2001 July❮❮prevnext❯❯

Story of the Moment
This is the story of one of the best days of my life.

June 30, 2001, Mo and I got married...

Murphy and his Law had their say, but didn't take the day: A serious fire in the apartment across from the one where the dress was, rings secure in a safety deposit box-- and a lost key, two soon-to-be-newlyweds developing colds, 90 degree heat (plus) that you could swim in, followed by one of the biggest thunderstorms I've ever been out in to finish up the night.

---

Quote of the Moment

The one-thing-after-another thing can stop now!

---

Rest of the Story of the Moment
But it worked out so well, Mo had done the lion's share of the planning, (and still wanted to marry me despite me being such a bum) and the result was fantastic. The site was great, a beautiful setting. The photographer-- working in an almost rather documentary style, with the "formals" almost an afterthought-- really knew what she was doing. DJ Brother Cleve spun great tunes, balancing the music we requested (by burning a cd for him) against the music people really got into... and finding where those two groups of music overlapped. We had a hayride, a trip to a petting zoo, and it turns out a raging storm can be great to dance in. The food was great, the cake so tasty, the flower arrangements so lovely.

And then of course, (well, before all of that) I got married to the terrific person I've been in love with so long... our ceremony was short and sweet. One of the readings was my own Yee and Lan, which is a 'just so' story I wrote once upon a time that seemed custom made for the day. (Though it wasn't...) And we remembered the vows without a burble.

Man, I'm very happy.

Anyway, I could write more, but I'm out of time, it's past midnight and I have to get to Mexico!

Autumn

Here on an autumn night in the sweet orchard smell,
Sitting in a pile of leaves under the starry sky,
Oh what stories we could tell
With this starlight to tell them by.

October night, and you, and paradise,
So lovely and so full of grace,
Above your head, the universe has hung its lights,
And I reach out my hand to touch your face.

I believe in impulse, in all that is green,
Believe in the foolish vision that comes true,
Believe that all that is essential is unseen,
And for this lifetime I believe in you.

All of the lovers and the love they made:
Nothing that was between them was a mistake.
All that we did for love's sake,
Is not wasted and will never fade.

All who have loved shall be forever young
And walk in grandeur on a cool fall night
Along the avenue,
They live in every song that is ever sung,
In every painting of pure light,
In every pas de deux.

Oh love that shines in every star
And love reflected in the silver moon.
It is not here, but it's not far.
Not yet, but it will be here soon.

---

Four in the morning

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
the hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
If we're to go on living.

---

Dialogue of Soul & Stone

I was talking to a rock
and I said, "Stone"-
I talk to them like that-I said,
"what makes people feel extraneous?"

To which the rock in its own idiom
replied, "Extraneous's ass!
You think you got it bad.
Try igneous extrusion.
Try a little freeze and thaw.
Try glaciation.
Stand out in the weather for ten thousand years.
We'll talk extraneous."

One thing about rocks:
they cut you half an inch of slack
but never. That's why guys like me
idealize them. I said, "Sage"-
I laid it on a little thick,
this rock I'm talking to,
it's not much bigger than a Chiclet,
but I don't want to give offense-
so I said, "Sage, what
should the human species do?"

To which the rock said nothing,
but he got that look. You know:
they're thinking to themselves,
"Drop dead."

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

---

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

---

from "There is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings"

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to, he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
      I say the song went this way: O prolong
      Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

---

from The Once and Future King

Remember what Merlin said about learning:
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough."

Back from México... "Gracias, No", don't know how many times I said that to vendors there. Overall it was very good though.

---

Quote of the Moment

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in batallions.

At first I thought of that quote in terms of some of the airline hassles on the trip, but then I got back and found out my grandmother passed away (though that wasn't unexpected, but my mom thought that Grandma wouldn't have wanted us to skip a honeymoon for some old funeral), and another relative has been diagnosed with a tumor. Though the outlook isn't as bad as it could be.

Oy.

Anyway, I've actually collected a lot of quotes and ideas over the trip, so it should be a good next couple of weeks on this blog.

---

Quote of the Moment

>Did our prayers shower blessings down?
Well let's see...Sandy prayed for a warm glow and the apt next to Janis went up in flames.

