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The New Yorker had a piece by James Somers, A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft, about how GPT4 is empowering non-coders to solve coding problems. Many parts of my career path echo his.

He points out how once upon a time Squarespace and other tools empowered non-techies to make websites just by clicking around, and a set of medium-low-effort, sometimes high-paying work went away.

There are some interesting challenges to bringing that same egalitarian nature to programming - many of them have to do with deployment and environmental context. There are some obvious risks to allowing half-baked code on your server! (Some of those to the host can be mitigated by proper containerization.) I wonder what ChatGPT would suggest for from scratch deployment for the non-programmer.

But Somers mentions the tie-in with how we seem to be cracking the long-pondered "natural language programming" problem - of which COBOL was one of first attempts

In a 1978 essay titled "On the Foolishness of 'Natural Language Programming,' " the computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra argued that if you were to instruct computers not in a specialized language like C++ or Python but in your native tongue you'd be rejecting the very precision that made computers useful. Formal programming languages, he wrote, are "an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid."

But it feels like that equation changes somewhat with AI. You're not solving unique challenges, you're solving problems very similar to what many people before you have, and LLMs are uniquely empowered to draw from that. They don't truly model the problem in their head, and so have all kinds of limitations, but they are able to get to "DWIMNWIS" ("Do What I Mean Not What I say") in a way previous systems have not.

He talks about Go champion Lee Sedol's retirement after losing to Alpha Go

But whenever I think about Sedol I think about chess. After machines conquered that game, some thirty years ago, the fear was that there would be no reason to play it anymore. Yet chess has never been more popular--A.I. has enlivened the game. A friend of mine picked it up recently. At all hours, he has access to an A.I. coach that can feed him chess problems just at the edge of his ability and can tell him, after he's lost a game, exactly where he went wrong. Meanwhile, at the highest levels, grandmasters study moves the computer proposes as if reading tablets from the gods. Learning chess has never been easier; studying its deepest secrets has never been more exciting.

Near the end of the piece Somers sounds a hopeful note for the programmer:

Computing is not yet overcome. GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can't wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession. In fact, I feel somewhat more secure than before. As software gets easier to make, it'll proliferate; programmers will be tasked with its design, its configuration, and its maintenance. And though I've always found the fiddly parts of programming the most calming, and the most essential, I'm not especially good at them. I've failed many classic coding interview tests of the kind you find at Big Tech companies. The thing I'm relatively good at is knowing what's worth building, what users like, how to communicate both technically and humanely. A friend of mine has called this A.I. moment "the revenge of the so-so programmer." As coding per se begins to matter less, maybe softer skills will shine.

Here's hoping! For folks caught on the outside of the current boom-to-bust cycle, these sea changes are frightening. But right now, where I've had ChatGPT write me some simple one page apps, but also fall on its face on some similar problems, I'm optimistic I'll at least be able to ride out the rest of my career doing this kind of thing, with ChatGPT as an ally instead of a foe. But, my previous advice to young people: "uh, I dunno, maybe try programming? It always worked for me" seems more precarious than ever.

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Viral phrases from Chinese Work Culture. It's so easy to think of workers in China as just a big pile of "other", this can help give some insight and maybe empathy.

Increasingly the weirdness of phone numbers, how anyone can contact you without a prior connection if they know or can guess 10 or so digits, is becoming apparent. Hell, if it wasn't for the ubiquity of SMS text as the default "Two Factor Authentication", or non-SMS services like Signal that seem pretty bound to phone numbers, it would be tempting to try and make all phone numbers go the way of the personal landline.

(Man, it's been so long I don't even remember... when you moved, the phone number stayed with the house, right? Like it was cellphones that brought out more permanent phone numbers...)

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So, Republicans can't really win on fair votes, so:
A. they bitch and moan and make a culture of questioning any election they think they shoulda won
B. gerrymander the fuck out of everything
C. cheat and fuck around with procedure and not actually doing their fucking jobs to steal supreme court seats
Oh and
D. in Texas, make up bizarre ass "lets deputize everyone" new laws to avoid the normal forms of court review.

I mean what the fuck. How can anyone be a Republican and think their party is on the up and up?

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In a way aren't we all stuck between a sex shop and a crematorium?

