Entries from December 2002
James Lileks
One of the funniest damn books I’ve read in a long time is The Gallery of Regrettable Foods (which has a companion website). So imagine my delight at discovering that the author has a blog.
Bush yucks it up at Enron party
As an American, but not a deeply, blindly conservative one, I find it difficult to avoid being cynical and resigned. Despite a Bush administration that makes Nixon’s look like a Boy Scout jamboree, the average citizen seems indifferent to what’s going on in Washington. So my schadenfreude at finding this story is mixed with a [...]
Robo-rats and ratbots.
First, we had the rat with the robotic brain. Now we have the robot with the rat brain. No word yet what Ratbert thinks about all this.
L’Affaire DiIulio
Esquire magazine recently published a four page letter (long, but worth reading) by John DiIulio, former head of faith-based initiatives for the President, describing the way the Bush White House is completely driven by political calculations, not by policy. He has since apologized, saying his word were “poorly chosen.” This apology has all the plausibility [...]
Metablogging stuff
A confluence of factors have prodded me into spending the whole day nerding about in the Movable Type back-end.
Movable Type recently went through an upgrade. I was reluctant to install the upgrade, since I had made some custom mods to MT, and wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to reproduce these in the new [...]
Piracy and all that
Wherein I mention Tim O’Reilly’s recent article and veer into lengthy pontification.
Stereolab singer dies in bike wreck
I’ve never been a major Stereolab fan, but it was sad to read this nonetheless. I can point to the exact spots of four fatal bike-vs-car accidents in my general neighborhood.
Work is hell
Years ago, in its earliest days, I found on the Web some hilarious stories of tech-support hell. These stories have proliferated.
What would be worse than working in tech-support and putting up with people whose stupidity is almost aggressive? Working at a porn-video shop. Oh, much, much worse. Great stories, though.
Blue Genie Bazaar
Went to the Blue Genie Bazaar last night. Numerous exhibitors, and a generally high quality of stuff. There was one maker of very nice art glass selling his stuff for embarrassingly low prices.
The Blue Genies–three guys doing commercial art–have a wickedly funny style. One of their pieces was a giant replica of a handheld vacuum [...]
You are not your toy
An article in today’s New York Times discusses the sense of outrage that many Porsche enthusiasts have at the fact that the maker of their dream cars is now making an SUV, the Cayenne.
Now, I’m hardly a fan of SUVs, and I think this is a dangerous adventure in brand extension for Porsche, but I [...]