---

News of the Moment
Hard to keep on news while in Mexico, but happy to see more people realize Bush just isn't doing a good job. I hope the dems put up a good canidate so we only have four years of this clown, or at least use his antics to improve their leads in the Senate and regain seats in the House. Image of the Moment
View from the roof of the Casa Mexilio, the B+B Mo and I stayed at in Mérida on our honeymoon. Made possible by a special mode and some neat PC software bundled with my new Canon PowerShot S110 Digital Elph (yeesh, I'm surprised they have room enough for the whole name on a camera that small.)

---

Logrolling Link of the Moment
Ranjit's company Game Lab has some good coverage here. Man, I'm pretty jealous of what they're doing.

---

Quote of the Moment

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

In context, the narrator is talking about being scared as he approaches the "stronghold of an ogre", though with clever clipping I can recycle it seems like it can fit on the loveblender. Lines of the Moment

"I like my women like I like my coffee...hot, black, and with one of those little croissant things on the side."
"Oh yeah? Well I like my women like I like my coffee too... stuffed into a burlap sack the back of a donkey."

---

Link of the Moment
Interesting salon.com piece on The Day The Brands Died. Brands are the shorthand we use to tell the world our stories these days, they aren't always as trivial or shallow as they usually seem. Even if you're not really brand conscious, you're probably sending the message that you're not brand conscious, like it or not.

---

from the T-shirt Archive: #7 of a Series

"Einstein Simplified". Kind of a cute idea, a complex line drawing of the man turned into a simple cartoon in three panels. I think I got it at the Boston Computer Museum, and used to show off my geekiness in high school. One of the few black T-shirts I'd wear after middle school. Oy, my freefloating dread (the one that got me worried about Y2K, and then the idea of giant EMF pulses, that kind of thing) is starting to latch on to the whole economy situation. Mo's pretty doubtful about her company past 3-6 months or so, Homeruns might join webvan in the deadpool, that kind of thing. My company seems relatively stable, but still isn't quite making its budget this year. Yeesh. We have a pretty good nestegg, but still it's driving me nuts. Guess that comes from a semi-surprise layoff. (My dread always gets it roots in something sort of real, but usually there's some kind of subtext that is secretly fueling it.)

---

Geek News of the Moment
This is the ship from an upcoming Star Trek series, one set before the days of Captain Kirk. That idea captures my interest in a way Deep Space 9 and Voyager didn't, assuming it's done well. (You can see some spoilers for the pilot episode here.)

In doing some research on the design of the ship, I found a few cool sites: Ex Astris Scientia Starship Gallery has a lot of pictures of many ships from the various shows... the cutaway bridge views were very cool. Even more intriguing was a page on Starship Concept Art, behind-the-scenes coverage of what the designers were thinking. I especially like the original sketches for the ship that started it all. (Be sure to click on the "thumbnails", many actually contain much more information than is shown on the page.) (image from a cleaned up version by wes button)

---

Lit Bit of the Moment

The assistant's dark hair was messy. She is wearing sloppily applied red lipstick; a short black skirt with no stockings; a rumbled black V-neck sweater (at least she is wearing a bra); clunky black shoes. She looks like (pardon the expression) someone rode her hard and put her away wet.

I dunno, I think it's a funny expression.(Then the assistant asks for the day off to go to the doctor's for treating a UTI, and the narrator realizes someone did ride her hard and put her away wet.) I'm thinking about losing the "...of the Moment" titles I've been using, replacing it with smaller, content-based titles. Let me know if you have an opinion one way or the other.


--from this Super-Fun-Pak Comix edition of Tom the Dancing Bug (Ruben Bolling). I wish I could get a book of nothing but Fun-Pak Comix...

---

Rockets' Red Glare

You might be missing a lot of your skin and fingers after some of the ideas I've given you, but fingers and skin only last about 80 years. Freedom... true Freedom... that lasts a lifetime.

Moral Issues
Heard this on the BBC on NPR Friday morning, couldn't find it on the US Wire Service: France upholds 'right not to be born'. "France's highest court of appeal has ruled that disabled children are entitled to compensation if their mothers were not given the chance of an abortion.", the families argued that the doctor's had not acurately diagnosed the children's condition. A rather disturbing factor is how the lawsuits are being brought in the name of the children, rather than of the family. Over all the issues are so weird and complex that I can't wrap my head around them.

---

MicroSquish

Recently I was on a carnival ride called "The Drop Zone" with my nephews when I saw a similar Windows error message.

The Drop Zone is rather fun. They strap you in the ride, you are lifted to the top of a tower, about 100m from the ground. There are computer screens at the top which give you a narrative about how some spacecraft is going down and the whole crew are going to have to bail out, and then they drop you. You experience free fall for a few seconds. The kids scream. You land safely.

