Oh, yeah! PvPonline! I used to read the strip a lot more consistently. I should try and get that set up in Google Reader, I had it when I was reading via Bloglines. This reminds me of a wacky experience we had at our favorite sushi-teppanyaki joint, Kampai (which is conveniently located close to O’Hare, visitors stranded at the airport!). They have a very large location, with the floaty-boat sushi bar at the left hand end (with its own entrance) and the steakhouse/”hibachi place” restaurant at the right hand. They actually had two full-size dining rooms on the main restaurant…
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4 people were injured when a large older man in a fez lost control of his tiny ’57 Chevy Bel-Air at a Fourth of July parade. Okay, I’m making the assumption that the car was driven by a large older man in a fez, based on my vast experience with Shriners (my brother-in-law Frank is a member) and the headgear they wear at public events (I happen to know that lady Shriners have white fezzes, and have special travel cases for them when going to conventions). Medinah Temple owns a golf resort in the area, but I don’t know if…
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Pop-bottle snap-on cup makes ice cream floats on demand – Boing Boing The Fizz Cup is a cup that screws on to the top of a pop bottle. You fill it with ice-cream and squeeze the bottle and the soda rushes over the ice-cream and turns into an ice-cream float that fizzes out and into your gob, sparing you the mess of making ice-cream floats the old way. Yeah. This is nothing new; I had a gadget called a “Fizz-nik” when I was a little kid in Albuquerque. Mine looked like this, except it was green and white. It was…
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Evidence Supports Earlier Date for People in North America – New York Times Exploring Paisley Caves in the Cascade Range of Oregon, archaeologists have found a scattering of human coprolites, or fossil feces. The specimens preserved 14,000-year-old human protein and DNA, which the discoverers said was the strongest evidence yet of the earliest people living in North America. Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the well-known Clovis people, previously thought to be the first Americans. Recent research at sites in Florida and Wisconsin…
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I don’t pay much attention to what goes on around me at work – I have enough to do trying to maintain focus and stay on task without getting into dishing the dirt much about colleagues. But sometimes, a topic just begs to be explored. Yesterday, a co-worker who’s now a kind of tech services/general upgrades and hardware dogsbody was walking around behind me saying “Porkchops, porkchops,” in a sing-songy, “where are you” tone of voice. I responded with “applesauce,” because that’s what immediately leaps to my tiny little mind on instinct. She came to my desk and related the…
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Salt Lake Tribune – As Cottonwood Mall is demolished, firefighters will train in the crumbling buildings As shoppers flood stores in search of last-minute gifts, firefighters already have bagged the perfect present: They got a mall. Through the end of January, the Unified Fire Authority will conduct extensive training exercises in Holladay’s now-nearly-empty Cottonwood Mall at 4835 S. Highland Drive. “It’s a once-in-a-career opportunity to go there and do drills and practices,” UFA Capt. Troy Prows said Friday. “We use structures that are ready to be destroyed for practice.” But rarely do those buildings come so super-sized – with 700,000…
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I had a flashback yesterday on the phones. I was working with a client the day before who needed hotels booked from one end of Utah to the other, because she’d just been transferred to the West and had a long, long, long, skinny district to check out. We were chatting along and kidding around a little while I made with the flying fingers – I’m faster booking things “old skool” although the graphical tool we have is useful for “set it and forget it” bookings. So this woman was laughing about something I’d said to crack her up, and…
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Boing Boing: Objectophiles who harbor passionate sexual love for buildings… Cory Doctorow: Der Spiegel has an article on the theories of Volkmar Sigusch, a German researcher whose studies of “neo-sexuality” have led him to assemble case-studies of men and women who fall in deep, passionate, sexual love with objects, from the Berlin Wall and the Twin Towers to a toy steam engine. Back in 1979, Eklöf tied the knot with the Berlin Wall and legally changed her name to mark the occasion (“Mauer” means “Wall” in German). Ever since she was eight years old, Sandy K. was hopelessly in love…
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I'll try something from time to time here – when one of the random thumbnails catches my eye, I'll tell the story behind it. This was taken on a May trip to Washington State a few years back. David and I flew out for Folk Life and then took off on a big loop around the Olympic Peninsula, the National Park, and down and around the long way, ending up at Mt. Rainier National Park. It was a lot of fun, but the next time we do that, we'll retrace steps rather than circumnavigating the peninsula, it was a very…
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A passing reference to maltodextrin, a sugar-based sweetener, on BoingBoing turned on the little lightbulb what hovers over my brain, and I Googled around to find this: Sugar substitutes and the potential danger of Splenda Saccharin, the first widely available chemical sweetener, is hardly mentioned any more. Better-tasting NutraSweet took its place in almost every diet soda, but saccharin is still an ingredient in some prepared foods, gum, and over-the-counter medicines. Remember those carcinogen warnings on the side of products that contained saccharin? They no longer appear because industry testing showed that saccharin only caused bladder cancer in rats. Most…