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February 26, 2008
The Importance of Grammar
Think double negatives aren't no big deal? Think again. In this case, a UK man was acquitted of violating a restraining order because it "prohibited" him from "not doing certain things" like throwing rocks at his neighbors house. So if you're prohibited from not throwing rocks, well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
These charges were dismissed, and the restraining order rewritten, correctly this time.
Posted by Berry at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2008
Comma Sutra
Someone made a reference to the "Comma Sutra" in Doranna's SFF.net group, and
in a fit of madness I made a picture of it. Response was positive, so
I made a CafePress store where y'all can buy t-shirts and stuff. I
intend to donate at least half of any profit to the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund
Posted by Berry at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2008
Improvised Tractors
... would make a good band name. But as Kevin Kelly notes in his Street Use blog,
In the '60s Poland it was almost impossible to acquire a tractor in Poland.
That's true; I lived in Warsaw from 1963 to 1965, and it was common to see farmers bringing produce to market in downtown Warsaw, using horse-drawn wagons.
There's something to be said for horses as transport: they're fairly robust, easy to guide (heck, some can guide themselves on the homeward leg of a journey) and they can make more of themselves. On the other hand, they're slow by modern standards, have built-in obsolescence, they eat a lot, and disposing of their waste in a large urban area could be a major problem.
Posted by Berry at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2008
Just in Time for Valentine's Day!
The Texas law banning sale of sex toys has been ruled unconstitutional, just in time to get your sweetie that special something.
Posted by Berry at 10:10 AM | Comments (2)
February 11, 2008
Baycon Invite
Whee! I got my invite to Baycon, held in Santa Clara this year over Memorial Day weekend. Tim Powers is GoH; should be fun.
Posted by Berry at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2008
Best Headline EVER
Gacked from Charlie Stross' blog, is what I have to agree is the Best Headline EVER:
Police Find Crack in Man's Buttocks
(follow the link to Charlie to see a few more amusing headlines)
You have to wonder what's going on in these newsrooms. Does the headline writer truly not understand what he has perpetrated, or is he trying to slip something past the senior editor? I suspect both are in play, from time to time.
Posted by Berry at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
February 05, 2008
Fun Game
I'm just a casual computer gamer. I tend to like puzzle games, and recently found a good one. It's not super hard, but just hard enough to engage my interest for a while.
I downloaded the "Cradle of Rome" demo from Yahoo Games. The conceit is that you're trying to build Rome from scratch, and you do this by accumulating resources by playing levels. The levels are three-in-a-row tile-matching sort of like Bejeweled and such, but have some interesting twists like chained tiles that won't let other tiles fall until they're cleared.
Now like most Yahoo games demos it timed out after an hour of play. However, this demo has a "Well, OK, five more minutes" feature, where you can play for another 5 minutes after it expires. And then five more minutes after that. And so on.
And the part that makes it interesting is that each time it times out like that, IT SAVES YOUR GAME FOR YOU.
Now this sounds like a pain in the anatomy, but I've come to regard it as a feature. Rather than addictively sinking into it for hours, it has an automatic stop that makes me think "is there something better I could do?"
If yes, I do something else. If no, I play another 5 minutes.
I'm half tempted to buy it on general "I like, I pay" principals and then NOT install the full version.
Posted by Berry at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)
February 04, 2008
Comments no longer require approval
Since I seem to be getting more "real" comments than spam, I've turned off the feature where I have to manually approve all comments.
Spam will still get ruthlessly deleted and the poster's IP banned as soon as I notice it. I try to check a couple of times a day.
Posted by Berry at 09:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2008
New episode in da House ... NOT!
After the Super Bowl, Fox showed a new episode of "House". I'm a big Hugh Laurie fan, from "Blackadder" to "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" to "House", so I was pleased. Especially since new episodes of my favorite shows have been scarce with the writer's strike going on. (Which is OK; if you ask me the writers deserve all they're asking for and more)
So later on, I selected the episode from the TiVo menu and started it ... and got the last 15 minutes of the Super Bowl post-game coverage.
Then "House" started, and my daughter piped up with "Dad...skip to the end and make sure we got the whole episode."
I did, and we didn't. The stupid network didn't push a schedule update to the TiVo, and it cheerfully recorded exactly an hour of video, including the last 15 minutes of the Stupor Bowl and the first 45 of "House".
Perusal of "Upcoming Showings" in the "House" Season Pass showed NO repeats of the episode. We'll have to wait for reruns, or BitTorrent it.
Sigh.
Posted by Berry at 02:44 PM | Comments (4)
Chicken Kebabs
(Update: I've closed comments on this entry because some jerk keeps
spamming it with stupid spam links. Just this entry. Go figure.)
So the other night I made chicken kebabs for dinner, and EVERYONE loved them. It was the same old stuff, but a new marinade, which turned out to be a hit. Here's how I did it:
Take a larage boneless double chicken breast (i.e. the breasts from one chicken), remove the skin, and cut into more-or-less bite size cubes. Put into a bowl with about 1/2 a cup of tamari (we use all-soy organic tamari because regular soy sauce has wheat, and we have celiacs in the household), a tablespoon of honey, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and (this is the key) a half-teaspoon of whole cumin seeds. Stir and let marinate while you prepare the rest of the meal.
I made a salad of a carrot sliced fine and half a head of red cabbage shredded, with half a bottle of commercial garlic ranch dressing.
I also cubed up a red bell pepper and an onion, and made a pot of rice.
When the rice was almost done, I turned on the broiler and threaded the chicken, onion and bell pepper onto skewers and put them under the broiler, then turned on a TiVo'd episode of NCIS from the first season. At the commercials, I turned the skewers. After about 15 minutes it was done, so we served it forth.
The cumin came through very clearly, but subtly and delicious. My son even ate the leftovers cold and asked for more.
And Gibbs caught the terrorists in time.
Posted by Berry at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)
McCain wins key Isengard endorsement
Looks like he's picked up the key Uruk-hai voting bloc.
http://eisengeiste.blogspot.com/2008/01/endorsement-post.html
Posted by Berry at 09:33 AM | Comments (2)