The second time we did the ride, we got to the top and Windows had crashed. This time it was my turn to scream...

---

from the T-shirt Archive: #8 of a Series

"Hand With Reflecting Sphere". A lot of geeks have an Escher shirt. I thought this shirt, by having a single Escher image, was much classier than the ones that had like 6 images all around the shirt. Thanks to Bill the Splut for pointing out the following cut and paste typo (since corrected) in yesterday's entry:

You experience free fall for a few seconds. The kids
cream. You land safely.

Heh heh. Whoops.

---

Navel Reserves
This commercial for Levi jeans is one of the most disturbing I've seen in a while...yet strangely alluring. (I guess the allure comes mostly from the taut female tummies. (Though there may be yet another subconscious level from The Soprano's Jamie-Lynn Sigler singing "I'm coming...I'm coming (out)"))

---

Quote of the Moment

Never buy a secondhand camera from a pornshop..........trust me.

Cut flowers are kind of weird...I mean they're alive, but not really, sort of like big old undead zombie flowers roaming our mantelpieces.

---

Cosmic Zits

"But what about self-esteem?"
"Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple [on the ass-end of creation] and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace--and maybe even glory."

---

Fishy Files?
Something on your Windows machine you want to keep from prying eyes? Blowfish Advanced CS is good encryption with an OK UI. By default it uses the highly regarded "Blowfish" algorithm, but you can set it to use a number of others as well. It's not as good as it could be, since by default it makes encrypted files that are named the same as the originals, plus a ".BFA" extension, so it's not good at hiding the fact that you are hiding something, but over all it's a good deal, a quality freeware product. Today, my mom flies off to England to live there for three years. That's pretty intense.

---

Compassionate Conservatism

Who cares what you think?

Admittedly the author was being a bit of a dork but it's surprising how undiplomatic our "Mr. Geniality" president can be.

---

You Like To Watch, Don't You?
metaspy is pretty cool, you can see what terms people are searching for in "real time", and it comes in censored and uncensored versions.

---

from the T-shirt Archive: #9 of a Series

"Escher-Sketch". Cute parody of the famous escher lithograph. I've seen a similar title used for a computer program in Antic Magazine. Just a quick note, have to get to work early for a day of diversity training. By the end of the day I expect to be much more diverse.

---

From an AOL-IM Chat
john: did you hear (/.) about the russian programmer arressted for proving the adobe's eBook isn't secure (DMCA) ?
kirk: yes. And please don't write (/.) again; my brain keeps trying to parse it as ASCII art and I'm very uncomfortable with some of the results
--2001.07.17. (/.) is a parenthetical reference to the geeks favorite site, slashdot Wow. My mom goes to London, and my president follows shortly thereafter? Coincidence? Or something darker, more mysterious?

---

Quote of the Moment

You can type this shit George, but you sure can't say it

---

Online Comics
The sweet, not quite innocent childhood you wish you had: You Damn Kid. It's kind of like Red Meat watered down with Peanuts. I especially liked this cartoon. ("Friend, can I have your shoes?") The same artist does an even-closer-to-Red-Meat cartoon "The Beevnicks"... I found this one especially amusing. Conspiracy Theory
My buddy John pointed out how similar one of the stars of Pixar's upcoming flick Monsters, Inc. (right) is to my beloved Alien Bill (left). I had seen the same preview, but it didn't really register... maybe because of the claws, or probably the mouth. I was going to get all huffy about that, but then I remembered how similar Alien Bill's design was to Steve Jackson Games's The Awful Green Things from Outer Space (below). So I guess I have no room to talk. (Actually, I think that Awful Green Thing is glaring at me right now even.)

---

Tool of the Moment
Not as slick as some tools out there, spellcheck.net offers a very cool, free, easy way to do some spellchecking. It's a good UI. (http://spellchecker.net offers a slicker interface (blogger started using it) but it's a pain to install.)

---

Quote of the Moment

It doesn't matter what they say about you as long as they spell the name correctly

Quote of the Moment
"You should never stand in love's way, especially if love is driving a bus."
--R. M. Weiner

---

Net Toy of the Moment
Two shockwave games: sometimes you get the worm, and sometimes the worm gets to be you, or something. The first is the cooler by far, an interesting blend of frustrating game and art piece. Turns out the whole thing is based on this video short, a commercial for UK Compaq. Guess the video, by these guys takes out some of the mystery. Still, kind of neat to see. (found via memepool's archive)

---

Net Humor of the Moment
This poem is making the e-mail rounds, apparently compiled from actual quotes of our president:

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize Society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

Quote of the Moment

Photography isn't about the pictures. Pictures never come out right. It's about the adventure.

