The Phantom City

Joe Killian went to a Gun and Knife Show at the Greensboro Coliseum and reports back. Good stuff:

Apparently people who are selling Nazi flags, bronze busts of Hitler and Rommel and stocking “The Turner Diaries” in the non-fiction section (all of which we saw) don’t like having their pictures taken.

One of the hazards of keeping the TV on as background noise while working over a weekend is that you might end up hearing fashion advice for guys. What I just heard: “Sexy tops, lowcut shirts, and skinny jeans” are in for men.

Okay, if you’ve seen the pictures in a photographic record, you kind of know what I look like. What I now can’t get out of my head is a picture of me, dressed in a lowcut satin shirt with a sequin pattern and a pair of jeans that look like they were painted on. Suffice it to say, at 5′6″ and the approximate weight of an NFL running back, that’s not a good picture, for me or the rest of the world. TV fashion shows should carry liability insurance.

At first I thought he was talking about us.

Get Fuzzy’s Bucky Katt comes up with a better name for mockingbirds, at least the one that lives near us.

I love it when comic book characters start speaking in logo…

Image courtesy of Seven Hells!

37signals, the company that offers products such as Basecamp, Backpack, and Writeboard, noticed that a plurality of their users use Firefox.

Not real surprising, since 37signals has done a good job of marketing its wares to a techy, early-adopter type crowd, but hasn’t completely broken into the mainstream. It’s interesting to see, though, that Basecamp, their project-management application, has the highest Internet Explorer usage. Good indication that people are using them at work, which is still heavily IE-dominated.

Me, I like Firefox. I probably wouldn’t use IE if we didn’t need it for some of our applications at my work. With Firefox, this blog design is liquid. With IE, it gets stuck in the middle, because IE can’t figure out a simple minimum-width attribute in CSS. Supposedly IE7 will fix that.

Come one, come all! See the amazing “Don’t Marry Career Women” article at Forbes. Marvel at the reasoning! Take a trip back down nostalgia lane to a time when cars were big and women stayed in the kitchen!

Seriously, did someone over at Forbes go insane? Here’s the first paragraph:

Guys: A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.

One of the “Nine Reasons To Steer Clear Of Career Women”: You’ll have a dirty house.

What?!? This is the kind of reasoning I heard when I was growing up during the Seventies, and even then I’m not sure most people who said it really believed it anymore.

Link courtesy of Boing Boing

Update: I had to post a link to Gawker’s tale, told from the stock photos used by Forbes to illustrate the Nine Reasons.

Update, redux: The link to the actual article has stopped working. Here’s a link to the Google cached version.

Update, again: Forbes put the article back up as half of a Point/Counterpoint article, at the original link.

Tonight, we saw a bit of Airplane II: The Sequel, and my wife said Buck Murdock reminded her of me. Buck Murdock is played by William Shatner…sweet.

Quote from Buck:

Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap, will ya? We’ve all got our switches, lights, and knobs to deal with, Striker. I mean, down here there are literally hundreds and thousands of blinking, beeping, and flashing lights, blinking and beeping and flashing - they’re flashing and they’re beeping. I can’t stand it anymore! They’re blinking and beeping and flashing! Why doesn’t somebody pull the plug!

North Korea has a way with press releases, and the NK News site makes sure we all get to share. Some recent samples:

• KCNA Blasts Military Adventure of U.S. and South Korean Warmongers
• Agreement on Cooperation in Public Health Inked between DPRK and Zimbabwe
• Former Unconverted Long-term Prisoner Kim Sok Hyong Dies
• All Koreans Called upon to Crush For. Aggressor Forces through National Cooperation
• Japan’s Crime to Exterminate Korean Nation

I have a personal favorite from this collection, though:

U.S., Provoker of “Panmunjom Incident”

At the end of such provocations, they mobilized 14 hooligans at around 10:45 on August 18 to cut a tree standing in the Panmunjom Joint Security Area without any agreement with the other side. When the security personnel of the DPRK demanded stoppage of the rude act, the hooligans pounced upon and made a collective assault on them, wielding lethal tools.

New Web 2.0 version of the logo, created by the Web 2.0 V2 Logo Creator:

Link courtesy of inessential.com

A while back, Spam seemed to know me a little too well. Let’s see how familiar it is with me today.

A sampling of subject lines:

I was just on my cam.. where did you go

Well, “Bekki,” I actually just got to my computer…wait, how do you know when I’m at my computer?

I’m 19, Want to see me in my dorm?

Right, and walk all the way from visitor parking during the summer. Not likely.

Your next purchase at American Eagle is Free!

It would have to be.

why…

Why indeed.

Those young people taking the position you deserve because you lack a Degree?

It’s not the degree. It’s their speed, strength, and agile minds. Darn young’uns.

Younger girls, older guys?

Well, my wife is younger than I am. (Great, I’m getting old-guy spam, and I can’t really object to it.)

Take pleasure from There’s a super-product waiting to turn you into Superman in …

YES!!! Finally! Ever since I was a child I wished there was some way to turn into Superman. Perhaps this will be answer I’ve sought.

…click…

Uh, wow…I guess not. That wasn’t about being Superman at all. I mean, I guess Superman…No, that just seems weird.

It was worth opening just for the phrase “supernatural intimate,” though.

Tanisha

No, I’m not Tanisha.

Trudy

No.

Elba

No…What is this?

Attention Women – Complimentary advice about your credit cards..

Oh, I see the problem. I think you’re operating on a fundamental misunderstanding, Spam. You don’t know me well this day at all.