Category: Entertainment

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You know the routine. We can’t pass up a bizarre image without taking a photo and posting some sort of comment. Not even on vacations.

Alien Fresh Jerky SignThe drive to Las Vegas from southern California is simple: make your way to the 15, head north, and keep going until you get blinded by the neon. The ⅔ mark is Baker, CA, a small strip of restaurants, stores and gas stations in the middle of the desert, famous for the Bun Boy and the world’s tallest thermometer. Baker has something new: Alien Fresh Jerky.

We were staying at the South Coast Hotel and Casino, the latest megasino to open, which is a bit off the strip. At first I was a bit worried about finding the right exit. As it turns out, it’s the first giant hotel you’ll see as you approach Las Vegas from the south…about two miles before you actually have a chance to get off the freeway! (They have a free shuttle to the strip, though that had its own share of problems.) They put us in a room on the 24th floor, which had a great view of suburban South Las Vegas. Continue reading →

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Lately I’ve seen an interesting pattern emerge in the comment spam logs here. Along with the usual collections of links to pills, porn, and watches, there are a bunch of trackback spam attempts using innocuous websites like Google and Yahoo and the phrase “this is very good,” over and over.

Title? “this is very good”
Blog Name? “this is very good”
Author? “this is very good”

The excerpt itself varies a bit, but is usually something like, “this is related article.”

I figure they’re either probes or attempts to poison blacklists.

What’s funny about these is that in the logs, the fields are all run together, so it looks like this:

author: this is very good title: this is very good blog_name: this is very good e-mail: …

The natural inclination is to break the phrases at the punctuation, so it looks like it’s saying, “This is very good title. This is very good blog name. This is related article.”—making it sound like Zathras is behind the keyboard!

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There are certain ideas that I find completely acceptable in the context of science-fiction, but completely looney in the context of actual science.

Take, for instance, Erich von Däniken’s premise that gods were really ancient alien astronauts. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s way out there in terms of science. It assumes that (a) myths are historically accurate, (b) aliens exist, and (c) low-tech humans couldn’t possibly have created things like Stonehenge, pyramids, giant stone heads, etc. Not to say it’s not possible that aliens visited the planet in the distant past—just that comparative mythology and architecture aren’t exactly compelling evidence.

On the other hand, I have no problem with the concept in science-fiction. It’s the basic premise of Stargate. The movie and early seasons of SG-1 focused on Egyptian mythology and technology, and in subsequent seasons of the show, just about every ancient legend has turned out to have an alien race behind it. It also figures into the backstory of Babylon 5, with the Vorlons having visited nearly every known race in ancient times, insinuating themselves into local religions and engineering telepaths over the course of centuries.

(via Sclerotic Rings and *** Dave)

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Since Star 98.7 has suddenly decided to play actual music in the mornings last week, I’ve listened to it a couple of times on the way to work. They do still seem to like playing the same 10 songs over and over again, so there’s only so much I can take before switching over to another station, but something strange jumped out at me about their new slogan.

“Today’s Music Alternative”

I’m sure they intend it to mean an alternative source for music, but it sounds like an alternative to music. And considering they’ve dropped their talk shows and DJs in favor of more time for music, I don’t think that’s the message they’re trying to convey.

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Animaniacs DVD colume 1 cover artEver since TV shows started coming out on DVD en masse, I’ve been waiting for Animaniacs. I didn’t grow up with the show, but it was a big part of my senior year of high school and the first couple of years of college.

They didn’t even have the whole series on VHS—just a paltry five or so tapes with cartoons stitched together by theme.

Well, this morning I got an email from aeryncrichton that Pinky and the Brain would be coming to DVD in July. I figured, great, but what I really want is still Animaniacs. So I started looking around the site, and it turns out that Animaniacs Season 1 is being released on the same day!

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Yesterday, we drove past the same tax accountant who had a Dancing Statue of Liberty out front a few weeks ago. This time, there was a guy outside dressed as Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam, and an interesting countdown.

Also, notice the banner indicating 2 days to April 15. Recall that this was on Saturday… in other words, April 15!

Of course, because of the weekend, income tax is due on the 17th this year, so the countdown was correct if you think of it as a countdown to the tax deadline. I figure they just didn’t want to get a different banner just for this year. But it just sounds like celebrating the Fourth of July on July 3.

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On Friday I received an email about the “IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 D&D FORUM.”

My first thought on seeing the subject was, “Well, it’s clearly not Dungeons and Dragons.” So I thought about other D&Ds, and the next thing I thought of was drag and drop. I knew that couldn’t be it, either. Who would hold a conference on drag-n-drop? (Now, I can see a D&D game dealing with a “dragon drop” contest, but that’s another issue entirely!)

I opened the newsletter, and of course it was a design and development conference. Should’ve been obvious, but I just didn’t think of it.

Any acronyms/abbreviations you’ve mixed up? Not just acronyms for which you know more than one meaning, but the ones that you’ve seen in one context, and the first meaning you thought of was from some other field entirely.

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