The acqua alta return to Venice. These pictures show it best. This is not completely without precedent, but it is unusually high this year. Where’s the Doge when you need him?
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The American car makers for the past 30 years have focused exclusively on short-term profits and ways to milk the last $5 out of horrible cars. If they wish to worship short-term profits, then let them die from it.
The worst thing the US Government has ever done was to bail out Chrysler. It should have been allowed to die, broken up, and resuscitated as multiple new companies. The same is true of GM and to a lesser extent Ford. It’s sad that it means, short term, that people will lose their jobs and that old-line names will go away, but long-term it is necessary if there are to be healthy auto companies.
The best proposal I’ve seen if we are to salvage the industry is, rather than just shovel money into the pit that is Detroit, guarantee that the Government will replace 100% of it’s auto fleet within the next 4 years, if Detroit builds cars worth buying. Give them something to work towards—higher mileage, better quality—and they might be able to do it.
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It’s not the “winner” of the contest but it sure made me nearly fall out of my chair laughing:
Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay—the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.
Prose that purple takes talent. More on their site.
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One of the things I positively hate about American coverage of most sporting events is the constant need to hear someone talk. Can’t we just let the athletes compete, and not have some narcissist who loves the sound of his own voice bleet on and on about pointless bits. If I want background, I’ll go to Wikipedia or something.
Enjoy the opening ceremonies without NBC’s idiocy. It’s amazing what the combination of brutal oppression and unhindered greed can do.
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In doing my part to protect America from the skurge of dangerous haircare products—like Aquanet—I have labeled all my little 2 ounce bottles and placed them in a wee little pint bag:
For the nerdy among you, yes those are Nalgene bottles.
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Joss Whedon is at it again with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Just brilliant.
Act I is out.
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What the heck happened this morning? I get into my rental car, and flip between three satellite stations and each is playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. My car has been Rickrolled.
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The art of procrastination, as expressed in a flow chart. Simple to follow!
Share and enjoy.
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On a project I’m working on, we have a contract administrative person. This person, who is nice enough, has an odd tendency to share every bit of minutia with everyone. It’s like having a verbal Twitter stream.
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It speaks volumes about my personality when reviewing a document that the first thing I think of is: where the hell are the ligatures? The second thing is: why, oh why, must they use Arial?
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As people who know me will gleefully admit, I can be a pedant about certain things. Therefore I took great pleasure in this entry in the Q&A section of the Chicago Manual of Style website:
Q. Is it proper to define an acronym within an acronym or an abbreviation within an abbreviation? I am working on a document that contains an abbreviation that is really two other abbreviations smushed together with additional words tacked onto either side. And to top it all off, the overall abbreviation doesn’t even contain the first letter of every word in the other two abbreviations. They’ve dropped letters to make it shorter. Finally, if it is acceptable to do this sort of thing, how would I define the abbreviation or acronym on first use within the document if the two incorporated abbreviations were not previously defined in the document? Whew!
The answer was apropos:
A. Who wrote this document—Dr. Seuss? Yes, you may explain this funny animal parenthetically regardless of the lack of previous explanation. And maybe you should hire a cartoonist to illustrate.
Often I work in fields where not only are there entirely too many acronyms, but often the same TLA has multiple meanings depending on the context. This makes for all sorts of fun. All I can say is I’m happy for the acronym package for LaTeX
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If there is a downside to living in a 1960s high-rise, it is this: centrally provided heating and cooling. Now, don’t mistake this for someone else setting the temperature, but unfortunately someone else does decide when you flip from one to the other. I’m sure historically this hasn’t been a problem, but this year, it got warm early, and there’s nothing as tiring as coming home from a long trip to a home that’s 85F. The only solution is to open the windows. While this is only going to go on for a few more days (May 1st the building switches to chilled water), I decided to take action.
So, I bought a lovely Hunter Century stand fan. Not the cheapest thing out there, but everyone I’d talked to thought it was by far the quietest and most attractive. So, off to Amazon, and 2 days later I receive the fan. I put it together, and turns out it’s DOA. I tried everything, even pulling out the volt-meter. Looks like there’s a break in the winding of the motor.
I call Hunter’s 800-number customer support line, and after about 2 minutes they agree to send me out a new one free of charge. I just received that this morning, put it together, and … beautiful quiet breeze. Great customer service saved dissatisfaction once again. Now just to find out how I’m supposed to ship the bad one back to them!
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Something I’ve noticed over my life is that while generally “taste” goes up with money, especially the cost of something, there’s a certain precipitous point where it collapses into Donald Trump and Paris Hilton territory:
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