Vote Me Cool (Crass Begging)

Voting has started at Lifehacker's coolest workplace contest. Set your better judgment aside for a moment and vote for me! I actually seem to be winning, although this is apparently only the first bracket. For those with short attention spans, my office is the first one.

Chalk (Recommendation)

Here is another nifty, free, ultra-light game with an excellent concept. It is a little on the twitchy side for me, but the mechanics are just so slick. Take a look at Chalk. The built-in tutorial explains everything.

Search Skill Failure

There isn't enough of an effort to jam old crap onto the Internet. Twenty years ago, on the SF convention circuit I didn't participate in, there was a guy whose name was Michael Spiro (but not this one) going around singing a pair of filk songs. Yes, filk -- I normally can't stand it either. These two songs were called "Music, Sex, and Cookies" and "The Lead-Fingered Folkie". The first, originally by George Uetz, is not hard to run down information on. The second, nowhere to be found.

"The Lead-Fingered Folkie" was sung to the tune of The Boxer. I don't recall all the lyrics...

I'm a lead-fingered folkie and my story's seldom told
I massacre folk music with three feet of fretted chipboard and a capo
I take requests
And I play the ones with just three chords and disregard the rest
Ly la ly, ly ly la ly

So, with all this information, why can't I find some bootleg mp3 floating around? I guess I should really be asking PTP about this. If anyone has his email address, shoot his post at him for me.

Chinese Accountability (Reblog)

I'm not usually all that bloodthirsty, and generally don't look favorably upon capital punishment. However, when I read this news item I found myself wishing we had similarly strict penalties for the malfeasance of our elected and appointed officials. Our harshest sentences are not out of line for lying to your electorate, or subverting the U.S. Constitution. You know who you are.

75% Of Our Furry Household Butts (Pets)

Approximately once a week, the itty bitty kitties get a tiny amount of soft cat food for breakfast. The circle like sharks and then dart in for their fishy feasts. 'Dolon uses this as an opportunity to hone his mathematics skills, attempting to form an isosceles triangle with the cats. This will of course statistically minimize the time of his approach to the first leftover bowl.

DKM Returns (Reblog)

Could it be true? Potentially exciting news for genre fiction aficionados... Daniel Keyes Moran claims that he's going to be publishing AI War after over a decade of time off blogging about the Lakers. In theory, that might mean a book available for purchase in 2008.

ピタゴラスイッチ (Recommendation)

Pythagora Switch is a Japanese children's program that uses really nifty Rube Goldberg eyecatches. These have been helpfully compiled (video), and are well worth watching.

A (Not Yet) Treasonous Opinion (Reblog)

There is an opinion piece on the war by Andrew J. Bacevich in today's Washington Post that I think is worth reading. Few innovations spearheaded by the current Bush administration are more hateful and evil than the notion that civil opposition supports terrorists.

Latest Dog Trick (Pets)

Yesterday after an orgy of nursery shopping we settled in to an early movie with a large bowl of popcorn. The movie was so bad (expected, but we gave it a shot anyway thanks to the sweet insulation of Netflix) that NDM ended up using the time to teach 'Dolon to eat popcorn off his nose. Or, rather, to not eat popcorn off his nose until he is told to.

Museums For Our Idiot Nation (Reblog)

The Creation Museum opens on Monday, a testimony to the bankruptcy of our education system...

How could anyone seriously posit that humans and dinosaurs didn't live together? Just because their fossils don't appear together -- "Remember, we don’t find human bones buried with coelacanths either, but we live together today" (from Answers: Building a Biblical Worldview).

Unfortunately, I have no trouble believing how stupid people are.

Auger (Pets)

One hundred uses, now one hundred and one! Excited by the yummy snack treats that come out of small holes in the ground, 'Dolon has started boring his own snack attainment voids. Here and there in our yard. And in our vegetable garden.

The perspective makes it a bit hard to see, but the darker area towards the bottom of the picture is one calendar day of dog grounding.

Cicadas

We've been enjoying our 17 year cicada eruption. 'Dolon has eaten his commemorative cicadas (to the tune of perhaps 3 pounds), NDM has taken her commemorative macro photographs, etc.
You have to look hard in this picture to see that it is full of shed skins. NDM even got some in flagrante shedicto shots...
Her macros turned out very well!

Scented Dog (Pets)

Since we won't buy him cologne, 'Dolon is left to his own devices. We hope this is just a mash of partially digested cicadas that he's rolling in.

Molpe 2007 Kill #2 (Pets)

Molpe's had a rough predation year; I think she's been suppressed by 'Dolon breathing down her neck whenever she's outside. Today was just her second, so she's only one a month for her outside season.

