A little old man walks up to the mailbox, carrying a chihuahua. He puts the dog on top of the mailbox, drops a letter in the slot, then scoops up the dog and walks off.

Date:	2008-04-16 16:37
Subject:	Morning Randomness
Security:	Public
Mood:	curious

Spotted outside of work today: a short black dude, dressed up in Revolutionary-era garb and with a race number pinned to his chest, being filmed repeatedly running across the street.

We were driving home from dinner when we passed through a big, smelly cloud of smoke.  We tried to figure out where it was coming from, got it narrowed it down to 1 or 2 houses and were debating about whether to call 911 (since the cloud seemed to have vanished), when a cop car pulled up.  Another cop, an EMT and a fire engine later, it was determined that one of our neighbors had started a fire in his fireplace, but hadn't cleaned his chimney in a very, very long time.

Three useful lessons:
1) we have alert neighbors
2) El Suburb's finest have a very quick response time
3) clean your chimneys, kids!

After a tiger got loose at the San Francisco Zoo on Christmas and killed a zoo patron, people have understandably been taking a closer look at how the zoo is managed. Along with decades of unsolved problems and a zoo manager with a history of autocratic decision-making comes this little gem:

And a public address system that could have warned zoo visitors about the tiger escape and urged them to take shelter or evacuate the grounds was dismantled about 15 years ago, after zoo neighbors complained about the noisy announcements from the loudspeakers.

If I lived near enough to a zoo to hear the loudspeakers, and they can use that system to announce that a tiger is loose, you'd better believe that the last thing I'd be asking that zoo to do would be to dismantle the loudspeaker system. If the tiger had actually gotten further and ran loose in the neighborhood, those same neighbors would be down at City Hall absolutely howling about how they weren't notified fast enough.

What the hell are people thinking?

You're a starlet in LA who was killed off your then-declining television show well over a year ago and you haven't had a project of note since. Then your inevitable DUI arrest happens... and the LA cops misspell your name on your booking sheet.

Awww. At least TMZ still cares.

So Christmas was fun and tasty. Sweetcheeks smoked up a huge prime rib and the panettone bread pudding recipe I poached from Giada was a hit (and met with a lot of "I don't normally like panettone, but..." comments).

And my mother the perpetual project-starter, who talks about big things but rarely follows through (ask her about her kitchen remodel, or rather, don't, because it makes her a little punchy to get shit about the same thing for going on FIVE YEARS NOW) -- my mother actually finished a quilt, which she presented to my aunt to gasps of surprise and cheers and applause and one snarky declaration that "it's a Christmas miracle!" from someone who shall remain creepyanonymous.

But enough of the Christmas cheer. Jette asks in today's Holidailies writing prompt what holiday song you would like to see "banned from the face of the planet" and why.

That one's easy -- Paul McCartney's "A Wonderful Christmas Time". It looks inoffensive on the surface; togetherness is certainly something to celebrate, right? But then it gets a bit dictatorial: the mood is right, yet there are poor children who should be singing this song instead of crying. If the mood really were right, would Sir Paul need to bring these wayward tots in line? And right about at that point of the song, the singsongy chorus has locked itself away in your brain and OMG PLEASE NO MAKE IT STOP AAAAAAA.

The worst part is that it leaves scars. You might not have heard that song in days, but all it takes is one repetition of that one line of the chorus and the trauma comes flooding right back.

What holiday song do you want to see killed dead forever?

From Arinell's, a pizza place in Berkeley.

Date:	2007-12-21 19:47
Subject:	End of an Era
Security:	Public
Mood:	melancholy

I first met him when he was a kitten, small enough to rest in the palm of my hand. He was one of the offspring of the cat belonging to my then-boyfriend, and the ex had named him Lestat.

Never was an animal less suited to his name. He was dark instead of light, bulky instead of lithe, aloof yet sweet when he decided he wanted human company, a bit dim and utterly without guile.

I ended up adopting both Lestat and his mother. The two of them came with me from college and up Highway 1 in the front seat of a 14-foot U-Haul. (Of course, the two of them bellowed at the top of their lungs the entire way.) When I moved to Austin shortly thereafter, Lestat (whom we'd started to call Big Boy because his real name was such a poor fit) and his mom stayed in Mayberry with my parents because I couldn't fly them in during the summer.

By the time fall rolled around, I'd realized that if he came to Austin, his habit of lying in the middle of the road would have him flattened within weeks and he'd be miserable as an indoor cat. And my parents had grown attached to him. So he stayed in Mayberry, where he could stalk through the underbrush at his leisure and where the neighbors knew to slow down in front of my parents' house and wait for Big Boy to heave his 20-pound bulk up and scoot out of the road before proceeding. (The neighbor across the street even put up a moose crossing sign for him.)

