While Christmas shopping, I kept seeing things that made me wish I had brought my camera. The ridiculously giant Christmas tree at Fashion Island was not one of them; all I needed was a picture demonstrating its height.
A toy store yielded a number of amusements (appropriately enough), in the form of a series of unconventional action figures—Jane Austen, Leonardo DaVinci, Mozart, Charles Dickens… and of course talking Jesus and Moses figures. And then there’s the Avenging Unicorn!
On Friday, Katie wanted to look for some craft supplies at a store we’d seen before, called—believe it or not—Yarn Yarn. We’d first noticed it a couple of years ago, and took a picture of the sign for blog purposes.
The store was closed, but on our way back to the car, we spotted the Puzzle Blimp flying around. So here we had two old blog posts coming together.
Except there was one problem. It turns out that when we took pictures of Yarn Yarn and the nearby Holy Computer, we never got around to posting them online. So here, delayed by two and a half years, are those photos, plus a couple of new shots.
The Puzzle Blimp Returns! (As noted last time, it’s Ameriquest’s Soaring Dreams Airship [archive.org].)
Hmm, is this what Robin says when Batman analyzes evidence using the Cray he has in the Batcave?
Maybe it’s just the fact that I see so much spam, but the first thing this name makes me think of isn’t photography.
Is this what he saved those mean girls from?
It appears to be an energy drink, which is kind of ironic, considering how closely Bacchus was associated with wine. On the other hand, his followers would work themselves into a frenzy.
A word of advice: If any Maenads drop by with a few cans of this stuff, run. They may look cute, but they’ll tear you apart.
The Leather Factory sign was missing a few letters one night:
So whose factory is it, exactly? She Who Must Be Obeyed? Can guys even buy stuff there?
The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:
It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!
On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.
The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.
As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.
I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.
How often do you get to revisit an old in-joke? Six years ago, Katie and I were driving past the Inn-N-Out by UCI and noticed the sign was only half-lit. Katie exclaimed:
It’s an inn! The out is out on In-N-Out!
Last Friday we went back to UCI for a play and had dinner at the Indian restaurant across the street. As we left the parking lot, we saw this:
Ah, nostalgia!