So far this year she seems to have standardized on bringing her kills to our front door mat, which is a nice change of pace. It makes taking a snapshot really easy! And hopefully on that inevitable day when she releases her first live catch it will make it easier to round the poor thing up and get it out the front door.

A Fair(y) Use Tale (Reblog)

This brilliant little clip video uses Disney films to explain copyright. It probably won't survive on YouTube long...

Scylla's Cold Defense System (Pets)

When the Chicago lake effect turns your 80° Saturday into a 50° Sunday, Scylla knows what to do. She'll have the last laugh when the rest of us die of exposure...

Email IBKC

I've used FeedBlitz to add email subscriptions to this blog in a feeble attempt to get my parents to read it sometimes. (There isn't enough time in their days to use something as invasive as an RSS feed :-)

Just look to the right if you want to use this feature; updates should go out once each day that there are new posts.

Sisterly Détente (Pets)

These days this kind of sisterly familiarity is a rarity. Their hissing organs must have been overheated by this point.

Bad Dog Day (Pets)

'Dolon started out today as cute as ever, and we treated him to a dog park excursion. We keep a wubby in my car for him, and apparently because he only gets to chew it on rides it has become extra special for him. He had a blast at the dog park, but he didn't reward us for our largesse.
'Dolon backslid today, doing almost every horrible thing we've been trying to break him of for the past 6 months. His crowning achievement occurred after we threw him back in the house so we could deal with the injured robin he was trying to eat. What tastes almost just like robin? You guessed it! Freshly baked banana cake on a counter he has never, ever dared go near before. I hope his 15 seconds of bliss was worth where he ended up for the rest of the day!
Hard to believe this is the same dog who is freaked out by our snapping turtle...
Or almost too afraid to get up on the couch with Scylla...
Although I suppose he does have reason to be afraid of Scylla. It is obvious what she is thinking here, and it wouldn't be suitable for posting as an I CAN HAS CHEEZEBURGER? caption. The next photograph has been withheld out of respect for our more squeamish readers.

Kitchenarium Updates (Chow)

Put up a simple recipe for sweet potato and cabbage soup. Easy, vegetarian, and delicious. This is the modification of another recipe I've talked about before.

Torture Is The Republican Black (Reblog)

Potamochoerus Porcus

NDM holds here a brand-new red river hog. Or maybe it isn't brand new, and certainly I wouldn't know what zoo this was at, or if it is even at a zoo. The animal could very well be animatronic and does not imply that a birth recently took place. Don't be surprised if I'm forced to take this image down later due to overzealous wifely copyright enforcement or something.

Oh, and both of the subjects in this photograph have rosy cheeks from too much on-the-job drinking.

Firefox Blogging Hiccup Resolved

Thanks to blostopher pointing out what in retrospect is a blindingly obvious thing to check, I can now post to Blogger using Firefox again. Happy day!

Our Ruling Felons (Reblog)

"Does this sound in any way like the behavior of a government operating under the rule of law, which believes that it had legal authority to spy on Americans without the warrants required for three decades by law? How can we possibly permit our government to engage in this behavior, to spy on us in deliberate violation of the laws which we enacted democratically precisely in order to limit how they can spy on us, and to literally commit felonies at will, knowing that they are breaking the law?

"How is this not a major scandal on the level of the greatest presidential corruption and lawbreaking scandals in our country's history? Why is this only a one-day story that will focus on the hospital drama but not on what it reveals about the bulging and unparalleled corruption of this administration and the complete erosion of the rule of law in our country? And, as I've asked many times before, if we passively allow the President to simply break the law with impunity in how the government spies on our conversations, what don't we allow?

"If we had a functioning political press, these are the questions that would be dominating our political discourse and which would have been resolved long ago."

-- Glenn Greenwald, writing on salon.com.

Don't Let His Hatred Fade (Reblog)

The Rev. Jerry Falwell is dead.

"If I were doing something that the Bible condemns, I have two choices. One is to straighten up my act, or the other is to somehow distort and twist and change the meaning of the Bible." -- Jerry Falwell on Frontline in 2000.

We know what choice he made.

The Evil That Fake Lawmen Do (Reblog)

Criminal subverter of U.S. law, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, is resubmitting the failed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 with an updated year. This glorious piece of potential legislation provides for up to 20 years in prison for attempted (but failed) copyright infringement, the criminal prosecution of IP violations even when said is not actually copyrighted, and the seizure of property from offenders.

Stuffed Chairs

I'm imagining a chair like this made out of stuffed Batmans for Myra. (This particular chair is obviously intended for my wife.)

Fox News Forced To Love Puppies (Reblog)

Did we roll back to April? If not, this must really be happening! Rupert Murdoch has declared he's going to make his News Corporation behemoth -- yes, including Fox News -- carbon neutral by 2010. Somewhere a blood vessel burst in his evil little brain, and he now recognizes that global warming is more than just a conspiracy of blood-sucking homosexual communist science-worshippers.

