I'm blogging to you tonight live from the El Dorado Hotel in beautiful downtown Sonoma, in the heart of the California wine country. We're here for a friend's wedding tomorrow, and it's getting late, so I'll have to be brief.

I was up way too late watching the first season Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs that I got The Lady Janet for Christmas, with and without the director's comments, and having just read The Da Vinci Code, I was quite amused to hear Joss Whedon say, after Giles draws a picture on a white-board of a Mercedes logo without the circle, 'If I had to count every vaguely triangular symbol that they've had to draw, or find in a book, or rip off somebody, or destroy, or whatever, I should go mad and start babbling, much as I am now.'

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Also, a quick nod of the blogger's cap to John over at J-Walk. My traffic was almost double today because I made it into the list he posted of his Top 20 referring sites. Pretty cool.

posted by Chris at 11:27 PM Permalink

 
Too Cool. This guy plays a transcription of Jimi Hendrix's performance of 'The Star Spangled Banner' from Woodstock: Live at NPR: Cellist Matt Haimovitz. Click the listening link labeled 'Anthem.' (via Metafilter)

posted by Chris at 4:57 PM Permalink

 
I've finished The Time Traveler's Wife (see below), and I just can't recommend it strongly enough - buy it now, check it out from a library, or borrow it from a friend, just read it. Niffenegger does a fantastic job with all the hard stuff like paradox, fate, and free will. It's a sexy, thinky, fun read - you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll scratch your head and wonder. Read it.

Now I'm moving on to The Da Vinci Code and I'm enjoying it so far, but I'm only 38 pages in, so about all I can say right now is, 'Is there help for the widow's son?'

update - When I bragged to The Lady Janet that I was one of two Google hits for the widow's son quote above, she casually informed me that it was only because it was really, 'Is there no help for the widow's son?'

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I was watching Austin City Limits night before last, trying to catch Fountains of Wayne, and they were OK, but the guy who did the first half of the show, Jason Mraz was simply phenomenal.

He did a song called I'll Do Anything that's reggae/pop with a section that says, "Let's get set then, to go then, and let us jet set, we'll be like the Jetsons. You can be Jane my wife. Should I marry Jane tonight?" (He does a little aural quote from the Jetsons theme song on "Jane my wife," then he plays up a pun on "marry Jane"="Mary Jane"="marijuana"), then, on the Austin City Limits version, he lapses into a verse of Bob Marley's One Love and comes back - it was just cool.

And I think you can tell just by lookin' at this guy that he sounds a little like a young Paul.

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A lot of bloggers have picked up on the new Google beta for searching and displaying text from books (kinda like their answer to Amazon's Look Inside the Book), but it's all been pretty general, so here are a couple of concrete examples: When I looked up The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and clicked on the obvious thing, I saw this, but curiously, now the first link is kinda broken. Guess that's why they call it a Beta.

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Also making the rounds, I assume that this nod to George Carlin's famous Seven Words You Can't Say on Television is real. I note that compared to the orignal, the T-word is missing, having been replaced by the A-word.

posted by Chris at 11:23 PM Permalink

 
I started this entry as a 'Duh!' award, but I'm saving those for things that should be patently obvious, so I've created a new award called 'Doh!' for things that are just plain stupid and/or unsafe. Today's 'Doh!' award goes to people who don't turn their lights on when it's a grey, overcast, foggy day. The visibility here in Auburn today is somewhere in the range of 10-15 ft. for large unlighted objects, and probably 20-35 feet for bright lights - you can see the street lights a ways back, but you can't see parked cars.

My father-in-law just dropped by our house and said 'half the people don't even have their lights on,' and that got me thinking as I drove in to work that about half the people really didn't, but then I decided to get all statistical about it. I spent a few minutes in the front window of our office monitoring a fairly busy street that is our main downtown drag, and here are the results:

Out of 124 drivers,
103 (83.1%) had their lights on (good for them!)
4 (3.2%) had only their parking lights on, and
17 (13.7%) had no lights whatsoever (idiots in about the right proportion).

So that got me thinking about daytime running lights when it's not foggy and the sun is shining. When The Lady Janet quit working to stay home with Emily, we looked very closely at our auto insurance to see if we could save a little money, and we did a bunch of stuff like cancelling AAA because we were already paying for roadside assistance and raising our deductibles. But the other thing I noticed is that USAA thinks it's worth a $60/year deduction if you have daytime running lights on your vehicle.

Now, my old '89 Honda Accord doesn't have them, but I figure, 'Hey, if USAA thinks it's worth $5/month this must really cut down on accidents,' so I drive with my lights on all the time, and I think it's very helpful because my car is dark silver grey and it blends into the road.

I was trying to decide whether to call the little side lights I saw in my tally 'running lights' or 'parking lights,' and they are definitely 'parking lights,' but I ran across a bunch of sites at the top of Google that are people trying to organize a 'stop the running lights' movement. You be the judge:

• DADRL - Drivers Against Daytime Running Lights
• Howstuffworks - If Daytime Running Lights Were Mandatory
• HighwaySafety.org - Safety Facts.

Oh, by the way, here are the CHP's safety tips for foggy conditions - I was a little surprised by their suggestion that if you have to pull off to the side, you turn off your lights, but it makes sense, because someone might think you were on the roadway and try to follow you.

