Today’s Bizarro cartoon has a nice ‘fair and balanced’ look at Fox News: Bizarro Fox. (My apologies to Dan Pirarro and King Features for rippin’ off the image – it changed to tomorrow’s comic, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it a permalink.)
Carnival of the Vanities is back home again for its 52nd week anniversary at Silflay Hraka: Carnival of the Vanities – #52. I didn’t submit an entry this time, but there’s some really good stuff there, so check it out!
I’ve been listening to this new Fountains of Wayne CD I just bought called Welcome Interstate Managers, and it is fantastic. They sound a lot like The Cars did in their better years, but also pretty Beatle-y, and a lot like my music sounds in my head before it gets out and I screw it all up. I bought mine at the record store next door for $18.95 to try to help them stay in business, but I’d encourage you to click on the picture and buy one from Amazon right now for $12.99.
Our local Albertson’s has had 1 lb. chubs of ground turkey on sale for $1 each, so last night I fixed us up some 
turkey burgers. I’ve been in the habit of thinking that ground turkey is leaner than hamburger, and the label on the chub said, “50% Less Fat than Hamburger!” But I checked it against the label on the ground beef chubs we buy from Costco, and the turkey had about 33% more fat than the beef – guess the 50% less claim is for the old-fashioned 30% fat hamburger that I grew up with, and not the 10 – 15% stuff we usually buy.
We’ve been having a problem with little moths getting into our cupboards and getting little wormies in our flour, rice, etc., so we’ve been putting in these pheremone lure ‘pantry pest traps’ to try to capture them. But there seem to be more moths everywhere in our house than we’ve ever had, and I’m becoming convinced that the pheremones are attracting way more extra moths than the traps are catching. It’s an interesting Catch-22, and I’ve also wondered often if those electric bug-zappers don’t just attract more bugs to your yard.
As a seller of audiobooks, I was at a convention of my audiobook industry peers awhile back, and I told someone there that as the popularity of audiobooks continues to grow, we should consider an ad campaign based around the slogan, “Audiobooks… Not Just for Blind People Anymore!” and she had a cow. She went on to tell me that as an audio producer, she had recorded numerous programs for “Books for the Blind,” and that it was extremely important to say “people who can’t see” instead of “blind people,” because it stresses that the afflicted parties are people first.
Well, here’s what the National Federation for the Blind has to say about it: The Pitfalls of Political Correctness: Euphemisms Excoriated. (Special thanks to Sunny Place for the link.)
Turns out people don’t wash their hands about 25% of the time in U.S. airport restrooms (blech! What are they thinking!?), but they do much better when there’s been a SARS outbreak: Excite – News.
While we’re on the topic of airports and public safety, here’s something that’s just plain scary: Color-coded Travel Badges.
Here are a few more pics from Bodega Bay – sure looks like fun! (Click for bigger pics.)
 Having enjoyed an excellent Reuben sandwich as we blew through San Francisco yesterday, I’m vacationing in Bodega Bay this week with my family and my parents, and the in-laws are coming over to meet us tomorrow.
I’m posting a few pictures of some things we’ve seen the last couple of days, like this sea lion that hangs out around the fishing docks across the street from our rental. One of the crusty old salty dogs out on the pier says this good ol’ boy grabbed him and pulled him underwater and thrashed him up against a wall. Then he went off on a harangue (and I never thought I’d ever actually need to use that word, but that’s what it was, all right) about how he was beating the thing with a piece of PVC pipe and the game warden came up and told him he had to stop or he’d be arrested, at which point his comments quickly degraded, becoming completely inappropriate for our 4-year old’s beautiful little-girl ears. |
We also saw this old tabby cat who is apparently authorized to drive a forklift, as he seemed right at home behind the wheel. He was hoisting around some big plastic vats of live crabs when we first came upon him, but he was kind enough to pause for a second and pose for a picture or two. |
We ended the day with a visit to a secluded cove that was perfect for soaking up the sea air and getting our toes wet. (It was way too cold to swim today, but we had a lot of fun nonetheless.) |
This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen – I put off linking to it because I was expecting it to show up all over the place, but here it is (high bandwidth connection recommended): Ping Pong performance art. It’s amazing what people can do if they put their minds to it.
So yesterday’s Doonesbury tackled the infamous ‘masturbation prevents cancer’ study, and our local paper was one of the ones that substituted an old archive comic in its place. Here’s the real deal: Doonesbury@Slate – Daily Dose.
There is a cool site called MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action that gathers on-line petition names. They have about 77,000 people right now that are either Californians who’ve pledged to vote ‘no recall,’ as I do, or out-of-state residents who state that the recall as it stands is an affront to democracy no matter where you live. I’d urge you to check out the site, and to use this link to sign the petition as my referral. Thanks for listening.
I’m about halfway through with A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is a bummer, because it’s a library book that’s 
Another interesting one? Madame Curie’s personal effects were exposed to so much radioactive material, that people put on leather lead lined gloves and aprons just to look at her cookbooks!
Have you tried these new microfiber cleaning cloths yet? If not, you should – everything they claim seems to be true – I got a couple last week, and you really can dust without chemicals and the dust jumps on them like a Swiffer™, or clean windows with nothing but water. I also got a waffle-looking Scotchbrite™ microfiber kitchen rag, and it even took the kitchen grease off the exhaust grille on our microwave stove hood without soap. It’s almost fun to clean with these things.
I learned a new word today, sprezzatura, courtesy of Ftrain.com. It’s an Italian word from the high renaissance that means, roughly, the art of making the difficult look easy. It also implies a certain spontaneity and nonchalance in the execution.
The Beatles certainly had sprezzatura, but you know those guys worked hard at what they did – John Lennon said something to the effect that they thought of themselves as craftsmen, going in to work every day to practice getting better at their craft. Or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who writes as if he’s speaking off the top of his head, but I know from an interview he did many years ago that for some of his more complicated novels, he actually graphed out all of the characters and events against a timeline on the back of rolls of wallpaper.
My personal mission statement begins with the overall mission, ‘To move easily through the world as a man of good conscience,’ and I love that image of just breezing on through it all. Sprezzatura!