Craig Berry

I figure Art Nouveau will be constructed a little further down the block.

A post on a web-design-related mailing list to which I subscribe pointed out this site for an ecumenical Christian group.  It has the distinction of featuring the most spastic, overdone, unintentionally amusing Flash intro I've ever seen -- and that's a pretty high bar.  Enjoy.  I'm not responsible for any unwelcome neurological effects.

My daughter madelineusher , who spends a lot more time exploring this system of tubes than I do, clued me in to this article on nine real-life mad scientists.  Our old pal Jack Parsons is number eight -- second in the article, as they're counting down.  Given it's a humor piece, they don't do a bad job of summing up his life, despite little goofs like saying Parsons practiced "the Thelema".  The other eight mad scientists also make for fun reading.  Enjoy.

The Kinich Ahau Crisis. 

 So, how many geek points do I get for this?  I just received a fundraising email from the DNC (or some surrogate group) titled "McCain campaign attacks you", and I couldn't help muttering "In Soviet Russia..."

I'm feeling somewhat better, as evidenced by the fact that I decided to walk the last mile home this evening, rather than waiting to transfer to the local bus that stops a block from my house.  I always feel a little silly taking that bus for three stops, anyway, but feeling as I have recently I've been glad to do so.  Tonight it was crisply cool and breezy, and my energy level was suddenly back to something like normal, so I reverted to pedestrian normalcy.  By the time I got home I could definitely feel that some of that energy had been illusory, but still, I like the trend.

 Well, my slight blah yesterday turned into a full-on head cold by the time I woke up this morning.  I stayed home to rest and fight it off.

This has left me with plenty of time to wander the web.  Here's a wonderful parody of "Every Breath You Take", which I'll dedicate to my economic-policy sparring partner fraterseraphino .  A little context:  The video was made at Columbia Business School (CBS), and the lead singer is portraying Glenn Hubbard, the dean of CBS, who was on the short list to succeed Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve; Bernanke got the position instead.

"Do you pledge yourself to the path of service...?"

Since the actual hyper-volatility of the stock market apparently wasn't sufficiently exciting, some sort of glitch afflicted Google stock right at the close of trading today. Check out the low price. Apparently this incident is under investigation.

After Hours: 410.50 +69.07 (20.23%)  Sep 30 5:10pm ET

This showed up in my inbox this morning...

Poetic funding the way it should be -- for sesa777 , who deserves at least a billion dollar government poetry contract, and madelineusher , so she can win the artistic utility debate with her philosophy professor.

There's a parable in this somewhere...

Over the weekend at Kaaba in Philadelphia, we developed an idea for the first Kaaba-inspired lolcat image.  Thanks to my lovely and talented daughter madelineusher, it now actually exists.  It's rather large, so I'm putting it behind a cut tag.  slq, feel free to steal this for your presentation.  And if you don't get this, don't worry about it; it would take too long to explain.

"Free Tibet" flags made in China.

Excerpted from a spam I just received:

I am Miss DERICAH RICEH. I am 19 yrs old. I am the only surviving son of my late father Mr Lamine

I notice his (or, rather, her) last name differs from her father's, so presumably her husband can take care of her.  Thus, I'll decline the opportunity she's offering to help recover her father's diamond-mining fortune.  Good luck, Dericah.

I'm evaluating a product for use at my day job which proudly boasts that it offers an "Application-oriented API".  Given that API stands for "Application Programming Interface", I'm finding it difficult to picture a non-application-oriented API.

Oh, wait, I forgot Win32.

Recently I bought myself the album Gamma 3, which is (oddly enough) the third album put out by Ronnie Montrose's band Gamma.  Released in 1982, this came out while I was in college; I heard it in the dorm occasionally, and then was treated to more of it over the summer while I was home listening to Greg Stone, the best prog-rock DJ ever, on the late lamented KOME in San Jose.

Years passed, then decades, but a song from Gamma 3 kept coming back into my head.  Titled "Third Degree", the only line I could remember from it was "As long as you're in motion, you're moving in the right direction"; that became a motto of mine, and several of my friends have probably heard it often enough to get mildly annoyed at me.  So I bought the album, finally, to see if there was some reason that song was stuck in my head.  The short answer is "no", though I do still like it, and as a side effect I discovered (or rediscovered) several other good tracks on the album. 

Saturday afternoon I was trying to get my energy level up for the evening event at LVX Lodge, so I decided to play one of those tracks, "Mobile Devotion", really really loud, while playing accompaniment on my recorder.  The recorder is not normally considered a hard-rock instrument -- note that they fade out from "Stairway to Heaven" just as Jimmy Page kicks into gear -- but I've never been one to take the ordinary course, and I've been known to toodle out some hot riffs now and then.

I opened up my mp3 library, chose the by-artist sort, and scanned down...through the A listings, then the B listings, then slowed down, scanning for the band name...didn't find it...looked again more carefully...

And then belatedly realized that I was alphabetizing in the wrong language.  My mp3 organizer doesn't realize that Gamma should follow A and B.

Some days it's a wonder I can think coherently at all with all the jumbled (and often contradictory) information I've got crammed into my brain.

Behold, my friends, the awe-inspiring majesty and might of the equally large boa.  (Or ELB, as belladonna93 likes to say.)

From an event announcement in Second Life:

1-THIS EVENT IS 3 HOURS
2-THIS IS NOT AN ALL DAY EVENT
3-THE PARTY IS 24 HOURS A DAY WITH THE BEST MUSIC ON SL. WE PLAY HIP HOP & RNB MUSIC. HIP HOP IS NOT DEAD!

It's not fair making me figure something like that out while high on Dayquil.

Hot off the AP wire:  Texas Train Carrying Chemicals Derails

Well, that certainly narrows things down, doesn't it?  At least we know it wasn't carrying vacuum, or dissociated subatomic particles, or dark matter.

The other day on the bus, I heard a class-action lawsuit ad that asked "Have you ever worked with chemicals on the job?"  If anyone can answer "no" to that question, I'd like to hear their story.

Some days I despair for humanity.  Other days I just chuckle.

I just unsubscribed from a Rosicrucian mailing list after a week, in large part because its denizens relentlessly top-post and fail to trim quoted text when replying -- even if they're replying to a thirty-message digest.

I am reasonably sure that the true representatives of Frater CRC will exhibit much better netiquette when I find them.