If you drive in fog, please read the tips.

posted by Chris at 12:01 PM Permalink

 
Here are two completely unrelated pictures. The first is a picture of Sadam that I got in an e-mail today - I've tried to avoid writing about him, but I figure a picture's OK. The second is just a picture of a stir-fry I threw together the other night. The stuff looked so pretty sitting there all cut up on the counter that I just had to take a snapshot to share.

posted by Chris at 6:56 PM Permalink

 

OK, here's a pet peeve. I hate children's books that try to have a rhyme scheme and don't, especially if they're knocking off something well known that originally did it right. Case in point is this book I just suffered through tonight called The Berenstain Bears Save Christmas. Now the story is all right, but the authors decided to take The Night Before Christmas and adapt it to a new story line about the bears, and they didn't do it well, so they put me through hell.

Good grief! I don't know how anybody could write that, think it's good, and still be able to walk down the street without tripping themselves. And where was the editor, I wonder? (And it gets even worse.)

(All quoted passages © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.)

posted by Chris at 12:03 AM Permalink

 
I'm not sure what to even think about this yet, but it's the first winner of the Asparagus Pee "Duh!" Award: According to New Scientist, "Men lose the ability to think rationally when they see beautiful women, suggests new research."

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I've always been a guy who normally reads only nonfiction unless something remarkable comes along, but that seems to be changing lately simply because of a new service at our public library.

They have this new online resource where you can reserve books and have them put on hold. Whereas before, you could place a hold on a book, you had to wait in line and pay a small fee, and it took forever, with this new system it automatically places you in a queue for the next shot at any available copy from any library in the Placer County system. It's free, and they notify you when it comes in.

So right now, I'm reading The Time Traveler's Wife, and before that, I just finished Steve Martin's little book Shopgirl, and you already know about Life of Pi and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Even though I've managed to intersperse a couple of the science and self-help titles that are more typical for me, I've probably read more fiction the last two months than I've read in the last five years, and it hasn't hurt a bit.

posted by Chris at 11:22 AM Permalink

 
I followed a link back from a Google search for "Pablum's Dog" that led someone to this site and found this fascinating if obnoxiously colored piece of work: El Camino SurReal Cantina. I recommend backing up to the home directory, or even all the way up to Metaphysics Anonymous, if this discaimer from their homepage rings any bells:

There may or may not be bare breasts, female or otherwise, on this website. I really don't remember. Don't enter if it might hurt me or get me wet. Fundamentalist Puritan Aunt Grundys should be cruising some other site, anyways.

posted by Chris at 12:03 PM Permalink

 
I'm sorry that I haven't posted in a bit, so here's a bunch of linky-doodles really quick:

• XENOPHILIA (The Band)
• Butterflies & Wheels
• Christopher Orlet
• FBI Freedom of Information Act Celebrities
• Fun with Words
• Lego Solves Rubik's Cube

posted by Chris at 1:10 AM Permalink

 
Here's a cutie, courtesy of the Heads Up! newsletter from GoCreate.com - it's not in English, but I call it The Pyramid of Persistent Bears. (flash)

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It's a Small World After All

Speaking of cute, I was watching an old Animaniacs tape last weekend, and there was a segment with Minerva Mink, and I got to thinking that you could do a Minerva vs. Ariel thing that would be like Ginger vs. Mary Ann.

Anyway, it turns out that Sherri Stoner, who does the voice was the writer for that episode of Minerva (and several other of the Animaniacs, primarily Slappy the Squirrel), is also prolific in movies and animated features as a writer, producer, actress, and voice talent, and was the live-action body model for Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast.

posted by Chris at 6:16 PM Permalink

 
I thought the free clip of the Paris Hilton video I ran across was OK, but when I tried to watch The Simple Life, I lost all respect for her. See, I'd really hoped that she and Ms. Richie would take it seriously and really try to show that they could do something, but the segment I saw where they 'worked' at a Dairy Farm was obviously a farce set up to act as a backdrop for them to stand in front of as eye-candy with a bad attitude.

Of course, it just so happened the dairy farmer had a hot tub in the back yard, and they had their bikinis with them. Yeah, right, whatever.

I hope they didn't really sell anyone the milk they watered down with hose water from a 5-gallon slop bucket!

The big surprise TV-wise this week was a special 'Home Edition' of Extreme Makeover, where they sent a family to the Bahamas for a week and completely gutted and remodeled their house. It was a great show!

posted by Chris at 4:59 PM Permalink

 
See, it's stuff like this where a woman get's trampled in a Wal-Mart over a $29 DVD player (do we live in the future or what?) that makes me think there may just be something to this: Adbusters: Buy Nothing Day.

posted by Chris at 2:27 AM Permalink

 
I went through the 'self-service' line at Albertson's tonight for the second time, and I think this is really where we're headed. I'm usually buying beer, so it's a little bit of a hassle that someone has to verify that I'm an old guy, but other than that, this is the way to go. I'll be really surprised if there isn't a huge backlash from the unions. More info: NCR FastLane™ : Self-Serve Cash Register.

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I spent some time today finishing up our Christmas lights, which I started yesterday. When I was going through the line at True Value Hardware to buy a power strip and an extension cord, the woman in front of me had an axe with the handle broken right below the head, and that sent me into a reverie.

You see, one of my earliest jobs was as a singing busboy at Black Bart's Steakhouse & Dinner Theater in Flagstaff, AZ, back when I was a young pup goin' to Northern Arizona University.

I'd get there right after school, and I'd vacuum the whole place, then I had to go out back and split firewood for the big double-sided fireplace that opened onto the bar and the restaurant.

As I told the checkout clerk at True Value, the management was pretty upset when I broke the axe handle the second time.

My other main memories of the 'Singing Busboy' period are having to buy several white shirts and a used iron, and the fact that Black Bart's served deep fried ice cream.

posted by Chris at 12:32 AM Permalink