Last night when I went to bed, the maple tree out front of our house still had most of its leaves.
This morning, not so much. The neighbour’s car was covered with a thick layer of leaves. The path, the lawn, the sidewalk and the street are pretty much indistinguishable.
I suppose at some point soon I’ll have to acknowledge that winter is arriving very soon.
I don’t watch The Daily Show myself, but this video by its writers about caps it:
Good luck to all the TV writers out there, and may they prevail.
h/t to DMc
From a federal government press release in my RSS –
Allergy Alert – Undeclared Milf Protein in Anna’s Biscuits and Cookies
All kinds of rude jokes practically write themselves.
(as of this moment, they haven’t fixed it on the website either)
This is a photo I did not take of a young guy standing in the doorway of my subway car, dressed thuggishly with the low-slung goofy pants, huge hoodie and the whole bit, with two perfectly spherical puffs of black hair sticking out the top of his black do-rag, one on each side.
(hat tip to Boing Boing)
Now you can buy plush human organs — no, not THAT kind of organ*, just the boring internal “guts” kind of organ.
I could see giving someone a plush anatomically-correct heart as a silly romantic gesture, if the recipient were suitably biology-geeky. But on what possible occasion would you give someone a plush kidney or liver? Hmm.
Perhaps the plush organs could be friends with, or alternatively have wars with, the giant plush microbes.
* I am so, so not imageGoogling that concept
Happy Halloween, Samhain, etc.
Later I’ll be attempting to affix a tiara, ballet tutu and pink cape to M’s pink unicorn costume so she can be a princess ballerina unicorn. We had a ballerina dinosaur a couple of years ago… I detect a theme here…
Quotation of the Day for August 29, 2007
“I was looking at the moon last night,” Bodo said. “You can see it very well from my cell. I was looking and I thought, one day there will be people there and they will have jails there, because they will have arseholes on the moon. Wherever there are people, there are arseholes. Be careful, Guy, you never know when you may turn into one. Look in the mirror often.”
- Tibor Fischer, in Don’t Read This Book If You’re Stupid.
Remember all that stuff you learned in school and thought was kind of useless? Actually it was all taught to you so that you can carry on dinner conversations with five-year-olds.
Some things we have discussed over dinner (and breakfast, with much creaking of brain cells) recently:
Still, having one’s brain stretched in this way is preferable to the alternative: carrying on a conversation with another adult while the five-year-old works herself into increasingly bad behaviour in search of attention. So.
I’m cool with all the biology stuff and can address economic basics with some confidence, but I am regretting not taking more geology. Great background for childrearing, is geology. Apparently.
If you are a spammer who likes to use any of my domains as spoofed addresses for your nasty little missives, causing me to have to pick my real email out of thousands of your horrid little bounce messages, I had better not ever find out where you live, because if I do I will come right over. And I will then cheerfully disembowel you with my left thumb and a salad fork.
Grr.
by Mark Frauenfelder
Mark Frauenfelder (of BoingBoing fame) has done a good thing: written a book about web stuff that’s both comprehensible to those who are less experienced while still being useful to those who are more expert. It’s clearly written and well edited, with great sidebars with more information, tips, and ideas. Frauenfelder’s voice comes through clearly — the tone is “one friend to another,” not “textbook”. I didn’t learn anything new from it, really, but I enjoyed reading it. I did pick up some extraordinarily useful tips and a large number of ideas for teaching this stuff efficiently.
I’d recommend it highly — both to those who feel they’re pretty web-native and those who aren’t. The Toronto library has a few copies and not too many holds.
Late summer and early fall are usually the season of Projects in our house. They’re usually of the preserving kind, although as always renovation projects elbow their way in as well. First up (June or July) is the strawberry-jam project, which is later followed by other berry jams and various peach projects (August), then grape juice and grape jelly projects and various pesto projects (September), and lastly tomato-, mint-, apple- and crabapple-related projects.
It’s my Estonian heritage I’m sure. It’s summer! Preserve, preserve, because soon it will be cold and we might die! I have to enter winter with a nice big shelf of preserves and a freezer full of pesto or I feel deeply uneasy. I own an insane number of mason jars and I find it hard to part with them. If I share one with you, you know I really really like you and would very much want you too to live through winter.
