good So to use up some time until more people get here, and to keep my hand in, this'd be a good time to dump my "things to post about" folder some more. (I can do that, because I semi-routinely back up my bookmarks folder to my web server.) People have forwarded me all kinds of cool things, after all.
The 9/11 Report as You've Never Imagined It:
mari_who just wrote an extremely cool review of the 9/11 Report, which I haven't even gotten around to picking up yet. And it left her with an impression that seems to be the first original thought I've heard yet about it. Read the review, I couldn't have done it better myself, nobody could have. Great stuff, Mari!Proving that Pigs Can Fly:
technomom just wrote a great rant, on how to design a program to teach pigs to fly, and get government funding for it, and get the government to make your program mandatory for all pigs ... it's the perfect metaphor for all kinds of quack psychotherapy and medicine that gets forced down people's throats. It's also funny as heck. Check it out, too!Dogs and Cats in a John Wu World: There's some ridiculous drama going on in LiveJournal today. Without making any effort at all, I've picked up a good chunk of it, because half the journals I read have weighed in on it. As best as I can figure it out, the deal is this. The gang over at Something Awful set up a stack of free LiveJournal accounts to troll from, and an LJ community to coordinate their trolling. They got caught at it, and they and everybody near them got banned big time. The soap opera gets funnier and funnier, and deserves a whole post of its own once all the drama gets sorted out, but for now I mention all of this just because of a footnote. A certain inflatable plastic toy unicorn (*cough*
xydexx *cough*) was gloating about this, and just threw in, in passing, a link to this commercial for cat food, which is simply the funniest film clip I've seen in months.And She Thinks She's Going to Get Any Sympathy? From Post-Dispatch back on August 30th: "Woman accuses theater staff of assault" because they arrested her ass and threw her out of the theater for talking on her cellphone. Look, they warn you over and over again to mute your cellphone before you enter the theater. If you have to answer your phone, step outside and do it. If surgeons can do it when they're on call for emergency surgery, so can you. There's a limit to how many paying customers' experience you can ruin before, frankly, people will cheer even if the cops beat you down and sick dogs on you. I can't shake the suspicion that if the cops were chasing an al Quaeda terrorist through a theater and let him go in order to rough up someone talking on the phone in the middle of the movie, the audience would cheer for the cops.
Tom Swift Jr., Cheery Fantasy and Unpleasant Reality: I grew up on the old Tom Swift Junior series, and meant to save the link to "Tom Swift, Jr.: An Appreciation" until I took the time to write about them, to bring up the good parts of the books, the parts that make me unembarrassed to have obsessively collected something that formulaic and cardboardy. But I'll wait, because something else reminded me of Tom Swift Junior today. I was browsing Amazon.com, and they tried to sell me this book, which I'll have to get from the library: Ken Silverstein, "The Radioactive Boy Scout." This I have to track down from the library (where there's currently a 17-name waiting list already). From the reviews and summaries, apparently a teenage kid actually managed to build a working breeder reactor (not just an ordinary fission reactor, but a plutonium producing breeder reactor!) in a potting shed in his parents' back yard, before he got caught. I'm absolutely stunned, both by the mild horror and by an overwhelming current of admiration for his talent and gumption. I absolutely must know more.