According to Marketplace, critics of President Bush’s flu pandemic preparedness proposal contend that it’s too focused on vaccines and antiviral drugs, and that the money would be more effectively used by monitoring outbreaks and trying to stamp out bird flu in the third world.
In other words, they say we should take the fight to the flu abroad so we don’t have to fight it at home. Why does that sound familiar? 😉
Over the past few months, DC Comics has attempted to straighten out the origins of two female characters who were left with screwed-up origins after Crisis on Infinite Earths: Donna Troy and Power Girl. The two origins, however, took opposite approaches. Continue reading
WWW, while convenient to type, is rather unwieldy when spoken (at least in English). “Double-U double-U double-U dot some site dot com” takes a while to say. It’s not like, say, AAA, which can be easily spoken as “Triple-A.” Fortunately, these days most major sites have their servers configured to return the same web with or without the www. prefix, so you sometimes hear a website described with just its domain name.
This morning I caught the end of an interview on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report, and the announcer explained that the full version of the interview was available on their website, “dub dub dub dot marketplace dot org.”
I love carving jack-o-lanterns. These days, though, I don’t have much motivation to do one unless there’s a prize involved. So when I saw that someone on Puzzle Pirates was holding a contest for piratey-themed pumpkin carving, I jumped on it. This is my rendition of the navigation puzzle from the game, and my first-ever attempt at a projector pumpkin. I think it looks okay.
The lit picture is pretty dark, but it had to be or the “Arrr!” on the wall wouldn’t show up.
Suggestions for next year, or even out-of-season carvings for this year, are being taken……
I keep calendars displaying both the current month and the next month up in my cube at work. I figured I’d better post this configuration before it stopped being what I got to look at every day:
Saw this at Target today. I suppose I shouldn’t be much of a wine purist, since I don’t drink much myself (I think we have one bottle in the apartment, and we haven’t opened it in the year+ we’ve had it)—but somehow I can’t bring myself to buy wine-in-a-box.
I mean, think about it. “You, me and a box of wine.” How appealing does that sound?
Then of course there’s the fact that the boxes are roughly the size of the Macintosh G4 Cube. And of course, that brings up thoughts of the WINE project (which allows many Windows applications to run on Linux), but of course that won’t run on a PowerPC chip…
I dropped into Sav-on briefly today. Among other things I wanted to top off the supply of Halloween candy for Monday. Imagine my surprise to find that Halloween was crammed into half an aisle, and there were two aisles of Christmas already. (You may notice that the sign above this one doesn’t say “Seasonal” or even just “Christmas.” “Christmas” was the next aisle over. This was labeled “Christmas Lights,” presumably to avoid duplicate signs.)
Yes, the Christmas stuff is already up, and it’s still October. It’s annoying enough when malls put up decorations and start playing Christmas songs before Thanksgiving! Soon, buying holiday decorations is going to be like buying seasonal clothing. You’ll have to finish your Christmas shopping in July, or you’ll have to rely on the remaindered stuff that the stores couldn’t get rid of. And you’ll have to pre-order Independence Day fireworks in December, and hope they’re still legal to set off by the time summer rolls around.