LCD Lusts

Closer and closer to television nirvana! I can fit something up to 43" wide in my current living room furniture without having to get my hands dirty, and thanks to Mitsubishi’s super Thin Frame™ technology there is now a 46" 1080p LCD which is 42.3"x26.9". Incredibly, it is only 1" thick, too.

Now I just have to wait for them to shrink their asking price by about 70% so I can get it for $1k. Only a couple more years...

Holy Keyless Deadbolts, Batman! (Reblog)

As part of my quest to minimize the keys I have to carry, I'd like to install one of these babies. There are plenty of keypad locks out there, but then you have to remember stuff, and who has the spare neurons for that? Plus, this sucker is actually a deadbolt. Unfortunately, it also costs real money.

Firefox Blogging Hiccup Continued

Still no dice using Firefox with Blogger. I may have exhausted available help. Eventually I may break down and reinstall Firefox entirely; right now, I'm still using IE, with all of its weird formatting issues. The good news is this is keeping me from blogging as much as I might otherwise!

Conceivex, Inc. (Reblog)

Phil M's new fertility company -- he's out of the education technology industry now -- was in the news the other day. Although he won't be helping teach K-12 students any more, he is making sure there will never be a shortage of subjects for those still in the game :-)

Legend (Recommendation)

Today is the anniversary of Robert Nesta Marley's death from cancer, which he decided not to treat because of his Rastafari belief that his body must remain whole.

Most pop musicians produce a lot of dreck, and it is rare for me to find an entire album which I can appreciate from its first song to its last without feeling I'd rather have left something in a studio waste basket. In fact, even when "Best of..." compilations are released, they usually contain at least one boner. Maybe I'm just too picky. In any case, Bob Marley and the Wailers' Legend is an exceptional album front to back, and apparently well over 10 million people agree with me (for once).

The Cost Of War (Reblog)

What does $456 billion buy?

2B 7E 78 12 3F DB E7 93 2D 2A 0F 97 A4 4E 7E F0 (Reblog)

Although I ran across this on Slashdot, I still found it pretty funny. In a gnaw-out-your-own-entrails kind of way. Go visit Freedom to Tinker and get your own DMCA-protected 128 bit integer (mine is this post's title). They encrypt a copyrighted haiku with the number, grant you decryption rights, and the DMCA then affords that number the same protection the RIAA has been invoking for discovered AACS keys. You can read further down the Freedom to Tinker page for some more information about this AACS key curfuffle.

Encyclopedia of Life (Reblog)

I'm excited about the Encyclopedia of Life project, although it is going to take a long time... Look at their yeti crab sample. Particularly cool:

• The scaling of content by level of expertise.
• The presentation of taxonomic and evolutionary information, with nary a mention of what second of his six days God intelligently designed the organism. The horrible, horrible bias! Thank God!
• The availability of RSS feeds to track updates to the aggregated data.

Yarddog (Pets)

Some recent photos of 'Dolon enjoying our back yard.
'Dolon starts out coy. After a while, though, he warms up and gets down to some classic posing. Never has a more dignified dog sat down for a photo session so soon after peeing on himself.
After a while, he begins to feel like he's too cool for any more pictures.
It must be low blood sugar -- lord knows we starve that poor dog. The solution? Mmm! Mulch!
But too much mulch can damage your lawn-worthiness. Here, 'Dolon floats half submerged.

Jimmy Trivette, Off-Broadway Star

For CMD: The Chicago Reader has a feature on Walker's sidekick for you.

Firefox Blogging Hiccup

My blogging is temporarily throttled by some Firefox issue. For now, I have to overcome my natural resistance to using IE to be able to post...

Missed posts because of this issue:

• My friend Aaron Loeb's play, First Person Shooter, is playing in San Francisco.
• Some more random chow posts.
• A bitch about the milquetoast Democratic debate.

March Of The Easy Recipes (Chow)

I'm not sure why, but it is absurdly gratifying to me when people use one of our recipes. JAM was kind enough to try one with a tasty Belgian ale and send in these pictures. As with all good cooks, he fearlessly substituted things he had on hand when necessary, and has survived to eat again.
Although based on which recipes people have tried, I clearly need to start claiming that they're easy to make at the beginning of every recipe. Rest assured, I never cook anything that is very difficult.

And one little cooking note, in case it helps someone else out... If you suspect that Manouri will not melt into a sauce, well, you'd be right. It is no substitute for chèvre. Sorry dear!

Buying The War (Recommendation)

If you haven't caught this PBS documentary, you can watch it online or read the transcript. Make sure you have your blood pressure medication handy.

Mission Accomplished

Four years ago today, and over 27,000 American casualties ago, President Bush told us it was "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."