‘A‘a fresh? Hmm, that makes me think of something more like this:
(Image courtesy of the US Geological Survey)
No thanks, I think I’ll stick with the mild salsa on this one.
Edit: For the benefit of out-of-state readers, the sign’s for a restaurant called Baja Fresh.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been three years since the first post on this blog. I still think of myself as being kind of new at this, but at this rate, we’ll be in the old guard. Or at least the new old guard. 😉
Topics have shifted around. It started out as a personal blog with Sci-Fi overtones, and slowly took on more of a focus on humor, comics and tech. Posts in the early days were divided 60/40 between me and Katie. These days it’s more 90/10, partly because we’ve both shifted a lot of the personal stuff over to LiveJournal. Strange photos started showing up very early on, making up what are now the Strange World, You Must Be Mistaken, and Signs of the Times categories.
The site started on B2 and moved to WordPress when the project forked.
Even the title is subtly different. It started out as “Ramblings,” with a “K²” icon to the left. After a while, the icon became part of the title, and it’s been known as “K-Squared Ramblings” for most of those three years.
According to the WordPress Dashboard, we now have 912 posts and 961 comments Continue reading
Okay, read the last two titles together: The 40 Year Old Virgin, Unwanted Woman. It seems like the second line might explain the first…
(On a side note, this is the second post with pictures from my new camera phone. The image quality is pathetic compared to the good camera—640×480 vs. 5 megapixels—but it’s a lot more convenient to carry around, and quite adequate for this type of photo. And it’s much better than the expendable camera was, especially at the end of its life.)
Yes, they’ve actually replaced some of the grass with more grass, instead of astroturf. Here’s the same median where I took the original Grass Under Renovation picture.
I still have no idea why they bothered letting it die, putting up signs to warn people, and seeding all new grass. Not that I paid much attention to it before, but it doesn’t look particularly different.
It’s less than a week to Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19). Dougal Campbell has a WordPress plugin to piratify yer blog.
Arrr, I be thinkin’ about it!
I think all of Warren Ellis’ crop of new series have launched at this point. I’ve picked up the first issues of Fell, Desolation Jones, and Jack Cross.
Ellis is one of a few writers whose name will get me to at least look at a new book. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t. His superhero stuff doesn’t appeal much to me, with the exception of Planetary, which is on my must-read list on those rare occasions that a new issue comes out. (Others include Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon, and Joe Straczynski. Heck, Joss actually managed to get me to pick up an X-Men book!)
Desolation Jones tells the story of an British ex-secret agent living in exile in Los Angeles. In fact, there’s an entire community of ex-spooks living in L.A., an open prison that the city’s normal residents don’t even know about. Jones underwent an experiment, the “desolation test,” that left him both enhanced and destroyed. Many of the people he knows underwent similar experiments. There’s a man who only needs to eat four times a year—but ends up chewing through entire herds of cattle when he does. A woman whose pheromones trigger fear and revulsion, and literally has to beg Jones to spend an hour with her just to stave off the loneliness. Despite the background, the book is more hard-boiled detective than thriller. And the characters are well-drawn, both literally and figuratively. Issue #1 had me interested enough to check out issue #2 (despite some of the less savory aspects of the story). Issue #2 had me hooked.
Jack Cross is pretty much a straight-forward thriller, with an ex-agent brought back into action, a conspiracy within government agencies, etc. I’m just barely curious enough to look at #2, but it’ll have to be really interesting to get me to keep going.
Fell just came out last week, and breaks from the other books in several ways. First, it’s designed to have a complete story in each issue. Second, it’s designed to be cheap. By telling a highly-compressed story in 16 pages, with text pages filling in the rest, it keeps the cost down below the magic $2 mark (if just barely). As for the actual content—it’s another detective story, this time about a quirky police officer with an excellent intuition, Richard Fell, who ends up in a hellhole city called Snowtown. As promised, there’s a complete story, but there are also hints of something larger. Eveyone Fell meets is disturbed in one way or another. And the book is so full of story, I didn’t even notice it was 2/3 the length of a typical comic. Definitely good enough to check out the next issue!
It’s always strange when you throw out wacky ideas, then see them turn into reality. About four years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around talking, and someone uttered the remark, “Diet Spite.” From there we filled an entire page with culinary brand names made from abstract concepts, not unlike the Wheat-Free Chaos we found a month ago.
One exchange went like this:
Kelson: “Diet Red.”
Daniel: “Sure, that’s red.”
So it was a surprise to find this can at Trader Joe’s:
Truth is stranger than fiction. It just takes time to catch up.