---

Photo Gallery 1
So I got that new Canon Digital Elph, and I'm loving it. I've actually started carrying with me everywhere, the same way I do my Pilot and cellphone, and started playing at being a photographer. These are some of my favorite post-honeymoon pictures (shrunk down from the originals which were five times times the size seen here):

Time
So I've been digging through the Memepool By-Subject Archive for links, grabbing some for future use here. One link that I didn't record, but stuck in my head, is this one for some really innovative watches. They also have screensavers with shock wave demos. The idea of playing with the visual representation of time, but still staying in the framework of traditional clockfaces, is really sticking in my head.

---

Quote of the Moment

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

I link to think that I'm better than most at not sticking to my old thoughts when somebody makes a really convincing argument. That might even be true, I can be awfully wishy-washy. When I was in sQ at Tufts, around audition time I got the nickname "C'mon, guys, she wasn't that bad... was she?" (Probably about the longest nickname I've been saddled with.) Feeling pretty uninspired. Maybe it's the heat. (Heard about three people at Davis Square last night complain how hot it was... but it didn't seem that bad to me, the evening breeze kicking in. Then I realized I was in Mexico for a very very hot week.)

---

Online Toy of the Moment
What Historical Military Leader Are You Most Like? I'm a Robert E. Lee, which I think is the most modern seeming choice: don't be a glory hound, trust your troops to make the right decision, negotiate well. (I plotted out the binary tree of 4 A/B decisions that lead to the 16 possible outcomes. I'm geeky like that.)

---

Cartoon of the Moment
A Brilliant Tom Tomorrow Cartoon.
Salon rocks so much.

---

Quote of the Moment

Dear L. L. Bean, please rename the color choice for mens' boxers to something other than 'cream.' Many thanks.

Image of the Moment
This image is making the rounds. I guess it would be funnier if the pope were in better health, but still you can see him thinking "mama mia, won't this guy shut UP???" as Bush reads on and on and on.

---

Geek News and Links
How to really secure your PC against theft-- it's the Google cache, without images, for some reason the original is gone. NASA tries to build that little floating sphere droid Luke learns lightsabering with in the original Star Wars. Finally, the new geek rallying cry is "Free Dmitry", the guy who got arrested 'cause he pointed out Adobe's system wasn't as solid as advertised. (The former geek cry was "Free Kevin", I think Mo has the bumpersticker somewhere.) (Most of this stuff via slashdot) Quote of the Moment

hey, I just typed the best apostrophe ever! I accidentally typed ' in my unix telnet window, and it came back Unmatched ' .

This one might need a little explaining...when you type an apostrophe (single quote)into a unix command, the system expects a close quote... hence that particular comeback. But the news that the ' was unmatched, well, that's high praise, coming from a unix system, not known for their enthusiasm.

---

Art of the Moment
Ranjit also introduced me to LeCielEstBleu (the sky is blue), the single greatest shockwave site I've seen. The pieces there are true interactive art, IMO. I especially liked "flying giraffes"... click on zoo at the bottom left, than the giraffes. It has a terrific dream-logic quality to it. (The piece to the left is "little bête")

By the way, you should check out Ranjit's site moonmilk if you haven't recently; he's updated the okraleidoscope with sound, and now it's really mesmerizing. Almost makes me wish I grew up down south so I'd know what okra really was... Weird. Feeling very vaguely short of breath. Not desperately so, but in a way that makes me want to breathe deeply every 10 minutes ot so. Hmmm, should I be worried?

---

As Hosed As You Think You Are
Interesting page on PsyOps, the art of psychological warfare, or rather psychology during warfare. Dropping pamphlets, radio broadcasts, etc. I especially like the material about the Gulf War, especially the sample pamphlets. (This kind of thing probably had a big effect on the huge number of bloodless surrenders.)

---

Yet Another Geek Quote

My latest idea is for a beat-em-up game in the Mortal Wombat vein called Friedrich Nietzsche's Art Of Fighting. The player basically has two kinds of attacks: the first attack will actually increase your opponent's health bar, while the second will kill the opponent instantly no matter how strong he or she is. Thus, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, in every possible sense. I'm sure there's a market for it.

