SNAFU

Blogger is still FUBAR. FML. Maybe there will be a post tomorrow...

Can't Post!

Blogger's web interface seems to be FUBAR this evening, so no post for today (I'm typing this on my phone and would rather stab my self in the face with a fork than try to type up something of any consequence on this thing!).

Is Merc still Xr? ;)

This is a test, to see if I can edit a saved post and publish it. At the moment, blogger won't let me create new posts...

Friday Creature Catastrophe

So, the alarm started beeping and I called the alarm company and they said the unit's main battery needs to be replaced. I went down to the basement to find the main unit and found a puddle on the floor. Went back upstairs to find the source of the puddle and discovered that the water supply to the refrigerator has a leak. So, now I need to find the shutoff valve for the refrigerator's water supply and then I can return to trying to find the alarm system's main unit.

This day as taken quite the unexpected turn. Which is to say that I may not get a creature up today.

Which reminds me -- I'm thinking of dropping the Friday Creature in favor of Friday Food Porn. Does anyone want to weigh on that issue while I return to the basement?

10/10/10

I wanted to whip up a post for the occasion, but instead I spent yesterday ridding my pantry of a mouse and today trying to find my keys -- and then making a new copy of my keys because I was unsuccessful. :-P

Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day...

Great design

It just makes you say, "wow."

Wow! It's February!

So... what now?

Quick!

10 things to do before the new year (plus, when's the last time you backed up your data?).

Better get scribbling, folks!

It's National Novel Writing Month (and National Blog Posting Month!).

And I gotta add a grumble there, for the choice in month... I'd love to try it, but November is always insane around here! Why not a really quiet month, like January?... no holidays, those of us in the northern hemisphere are generally stuck inside with the worst weather of the year, and there's nothing much going on then.

But if you are participating, let me know and I'll follow along!

The Journey Begins

Now's your chance to have a vicarious adventure, and be in on it from the very beginning! Here is the web site: Traveling Teacher and this is the premise:

"Could a person who had no money travel around the world relying on the generosity of strangers?"

This is the question that I posed to some of my students last spring at Southeast Whitfield High School in Dalton, Georgia, while we were discussing the topic of whether people are basically good or basically evil.

Personally, I believe almost all people are trustworthy and will often go to great lengths to help others, if given the chance, but the class never came to a consensus, which led me to the idea of trying to find out for myself if I could travel on nothing but benevolence.

There promises to be plenty of opportunity for readers to have input into this adventure, so go head over and check it out!

Well, duh.

This was an actual headline in today's Chattanooga Times Free Press:

Nearly half of children under 5 are minorities

Quote of the Week

Here's juicy bit: "The government doesn't create jobs. Let's get this notion out of our heads that the government creates jobs. Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job." -- Michael Steele, current chair of the RNC

We saw that on TV one evening this past week and G-Dog, who is a professor and has been employed by the University of Tennessee for close to 20 years, turned to me and said merely, "oh, really?"

I'm not sure what this means...

I took three years of French in high school, but I beyond my teacher's tic-ish use of the word, "écoutez," I don't really remember much French from those classes. We used to have to memorize dialogues, and while I remember working hard at them, the only one I still remember is one from my sister's Spanish classes (I wouldn't attempt to transcribe the Spanish and I don't know the translation, but the conversation centers around a discussion of Susanna's aunt).

And I don't think I remember any of the songs from my own experiences in chorus classes (hey, all you old people -- remember those? how quaint, huh?), but this song (in the video, below) -- again, from my sister's, and not my own, elementary school class -- is seared into my brain like some sort of horrible childhood trauma.

So, why did my sister's school experiences sometimes make more of an impression on me than my own? Beats the hell out of me. I'm just putting this stuff out there.

Tilt!

Today's apparently Cool Do-It-Yourself Day on 10K Monkeys. First, I found the make your own font site, and then I remembered this cool tilt-shift site I discovered in the midst of all the holiday/inauguration chaos. What's tilt-shift? It's a photography method using a lens that's tilted relative to the image plane, a large aperture, and shallow depth of field. It produces images that look like miniatures and can be used in still or video photography (here are some more videos).

Like it? Guess what? There's a web site where you can tilt-shift your own photos! I took my photo of the Bosphorus in Istanbul and put it through the grinder. Below are the original photo and the tilt-shift version.

Oh, this is so cool!

Apparently you can make a font out of your own handwriting -- or any other set of letters you might produce in a creative moment. And it's free!

A War on Profanity?

It's hard to believe that someone could come up with an idea that is dumber than the War on Drugs, but South Carolina State Senator Robert Ford has gone and done it (via Ice Station Tango):

Now, why would we, as a community, want to take a productive member of society and turn him into the taxpayer's problem by throwing him into jail or prison, when all he did was drop the f-bomb (or pick up a bit of weed for the weekend)? Plus, if swearing were outlawed, we'd miss out on wonderful moments like this one (via One Good Move):

(from old jews tellling jokes.com)

Another list

The Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2008 (alternate link). Go ahead. Your finger is already twitching. You gotta find out who's at number one...

