The Phantom City

5,000 years of history mapped in 90 seconds.

Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

Apparently Brett Favre brings his own weather with him on the road. Green Bay and Seattle are playing Monday Night Football in a snowstorm, in Seattle.

When you’re watching pro wrestling, and two tag teams are competing called D-Generation X and the Spirit Squad, it’s inevitable the team named DX will be the good guys.

According to the USA Network, we shouldn’t just respect Pearl Harbor veterans for being great soldiers fighters. They were also great lovers.

Quote from a commercial for the Xbox 360 version of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2:

“9 girls…1 island…You do the math.”

What? I guess I don’t understand math well enough.

I still laugh when I see the commercials for Clerks II, even though we’re now down to the DVD release.

On the other hand, a little part of me wants to throw up when I see the commercials for Turistas.

The best female pro wrestlers are the crazy ones (Victoria and Mickie James).

Mattitude is still cool.

Diwali is the Hindu Halloween. (Okay, I’m catching up on The Office, and I don’t know if that is really true.)

It doesn’t take much effort to get an “USA!” chant started in Pittsburgh.

I still mark out completely when I see Dusty Rhodes on TV.

The presence of Jeremy Irons in a movie can only mean good things. Right?

Good mashup.

Link courtesy of TV Squad.

One of our traditions is to not spend Thanksgiving with family…well, except for the family comprised of my wife and myself. It got started when we first got together and decided instead of trading off the Thanksgiving holiday between our families we were going to take advantage of a long weekend and go on trips ourselves. We see our families pretty regularly anyway, so no one worries about it. I think it’s seen as just one of our quirks.

The first time we took a trip on Thanksgiving, we went to Wilmington, NC and figured out the real trick to traveling on Thanksgiving is finding a place to eat. We ended up with Waffle House for lunch and room service for dinner, since we didn’t have reservations anywhere. We had a good time, though, and the city turned into one of our favorite long weekend destinations.

We decided to recreate it this year and drove down to Wilmington on Thanksgiving day. We stayed at a place downtown, and had Thanksgiving dinner reservations at the Pilot House. (Lunch was a convenient Wendy’s.)

We found out that the hotel’s staff was going to be out of town for the day, so we were able to let ourselves in and pick up our key. One advantage to more of a bed-and-breakfast-style place, but we really didn’t see anyone around much otherwise either, despite a few trips past the office. I’m guessing Thanksgiving may not be a big travel holiday for them.

Dinner was good. The Pilot House has a fairly traditional Thanksgiving menu, despite its reputation for seafood. No pecan pie left by the time our reservations rolled around, unfortunately.

Our hotel room was…interesting. I’m not going to mention the name, because I don’t want to give an unfavorable review to a place I’ve only stayed in once. However, I’ll just say the best I could describe the decor is “quaint,” by which I mean “1985,” we had one 20″ TV that was situated to make it hard for both people to watch it from bed, and no alarm clock. I’m cool with the decor, and the TV, but the missing alarm clock was different. Admittedly, they didn’t list alarm clocks as one of the features of the room, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.

Breakfast/lunch (brunch?) the next day was at Front Street Diner. Good food, and normally crowded with locals. I miss their fried bologna sandwich, but it’s probably best that it’s gone. I think the greasy goodness probably cuts my life expectancy short a few minutes each time I have one.

I started to take some pictures of the trip, and the camera battery died immediately after taking the first shot. You can see photos from our past vacations here, though, and imagine what I would have taken pictures of this time.

We hit a used bookstore, as usual. This trip was to McAllister & Solomon Books, which has a decent selection of pulp SF & Fantasy novels. I always end up finding a couple of Doc Savage novels I don’t have. Another good bookstore is Daughtry’s Old Books. Mr. Daughtry is usually in his shop, and he likes to talk to visitors.

Dinner was at Caffe Phoenix, another downtown eatery that we’ve walked past in recent years and passed up because the food seemed too…ah…complex for our tastes. Trying it this time was a good decision. Thinly-sliced marinated flank steak for me, and vegetarian lasagna for Lorrie, were both excellent dishes. We’ll be back when we get down there again.

The next morning, after the skylight in our room started leaking, we realized we really didn’t have anything planned for the day that required us to be in Wilmington as opposed to our house. So, one early checkout and a remarkably easy drive later, we were back home, relaxing in familiar surroundings. Not the most exciting trip, but fun because of the company I shared it with.

I will have to say, though, I’m still craving the one thing Wilmington…well, Wrightsville Beach…has that we couldn’t replicate back home: The Oceanic. We’ll be back in Wilmington again soon, though. It’s one of our places.

Kitten meets MacBook. (YouTube)

Link courtesy of Kitta.net.

When I run across interesting things to link from my blog, I usually send them to my Gmail account with the best intentions of blogging about them “when I get some time.” Well, that doesn’t happen as often as it should, so I’ll clear out a few items now:

5 Lamest Charlie Brown Cartoons – 10 Zen Monkeys covers the five worst Peanuts animated specials. I can’t agree with the inclusion of Snoopy, Come Home, though. Link courtesy of TV Squad.

