Hello?!?? Anyone home?!??
Piemonte, ITALY. September 2002.
What was once someone’s childhood home has fallen to wrack.
You can’t go home again.
Moody Monday theme: Gloomy.
1. Partially or totally dark, especially dismal and dreary: a damp, gloomy day.
2. Showing or filled with gloom: gloomy faces.
3.
1. Causing or producing gloom; depressing: gloomy news.
2. Marked by hopelessness; very pessimistic: gloomy predictions.
We live where we live because his nibs likes to watch boats! boats!
The Pirate made a HaloScan comment a while back about the awesome sight of huge merchant ships gliding by. Some pictures (taken yesterday) might be in order.
This container ship was the most impressive to sail by the bottom of our hill yesterday. Note the containers. Stacked seven high. The Coast Guard helicopter is paying a vist.
The ship sails on under the Bay Bridge where it will hang a left (hang a port?) and make its drop at Oakland, which can handle container ships while our fair city cannot.
Long story why.
Foggy this weekend. Far foggier in the Central Valley than here. We couldn’t see across the Bay. Folks in the Tule fog couldn’t see five feet in front of them.
Update:Changed outline color on pics to make it more obvious that a click would pull up a larger pic.
Old dirt road at Bixby Creek
Theme Thursday‘s theme is SHADOW:(darkness, overshadow, dusky, shade, unilluminated,… )
Use TallOrNot (a Shockwave application) to compare your height to that of famous people.
I’m shorter than Alfred Hitchock, taller than Ann Margret, and the same height (when I lie a little) as Olivia De Havilland and William Faulkner.
Did you know Burl Ives was 6’1″?
(Link via BoingBoing)
I checked the weekly SNews today, hoping for some excitement in the Letters to the Editor section.
Alas, there was no tit in response to the tat from last week’s paper — a letter from Todd Dwyer, a teacher at the local high school, in response to a letter from Elaine Hocker in the 22 Dec 2004 issue.
Mrs. Hocker had objected to “the double standard being advocated in our liberal education system” which allowed Redwood Middle School students to learn from a Muslim faith curriculum course while a fifth grade history teacher in Cupertino had to file a lawsuit against the Cupertino Union School District because he wasn’t allowed to hand out papers to his students “containing portions of the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents” because he’d “neglected to remove “God” or “Creator” from the contents of the documents.”
Which is all bullshit, of course, and a great source of shock! and uproar! for the right-wing pundits, Fox News and Newt Gingrich.
Yes, the teacher was told not to do what he did, but was anyone surprised when his lawsuit was filed with the assistance of the Alliance Defense Fund?
Hocker wrote
the best solution for the Cupertino school district’s problem would be for the community to get involved. Assuming there are still some Cupertino churches that have not progressed to the Pagan state of having sexual orgies on their altars or casting their babies into the red hot arms of some stone idol, then these church members should immediately take action to recall all of the Cupertino school board trustees, and have the superintendent and school principal dismissed. Such action would not only solve the school district’s problem, but might also act as a deterrent to other school districts intent on implementing their unconstitutional liberal ideology.
Well!
Dwyer came out swinging and said, among other things,
We explain to our students—wherever and whenever appropriate and/or necessary—that what Ms. Hocker and her born-again friends share with other fundamentalists is their boundless capacity to hate. Just like fundamentalist Islamic ideologues who doggedly adhere to religious misinterpretations every bit as silly and dangerous as Ms. Hocker’s, Christian fundamentalists are blinded by their own bigotry and hatred. Just like Christian fundamentalists, Muslim fundamentalists long to impose their own unrealistic and intolerant pseudo-Calvinist morality on the rest of the world.
The fact of the matter is, Ms. Hocker and the rest of America’s right-wing religious fanatics have much more in common with Al Qaeda than they are willing to admit. Just like Al Qaeda, Christian fundamentalists hate the same things and the same people: homosexuality, pacifists, Jews, educators, uppity women, art, enlightenment, short skirts, gangsta rap, tattoos, infidels, OB-GYN doctors, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc. Just like Muslim fundamentalist fanatics, Christian fundamentalist fanatics believe that they are right, and everyone else is wrong. Just like fundamentalist Muslim religious fanatics, fundamentalist Christian religious fanatics have just enough religion to hate, but not enough to love.
Well!
Here’s hoping next week’s paper will have the reaction. The delay is probably due to the fact the paper comes out on a Wednesday and any news items or letters need to be submitted by Wednesday to be included in the next week’s edition. If you read your SNews after you get home from work and snail mail your Letter to the Editor, it won’t get in in time for the next week’s edition.
The American Dialect Society released the final 2004 Words of the Year vote.
Nominated words are newly prominent — but not necessarily coined in 2004 — and can be any lexical item, term, or phrase that characterized the year (not necessarily just a single word).
The winnahs:
Word of the Year: red state, blue state, purple state, n., together, a representation of the American political map.
1. Most Useful: phish, v., to acquire passwords or other private information (of an individual, an account, a web site, etc.) via a digital ruse. Noun form: phishing.
2. Most Creative: pajamahadeen, n., bloggers who challenge and fact-check traditional media.
[...]
5. Most Euphemistic: badly sourced, adj., false.
[...]
The cite gives the remaining winnahs and also the runners-up and the vote counts.
If you like such word stuff, wander over to the archives for ADS-L or signup for ADS-L. You needn’t be a member to join in the discussions.
You might also like some of this stuff.
A while back (five years back now), I fell in love with the South Beach Beverage Company (Sobe)‘s bottle design.
The designs are based on a lizard motif, but the colors used on the bottles vary. The bottle caps vary (and have wise ass sayings that also vary). The lizard design varies. The beverage color inside varies. Even the molded lizards on the clear glass of the bottles vary. The design is cool, and Sobe’s decision to keep the design intact while it goofs around to make a distinct bottle for each beverage flavor created a cult following.
Folks I worked with knew how much I liked the designs and began bringing me bottles. I kept one of each design I came across in a corner of my office at the startup company. By the time I left the startup in mid-2001, Sobe had become a subsidiary of Pepsi Cola North America and I had a dozen or so different bottle types to pack up and take home with me. The younger niblet has augmented that collection since, but loved as it was, my collection was a mere fraction of the Sobe designs available.
I kept the bottles along a window sill in this office … until today when I realized that I wouldn’t be taking them to San Francisco and they’d have to be ditched at some point. Why not today? But first, I would take a picture of each.
In the process I discovered that two of the bottles were duplicates.
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