(In reference to the how long ago was it? Trumps' lawyers' press conference at the Four Seasons...Total Landscaping yard.)

For me, the funniest thing about Giuliani's badness for Trump overall is my (I guess unconfirmed?) theory that Trump just loves, loves, loves how the damn Mayor of NYC - with all his 9/11 gravitas and what not - is his personal lapdog. Like it must have been such a nice piece of the power trip for him... Yikes. So in Browns/Steelers last night, Myles Garrett ripped off the Steelers QB Mason Rudolph's helmet and then used it like a club. But - and I think this is really not getting enough attention - the video looks like Rudolph is working to rip off Garrett's helmet before. WTF is up with that? (Some of the comments say maybe Rudolph's hand was stuck? I dunno. But to ignore that part when looking how Garrett should be punished would be an injustice)

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This Tweet asks "Explain your ideology in six words or less without naming it directly." I guess it's more the Social Justice Revolutionaries and the Libertarians who have ideologies that can be so boiled down. Mine was going to be "Everything Matters, Nothing Matters That Much" but maybe that's more of an underlying philosophy rather than an ideology, per se?

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The USPTO wants to know if artificial intelligence can own the content it creates... What a weird question! My first thought is no - since this is one step away from personhood, and most AIs like this don't seem that autonomous.

But we grant virtual personhood to corporations, and they can hold copyrights, right? Is an AI less of a person than a corporation is?

Also shades of the issue if a monkey can hold a copyright on a photo they clicked the shutter for or if it fairly belongs to the human who set up the situation and owns the equipment...

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On my devblog, some thoughts on the Apple Watch and when technology is telling humans what to do. In FB comments the other day on my post about the search engine, and how rich a resource two decades of blog has become for me, I am reminded of a term for the concept I liked once upon a time - I am following the tradition of the "commonplace book" - or in verb form, "commonplacing".

The term is a bit unfortunate, because we now read commonplace as "ordinary, boring, dime-a-dozen", but if you look at the parts of the compound word, the meaning can be of a "common place" to hold on to quotes and other transferrable tidbits.

Actually the etymology "commonplace" is a bit of a mess - looking at the wikipedia page for Commonplace book there's a claim that "commonplace" is a translation of locus communis. Except that term seems to be a different beast - how different writers might have a topic or phrase in common - tropes, basically. In this sense the "commonplace book" is inly locus communis in the sense of "stuff I the collector ran into".

Thinking about it more I'm increasingly suspect of the derivation, especially seeing as how "commonplace" means "not very good or interesting".
(I guess "common" alone has that double meaning.)

I wish the term was more like "a gather-book", where things are gathered together from myriad sources for future reference.

Of course, "blogging" as a term has its own duality- usually a blog is either more focused on "commonplacing" (and emphasizing the outward link) or more focused on "journaling", people writing their own observations, often in diary kind of way. It's a spectrum, though I think most sites lean one way or the other.

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Speaking of commonplacing, did I really forget to send out a link to the Knuckle Tattoo Generator?

I think that's the font I ended up using on my devblog...

Everyone assumes they are the sperm that made it to the egg. Nobody assumes they were the egg all along.

Huh. That kind of resonates for me - is that asymmetry true for a lot of people? Is it more true for dudes? Definitely feels like there might be a sexist undercoat there. Also a shade of the old Yin (feminine/passive) Yang (masculine/active), which can be hella problematic when used as a role model for modern society. I get the feeling people feel affiliation for the faster and seemingly more action-packed journey of the young sperm cell, vs the slower travel for the egg that has been there since the mother's time in the womb. A lot of metaphors spring to mind, but again I think trouble arises with the temptation of attributing truth and guidance because of the "it's just nature!" parallels.

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If you don't find farts funny then you're a loser because you're choosing to have less joy in your life but the exact same amount of farts

I find you can replace "farts" with many things in your life and it still kind of works!