The Last Panel – A dedicated fan adds the all-important last panel to some For Better or For Worse comic strips. They finally become funny. Link courtesy of The Comics Curmudgeon.

Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala – Wikipedia creates reality. A take-off on the Encyclopedia Brown books I devoured as a kid. Link courtesy of Too Many Topics, Too Little Time.

Ancient Crash, Epic Wave – Did a comet hit the Earth 4,800 years ago?

PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast – Is tracking new lines of code the best way to compare the relative popularity of two languages? That assumes languages evolve to the same level of code complexity when addressing common problems. Might not be a bad assumption, but it would be nice to see some analysis of it. Link courtesy of O’Reilly Ruby blog.

Empires with Expiration Dates – Niall Ferguson examines the short shelf lives of modern empires. Empires are defined as largely political and military entities, with direct power. The question I have is whether global capitalism encourages indirect power, namely economic and cultural. Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.

Myths of British ancestry – Who were the Celts…and does it matter? Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.

synerG Web Site Design Competition – Deadline December 31, 2006.

An Introduction to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange – How to build your own hosted application to sell to Salesforce.com users.

Election Day 2006 – Whose Side is your Favorite Superhero on? – Dave’s Long Box predicts how superheroes would vote. The Hulk’s a Libertarian…he just wants to be left alone.

Twitter – There’s no way I’m using this, but I can see it being pretty interesting for a lot of folks. Kitta, for one.

For this holiday season, Amazon.com is letting customers vote on which deep discount specials they’ll offer. Tomorrow’s is 1,000 XBOX 360 Core Systems, each going for $100, starting at 11 AM PST. Nice discount, but I suspect they’ll be gone by 11:00:30 AM PST.

I am thankful for so many things in my life. I have a wonderful wife, a nice house, a job that pays well, a not-too-weird family, interesting friends, and most of my hit points. I’m also thankful for spam, at least in moderation…of which it has none. Spam always says, “Someone’s interested in you…and a few million other people.” It’s almost life-affirming. But what I’m most thankful for is that it gives me a chance to fill up an entry with random spam subject lines, trying to determine if Spam really knows me at all.

Some recent spam subject lines:

Are you ready to meet someone new this week?

I’m not good about meeting new people. Does it have to be this week?

guerrilla splendidly

I’ve never heard “guerrilla” used as a verb, but I shall endeavor to do so.

Hungry? Participate now for a gift card to redeem at your favorite fast food restaurant.

Mmmmm…Bandido’s. Not exactly fast food, though.

Free trip to Las Vegas “what happens here, stays here!

I’m trying to decide if this is an interesting commentary on the nature of space and time, or perhaps how we perceive history.

What are you doing tonight?

Packing for Thanksgiving, paying a few bills, watching some TV, trying to take over the world.

Be thornton so bankrupt

Sounds like being Thornton would be a bad thing.

You can save few hundreds every month Demetrius

Demetrius…not my name, but a cool name. I think you need to talk to Thornton, though.

I’ve got $

Good. Talk to Thornton.

Re: How are you doing

I’m fine, just fine. Thanks for asking.

hoeef just best price$ for top qulity meds fbav

What?

The best part of that spam is that I can buy CZZIALYS!

Sweet

Yep. Sweet.

Be hard as a rock, and bigger too

Bigger than a rock? What size is a rock supposed to be?

Hibachi what leather

The poor person who sent this is named Derek Necropsy. That doesn’t sound good.

Revolution in mens technology

Finally, a true universal remote.

Increase your mental powers & abilities..

I definitely need to do this. I would be more likely to if it wasn’t for the double period.

Prominent Andrew Sullivan accepting

Not every day you get a former editor for The New Republic in your spam.

Want to be a hero in a bed? 8

A hero? Without ever actually needing to get out of bed? It truly is a revolution in mens technology!

rock rpg

Why yes, I do “rock the RPG.”

***SPAM*** re: Happy thanksgiving holiday

And Happy Thanksgiving to you as well, Spam.

After Joe Lieberman was defeated in the Democratic primary for Senate, he presented himself to the Election Board as the candidate of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. Since the CFL Party didn’t seem to have any actual members, John Orman decided to switch his party affiliation to the CFL Party, and has now elected himself chairman of the party.

Here are some of the new rules he’s passed so far:

If you run under Connecticut for Lieberman, you must actually join our party.

The party will nominate people for office who have the last name of Lieberman and/or who are critics and opponents of Senator Lieberman.

If any CFL candidate loses our party’s nomination in a primary, that candidate must bolt our party, form a new party and work to defeat our party endorsed candidate.

Links courtesy of Obsidian Wings

What if Jack Chick worked with Stan Lee on a religious tract?

Yes, children, Galactus is Coming!

Link courtesy of Comics Should Be Good!