A writing assignment

Another one from Terry: This comes from Stephen Leigh, who in September posted this assignment that he gives his writing students. What color is fear? Bright, actinic blue, blinding and…

Another one from Terry:

This comes from Stephen Leigh, who in September posted this assignment that he gives his writing students.

What color is fear? Bright, actinic blue, blinding and sharp.

What sound does affection make? A soft whisper.

What texture does Autumn have? Crisp and delicate.

What shape does a conversation make? An elipse, like a slot car track.

What fabric is a kitten made of? Cashmere.

What noise is made by curiosity? A bloodhound’s whuffing sound.

What is the smell of knowledge? Musty old paper, leather, fabric, and the ozone of fluorescent lighting.

How do you punctuate life? Question marks, followed by exclamation points, parentheses, elipses, and, eventually, semi-colons, before a full stop.

What does death taste like? Dry dust, lightly chilled.

If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, what kind of tree is it? Fallen.

Good to know I’m some sort of elite …

What kind of Liberal am I? My Liberal Identity: You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the…

What kind of Liberal am I?

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

An amusing (if not very in-depth) quiz. A number of answers gave me quite a chuckle.

(via Terry)

You know that post about torture?

I think I would have absolutely no compunction about waterboarding spammers. Not to get any information out of them, mind you — just to make them suffer. Yeah, yeah,…

I think I would have absolutely no compunction about waterboarding spammers. Not to get any information out of them, mind you — just to make them suffer.

Yeah, yeah, I know …

But having just spent a few hours trying to fix comment spam in my old photo galleries, I’m not feeling terribly nice toward the group as a whole. And it’s not even the various “performance enhancer” types of spams I’m talking about here, but pretty nasty and disgusting pr0n links spambotted alongside pictures of my wife and daughter.

Yeah, a bit of good thuggish bloodletting and infliction of gratuitous pain sounds pretty good right about now.

(For the record, I thought I had addressed this particular security gap, but I happened to run across some things showing up in my web site visit logs, and tracked them down to discover that (a) I hadn’t stopped folks from adding comments in all areas, and (b) even where I had, it was still possible to search for the comments. Rrg. I’ve turned off all the comment options, and 600ed both the comment add module and the search module. Which should do the trick, a lot more easily than individually deleting each of the several hundred-or-more spam comments.)

Note: No, I don’t think I would torture a spammer. Not really. But I might enjoy shackling one up and making him/her think I was going to torture them … Or, failing that, I might be convinced to seriously key their car.

Fall Back

Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday morning here in the US. Set your clocks back an hour before you go to bed Saturday night. Unless your clocks autoset. Unless your…

Daylight Saving Time ends Sunday morning here in the US. Set your clocks back an hour before you go to bed Saturday night. Unless your clocks autoset. Unless your autosetting clocks are frelled by the recent changes in the DST law. (Mutter mutter mutter …)

Our constant moon?

Not if you take two years worth of moon pictures and put them into a two second film loop. Freaky. This video is a fantastic articulation of the fact…

Not if you take two years worth of moon pictures and put them into a two second film loop. Freaky.

This video is a fantastic articulation of the fact that the Moon’s orbit around Earth is not, in fact, a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse (with about 5% eccentricity) which travels closer and then farther away in turn and changing apparent size in the process. The orbit is tilted slightly with respect to Earth’s daily planetary rotation, presenting slightly varying angles, and there is obviously some wobble in the orbital path, which astronomers call libration. In total, we actually see somewhere closer to 59% of the Moon over time rather than what the pedestrian 50% bright-side model would offer.

Or, as Juliet put it …

O, swear not by the moon, the fickle moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circle orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

Or at least wobbly.

“I am Host at The Olive Garden”

A short (26) series of comic strips written by a guy who was, well, a Host at The Olive Garden. Funny, poignant, slice-of-life amusing….

A short (26) series of comic strips written by a guy who was, well, a Host at The Olive Garden. Funny, poignant, slice-of-life amusing.

On Halloween … the Tax Man Cometh …

According to the state of Iowa, pumpkins are not food, and therefore are subject to state sales tax. Renee Mulvey, the department’s spokeswoman, said officials decided that pumpkins are…

According to the state of Iowa, pumpkins are not food, and therefore are subject to state sales tax.