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via http://store.iam8bit.com/collections/sequel - awesome posters for never made sequels. I love how this one lets a terrible artist like me really think about what signifies male and female in sketch forms, without resorting to my usual "boobs and eyelashes" style of doodling women. (I have a plastic Iron Giant on my desk at work, actually, despite only barely having seen the film, I just dig the design.)
Art Class last night. I spent a bit more time with the iPad... sometimes it seems like cheating but it also feels like the most likely tool for me to make stuff people will find worthwhile. Though last night the opposite was true; people liked the angry charcoal work I did (I used a dark background in part to hide the fact I was using the flip side of the pad and there were some smudges from a pervious work on the paper.)

What was interesting about the iPad work is that it got about 5 times better when I zoomed in, the first thing didn't fill the space very well.

Also, the red lines I originally meant as just guidance, but they turned out to be some of my favorite lines of the class. Though my instructor REALLY hates my tendency to use and show multiple marks on the same space... I'm not sure I agree.






A rep from MBA online encouraged me to repost this, and it's kind of fun, so why not. (It's interesting though... in the short term, I think the consensus is that Nintendo is suffering, despite the success of the Wii, it's kind of getting squeezed by the other consoles for the "serious" player, and by iOS devices for the casual...)

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The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens.

Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs has a nice "And one more thing...", a self-reflective passage from the guy himself:

What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how - because we can't write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That's what has driven me.

A good read in all.

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It just proves that if you're a good-looking French girl, you can get away with just about anything.

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It's as if Sony was using Helvetica before almost everyone else, then switched to Arial when the world followed suit.

Many details matter. Arial vs Helvetica does not.

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Engineers are taught to make a decision analytically, but there are times when relying on gut or intuition is most indispensable

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The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you've cast your lot with the destructive people.

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Once you start to explain individuals' behavior via logic after the fact, you're likely to start to see your group's norms and standards as universal.

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iPhone 4S: Iffy battery life, Siri is kinda "Egg freckles"-y, iMessage is handy but less reliable than "just SMS". Nothing so awful, but it kinda lacks Apple "perfection".

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Never thought I'd be brand loyal to gum, But Wrigley's, from oldies like Big Red + Doublemint to the weird "Dessert Delights" is superior to most everything else.

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http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/2011/11/simplicity-simplicity-simplicity.html My essay on simplicity and the choice of Javascript toolkits... Leonard was visiting, up from NYC, and we decided to take an impromptu field trip to Funspot, home of the American Classic Arcade Museum, what the Boston Globe calls "the Louvre of the '8-bit' world."

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I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem.

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I find it hard to be sympathetic toward beggars when they have smartphones, even if they are Blackberries.

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Why did Dr. Manhattan cross the road?
It is May 18, 1979. I am crossing a road.

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november loveblender

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Defense has to be the best part of most sports. These guys can throw and catch in their sleep; how do you stop that?

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Least favorite part about undefeated Colts; those guys don't even try for unbeaten seasons, so the Dolphins' achievement will go unchallenged. So I now have two friends who use CPAP machines, masks or tubes they wear at night hooked up to machines that push air to help open up the passageways and let them sleep better. Big benefits to general feelgoodness are reported! So I've been feeling a bit sleepy lately, and being the hypochondriac I am I almost want to get a sleep study done, but waking up this morning after a good 9 or 10 hours, I think it's more a matter of, you know, not staying up 'til 1 or 2 every night while getting up at 7.

Still don't like how much sleep I'm obliged to do in this world.

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Links of the Moment
BoingBoing lined to this mildly interesting Psychology Today article on Scams and Cons. Once concept the article presents is THOMAS, "The Human Oxytocin Mediated Attachment System", a neurochemical base for trust.

THOMAS is mentioned in a few other articles. One was an eye-opening study on how touch induces trust. In talking about handshakes and hugs, I'm reminded about how much less hugging East Coast guys do than West Coast. (Heh, though you know, I think one of my main observation points for the West Coast was the guys in the movie "Swingers".) I asked EB, and sure enough, he had to switch gears when he made the coastal switch. I just vaguely worry about the neurochemical implications of that, that on the East Coast were more isolated and less trusting. (There was a kind of surprising subculture of guy greeting hugs at The Salvation Army crew back in Ohio.)

The other article was on couchsurfing... apparently there's a big subculture of mutual beneficence going on, people opening their homes to other travellers. There's the website couchsurfing.com. That seems like it might be cool to get into someday, sort of like a short-term AFS for grownups.

