Save ApexDigest Raffle!

September 22, 2006

Mary Robinette Kowal is sponsoring an effort to help save Apex Digest, The Science Fiction Horror Magazine.

Once upon a time when someone needed help, people chipped by throwing a rent party in their home or putting on a play. Now, instead of, “My uncle’s got a barn,” we’re saying, “I’ve got a website.”

The list of items and services donated is nothing less than astounding! Seriously, if you have a jones for fine fiction and want something unique, buy a few tickets and score something amazing.

Does This Smell Okay To You?

September 6, 2006

Lifted directly from lifehack.org’s article, “Does This Smell Okay to You?“:

Here is a collection … on how to tell if your food is spoiled.

  1. Eggs: If something is trying to peck its way out of the shell, the egg is not fresh.
  2. Milk: Milk is spoiled when it looks like yogurt.
  3. Yogurt: Yogurt is spoiled when it looks like cottage cheese.
  4. Cottage Cheese: Cottage Cheese is spoiled when it looks like regular cheese.
  5. Regular Cheese: Regular cheese is basically spoiled milk so really doesn’t spoil. But when your regular cheese begins to look like blue cheese get rid of it anyway.
  6. Mayonnaise: Mayonnaise is spoiled when you have to have your stomach pumped because you became violently ill after eating it.
  7. Meat: If cats gather at your back door whenever you open your meat drawer, the meat is spoiled.
  8. Bread: Bread is spoiled when it attains the ability to cure an infection.
  9. Flour: Flour is spoiled when it has moving rice in it and you didn’t put any rice in it.
  10. Canned Goods: Canned goods are spoiled when they begin to resemble a rugby ball.
  11. Carrots: Carrots are spoiled when they take on the characteristics of a wet rope.
  12. Potatoes: Potatoes are spoiled when they have more eyes than your graduating class. Nor should they have a deep leafy underbrush.
  13. Chip Dip: Dip is spoiled when it doesn’t stay in the same place you put it in the refrigerator.
  14. Wine: Wine is spoiled when it becomes an acceptable base for a salad dressing.
  15. Lettuce: Lettuce is spoiled when its color and consistency can be mistaken for green jello.
  16. Raisins: Raisins are spoiled when they can be mistaken for bituminous coal.

And, why is it that when someone offers us something that obviously smells bad WE ALWAYS SMELL IT?!?  I see this happen all of the time;  someone makes comment similar to “Oh, man that smells nasty!  Here take a whiff!” and someone else leans over smells it and recoils in disgust.  WHY?!?

Okay, I’m done.

Bender rocks…

August 15, 2006

“Ah, computer dating. It’s like pimping but you rarely have to use the phrase ‘upside your head’.”
    — Bender, “Put Your Head On My Shoulder” episode, Futurama

Shimmer Summer 2006 Issue
The Summer 2006 issue of Shimmer: Available August 1.

Heat makes the air shimmer. It’s too damn hot to write marketing text. Buy a copy of the Summer 2006 Shimmer. Read it.

Why? 8 new stories, art, and an interview with writing team Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

Angela Slatter, Tom Pendergrass, Paul Abbamondi, and Marina T. Stern return with stories of books, bureaucracy, blood, and heartbreak. Amal El-Mohtar and Stephen Moss make their fiction debuts. Beverly Jackson tells a fish tale, and Michael Livingston talks about gnomes. (Check out our Featured Author page to hear Michael read the story.)

Bonus: after reading, the print version works as a fan! Our pdf readers are on their own.

“We all have to be proud of our children – it is the only thing that keeps us from killing them.” — Dr. Connor (Jemma Redgrave), “Shrink Rap”, My Family (BBC Comedy)

If you look at my books you would find a couple of shelves devoted to comic collections – not the comic books but anthologies of different comic strips like Foxtrot, Bloom County, Doonesbury and Dilbert. Dilbert far outnumbers the others; Foxtrot comes closest of the rest. I’ve got all of Scott Adams, Dilbert’s creator, books, a digital book and the audio book of one of the paper ones. I’ve got stuffed figurines that Scott Adams has signed and I’ve eaten at the restaurant that he owns part of in Pleasanton, California (Stacey’s Cafe).

I think Scott Adams is a very, very funny man.

With that introduction, here are two recent blog posts by Mr. Adams which had me laughing so hard I could barely read.

A Tail By Any Other Name

13 Inch Tail

Enjoy.

P.S. These are a bit on the crude side – if you are easily offended you might want to get some counseling and not read these.

The Gwigle Game

May 17, 2006

The Gwigle Game

So, I spent a good deal of time late last night playing this game. I didn’t do too bad; Mary gave me a bit of assistance on a couple of items and I reciprocated on a different one for her.

Of course, it is all Beth‘s fault.

Two of the answers were far too obscure for my tastes. There weren’t any clues in the text to get you started, even with Google. Fortunately, Mary’s very smart and well-educated.

A rather decent time waster…

One of the reasons I don’t post more often is that I spend most of the time in front of the computer at work for my employer. Either that, or I’m playing Sudoku, to which I’m happily addicted.

To that end, I’ve thought about using my Pocket Pc to post. As a software engineer I was going to write my own. Being inheriently lazy. I decided to try out some free or open source software first.

So, expect to see more posts here and my spelling may get worse as I use the Transcriber as my data entry tool.

MoeMore later after I’ve worked more with it.

Today, Heather relates what every parent has endured – poop on the loose. I don’t think I have laughed that long or that hard in a very long time. So, if you are scatalogically tolerant, follow to dooce and make sure you have swallowed anything you might spit up…

I gotta read it again… wonderful.

How the MPAA killed the movie theater experience: a first-hand report [Politech]

James Reid details his experience at a Toronto theater at the hands of the MPAA:

To add further insult to the debacle at the
gate, near the exits at stage right and left
were two uniformed security guards at each door,
all four with video cameras scanning the crowd
and making themselves very conspicuous.

This was not just a bit of pre-show MPAA theatre,
they stood there for the entirity of the movie, red
LED’s glowing, scanning the crowd to remind
us that we were under close surviellence and our
actions were being recorded.

If you have sat in a chair in a dark room watching
disturbing scenes unfold in front of you, while four
uniformed people with video cameras stand in front
of your, silently recording your reactions, you might
be reminded of scenarios from a Clockwork Orange,
Brazil, 1984, Videodrome, and strangely,
that 90’s relic: SFW.

I already have curbed my attendance at the local megaplex due to the high ticket prices. Three people at 7.00$US costs more than a 19.00$US DVD at Costco and that doesn’t even include the popcorn and soda.

One, JUST ONE, experience like the one above will effectively halt my attendance at that theater. I have a decent sound system at home and while playing my DVD at home isn’t the same, I will not support any organization that treats me like a criminal for visiting their place of business.
https://tchansen.wordpress.com/category/entertainment/
tchansen.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
91610
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NDNC7FDVBWYBNH3T627WWZCES6LOLFOG
<urn:uuid:bec19e68-c24c-4106-b0f9-5daad8e3fe4f>
2017-06-28T19:14:20Z
192.0.78.12
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:ZXCNHXISOEQ2PS7TBHYGJLFDWB6ZPOPG
<urn:uuid:54971d87-43db-43a9-802e-9ca637425db7>
https://tchansen.wordpress.com/category/entertainment/
length
response
<urn:uuid:39194cd2-52d5-473b-ad62-2e4aed9fc898>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-145-237-18.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf