going out, and now it seemed that the drain was clogged. I mean *clogged*. This happens periodically, and it did seem to be draining slower lately, but this was sort of abrupt. I unscrewed the drain cover and started plunging, to see if I could get whatever it was in there to loosen up enough to drain the standing water so I could pour in the Crystal Drano. I was so aggravated - I needed to get showered and out the door or I would be late in picking my mother up. I plunged and plunged and plunged, but to no avail - whatever it was wasn't budging. So, I got a big cup and started bailing.

After about 10 minutes of scooping and dumping (and spilling dirty bathwater all over the bathroom) I managed to get just about all of the water out of the tub. I poured the Drano into the drain and left the bathroom, closing the door behind me. Sheila and I were talking about how quickly the drain got clogged and how thoroughly clogged it was when I was struck with a thought... while she had her back turned to play on the computer, I got up and walked back to the bathroom, peeked around the corner and was faced with confirmation of my idiocy - the reason there was still 2 inches of water in the tub was that I didn't unstop the drain after shaving. A half hour of my life down the drain (sorry).

Thank God it didn't get as far as a call to the plumber.

posted at 11:48 AM | link |