Here’s the WTF?!?!?!!!! moment of the day. Actual spam received over the weekend:
Sell Your Organs Online!
Reply to this message if your interested in selling your organs!
Seriously, what the hell?
Forget the fact that selling organs is illegal in the US. And I’m sure mailing them across state lines would be a felony. And you sure as heck can’t list them on eBay. Or Amazon—can you imagine? “15 new and used livers available.” “Customers who purchased kidneys also bought…”
I stopped in a Starbucks after lunch last Wednesday. I confused the barista by ordering a frappucino—he said something about how I was going to freeze my kidneys or something, and when I remarked that I was going to be in the office, he said he was joking with everyone who ordered anything cold. (Local readers may recall that last week was not particularly warm by SoCal standards.)
I also noticed a stack of boxes by the wall, all of them like this:
(For the record, this was November 9.) I assumed they were full of Starbucks’ Christmas and holiday-themed merchandise, but it was the phrasing that got me. The holidays start November 10? That’s kind of early, isn’t it?
I suppose it depends on which holidays we’re talking about. Usually, “The Holidays” refers to the Thanksgiving–Christmas period that also manages to encompass Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Boxing Day. (Wait, no one actually observes Boxing Day? Well, never mind, then.) They could be including Veterans’ Day, but there’s not much in the way of decorations, and the merchandising possibilities don’t tend to overlap much with coffee paraphernalia.
Hmm, here’s an odd thought. In America, we always associate snow with Christmas. Hence the snowflakes printed on the box. But in the southern hemisphere, December is the beginning of summer. I suspect Christmas songs like “Winter Wonderland” don’t get much play in Australia.
Mark Evanier’s review of Penn and Teller: Off the Deep End reminded me of two things: First, I forgot to watch the show. Secondly, on Thursday evening I caught an interesting commentary on the radio: Alien Encounters: Dolphins and a Magician. And no, it’s not Penn sounding off—it’s Teller. Yes, the guy who (almost) never talks on camera. While preparing for the underwater magic show, he turned around and came face to face with a dolphin, and… well, it’s probably best if you let him tell the story.
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.
Woke up early (well, early for me) so we could get out and hit the polls before work. I was amazed that there was only one person in line ahead of us. Not only that, but there was only one line, not three or four broken up by last name.
Well, it’s a mid-term election. Plus it’s morning, and the last few years we’ve gone in the evening. (There was one year that I voted at lunch, but I had to drive Katie to the poll after work anyway, so it’s easier if we just both go at the same time.) It must have been last year that the line was so long that we got there at 6:30 or 7:00 and didn’t finish until after the polls “closed” — meaning they didn’t let anyone else get into line. (Sensibly, they allowed anyone who was in line by 8:00 to vote.) And there were a lot of people waiting behind us!
Now on to programming for a few hours until Microsoft kicks their patches out the door.
If you live in California and you’re a registered voter: vote!
If you like the initiatives on the ballot, vote them in.
If you don’t like them, vote them out.
If you’re disgusted with the way the initiative process has been subverted by the very political machines and special interest groups it was supposed to circumvent, protest it by voting them down, not by abstaining.
This view of the Moon and Venus was taken from our apartment balcony earlier this evening.
I also took a picture yesterday, from the top of a parking structure near John Wayne Airport (we went to a show at UCI later that evening.) You can see the red trail an airplane left as it crossed the frame:
Having seen that pairing last night, I knew I had to be ready to catch it today! I figured the Moon would be a lot closer, but I hadn’t expected it to actually pass Venus tonight. It really gives you an idea of how far the Moon moves in 24 hours. (or, in this case, roughly 23 hours, since yesterday’s picture was taken at 6:00 and today’s was taken at 5:10).
To be honest, I wasn’t actually certain it was Venus. It was my first thought, because of the brightness and the color, but I kept thinking it was too far from the sun. I kept trying to convince myself it was Jupiter or maybe Saturn (it wasn’t red enough for Mars, and besides, I’d seen Mars on the other side of the sky the night before). When I looked it up and realized it was Venus, I started remembering my days in high school when I would walk to school for a 7:00am “zero period” class. In winter it would sometimes be just dark enough when I left to see the planets and the brightest stars. I would keep my eye on Venus as the sky brightened, trying to see how late I could still see it by knowing exactly where to look.
