July 2007 Archives

Snowbird loves him some tasty greens, but Celery is eat-shy in front of the camera:

(Technorati tags: parakeets)

When geeks go on political rants:

British Suspects Detained in "Cheese Bomb" Training Run

Miami, FL (APE) - Transportation Security Administration authorities today confirmed the arrest of two British suspects in connection with a recent spate of what are described as "dry run" airline bombings. Authorities stated that the two may likely have been complicit in what are described as fake devices using modeling clay or block cheese that were seized in four separate incidents in the last two years at various US airports.

More, from My Left Wing...

(Technorati tags: cheese terrorism, homebody security)

The opening gambit of last night's Colbert Report:

(Technorati tags: Stephen Colbert, Harry Potter)

Once you’re finished with Harry Potter and the Deathly Halllows and you’re after another magic fix, head over to the Cosimo Blog. Cosimo is the boutique publisher I freelance for, and I’ve made some suggestions for diving into the history of magic in myth and folklore in classic works Cosimo has reprinted.

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Cosimo, magic, myth)

LOTS OF SPOILERS. DON’T READ THIS POST UNLESS YOU’VE ALREADY FINISHED THE BOOK OR YOU DON’T CARE IF IT’S RUINED FOR YOU.

Spoilers after the jump. You have been warned.

[no spoilers here!]

10:48pm. Done. Whew.

Must assimilate. Will sleep on it and have some reactions tomorrow.

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows)

[no spoilers here!]

8:40pm. Up to page 607, end of Chapter 30...

Amazon copy arrived around 4:30 -- I was already more than halfway through my Borders copy...

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows)

[no spoilers here!]

3:50pm. Up to page 423, end of Chapter 21...

Amazon copy still has not arrived...

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows)

[no spoilers here!]

The staff at Borders at Park Avenue and 59th Street was superorganized about things (although apparently some smoky magic trick set off the fire alarm and brought in a fire marshal). The crowd -- which consisted of way more adults than kids -- was cheerful and excited. Picked up my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at 12:10am. Started reading on the subway on the way home.

At 11:30am, I finished Chapter 10, page 200. I might actually finish today.

Glad I didn't wait for my Amazon copy: it's still not here...

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows)

It never quite made sense to me that so many Christians are so down on Harry Potter. And then I read this in the Washington Post:

Geek critique:

(Technorati tags: iRack, Iraq)

Mark Morford, Gen X columinst for SFGate.com and my geeky spiritual brother, has recently had a very similar experience to mine with regards to making the HDTV plunge. And he wrote about it, of course:

So why I felt the need to sell my perfectly good lump of a TV to a former housemate and then swallow the red pill and sink a small mountain of cash into an enormous, glistening 46" Samsung LCD that weighs almost as much as my ex-girlfriend and blocks out the sun and will likely be obsolete by the time President Obama gives his first State of the Union address (prediction: optimistic, but overall, still pretty screwed) in order that I may be able to see -- what now? NASCAR? "Grey's Anatomy?" Reruns of "Scrubs" on WGN? -- from deep space and still not miss any major plot points, is a bit beyond me.

Much more:

Excellent Harry Potter parody:

via Media Bistro

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Welcome Back Potter)

From Jezebel via Pandagon, Feministing, and a ton of other sites, comes this monstrous example of the evils that Photoshop can be put to:

Real, beautiful woman? Or plastic fembot? Have the photo editors and Photoshop geeks at Redbook not heard that with great power comes great responsibility?

(Technorati tags: Redbook, evils of Photoshop)

Is there anything cooler or nerdier than checkin’ out the new words that are being added to the dictionary? I don’t think so. Merriam-Webster recently clued us in to some of the new additions that will be showing up in the 2007 update of its Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, and I cannot tell you how excited I was to see that such glorious units of language as DVR and soduku were being given a hearty literary slap-on-the-back of approval.

And wait! What’s this? Also on the new-word list: RPG. Wow: are role-playing games finally being recognized by the tome that, I can note that in my capacity as a professional editor, is, in its various editions, the official dictionary of choice for 99.9 percent of major magazines and book publishers? But no: geekiness has not won out. Merriam Webster thinks “RPG” means rocket-propelled grenade. Real-life desert warriors trump the half-elven kind.

(Technorati tags: Merriam Webster)

I am counting the days till Friday night, when I will be lining up outside a Borders in Manhattan to pick up my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (I had preordered from Amazon, but then I learned that Amazon isn’t guaranteeing delivery until 7pm on Saturday, which would have meant the loss of an entire reading day. So I’ll be off to Borders. Not that Amazon would let me cancel my order... bastards.)

Anyway, in the meantime, there seems to be a teeny wheeny bit of buzz about the new book. Like this stuff:

Poor Sam is not doing so well these days.

I noticed blood in his urine the other day, so I took him to the vet, where they found a likely urinary tract infection and some sort of thyroid situation, so he’s now on antibiotics and a thyroid med. The vet will call tomorrow with the results of a second blood analysis, and then we may have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. There definitely seem to be some kidney problems.

When I Googled his thyroid med, Methimaz, I found another cat on the same med who looks amazingly like Sam: Fritzie. Weird.

(Technorati tags: cat, catblogging)

Political blogger Atrios -- a Generation Xer -- has the solution for Iraq at his blog Eschaton:

I'm probably not the only person who has played a game of Risk with someone who, when losing, decided the best course of action was to just give the board a good whack and scatter the pieces.

He’s got a point.