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Odd, my embedded twitter javascript seems to be somehow busted.

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Keeping his campaign promise to meet with dangerous world leaders without preconditions, Obama went to the White House

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I generally dig Jeanette Winterson but so far "Lighthousekeeping" is a slog, just a grungy highlands shadow of magical realism.

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five minutes till the glorioustrainwrecks.com kotmk 2 hour game jam! So warm out! Lovely.

Lines from "The Selfish Gene" that I Find Mildly Amusing When Taken Out of Context of the Moment

• "Baby bird screams do not become infinitely loud, because of other considerations."
• "There is no reason why a man should not inherit a tendency to develop a long penis from his mother."
• "The word excess has no meaning for a male."
• "An individual wolf, therefore, is a vehicle worthy of the name."

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Skepticism of the Moment
The John "Dead Guy Whisperer" Edward Cold Reading Bingo -- has a nice description of a lot of the chutzpah-laden techniques he uses to make his (semi-obvious) guesses seem more like actual supernatural communication. (via Nick B)

I need to rant for a moment, about something very geeky and ultimately not of great consequence. (I understand this is tremendously unusual for this site or the web in general.)

So last night Ksenia wanted help looking for some symbol/logo type stuff for an art project... specifically for a symbol for "art" in general. Poking around the "webdings" font, I found this neat thing, character code 173, which "normal" fonts display as a little dash character: Perfect! But I also wanted to let her see all the funny little icons that came in Webdings and of course good old Wingdings (and Wingdings 2). So I made a little program to print every character in those odd fonts in a single HTML page. And it was cool. But then I noticed... the Iconic Mona Lisa wasn't there. Investigating further with Window's character map tool and my program, I could see that the character before Mona Lisa was there, and the one after was there, and there was another icon that used the same basic image but put it in a "document copy" frame, but not that one. Not in Firefox, not in IE.

After beating my head against the wall, and even doing some research online, I found out that Character Code 173 is a "soft hyphen" and is involved in a giant, retarded, overly-anal-standards moronic mess that means browsers elect not to show it, because maybe it's supposed to not be a character, but some kind of weird-ass hint about where to break a word (but, maybe not, so the browsers really should be showing it, even if the whole idea of providing a hint about where to break a word wasn't totally antithetical to HTML in general.) So, I had a 1-in-256 chance (more or less) of running into this issue on the character I wanted, and the universe being what it is, of course that is what happened.

UPDATE: somehow inspired by Lex's comments, I made up a 8.5 x 11 version of the graphic, suitable for printing and maybe even framing. I love how it's an 8 megapixel image that's only 58K.

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Funny of the Moment
Straight from the "Why Didn't I Think of That???" Department: Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. Brilliant! I remember these books and the story captures the detail perfectly. (via felisdemens)

I was watching that show "Wife Swap". Whew. They really find the extremes of American families, and then throw 'em together...the huntin' hillbillies with the Confederate flags paired with the PETA, vegan, raw-food, maybe-we-can-even-just-live-on-sunlight hippy... pretty compelling. Of course, they don't show anything about the "traditional" meaning of wife-swapping, which would be whole new levels of weirdness.

After that shows was Monday Night Football, which is actually why the TV was on. Musta been like the fourth or fifth episode of MNF I've seen this year, and I just realized that the whole "auto-assembly" theme to the intro might have something to do with the Superbowl being in Detroit this year.

Duhr.

Only been to Detroit once, and my observation about the city is this: it hosts the most grueling Thanksgiving Parade I've ever marched in.

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Comic and Link of the Moment

--Yet another set of Stupid Comics from back in the day. If you're in a hurry, just check out this page, especially the bit at the end about the haikus.

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Politics of the Moment
Slate.com had some articles about the changing landscape in DC: Bush's new line about I Was Wrong, but So Were You replacing his "We're always right" approach, and a Christopher Hitchens about gullibility. The final paragraph of that article is the most relevant, because it's the first to pose the question, usually begged, was invasion was the best and/or only way to keeping Saddam and his desire for WMD in check? I still hold that cranking up the inspections and giving them military teeth would have made for a safer regional and global situation. We're now obligated to stand guard at a house of cards that we ourselves made. There was human suffering under Saddam, there's human suffering with the war and terrorist incidents after Saddam.

