A great resource for stylish people with freakishly long torsos and arms: Claiborne by Liz Claiborne. A couple of their products have even been listed on Mightygoods, including this long sleeved polo which has been on my wish list since forever. And no, I have no affiliation whatsoever blah, blah, blah—their stuff is just sooo sexy. Also, Mathowie recommends Bananna Republic for those with ‘ape arms’.

Stomach flu, work related travel, and all of the standard excuses. My apologies to the hypothetical reader. A couple interesting things I did not know about stomach flu: the name applies to a number of bugs with similar symptoms, and all can be contracted only by ingesting the germs. Ew.

I’m glad I’m not the only one planning on living forever. It’s interesting the reactions you can get from people, educated people, when you talk about these subjects. I can’t tell you the number times I’ve heard “Oh no thank you… I’d be so frightfully bored.” And I’ve always wanted to reply “Then you are already not living right, and not taking full advantage of life.” [via]

I’m still slowly bringing the archives online (2002 is complete!), and I keep running across things in my efforts. For instance, the ecological footprint quiz referenced here. When I originally took the quiz, it only took 7 acres to support my lifestyle. I just took the quiz again, and I now require 16 acres of arable land just for myself. That’s probably the difference between having six roomates and having only one. Having your own home where you only have to put up with your signifigant other is the ultimate luxury, I suppose.

The Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office is suing an “online university” after they were able to procure an MBA, a steal at only $299, for an investigator’s pet cat. Considering the income boost associated with having a degree, I wonder how many people purchase this sort of thing knowing full well what they’ll be getting: a piece of paper stating that they’ve graduated a college that may not even exist. In South Carolina, a person with a bachelor’s earns on average $12,600 more per year than a high school graduate. That’s certainly a statistic that makes me, for one, think.

The House Government Reform Committee saw a report yesterday on abstinence-based sex ed
programs.“[…] released by Rep. Waxman [D-CA, the report] shows that many federally funded abstinence-only education programs use curricula that distort information about the effectiveness of contraceptives, misrepresent the risks of abortion, blur religion and science, treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact, and contain basic scientific errors.”Can’t say I’m surprised, as “abstinence-based sex ed” is doublespeak for “lie to the children.” I mean, come on, if they’ll lie to themselves — because they have to know lots of these kids are already having sex — why wouldn’t they lie to the children, too? This misinformation will lead to a lot of heartbreak and at least a few deaths. So, this would qualify as one of Bush’s more innocuous policy decisions.

I think I have outrage fatigue.

I’m tired of speculation about why movie stars keep naming their children crazy sh*t, so here’s the real explaination: an actor does not want to name their child after a character they have played. Really, it’s a simple as that. Can you imagine if Julia Roberts had named her daughter Vivian? That just would not have worked. When you’ve played hundreds of roles, your pool of acceptable baby names just shrinks right down. As for all of the talk of how unfortunate it would be if the children grew up and realized how weird their names are (or even worse, if their merciless little classmates realized it first), honestly, who the hell is going to make fun of Julia Robert’s kid?

Like the corporate flag displayed in this AP photo of canadian George II protestors? Buy your own. Though at 25.00 CAD, american buyers may want to wait for the exchange rate to improve. So about four years, give or take.

It isn’t over. Complacency is deadly.

I love the Internet Archive. Thanks to these folks, and despite capricious web hosts and hard drive crashes, I’ve recovered all of my old blog posts back to 2000. They’ll be coming back online slowly, as I’ll be pasting them into Blogger as I find time. All of the links in the archive calendar are active, but not all of them work yet.

There’s nothing quite like the glee of recovering something you created that you thought was lost forever, even if it is something as disposable as a bunch of weblog posts.

Magpie, PHP, and RSS. Lately I’ve been looking for a way to harness all of the RSS feeds coming my way from del.icio.us and Netflix and Bloglines. This looks like the simplest way so far. Too bad I don’t have PHP on this host. And of all the feeds Netflix offers, why don’t they syndicate the movies you’ve rated, with ratings? They have a library of about 500 films I’ve rated, and I’d love to have access to that data.

Boing Boing brings us news of a working, cockroach-guided, robot. As elegant a hack as this is for overcoming the limitations of machine logic in a real-world environment, it’s still f*cking creepy. Maybe it’s just my innate hatred of cockroaches, but damn, that’s nasty.

Fabricating evidence Statistical analysis through google searches:

i hat emy life 21 results

i hate my life 35,700 results

Thus: the more highly educated you are, the more likely you are to be depressed. Incidentally:

i hate my wife 2,620 results

Proof that married men are predisposed towards mendacity, as there are way more than 2,620 men out there who can’t stand their partners.

People familiar with our new Attorney General’s record (of which I am emphatically not one, as I’ve never heard of him before today) take a dim view of his appointment. So we may be worse off in terms of the Justice Department fufilling its appointed role, and not just being the enforcement arm of the administration’s political agenda, than we were this time last week.

Light pollution has been one of my peccadilloes for a while, but I’ve only just now found out that there’s somebody trying to do something about it. The International Dark Sky Association works to “build awareness of the problem of light pollution and of the solutions, […] the adverse problems affecting our view of the universe in which we live […] to preserve the beauty of the night around us.” I still remember moving from the boondocks to the suburbs when I was a teenager. I’ve stepped up to even more urbanized areas since, and I still miss the night sky.