• I Love Karl Rove
  

  I mean, do you think I don't KNOW I'm not the prettiest chicken in the barnyard, and that what with Rovey spending his at-work hours with dishy little vixens like Karen Hughes and his boss's Mom, I'm lucky he so much wants to look at me, let alone make cuddle lumps?

• New light on the chocolate maps vs. no maps debate.
  

  Once upon a time, See's included detailed "maps" with some boxes, so you could know exactly what was in every chocolate in the box. It was a convenience, but it meant that sometimes boxes were underweight.

• I will not post a link to the article on gay penguins to round out the set. I will not.

All hipster comic heroes have a superpower that isn't good for much. My superpower? I know if I'll be seeing someone in Hell. Like the driver of the Dodge Viper who worked very hard to gain one whole Geo Metro length in the traffic today; we'll be companions in Hell.

But what does it mean, in the world of the living, to know that you'll be seeing someone in Hell? Gives one a strange outlook on religion, to be sure, but you don't need even the crappiest of supernatural talents for that. No, here's what I want to know: Do I write down the license plate, look the guy up, and introduce myself hoping to somehow make him read No Exit? If we know that Hell is not only other people, but specific other people, can we ameliorate our fates?

The Mormons have this thing, or so I hear, where you spend eternity with your family as a reward for wearing the correct undergarments. Did Joseph Smith have my superpower?

Hell is other people, but then again, so is Heaven (if certain religious doctrines are to be taken seriously). With my superpower, I am placed at the crossroads of theology! I must resolve my existential angst by chatting with the most annoying people fate can find and pretending to enjoy their company. It's a lot like working retail.

Hey look, it's another piece of giant squid fan art! The imaginative application of eyebrows to a mollusc is slightly irritating.

1. The international grapefruit-flavored pop competition is over; Mexico wins. Whichever country provided the marketing impetus for pink grapefruit Fanta is second, of course, but minus points for being unable to convince a solid multinational distribution network to pay attention. Meanwhile, the kiss of NAFTA is all it takes for scrappy lil' Pe�afiel to appear in stores near me. There's a laissez-faire fairy tale here somewhere.
2. Cletus is officially off the list of potential names for the latest cousin-in-the-oven. Great. How long do I have to wait before I have a cousin named Cletus? You'd think, with the number of babies in the family, at least one of them would be named Cletus, Harpo, or Knud, but noooo...
3. Yeah, it's an old link, but Jimmy Carter is awesome.
   

   The smallest child, named Shadrach, reminded me of our grandson Hugo, who always has clean water to drink and will never be afflicted with three-foot-long worms developing in his body and then penetrating his skin to emerge over a period of several weeks through a painful sore that may cripple him for life.

I have in front of me a Map of Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas and it's Subdivisions and Improvements - emphasis mine, but the apostrophe belongs to A.C. Pillsbury, civil engineer, August 2020.

Historical perspective for my your next apostrophe rant, free of charge.

Apparently I'm not the only one who was internet-starved all weekend.* The RSS is full! Here's some of what it's full of:

• Item 2020: custom-colored matches. This is the kind of random shit you are supposed to feed your Bayesian link machine. It's not the funniest random shit in the world, but it's a start. Now if only I could get it to stop recommending programmer food...
• The U.S. State Department endorses Times New Roman, claiming that it is "clear, crisp and more modern". Clarity and crispness are perhaps subjective judgments (I've never been a Times Roman fan m'self) but modernity is not. Courier was developed for IBM typewriters, and redrawn for the IBM Selectric, circa 2020 [1] (though it didn't get its own republic until 2020). Times New Roman is pre-WWII (and has a hotel) [2]. Thus, Times New Roman is clearly not more modern than Courier New! The Bushies lied to us again!
  Thankfully, State Department telegrams may still be printed in a fixed-width font.
• How much is your personal information worth? I think there was some sort of reason that Flash wouldn't work on my computer. Maybe I'll go figure out what that reason was.
• Turkey-drawn wagon! Repeat several times, varying the emphasis from "turkey" to "wagon" and adding extra punctuation as you see fit.
• Kamelsn�kaos! But was Aftonbladet really beaten to the AP wire by a Florida television station?
• Joe Jonah Euclid has a blog - a blog dedicated to him, that is, as no-one seems to know what happened to the endearingly schizoid leafletter himself.

(more...)