Part of me thinks the Blip Festival looks like a really interesting and cool event that I would like to check out. Another part of me thinks if they really wanted me to come, the wouldn’t put diagonal stripes behind white text.
November 28, 2006
Air Duct-en
If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe your lying eyes. There are limits to my faith in duct tape.
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All The World Loves a Meme…
I am a pure-bred New Jersey boy with a long-standing New York disposition. Why don’t I have an accent?
Also, I hate conversations of the form, “How do you say closet?” Why did I take this quiz?
| What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Midland
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio. |
|
| Philadelphia |
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| The Inland North |
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| The South |
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| The Northeast |
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| The West |
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| Boston |
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| North Central |
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| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes |
|
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November 23, 2006
The Emerging Atheist Majority
It’s only a kind of rhetorical overreach on the part of atheists — pitting “religion” versus “not religion” as the key disagreement — that creates the appearance of a large majority in favor of “religion.” There’s clearly a significant human predilection for not-supported-by-science beliefs of various sorts — in the existence of a god or gods, astrology, fortune-telling, alien visits to earth, the healing power of crystals, etc. — but there’s no particular convergence of these beliefs on anything in particular. Meanwhile, on many of the particular question you might ask about religious subjects, atheists are going to be in the majority. Like most people on earth, atheists don’t believe that Jesus Christ died for man’s sins. Similarly, just like most people, atheists don’t believe that Muhammed was Allah’s greatest prophet or that the Hidden Imam will return. And, again, like most people atheists don’t believe that you’ll be reborn on earth after death in a new body.
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November 10, 2006
Nancy Pelosi, Will You Marry Me?
This is exactly what I was talking about. (Via Unfogged)
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Edgy Eft-ing Sound
This is kind of weird, coming two weeks after I upgraded, but my audio card just completely stopped working. At first, I thought this was one of those little Linux driver farts—I spent half the summer restarting X to get Skype working again—but a reboot didn’t fix it and there were no relevant error messages to speak of. Following these directions fixed it. The key part, I think, is making sure asound.conf exists—it seems that somebody (not me) had deleted it. In fact, I can’t find a Ubuntu package that wants to take credit for installing asound.conf, much less one that wants to take credit for deleting it.
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Bad Eating in Italy
This is strange and a bit sad: NYU Florence students complain about bad food. I studied at NYU in Florence in 1998 and it was probably the culinary high point of my life so far. Of course, I didn’t live “on campus” and I don’t even recall there being a “dining hall”—we shopped at the grocery store in the neighborhood, which had good, fresh bread and good, cheap wine. It’s unclear if these kids are getting a sub-standard product or if they’re just little whiny carb-counters—either way I feel sorry for them…
Kids, leave the villa, walk 50 meters up the hill and go into the grocery. Tell the guy you want mozzarella e pomodoro on foccaccia. (He’ll probably correct your pronunciation.) Doesn’t cost more than a few bucks and I’m still craving it to this day.
Also, kids, don’t be stupid: Pane e Olio is ten minutes away, Cibreo makes the best polenta and pappa in the world, and there are about ten thousand other great places whose names I forget. Go forth and get fat on good food.
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November 8, 2006
Two Things That Should Have Occurred to Me
1) The plastic delivery container from the comfort-food take-out place might melt and dissolve in the microwave.
2) Chicken pot pie crust won’t reheat in the microwave anyway.
P.S. Can you imagine how much work I’m getting done today?
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In Non-Election News…
You know those cardboard sleeves that come with CDs these days? The kind that wrap around the jewel case and are always kind of hard to slip the CD into and out of? The ones that you end up leaving around empty and crushing under a stack of jewel cases on the shelf?
Does anyone not hate those?
I can think of exactly one thing in their favor (and it’s a small thing): CDs that come in cardboard sleeves don’t usually have the barcode stickers of death along their top edge. (BTW, the barcode sticker of death is pretty manageable if you just always have a knife handy.)
POSTSCRIPT: It occurs to me that I might be the only person left on the planet who still buys CDs, a possibility that is reinforced by the fact that Tower Records is closing its doors. Which leaves me with only the rather-inconvenient Virgin Megastore in terms of corporate CD buy-ery. But that’s OK, because I buy almost all my CDs at Other Music, in either the In, Then, or La Decadanse sections (I can’t remember which).
POSTSCRIPT (2): Which reminds me that I bought a copy of Cometbus fanzine there the other day. Can you believe that paper fanzines still exist? As there are photocopiers in the world, Aaron Cometbus will carry on…
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Sorry, Lois. Sorry, Diane.
PA-6 has been called for Jim Gerlach. That gives me an 0-3 record doing GOTV at the federal level. Boo.
How is it that the Democrats can pick up almost 30 seats in the House and lose in moderate districts in PA and CT? I mean, arithmetically, is that possible?
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Procrastiblog 