Super Stamps In '06 Thanks to Tony Collett for alerting me that DC superheroes stamps are coming from the USPS next year. This is one way to get me over the price increase to 39 cents.
Posts
McDonalds Gets New Buns? ... and their food declared the path to the Aryan superman? Okay, so it's just for Japan (at least so far) but McD's has gone with a sexier campaign and a female dressed in Ronald's colors . (Thanks, Tammy , for the tip.) At least as interesting as this is, I was more intrigued by the quote from Den Fujita (at the end of the piece) when criticism of McDonalds' potential impact on the Japanese diet: "The reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years. If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years we will become taller, our skin become white and our hair blond." I can only guess what Mr. Fujita looks like, but I suspect he's not tall and blond. I wonder if this reflects a cultural thread of self-loathing among the Japanese? Update: Thanks to CryptLeak not being crippled by chronic indolence, I've added a shot of Mr. Fujita t...
A little this, a little that... Something's trying to take me down, though I only realized it during this time off. No nausea and no outright pain - aside from some headaches - but leaden limbs and getting out of breath over nothing. I finally realized my lungs are compromised, with a spongy feel deep in them, taking up a third to half - or at least that's how it feels. Now I'm on antibiotics. We'll see what shape I'm in by Monday. Friday (aside from the trip out to see a movie) and through much of today I was resting, apparently needing it. I'm feeling more myself now. This evening we managed some clearing out in the living room today - getting some surprisingly bulky clutter out of the way as we decide where to place the tree this year. The Christmas decorating -- we've resolved to kick the season off earlier this year than happens during most -- has begun, and is now slated to be the main task for Sunday. I finally posted another set of auctions ,...
The First Muggle-less Potter Nick and I finally made it out to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this afternoon following a roughly five hour delay. Hey, it's a holiday weekend. Schedules are for slaves. Seeing a movie targeted primarily at a child audience on Black Friday was likely not among my swiftest moves, but by and large the audience was well-behaved in the nearly packed theater. Unfortunately, there were some kids with control problems and even more unfortunately four of them chose our row. Some poor woman plainly drew the short straw for her block -- either that, or she promised her own one or two kids she'd take them to see the movie and they spread the invitation out to several friends. I lost count of how many times we heard "this'll be the last time" whispered to us as we had to partially stand up and turn the three inches of clearance between my knees and the seat ahead of me into seven. The youngest kid, probably no more than seven, was som...
Wax Off Noriyuku "Pat" Morita 1932-2005 Whether you knew him best as Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid films or Happy Days ' Arnold, he reportedly died sometime late Thursday of natural causes, though the news wasn't circulated until today. It almost seems a little creepy that early this morning I plugged my name into the Japanese name generator in the previous entry and came out as "Morita" also. Well, I said "almost" and "little."
When Black Friday comes... I'm gonna dig myself a hole. Gonna lay down in it 'til I satisfy my soul. Okay, actually I'm going to deposit my paycheck (given to me Wednesday, but dated for today) and then Nick and I will be seeing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire , which I've heard naught but good things about. (With the caveat, of course, that each review was from someone who wanted to go see a Harry Potter movie.) Older son, Travis, is still up as we head for 4am (whereas I'd gotten several hours sleep, and will be heading back to bed shortly), playing games online. He tells me he knows he'll be dead asleep when we're getting ready to head out, so he'll not be attending Hogwort's today. Black Friday , perhaps more than any other day of the holiday season (though the day after Christmas can be fairly horrible, too...) makes me happy that I left my last (so far) retail job behind in '88. I've been an unofficial participant in Buy Nothing ...
The Holiday Kick-Off And, no, I'm not referring to football. I neither know who was/is playing today nor do I care. My father-in-law had some game on down in the den towards the end of our visit there today, but I don't even feign interest in such things. A suitor for his sole granddaughter was there, trying to bond with him over the ritual watching of the passing of the pigskin, so they were set. The boys, my nephew Danny and I went out to a set-up on the enclosed porch to watch a sudden wind and rain storm tear branches from trees and send a garbage can pinwheeling across the back lawn (enclosed in stockade fence, so it wasn't really going anywhere) while playing Resident Evil 4 on a PS2. As mentioned in this morning's post, we had a little snow overnight though it was ephemeral. The sunlight, wind and temps reaching up into the upper 40s banished the roughly half-inch blanket so that someone who'd gone to bed before 2 but slept in past 9 wouldn't...
Happy Thanksgiving! (Slightly expanded) It's all relative! Try to tell me you're not having a better day than Tom. Four days off - at least that's the plan - and I'm trying to enjoy them. Everyone pitched in while I was still at work Wednesday, which made the night's prep a pleasure. I cleaned, seasoned and stuffed a 23 lb. bird, which is now in a double-pan rig (to protect against anything spilling into the oven), sealed in a bubble of aluminum foil and roasting slowly. I was surprised at how much stuffing I could fit in that bird. Between the tendency of that to swell and the general effect of the slow-roasting I'm expecting it to swell up like a meaty version of Jiffy Pop. A large potful of potatoes has already been cooked, mashed, & blended with butter, some salt and a little pepper, then put away. I prefer to get most of the meal prep out of the way the day before, so I can concentrate on the smaller touches on Thanksgiving day. With the help I ha...