Over the next several years I saw him on my frequent visits back to Mayberry and lived his adventures vicariously by phone. Once, after a two-day absence, my mother canvassed the neighborhood looking for him, and found him clinging to the very unstable top of a 50-foot redwood and hollering his fool head off. The fire department actually came out to un-tree him (I didn't think fire departments actually did this outside of cartoons, but Mayberry is a different planet), but their ladders wouldn't reach and he jumped over to the very unstable top of another tree to get away. He somehow managed to get down on his own and showed up at the house at 3 AM, chastened and hoarse from all the howling. He didn't leave the house for days.

As he got older, he started spending more time indoors, having lost his taste for middle-of-the-street napping and his willingness to defend his turf from younger, stronger neighbor cats in need of territory. He became less aloof, accepting more affection from my parents, though he still had to get up at 5:30 to go roam for at least a few hours. This morning, before his daily constitutional, my dad says he fell over and didn't get up.

Big Boy had over 18 years of quality roaming and sunning time, a neighborhood that catered to his needs and all the affection he could stand.

Rest in peace, my little-big friend.

Date:	2007-12-21 07:34
Subject:	TOST (Thessaloniki, May 2006)
Security:	Public
Mood:	hungry

TOST (here in a rare appearance in its original English spelling) is served all over Greece.
I never actually had a TOST, but it's something like a panini.

Also for sale here, from top to bottom: something I can't read, pizza ("pitsa"), coffee, glyka (sweets).

Scene: the Nest household, Sunday evening. The over-the-door hook has not worked as advertised, so the wreath I bought a week ago is going on... the mailbox. (Hey, YOU try to find somewhere to hang it.)

creepyanonymous: (hanging the wreath) I dub you... Franklin!

magpiebofh: Franklin?

creepyanonymous: Franklin.

creepyanonymous: (waits expectantly)

creepyanonymous: A wreath. A-wreath-a...

magpiebofh: (silence)

magpiebofh: You just ruined my Christmas.

creepyanonymous: I WIN!

This story on NPR yesterday was so content-free I'm not sure why they even bothered to waste the airtime on it. F-Secure, a company that sells anti-malware products and that is described in the piece as a "computer security company," released a report saying that threats against Mac products are increasing. (A somewhat less content-free take on the same story is here.)

Here's a transcript of the NPR story for the deafies and those who can't listen at work. OK, it's not an exact transcript, but pretty close:

Announcer: Haxors are going after Macs!

Reporter: Haxors are going after Macs! Apple must be sad!

Security Researcher At F-Secure Who Totally Doesn't Have A Stake In This: Mac gadgets have a greater market share now!

Reporter: There are a hundred types of Mac malware out there now! Windows has half a million!

Mac Blogger: Nope, not worried!

Reporter: Practice good net hygeine, kids!

Woo! I feel way more informed now, don't you?

OK, I get that they had less than two minutes of airtime, but all this seemed to do was give the report publicity, not explain it or put it into context for listeners. An increase in malware doesn't mean that Mac products suddenly have more vulnerabilities -- it just means more people are looking for them! Not all vulnerabilities are equally bad! Did I mention that F-Secure sells anti-malware products?

But what worries me the most about this is this: what if all their reporting is this shallow and I just don't know it because it's not about my field?

When we first moved to El Suburb, it seemed like all of the temporary paintings that went up on the windows of the local shops around this time of year were done by the same guy. I don't know anything about the sign painter, but I imagine him as a wizened little man who looks something like the elves he paints.

This year, there are several other people painting windows around town, but it's just not the same because none of them are as happy and cute as these.

via libraries, The Mildly Attractive Men of SLIS Wall Calendar for 2007. Proceeds help send these budding guybrarians from the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science to the World Library and Information Congress next summer.

Check out the sports action shots here:



You've gotta love people willing to geek out in public like this, especially in service of their nerdy educations/careers. (Hey, conferences are expensive!)

I maded it.

A couple of days ago I posted about how we couldn't even try to keep up with the Joneses, Christmas-decorationally speaking, because we don't have any outdoor outlets.

Looks like that may not be a problem next year:



We have a niiiice southern exposure to power these babies on days when it's not raining. And yeah, they're a little spendy, but much much cheaper than rewiring the whole house (which needs to happen, but after the roofing/painting fest this summer, it's a few years off yet.)

RETINAL SEARING, HERE WE COME.

Once again, the coffee cup tells us how to be better people this holiday season:

Today I saw a dude crossing San Pablo with a washing machine on a dolly. I've seen this a bunch of times, with different dudes and different appliances on different stretches of San Pablo.

The why is somewhat obvious -- the dudes are probably only moving the appliances a short distance and they don't have access to a truck. But where are the appliances coming from and where are they going? And why is it that dudes-with-appliances always seem to be jaywalking, and hauling said appliance over the median, instead of just going down to a crosswalk? Aren't those appliances kind of a pain in the ass to maneuver over grass and curbs?

Wheels within wheels.

A bumper sticker that read "$3? $4? $5 a gallon? Who killed the electric car?"

...on the back of a Lexus LX650 SUV. "Our most powerful utility vehicle" at 13 mpg city, 17 mpg freeway.

The jokes, they write themselves.