Well, I finally found out the reason for the Grass Under Renovation signs. I passed a median where a road crew was setting out what I first thought was sod, but then realized was Astroturf.
Nice one. I suppose it’ll save money on water and maintenance, but then so would painting the concrete green.
Couldn’t they just put in some native plants and leave them alone?
From time to time on our morning (and sometimes evening) commute, we’ve spotted a multicolored blimp. Sometimes it’s in the air, sometimes it’s parked on a field.
For obvious reasons, we’ve started calling it the “puzzle blimp.”
We kept wondering just whose blimp it was. There was no logo we could see, and blimps are mainly used for advertising. Well, that last photo we caught turns out to have the answer:
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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)
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.
Remember the guy who noticed the same model in a ton of spam and started stringing the ads together into An Unsolicited Commercial Love Story?
In the past week I’ve noticed the same model showing up in ad banners on various sites, particularly IMDB and Comics.com—some of them using the same stock photos. (And someone should tell Comics.com that they’re being extremely rude by not only bypassing attempts to block pop-ups, but popping up two windows per visit. Stick with the banners, willya?)
Incidentally, the mystery model was eventually spotted eating lunch in a cafe in Auckland by a reader of cockeyed.com, and she added her own comments to the story.
Maybe it’s the housing costs, but people in San Francisco need a little extra incentive to give out their computer password than people in Liverpool. Last year a survey found that 71% would reveal their password for a chocolate bar. A similar survey this month in San Francisco found that 66% would give it up for a coffee.
At least Verisign made good on the offer—with a $3 Starbucks gift card.