Brown boots heeding the call of nature... Because I should be working, it was naturally time to do some goofing off and catching up. I noticed this piece on Alibi's blog concerning the recycling of old toilets as a bright white, porcelain gravel to top the Calveras Park Nature Trail. Between us, do you really buy the "cleaned" part? Oh, come on . I'm sure they hosed them off -- most had probably been left out in the rain for a while and that was close enough. It's being put on a trail in the woods, fer chrissakes... My first reaction was "how dangerous is this?!" Maybe this is a different type of material than I think of when porcelain's mentioned, but I expect razor sharp edges when porcelain fractures. Aichmophobia and coprophobia come together! Why, it's the Trail of Fears! (Thanks to CryptLeak for the phobia link sometime last week, btw.) Oh, I had to post a link to this report on the same story because they not only allay my fears ...
They say it's his birthday... (expanded) ...and he seems to be having a good time, but Highlander would have a better one if you'd swing by to wish him one. I dug up something he did years ago -- it was my third choice, for reasons I won't go into here - but seemed appropriately happy enough now that things have turned out far better on this front than he'd dared to hope. Anyway, Happy 44th! ...but I dance for no one! And now, as noted in the comments thread, here was my first choice...
Clix Fix (But beware the bricks!) Release week for Armor Wars . Tedious details below! The work week was too much for me, though I did find myself slipping into making posts on HC Realms -- seldom a good idea, but like going out on a bender it sometimes happens. Well, going out on a bender hasn't really ever happened to me. I haven't shot myself either, and I don't believe I need to do that before deciding how much I'd like it. If I have to choose between the two I'd rather look back on a couple lost evenings wondering why I wasted the time arguing than nursing a hangover and vaguely recalling saying and doing things I'd really rather forget. Come to think of it, I was right the first time. They're shades of the same thing. Besides that, though I was caught up in a too long week with too little sleep. Work demands kept me hopping, often attempting to go in two or more directions at once. I know, I know: "get in line." Still, mine's the only ...
He's no King Kong... ...but a 10 ft tall, 1200 lb gorilla 's difficult to ignore. While the existence of these apes has been known from fossil fragments since 1935, what's new is the discovery that they coexisted with humans for a significant stretch of time before dying out roughly 100,000 years ago.
Please scream No, it's not part of an interrogator's manual from one of our marvelous, detention camps at secret locales. It's yet another sign of blatant vote-fixing by the GOP apparatus in Ohio . Please consider it a must-read. In brief: 5 propositions were on the ballot. Four of them were reforms to Ohio's electoral process, all opposed by the local right wing elements of the GOP. A local paper with an exceptional track record for accurate polling going back to 1872, The Columbus Dispatch, pegged the vote on the first initiative, but on the other four there were significant differences -- wild, in fact for two of them. If we spread the word and press on this, it could prove to be a case of their hubris in manipulating the easily-hacked, record-less, proprietarily-protected Diebold machines blowing this rigged game wide open before next year's important mid-term elections. Don't let them wave this off and pretend that the matter was somehow settled long ago....
She knows what she wants... Ah, those Kryptonian... toys. Do I even want to ask about the helmet? Alternate headers "I wonder how many D batteries it takes?" and "Supergirl's Silver Age Sex Toys!" but if I have to be that obvious then I may as well give up. Thanks to Cryptleak for another of these sordid Silver Age snaps.
Ennui & Fatigue Sounds like a French vaudeville act. It's been a week plus of puttering about in detail work, running an insane schedule and much puttering about in trivial things in such time as remained my own. Anything of substance became an object to be eyed with suspicion. Potential Pandora's Boxes. We have a new washing machine, the need for which warped Saturday of last week into a mess. It was delivered Tuesday, and brought with it the new complication of a pump that is apparently so powerful that it overwhelms the capacity of the standpipe. Let it run and when it starts to drain there's a quick sound like an oversized slide whistle and then a fountain of water. There's no sink basin in the laundry room. I'm mentioning that because after having had three people ask, as if I was so dim that it wouldn't have occurred to me to hook the drainage pipe there, I wanted to spare potential commentator an early death and me a prison sentence. I've long sin...
Good Luck, Tony! Sometime today Tony Collett will be having his unemployment hearing. Please join me in wishing him the best in a swift and happy resolution to some major unpleasantness that's been hanging over his head for a while. I'd have posted a comment over there, but I cannot recall what password I used over there and there's no "Forgot your password?" link in the blogharbor comments system -- at least that I could see.