Amid the old lava flows on the west coast of Hawai‘i, locals have a tradition of arranging coral on the jumbled rocks to create temporary graffiti. It tends to be “friendly” graffiti, more like carving one’s initials in a tree than tagging a freeway wall with spray paint.
We drove past a beautifully drawn whale several times before we finally decided to stop by the side of the road, and Katie stepped out to get a picture:
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Up at the visitor’s center for the Mauna Kea observatories, there’s a sign that says, “Beware of Invisible Cows.” It was dark when we were there, and I tried to get this picture without using the flash since there were people with portable telescopes ten feet away, so it’s really blurry:
Fortunately someone in charge recognized the humor value, and the visitor’s center sells bumper stickers:
Of course, it turns out other people, visiting during the day, have snapped better pictures of the sign.
Update 2025: They still sell stickers, magnets and T-shirts featuring the warning! The T-shirts are printed with the words, but not the cows, in glow-in-the-dark ink, so at night, the cows are in fact invisible. I’m tempted…
Note: Our visit to Mauna Kea was on Saturday, April 9, 2005.
5.3 4.9 near Yucaipa just minutes ago.
7.2 off the coast of Crescent City early yesterday morning.
5.2 near Anza Sunday morning.
Quakes measuring 5+ are fairly common. CA gets several each year.
Three in a week, aside from aftershocks, is unusual.
Of course, the craziest was probably the two unrelated 7+ 7.3 and 6.5 quakes in Landers and Big Bear that hit within hours of each other back in 1992.
I’ve complained about people not reading the page they’re on before they fire off an email or fill out a contact form (and dealt with it here as well), but this is just pathetic—in every sense of the word.
For those who don’t want to RTFA, someone posted a blog entry about Wal-Mart’s entry into online music. A year later, it somehow landed the top search hit for “walmart application online,” and people started leaving comments asking for applications. Dozens of them.
(via IO Error)
While cleaning the apartment this weekend, we found a long-forgotten bag of “Lazy Lizard” Mozilla Coffee. RJ Tarpley’s, the company which sold it (and donated a percentage of profits to the Mozilla Foundation) disappeared last summer. By September, I couldn’t even find a whois record. The domain name has since been picked up by a link farm.
It was decent coffee, and it helped support some good software. And I got a nifty mug while they were still in business. There was maybe half a pound left, but 12-month-old decaf coffee just isn’t fit to drink anymore, so instead of brewing one last pot in salute, we tossed what was left.
A recipe for zucchini loaf showed up in one of the spamtraps over the weekend. It was one of the few that used to be real accounts, so I first thought it was someone’s long-lost friend who had a 4-year-old email address, but I scrolled down to the bottom and there was an unsubscribe link. Possibly some recipe mailing list… but one that hasn’t sent any mail for several years? Add in the fact that the message triggered Razor and the unsubscribe link hit the Outblaze SURBL list, and it’s beginning to look more like spam…but why would a spammer just send out a recipe?
Anyway, there’s just something about the phrase, “The Zucchini Loaf recipe is not for me” that I find amusing.
I received an odd email today which consisted solely of:
Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ….
That which brings the highest happiness!!
A little Googling, and apparently gouranga is a Hare Krishna term for happiness, also used in the sense of “be happy” and is mysteriously scrawled on bridges in the UK. (Hmm, reminds me of the “Anzel is Love” signs someone plastered all over UCI for a few weeks in the mid-1990s.)
It also seems that the gouranga spam has been around a while.