(Technorati tags: Atrios, Eschaton, Risk, Iraq)

It’s been more than a year since I did one of these “Onion or AP” bits, and I have to admit that I’ve given up on reading The Onion because it’s virtually indistinguishable from CNN these days. But then I came across a story on BBC News the other day that boggled my mind. Is it this one?:

Thousands More Dead In Continuing Iraq Victory

Statistics released by the Department Of Defense estimated that 2,937 U.S. troops and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the ongoing American military victory in Iraq.

"Victory deaths are at a higher level than we had anticipated, yes," Gen. George Casey, Jr. said at a press conference shortly after the figures were released. "But one of the crucial lessons of our Vietnam experience is that a victory, in order to remain victorious, can't be abandoned halfway through, or in the case of Iraq, one-eighth of the way through."

Or this one?:

British blamed for Basra badgers

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

Word spread among the populace that UK troops had introduced strange man-eating, bear-like beasts into the area to sow panic.

Onion or AP-- er, BBC?

Now I need a drink.

(Technorati tags: Onion, AP)

Oh, so wrong on so many levels, yet hilarious, too:

J.K. Rowling Hints At Harry Potter Date Rape

(Note: Deeming this "hilarious" does not, of course, constitute any kind of endorsement of rape of any kind, but instead brings it to the hoopla surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and yet should not be interpreted to mean that the blogger will not be at a Borders at midnight on July 21 in order to get her grubby geeky fingers on a copy as soon as is humanly or Muggly possible.)

(Technorati tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hollows)

The first book I've shepherded as editor from manuscript to finished book for Cosimo, the boutique publisher I freelance for, has just been published. It's called The Power of Yin, and it's all about the connection between spirituality and feminism and eco-awareness and saving the humans and all that cool geeky stuff. It's a really interesting book, and I know I'm supposed to say things like that, but it's actually true in this case.

More info on the book at the Cosimo Blog.

(Technorati tags: Power of Yin)

Yesterday was the the 60th anniversary of whatever the hell happened at Roswell, New Mexico, on July 8, 1947. UFO crash? Weather balloon down? Who knows? It’s weird that we commemorate the date not of the actual incident but of the day the Army in Roswell issued a press release about the debris from a “flying disc” it had recovered a couple of weeks earlier... which is the same day it almost immediately issued another press release denying it. Or maybe it’s not so weird. Maybe that day marks the beginning of our collective culture being defined not by fact but by spin.

Fifty thousand people got into the spin this past weekend at the Amazing Roswell UFO Festival, and the story is still spinning, with the recent “news” that a “deathbed confession” by one of the participants of the 1947 events supposedly confirms the “tiny dead ET corpses” aspect of the tale. *yawn* I will believe when a spaceship (the TARDIS, pretty please) lands at the UN, or in Trafalgar Square, or outside the Kremlin. Summer is UFO season, supposedly, so keep your eyes peeled. Could be the aliens are already here, spying on us -- Whitley Strieber thinks so, or not. It must be a beautiful thing to be so noncommital that you can claim to be right no matter what happens.

Spinal Tap do “Stoneghenge,” complete with monoliths in danger of being toppled by a dwarf, and “Big Bottom,” featuring every damn bass player in the U.K.:

Looks like they didn’t play “Warmer Than Hell,” and now I’m wondering if it’s really a real song at all, or just another joke. The only taste we may get of “Warmer Than Hell” is, I suspect, in the 15-minute film documentarian Marty DeBergi debuted back in the spring, in which he details his attempts to get the band back together for Live Earth. (See the film from the link midpage here.) A snippet of a rehearsal of “Warmer Than Hell” features the lyrics “The devil went to Devon, it felt like the fourth degree / He said, ‘Is it hot in here, or is it only me?’”

I guess my Tapgirl dreams of a resurgence of the Tap will go unfulfilled...

(Technorati tags: Spinal Tap, Live Earth)

From Sunday’s Times of London, about Live Earth:

Critics question whether a pop concert, however large, really has the power to make people take climate change more seriously. Others point to deeper contradictions. How, they ask, can an event epitomising global consumerism be a valid way of tackling a problem largely created by the West’s conspicuous overconsumption?

Well, this is too hilarious to let pass by uncommented upon: It looks like just as I spent the entire day writing about Doctor Who and watching/listening to Live Earth, David Tennant was watching/listening to Live Earth, too. I just snapped the image above off the tube during a rerun of a couple of Duran Duran songs this afternoon in London.

Reports are sketchy as to whether Tennant was writing about, or indeed even thinking about me. I’d say the chances are slim, particularly with his ladyfriend, actor Sophia Myles (aka the Girl in the Fireplace), sitting right next to him.

Brownie points to whomever can tell me what the hell is on his T-shirt...

(Technorati tags: Live Earth, David Tennant)

I’ve been watching the Live Earth stuff all day -- I dunno how I got sucked in, but here I am, glued to Bravo all day. I missed Spinal Tap in London -- I dunno how that happened, except that Bravo hasn’t seen fit to show that clip yet, and, oh yeah, I can’t watch the live streams on MSN because MSN wants us to use Internet Explorer to watch the live streams and there is no IE for Mac. I’m sure Spinal Tap’s appearance will be up on YouTube before you can say “choked on someone else’s vomit” -- I’m looking forward to their new song, “Warmer Than Hell,” written especially for Live Earth, but still: freakin’ Microsoft.

I’m picking up geeking out over the new Doctor Whos -- the ones that debuted in the U.S. last night on the Sci Fi Channel -- over at my movie (and sometimes TV) reviewing HQ. Start here.

And here are some Whovian YouTube treats for your amusement:

When fandom goes too far:

John Barrowman -- aka Captain Jack Harkness -- is a huge Doctor Who geek:

(Technorati tags: Doctor Who, fandom, John Barrowman, Captain Jack Harkness)