---

from the T-shirt Archive: #10 of a Series

Ratty and faded but beloved blue tanktop. Odd discoloration from too many washings. I think it had some kind of design on the front, like a kayaker, but that went away. Not up to my usual "interesting shirt" standards, but I liked it a lot, and prevented my mom from chucking it many times during high school.
Quote of the Moment

I have bought this wonderful machine--a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine--it seems to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

---

Photo of the Moment

---

Political Link of the Moment
Salon article reinforces an opinion I've been forming... with all the treaty rejecting we've been doing: Kyoto, ABM, Nuclear Test Ban, Small Arms, Land Mine, Biological Weapon Enforcement, from other countries' point of view, we've become the kind of "rogue nation" Bush is trying to use as a bogeyman...the irony is, well, if not "overwhelming", at least kind of funny. Quote of the Moment

The male has a negative Midas touch--everything he touches turns to shit.

This is the woman who Shot Andy Warhol. Interesting diatribe. Never heard of receiving the sexual favor of a woman described as "zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece". Also, "groovy" seems to have had a deeper meaning than the little campy phrase we use now it as now.

---

News of the Moment
Man, some Golf Officials are real jerks. A potentially amazing breakthrough for an autistic child being set aside for some niggling little rule. Using a "Slippery Slope" argument is, amusingly enough, a slippery slope.

---

Geek Link of the Moment
I've been meaning to post this for a while, a study on the psychology of people's passwords. Though since one of the cardinal words of passwords is don't tell yours to random people, you wonder how they conducted the survey. (via this slashdot article, with some interesting if long-winded conversation about it.) Creepy Thought of the Moment
I was watching the kind of cool Second War for Heaven flick The Prophecy (Eric Stoltz as the angel Simon, and Christopher Walken as Gabriel) and this one guy who hanged himself with the radio going (Gabriel turns him into a zombie of convenience for a bit) made me think I'd like to be buried with some kind of radio playing. With some sort of perpetual powersource, maybe a little solar panel up on the tombstone. Is that too creepy for words? I've always liked to go to sleep with a radio going, (back in my "waiting for nuclear war" days it reassured me that life was still going on) and it's probably a kind of extension of that. Some little bit of life, even though I'm dead. Maybe changing the station every day or so, since I know radio stations change their format anyway... (hate to have an eternity listening to country and western, that would just be too sad.)

---

Star Wasn't
Memepool recently had some neat links about Star Wars toys, including ones that never were. Gus Lopez's prototype page had some of the coolest stuff. This yoda trading card (left) was nixed (not surprisingly, the page points out... Lucas has been pretty tight lipped about Yoda's culture, and this card makes them pretty much just mystic buddhists with big ears). Also cool was Kenner's idea for a new, post-ROTJ badguy storyline (Atha Prime setting up for a new round of the Clone Wars) and this unproduced minirig that clipped on to the front of the Millennium Falcon (Minirigs were a neat concept: smaller, more affordable toys that were vehicles that didn't appear onscreen, but look like they could have.)

I've always been interested in the "expanded universe" of Star Wars, the universe beyond what you can see in the movies: the Role-Playing Game, the Comic Books, some of the novels. Today's sniffing around found me this well-illustrated guide to new fighter ships, like this lovely "X-Ceptor" to the right, representing an "after-market" merging of an X-wing and a TIE interceptor. I love the little astromech (R2D2) sticking out of the front. (Click the image for the page with a larger version of the picture.)

And of course, previously linked is the Star Wars Technical Commentaries, close to the ultimate in geekily explaining every nugget of the extended Star-Wars-iverse. Quote of the Moment

"The original coffeehouse was a place where men of all types could sit all day; the tobacco they smoked made it possible to drink coffee all day; and the coffee they drank inspired them to talk all day," writes Gladwell. "Out of this came the Enlightenment."

The article also talked about how messing with our brain chemistry has been going on for so long, from caffeine on up, that it should be considered part of what we are.

---

Creepy and Sad Link of the Moment
Yesterday's Cruel site was this website that starts "I assume that if you are reading this then i have died", written by an 18 year old before he committed suicide. I would have wondered if it was a fake, but it seems to be verified by this article in the Sun newspaper.

---

from the T-shirt Archive: #11 of a Series

"Destination Fun". Another tanktop. The design definitely doesn't live up to my usual standards for T-shirts, I guess I was more lenient with tanktops.

2001 July❮❮prevnext❯❯