Via DailyKos, the 25 Dumbest Quotes of 2005.
Includes such gems as:
- 13) "If you’ll look at my lovely FEMA attire you’ll really vomit.
I am a fashion god…
Anything specific I need to do or tweak?
Do you know of anyone who dog-sits?
… Can I quit now? Can I come home? …
I’m trapped now, please rescue me."
–Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown, in various emails to colleagues and friends
in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
- 2) "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?"
–House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX),
to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans
at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 9, 2005
As the Twelve Days of Christmas approach,
it’s time once again to make fun of them.
Strictly speaking, we can’t start until
December 25th, the first day of Christmas,
but the Xmas season starts earlier every year.
My favorite has long been Frank Kelly’s Christmas Countdown,
which was a big hit in Ireland and Britain in the early 1980s.
It’s couched as twelve increasingly exasperated letters from
Gobnait O’Lughnasa to his friend Nuala. Here’s Day Six:
Nuala,
What are you trying to do to us ? It isn’t that we don’t appreciate
your generosity but the six geese have not alone nearly murdered the
calling birds but they laid their eggs on top of …continue.
Via del.icio.us/popular, it’s dozens of Bunny Suicides!
Very twisted.
Update: Apparently, these are pirated scans from The Book of Bunny Suicides.
Harold Pinter’s speech
on accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road.
Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be
but it is also very clever.
As a salesman it is out on its own
and its most saleable commodity is self love.
It’s a winner.
Listen to all American presidents on television say the words,
‘the American people’, as in the sentence,
‘I say to the American people it is time to pray
and to defend the rights of the American people
and I ask the American people to trust their president
in the action he is …continue.
I cannot look at a 16-digit credit card number
and tell whether I’ve mistyped it or not.
And neither can anyone else.
I can, however, easily examine four separate four-digit numbers and spot typos.
1341329913245890 or 1341 3299 1324 5890?
The choice is obvious.
Yet most websites will not accept anything but the 16-digit string.
It’s a trivial matter to strip the spaces and normalize the credit card number,
and it speaks to the incompetence of many website developers that they don’t do this.
The cognitive burden should be pushed onto the programmer, not the user.
On a related note, Irish people write phone numbers as a seven-digit string.
I can’t parse 6274986 …continue.
My friend Raven knows far too much about prostates. She sent me this the other day.
Don’t forget that conducting regular testicular self-exams
(or getting someone else to do it for you :)
is a very important part of keeping healthy.
If detected early, testicular cancer is very curable:
http://tcrc.acor.org/tcexam.html
But you need to commit to doing it regularly,
not to just doing it every once in a while, or when the mood strikes you.
Because as everyone knows, sometimes you like feeling nuts;
sometimes, you don’t.
And, on a not completely unrelated note,
males with big testicles have smaller brains
– at least in the case of bats.
Via the Win Tech Off Topic mailing list, I learned about Pandora earlier today.
It’s an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project.
You create stations in Pandora by telling it an artist or song that you like.
It starts playing music that it thinks you will like,
based on its reasonably extensive database of carefully characterized music.
You can tell it if you particularly like or dislike its selections,
to guide its future offerings on that station.
You can have up to 100 personalized stations.
So far, it’s doing a good job.
(Originally posted to Home at
EraBlog on
Mon, 05 Dec 2005 05:23:26 GMT)
I’ve moved my blog again; this time to my own website. The new link is
http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog/.
I was looking up the credits of Intermission on IMDB,
then decided to look up my brother, David Reilly,
the actor of the family.
I found him.
I couldn’t find any IMDB listing for my other brother, Mark Reilly, the filmmaker.
Then I looked up my own name.
I wasn’t there, of course, but I did find
Der Spleen des George Riley,
a German TV production of a Tom Stoppard play,
Enter a Free Man.
I did quite a bit of work for Irish television in the mid-to-late Eighties,
but it was all behind the scenes computer graphics work
for such timeless gems
as Murphy’s Micro Quiz’M, Rapid Roulette, the Carroll’s Irish Open, …continue.
Via Larry Osterman,
Triumph the Comic Dog delivering the weather forecast in Hawai`i.
Very apropos, after yesterday’s snow in Seattle.
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