Renee Mulvey, the department’s spokeswoman, said officials decided that pumpkins are used primarily for Halloween decorations, not food, and should be taxed. Previously, they had been considered an edible squash and exempted from the tax.
As a result, the department ruled that pumpkins are taxable if they are advertised for use as jack-o’-lanterns or decorations, or if it’s understood that they will be used for that purpose.
Iowans planning to eat pumpkins can still get an exemption from the sales tax, if they fill out the “Iowa Sales Tax Exemption Certificate” form. Pumpkins also are exempt if they are of the specific variety used to make pies and are advertised that way. Pumpkins purchased with food stamps also are exempt.
“We made the change because we wanted the sales tax law to match what we thought the predominant use was,” Mulvey said. “We thought the predominant use was for decorations or jack-o’-lanterns.”

What about if we carve our pumpkins for display and then roast the seeds for consumption. Well, I guess we just need to fill out the form first (in triplicate) to save some sales taxes. How many folks will do that, I wonder?

Feh.

(via J-Walk)

Friday? Friday?!

I mean, TGIF and all that, but where the hell did this week go? Crikey! I still have a ton-and-a-half of stuff to do. That all said — well, TGIF….

I mean, TGIF and all that, but where the hell did this week go? Crikey! I still have a ton-and-a-half of stuff to do.

That all said — well, TGIF.

Been sort of crazy at work — two or three project proposals that have required a lot of work, personnel reviews, just a lot of … stuff. Evenings have been a bit nuts, too, between karate and this-n-that. Early part of the week I was heads-down in getting our digital photos organized (a work in progress); the last few evenings, I’ve just been crashing on the couch and watching Daily Show and Bionic Woman and House on DVR.

I’m hoping for a (relatively) relaxed weekend. Still have to get through Friday, though …

Karate Kid, One Year On

Katherine starts her second year of karate! Osu!…

Katherine starts her second year of karate! Osu!

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme

This one was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace. I am not going to tap anyone — pick it up as you…

This one was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace. I am not going to tap anyone — pick it up as you will.

First, the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

The lineage:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Primate Diaries.
My great-great-great-grandparent is Thus Spake Zuska.
My great-great-grandparent is Kate.
My great-grandparent is Finally Maturing.
My grandparent is Parts-n-Pieces
My parent is I See Invisible People.

The Questions and Answers:

The best adult novel in SF/Fantasy is: Good Omens
The best scary movie in modern pop culture is: The Blair Witch Project
The best happy song in classic rock music is: “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
The best cult novel in historic fiction is: The Name of the Rose
The best high-carb food in American cooking is: Tater Tots

(via Terry — though you have to wonder about any meme where the rules are substantially longer than the substance. 🙂 )

Potpourri for $1000, Alex!

Cleaning out tabs … Yes, because what I really want on my air travel is adverts on the overhead bins, like on a bus. At least used to be an…

Cleaning out tabs …

Yes, because what I really want on my air travel is adverts on the overhead bins, like on a bus. At least used to be an “uncluttered, relaxed and comfortable environment.”
Analyzing The Incredibles from a design and style perspective. “Yet as the pace quickens and the action builds, the design does too. Slick designer vehicles (think Philippe Starck on steroids) transport us to new architectural destinations: here are sites dotted by grand concrete allées, framed by volcanic window treatments and walls of perfectly gridded weaponry. Even Syndrome, the villain’s sensurround computer screen is well-designed, boasting well-kerned Bank Gothic letterforms within an icy blue-grey interface. It’s design run amok, at once exquisite and terrifying: Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis meets Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Japan.” Um … okay.
Les provides an update on the True Bible Decoder folks who were predicting New York’s impending Bible-predicted nuking, oh, a year ago. They’re still at it, hammering out impending dates.
A scientist whose 1955 paper questioning some aspects of the spontaneous generation of life has formally withdrawn the paper after finding creationists were citing it as proof of divine intervention in life — and after recognizing a variety of mistakes in what he wrote 52 years ago.
Halloween has been banned in Moscow schools as a “cult of death.” Boo!

Joss on Fox?

Interview with Joss Whedon on his new series, Dollhouse, which will star Eliza Dushku. It sounds interesting (if vaguely River-like in overtone) — but … Fox? Joss is doing another…

Interview with Joss Whedon on his new series, Dollhouse, which will star Eliza Dushku. It sounds interesting (if vaguely River-like in overtone) — but … Fox? Joss is doing another show on Fox? Is the man a glutton for punishment? (Okay, it sounds like the whole thing was driven by Eliza’s commitment to a Fox show — but, damn …)

It’s committed for seven eps, but don’t expect anything until after the Writers Strike.