# 40. Free Credit Report.com guy

Charges: OK, he’s actually French-Canadian, but he invades America’s headspace every day. It’s bad enough that we have to see this albino smurf lip-sync some ad man’s grating jingles of financial woe fifty times a day. It’s bad enough that these ditties, as calculatedly infectious as bio-weapons, bounce around our skulls like a .22 caliber bullet. But the kicker is that this culture parasite and his “band” are hawking a scam. That’s right; freecreditreport.com isn’t free—in fact, it’s 15 bucks a month after the week-long “trial period.”

Exhibit A: There is a website where you can get a free credit report: It’s called annualcreditreport.com, and it was created in compliance with an act of Congress by the three big credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Then Experian set up freecreditreport.com, and their suicide-encouraging commercials, to cultivate and benefit from public confusion.

Sentence: Powering Ween’s tour bus with a stationary bicycle.

Sad day on the blogosphere...

Soapblox is dead. That means that all the blogs hosted there, including such institutions as Pam's House Blend and the Swing State Project have disappeared. From what I'm reading on facebook, no one knows at this point if the blogs will be able to recover their data, so the archives could be gone as well.

Please keep your fingers crossed that the long list of blogs (see the left column after following the link above) will get back up and running in a timely fashion.

Update: well, some of the sites have come back up (intermittently?) and are posting status updates. Hopefully this will give them time to save the archives and make arrangements for alternative hosting.

More information is gathering here.

Best of 2008

I think the making of lists for last year has peaked, so I'll list (har! har!) a few here, for your new year's enjoyment:

• kiplinger's best of 2008: directory to bargain shopping, services, insurance quotes and cheap travel
• npr's best cookbooks of 2008
• multinational monitor’s worst corporations of 2008
• oxford word of the year 2008
• health.com's healthiest buys 2008: food
• the frisky's best female bloggers of 2008
• nyt book review's notable books of 2008
• cnn's top political turkeys of 2008
• rolling stone's hot list 2008
• yahoo's top searches 2008
• npr's best foreign fiction of 2008
• times online's best films of 2008
• si's nfl record breaking moments 2008
• nyt books best book covers of 2008
• mashable's most popular music of 2008
• yahoo top trailers of 2008
• askmen's 2008 great male survey
• petfinder's most popular pet names of 2008
• candyaddict's the best of the best candy of 2008
• mr. skin's top celebrity nude scenes 2008
• gary slapper's weirdest legal cases of 2008
• foreign policy's worst predictions for 2008
• sfgate's top viral videos of 2008
• roombuddy's best pranks of 2008
• abebooks's best debut fiction 2008
• google zeitgeist 2008
• discover magazine's top stories of 2008
• rtl's top movie cameos of 2008
• yup's notable quotes of 2008
• si's most stressful moments of 2008
• bookfinder's top out-of-print books
• crazy leaf design's most beautiful web sites of 2008
• discover's top ten astronomy pics of 2008
• smoking gun's mug shots of the year
• lifehacker's most popular top 10s of 2008
• si's best photos of 2008
• qsr's top food stories of the year
• the age's best photos of 2008
• zap2it's least watched tv shows of 2008
• boston globe's pictures of the year 2008
• about.com's top paranormal events of 2008
• readwriteweb's top products of 2008
• nerd approved's stupidest products of 2008
• ypulse's best and worst moments in 2008 tv
• wired's top tech breakthroughs 2008
• tbo's things we learned in 2008
• gizmodo's best of tgif lists of 2008
• cracked's most embarrassing photos of 2008
• smartmoney's the year in ripoffs
• dennis kennedy's best law blogs of 2008
• torrent freak's most popular torrent sites of 2008
• jonathan crow's most ridiculous movie moments of 2008
• daily beast's best and worst of 2008
• dallas observer's worst album covers of 2008
• altsearchengines: top health search engines of 2008
• videogum's best cats of 2008
• wonkette's top political teevee clips of 2008
• lifehacker's best beta releases of 2008
• fimoculous's most notable blogs of 2008
• best of the batavian 2008 (vote for your favorite!)
• the batavian's top stories for 2008 (vote for your favorite!)
• jesus's general: the year in hair
• the daily beast's the year in pictures
• stereogum's great concerts of 2008
• chattanooga times free press top stories of 2008
• most and best movie mistakes of 2008
• campus squeeze's worst of the 2008 nfl season
• the shiznit's best movie scenes of 2008
• seattlepi's best sports images of the year
• the poorman's wank of the year 2008 (vote!)
• the daily beast's hottest stories of 2008
• 2008 golden teddy awards for most excellence in blogging on the gideonse bible
• financial post's best jokes of 2008
• salon.com's the year in viral video
• who we lost in 2008
• ... and finally, the catchalls: fimoculous's list of all the lists and time's top 10 of everything 2008

One more day for giving!

Wednesday is the final day of the year, folks, and as such, it's the your last chance to make a donation for which you get credit in 2008. If you still need another little push to get your tax deductions to the right level for the year, please consider the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. It is one of many great causes out there.