But gah, who wants to deal with great vats of boiling water, pots of bubbling jellies or slow-roasted tomatoes when it’s 30 frickin’ degrees out? I made peach butter when it was still over 30 out, and I ended up with spatter burns up and down my arms because I simply couldn’t handle the thought of long sleeves in that heat.
Finally now it’s cold enough to enjoy jelly projects. Good, because my parents left a huge bowl full of crabapples on the kitchen table today before they left…
Quotation of the Day for October 7, 2007
“Fix what you can. Call the rest authentic.”
- Sarah Graves, offering home renovation hints in her novel Trap Door.
(The alt text was “You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback”)
Leaves turning…
And then falling…
And of course, time for playing in the pool, because it’s 35 sweaty degrees out…
It’s hard to contemplate turkey and soup and other fall things when one is raking leaves while wearing a sleeveless sundress, sweating heavily, and still fancying wheat beers…
Quotation of the Day for October 5, 2007
“This is the basis of car culture, the idea that the world and all of the world’s people are merely in its way.”
- Travis Hugh Culley, in The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power.
M: Can I have your nail polish? I want to paint my fingernails.
Me: No, hon, that’s not really appropriate for a five-year-old. Maybe when you’re a teenager.
M: But why does my friend T get to wear nail polish even back in kindergarten?
Me: Because T’s mom is nicer than I am.
M: You’re prettier than T’s mom, but she’s nicer. It’s not fair!
Me: Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.
–
M: Here’s a sticker for you mummy, and one for you, daddy. Good thing I had two stickers exactly the same so you won’t have to fight over which one is prettier!
Us: ….
From Try Harder
1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?
Paperback. It’s too hard to hold hardbacks in one hand. Plus, they hurt if you fall asleep and drop them on your nose.
2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…
Probably something cheesy with “nook” in the title. I am very bad at naming things.
3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…
“If God meant this here bulldozer to live He wouldn’t of filled its tank with diesel fuel. Now would He of?”
It’s Edward Abbey, but I’ll have to guess at the book — probably the Monkey Wrench Gang.
4. The author (alive or diseased) I would love to have lunch with would be
I’m going to assume “diseased” there is actually deceased so I’ll go with Patrick O’Brian. Lunch would be cheese toast and grog.
5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…
In the past we’ve accidentally taken a Collins Ready Reference into the woods in place of the SAS survival guide… they look very similar when one is packing in a hurry. The Ready Reference is a bit small but I’d want something along those general lines, for use in quelling arguments… a big quote book or the paper version of the CIA FactBook or the OED or somesuch.
6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…
Read to me until I fell asleep and then automagically stopped.
7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…
Libraries.
8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…
Hmm, I’m not sure, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be Bridget Jones. Maybe Han Solo in one of the more dashing Star Wars novels.
…No, wait. Han doesn’t get a lightsaber. A Jedi instead, then.
9. The most overestimated book of all time is…
The Da Vinci Code. What a lame, lame book that was.
10. I hate it when a book…
Wraps things up in the most obvious way possible.
Tagging Kelly, Too Many Quinces, Exit Pursued by a Bear, and anyone else who wants to take it up (leave your link in the comments).
Quotation of the Day for September 9, 2007
“I believe I have an unfair edge over most of my colleagues right now — my mind works faster than my mouth does.”
- Tim Johnson, U.S. Senator from South Dakota, at his first public appearance since recovering from a brain hemorrhage.
Lately some of the more pretentious online folks have started calling those pretty pictures of how your Facebook profile (del.icio.us profile, LinkedIn profile, etc.) relates to other profiles a “social graph” instead of the previously-used “social network”.
No, no, no. Graphs have variables. Networks have connections. What we have here are connections, not variables. There’s no y axis on those pretty pictures, just lines depicting individual connections between data points. Therefore, there is no graph, even if you do make your data into a pretty picture. It could perhaps be a map or a diagram or a web, but it is not a graph.
Sensible commentary and a bunch of comments at (among other places) Rough Type.
edit: the original post on this was Dave Winer’s How to avoid sounding like an monkey . That post also has a bunch of background.
We were pleased to be not the only ones returning a large number of wine bottles to the Beer Store. Everyone seemed to have large boxes or garbage cans full of the things… maybe everyone else saved them up for the whole summer too. Probably I shouldn’t respond to this by ordering more wine, but hey! now we have room!