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Marketing of the Moment
Piece on name letter branding...people respond positively to brand names that share letters with their own. Seems likely enough to me..."K"s and "R"s have always seemed like the "coolest" (or is that "koolest") letters to me, I love how sharp and angular Ks can be.

So lately I've been sinking some time into Grand Theft Auto: San Adreas...it's a pretty amazing game, greatly amplifying the feeling of an adventure overlayed on a "real city" that the previous games introduced to the field. It's the first GTA I've spent much time with since getting the GPS for my car, and I realized that its display, with a polygon-ish road map and a triangle indicating my position and direction is just like the little map shown in GTA. So basically, I've turned my life into Grand Theft Kirky...

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Strange Links of the Moment
After FoSO and some others seemed to indicate that they like the rambles, lately I've been trying to push this site in that direction a bit. But I don't mean to be neglectful of links, so here are 3 of the oddest things I've seen on the web this week:

• A Japanese McDonald's Ad feature a gal in a haute coutre take on Ronald...there's one for people who like their clown-clad models more ambiguosly gendered as well.
• What might be the best foosball playing you've ever seen.
• Robodump 1.0...a robot design to sound and look (at least from the legs down) like a high powered executive having quite a time of it in a company restroom. (They made it an executive so people would be less likely to strike up a conversation...)

Toy of the Moment
Let Them Sing It For You is a cool online toy, type in a sentence and it will piece together audioclips from lots of songs to sing those words. Its vocabulary isn't huge, so sometimes you have to think of a different phrasing for your message, but it's still about the niftiest online thing I've seen this week. I know I've mentioned this before, but dang, my sense of space gets so messed up when I switch my wedding ring to my other finger, because my left ring finger gets a little sore. I'm not kidding, it makes me feel a little dizzy, and typing and driving are both very weird. I guess normally these days I no longer have a difference telling left from right because that ring acts as a little orienting device...I don't just learn to turn right when walking down a hallway at work, I myst be learning to turn towards my ring finger, so having that switched is disconcerting.

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News of the Moment
Dang it. THe FBIs warning of "spectacular" attacks. Just when I was thinking that maybe we managed to cut the bad guys down to mostly the rinky dink stuff, and that maybe there was room for the economy to make a soggy recovery.

On the other hand, this particular warning might be overplayed by the media. Not that the situation is good, but the FBI seems to be talking a bit more in the medium/long term than right now, and points out "However, target vulnerability and likelihood of success may be as important to a weakened al Qaeda as the target's prominence."

I wonder about that increase in "chatter" they always warn about, which they say kinda sorta anticipated 9/11 as well. Is it an increase in seemingly idle chitchat among the things they're monitoring? Is it all so carefully veiled and code-worded that there's something there, we just can't tell what?

I wouldn't be surprised at a spike in attacks of some level or other if we move on Iraq. Which of course will be taken as a sign by the administration that they're on the right track, "proving" a formal link between Iraq and these groups, when really it might just be a general anti-US in the Middle East statement. Of course at this point those guys would attack anyway.

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Art Link of the Moment
Malta in the early 1300s:
When
Mickeys
Roamed
the
Earth.

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Japanese Pop Culture Link of the Moment
Bill the Splut thinks Japanese people may be insane. He may be right, but can we really respect the opinion of a guy whose nickname is "Splut"?

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Quote of the Moment

I'm not afraid of death; but dying scares the hell out of me.

I definitely understand what he's saying, but it's almost a paradox; you might not have the fear, but you might still have the metafear. I guess FDR said it first.

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Sex of the Moment
Gentle condemnation of the book "The Joy of Sex" (coming up on its 30th birthday, and one book I've always credited about giving me a clue about this whole sex thing back in the day) in this Salon article. For some reason this interview with Taleban leader Mullah Omar is giving me the heebie jeebies. Just a little bit. (Compare and contrast with Christopher Hitchens' Guess what, the bombing worked like a charm.)

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Link of the Moment
When we were in the middle of wedding preparation, I had repeated envious thoughts when I saw people getting married by Elvis or Hendrix in Vegas, but this guy took it a little too far...

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Quote of the Moment

If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.