Naked Pictures of Famous People

This afternoon, I'm participating in the Memory Walk for Alzheimer's Disease. The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences has put together a team to walk the three miles to raise money, and I volunteered to take part. I didn't realize it'd be this cold out though! I don't think I'll be wearing shorts...

If you're looking for a book with an interesting title to read, I'd suggest Naked Pictures of Famous People, by Jon Stewart. This is a book full of humorous essays by Jon Stewart, the host of the hilariously funny "The Daily Show". This book reminded me a lot of Cruel Shoes, by Steve Martin, which is unfortunately out of print. I like Martin's book better overall, but Stewart has some real gems in this book, including "Martha Stewart's Vagina" and "The Devil and Bill Gates". My site will probably now be blocked my all of the filtering engines on the net, since I've used "naked", "devil", and "vagina" in one paragraph. ";->"

New Look

Space Shuttle Discovery has made it home, safe and sound. Even after the Challenger disaster, I sometimes think that most people don't realize how dangerous going into space is. That said, I'm still waiting for my turn, I'd go tomorrow... Gore has taken the lead in tonight's Gallup/CNN/USA Today tracking poll. The poll actually combines the last several days, but it's good news for the Gore camp. As the Curmudgeon wrote:

Gore's popularity increases the less people see him. That conforms to the conventional wisdom that people are more in tune with Gore on the issues, but find Bush better on likeability and leadership.

I'm getting really tired of replacing broken floppy drives. Since starting my job at "CSBS" three weeks ago, I've replaced seven floppy drives. That's an incredible failure rate, and of course, most of them are in the older "Gateway" computers that aren't under warranty anymore...

Cartoonists hoping for a Bush victory? Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame, had this comment to make in this Washington Post article:

"From the standpoint of pure professional self-interest, virtually everybody in my business would love to see Bush elected. He's the new Quayle—a highly stable target because his flaw is a condition he can't do anything about—and isn't likely to change. Gore, on the other hand, is only as good a target as he allows himself to be. 'Stiffness' doesn't give you much to work with, and I don't see an enduring liability in his 'dishonesty'—in actuality a flaw the media assigned him for balance, but which is now creating serious blowback (as in, surprise—Bush lies, too!)."

I'm playing around with a new look for my site today. While looking over the themes available, I realized that what I had was very close to the existing SideMat theme, but that SideMat had some features that my design didn't. I run at pretty high resolutions, and SideMat will run text all the way out to the right side of the browser, fitting more information on a screen. It also has those neat highlighting links, and it just looks a little better than what I did..

The site looks a little bland right now, I need to personalize it some more before I'll be satisfied.

Hyphen

Nothing gets the heart pumping like a letter in your mailbox from the IRS. In this case, it was nothing serious, just a notice telling me that I forgot to file my "Form 8453-OL" when I did my taxes last spring. It's just a form for filing online, and they were even thoughtful enough to include one with the letter... Things are getting tense up in orbit. There's one last chance today to bring the shuttle Discovery home. If they can't land, they'll have to wait until Wednesday to try again. After Wednesday, they won't have any power left in the shuttle. Hopefully, they'll be fine, and will get home tonight, but what if they can't land tonight or wednesday? Well, I'd head over to the newly finished space station, if it was me. I'm not sure where they are in orbit in relation to each other, but I'm sure they're close, having just worked on it. Since the crew is scheduled to arrive next week, for a four month stay, I'm guessing it could keep the Discovery crew alive for a month or two while a rescue mission was mounted. Then again, I'm no rocket scientist...

I knew I hated coach for a reason... Al pointed to this story about death from flying coach. I'm only six feet, one inch tall, and a bit under 250 pounds, and I'm miserable when I fly coach these days. I can't imagine how those taller or wider than myself cope...

Update: Rebekah from blorg wrote:

[by the way, the whole 'economy class syndrome' moniker is a misnomer -- they say the likelihood of suffering it is the same in all parts of the plane because it's caused by not moving, not by the cramped conditions in economy class. but i'm ALL FOR this bad publicity forcing the airlines to improve the conditions and comfort in coach.]

The Washington Post is running this piece, about how far PR people will go to promote their product. It's pretty funny, a columnist offered to promote their products in his column if they'd allow him to publish something humiliating about them with it, it's amazing how many of them agreed to it...

Tom Coyne, 31, of Coyne Public Relations in Fairfield, N.J., was representing Nabisco recently at a publicity event to introduce Mini Oreos. He had rented a 70,000-pound cement mixer to dump Mini Oreos into a minivan through the sunroof. (Don't ask.)

Tom explains: "So, anyway, I'm a pretty big guy . . ."

He is on speakerphone. A co-worker yells: "Portly!"

"I'd classify myself as husky, not portly," humphs Tom.

"Anyway. My pants are a little snug, and I jump off the back of the cement mixer and I completely blow out my pants. My backside is exposed. Tighty whities. I immediately go into my 'Hey, I blew out my pants,' walk, trying to hide it. But there are 50 little boys who we brought there to eat cookies and milk, and they all start pointing and laughing."

Job Hunting? "UNI" has an opening for a Meteorological Decision Support Specialist. Don't let the job title scare you off, this is mostly a computer job, all you need is a "basic understanding" of weather. You'd have to work with me from time to time, though...

