“Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”
Author: tim
Holy Shit
Have I mentioned lately that my wife is cool as shit* (20G)?
Thanks, honey. I love you.
*(best birthday present ever)
Good Times
Good things happening to good people. Smiles, everybody, smiles!
Spain, Zapatero and Clint Eastwood
I just finished reading a great entry over at juancole.com (Professor of History at the University of Michigan), debating the assertion by Rupert Murdoch’s “news” organizations and others that al Qaeda won the Spanish elections. In discussing Zapatero’s victory speech, Mr. Cole lets loose this gem:
“After nearly four years of White House rhetoric stolen from old Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns, the determination in this speech to pursue anti-terrorism with an eye to establishing social peace and creating the conditions of human development hits me as a gale of fresh air.”
Well, amen.
You really should read the whole entry
Renewing my faith in the Interweb
There are times when my job as “the guy who wastes the most time while supposedly working” at InefficentCo® leaves me a little underwhelmed and with the distinct feeling that I’ve seen everything this great information superhighway has to show us. Those are dark days indeed, my brother/sister and, trust me, you don’t want to see me during my weaker moments. Moments where I bang the side of my head with my mouse, screaming at my monitor, “more funny!” and “why no worky??? why!!!???,” before I collapse in my cube, post-it notes showering down around me, and then lie on the floor, twitching, surrounded by dust mites and CAT5 cabling.
Then there are times like earlier today when I clicked a link on a hypertext document that brought me to Weight Watchers Recipe Cards, circa 1974. Oh, glory day! The angels must be smiling down upon me now as I spit coffee into my keyboard at Marcy’s Enchilada, or giggle with glee after reading about Jellied Tomato Refresher. What a time to be alive!
Thank you, poundy! You’ve re-affirmed my belief that this world provides us with an endless bounty of crazy people with crazy ideas who need (no, beg!) us to make fun of them. It is our job/mission to do so.
Now I feel better.
Those Naughty Girl Scouts
This is easily the best Kottke post I’ve read in a long time. Go get ’em, Jason!
Ahem
From a list of George Bush’s accomplishments so far:
Bush tax cuts could pay for hiring all nine million people out of work and pay them $40K for two years instead of benefiting wealthy.
apt-get moo
I was just reading about a hidden easter egg in the Debian operating system here, so I thought I’d try it.
So, just in case you were wondering what happens when you type ‘apt-get moo’ in a terminal on a computer running Debian Linux (jeez, i’m a geek), here’s a screenshot:
Hooray
Color me excited:
Feb 24, 2004 7:25 am – On FedEx vehicle for delivery
Update (11:21am): Just delivered!
Okay, I’ll shut up now.
SUV – NOT Safer
I read this article a couple of months ago in the New Yorker and was happy to find that it was online, so I could share it with those I love, i.e. You. (awww)
Anyway, it’s a really interesting article about the false security of driving an SUV. People say they drive these behemoths because they feel safer in them. Well, guess what, they’re not.
In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade – the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator – has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan – a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame – are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.