Don't know who to vote for? This web page will ask you about all of your positions, then compare them to the candidates running for President. I most closely matched with Bill Bradley, but he's withdrawn (he and McCain, etc. are still on the site). Second was Al Gore, and Harry Browne came in third. The site also classified me as a "Moderate Liberal Populist", which is fairly accurate, in my opinion... Who does it say you should vote for?

Should e-mail be hypenated? I personally think that it should, but I'm always confused. I know the e is supposed to be lower case, but what if I start a sentence with the word e-mail, does it remain small? Without a hyphen, it becomes "em-ale" phonetically, which is just wrong...

Atrocious

Atrocious. That's about all I can say about ISU's loss to Texas A&M today. Iowa State was out of the game after the first 10 minutes, the crowd silenced by a blocked punt that was run all the way back to the five-yard line, setting up an easy touchdown. Texas A&M looked well on their way to a shut-out, until ISU scored late in the fourth quarter. I just keep telling myself, it's okay, I thought they'd lose this game anyhow, and they only have to win one more to be eligible for a bowl game...

The Contender

I caught George W. Bush on Letterman's show last night. It was actually an informative interview, and I didn't get the impression that it was a typical phoney talk show interview at all. Dave actually grilled Bush about some serious issues in a very serious manner, if you didn't catch the show, read the Salon article, here's a bit:

So Letterman then asked Bush about the terrorist murder of 17 U.S. sailors in Yemen. Seriously.

"If I find out who it was, they'd pay a serious price," Bush said of the bombing. "I mean a serious price."

"Now, what does that mean?" Letterman asked, a follow-up Bush doesn't often get when he's asked about such bravado.

"That means they're not going to like what happened to them," Bush said, and the crowd went wild.

"Now are you talking about retaliation or due process of law?" Letterman asked.

"Heh-heh," Bush said. "I'm talking about gettin' the facts and lettin' them know we don't appreciate it and there's a serious consequence ... And I'll decide what that consequence is."

and

"I heard something a couple weeks ago coming out of your campaign and I just thought, 'Well, this is not true, he's not really going to do that,'" Letterman said. "Talking about wilderness lands up in Alaska or the Arctic Circle -- you're going to take trucks up there and drill for oil. And I said, 'Oh, that's a joke! He's not going to do that!'"

"Yeah, well, then you're not going to have any natural gas if we don't do that," Bush said.

"Don't you have bad air pollution down in Texas?" Letterman asked.

"We got a lot of cars," Bush said.

"Is it the worst city in the country for air pollution, is that true?" Letterman asked.

"Well, we're the best in reducing toxic pollutions," Bush said.

"But it's a problem -- isn't it a problem?"

"Well, it's a big city!" Bush whined. "It's a big city!"

"It's not as big as New York! It's not as big as Los Angeles!"

"We're making progress," Bush said.

"But listen to me, governor, here's my point," Letterman said.

"I am listening to you," Bush said, "I don't have any choice but to listen to ya!"

I think I can report another county that's been invaded by the Asian Lady Beetle. I've only found one of them in my house so far, but they're all over outside, I've picked three of them off of myself already today. Maybe they like my cologne.... You know, I think I made the Imagemap of the US that's at the bottom of that page when I worked for "John"...

I received a copy of this satirical debate transcript in an e-mail from my mom yesterday, but now it has shown up on "Slashdot". Thanks to "Liz" for pointing it out! I'm still snickering about it, here's a snippet:

Gore: As I was saying to Tipper last night after we tenderly made love the way we have so often during the 30 years of our rock-solid marriage, the downtrodden have a clear choice in this election. My opponent wants to cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans. I, on the other hand, want to put the richest 1 percent in an iron clad lockbox so they can't hurt old people like Roberta Frampinhamper, who is here tonight. Mrs. Frampinhamper has been selling her internal organs, one by one, to pay for gas so that she can travel to these debates and personify problems for me. Also, her poodle has arthritis.

Lehrer: Gov. Bush, your rebuttal.

Bush: Governors are on the front lines every day, hugging people, crying with them, relieving suffering anywhere a photo opportunity exists. I want to empower those crying people to make their own decisions, unlike my opponent, whose mother is not Barbara Bush.

Techdirt had a pointer to this story, which says that an even smaller PDA is on the way from Handspring. This is kind of a cool idea, I love my Visor, but I simply can't carry it with me everywhere I go. Something I could easily fit in my wallet (that's squish-resistant) would be ideal, especially if I could plug it back into the Visor later...

I was pointed to an interesting site by Weblogs.com today. Techdirt looks to have some good stories, run by guys who provide a little more insight into things than the crew at "Slashdot" do. The site runs on the same code as Slashdot, which I'd love to play with someday, but I somehow doubt it's as easy to use as "Manila".

This morning, in my car, on the way to work, I heard Bob Seger's Against The Wind on the radio. It reminded me of Forrest Gump, which reminded me that I had that soundtrack album here at work, which, in turn reminded me that I need to finish copying all of the music off of my CD collection so I can take it home again. Time to fire up Windows Media Player 7, and let the ripping begin...

My girlfriend and I caught The Contender last night, after a hurried dinner at Diamond Dave's. This movie is not going to be a box office smash. I'm not saying that it's a bad movie, it's just the type of movie that will appeal to about 2% of the movie-going audience. It's all political intrigue, it's about the wheeling and dealing in Washington, and it's about principles. Joan Allen, Gary Oldman, and Sam Elliot all gave great performances, and I could easily see Allen getting an Oscar nomination for this role. But hey, you don't have to take my word for it, you can read what Roger Ebert had to say, he liked even more than I did...