First things first: There is nothing finer than sipping an añejo tequila, a special-reserve single-barrel bourbon or a martini made with a craft-distilled gin. I could spend hours extolling the virtues of the super-premium spirits you can now find in your local liquor store. Those are the spirits of my dreams.
Dreams, however, are not what this is about. This is about snapping back to reality.
# 2007 May 30
Pearls Before Swine is my favorite currently published comic, and last Sunday’s installment touched my heart in just the right place:
(click image for the entire comic)
# 2007 May 30
Reference Shotgun Guide to settle all your shotgun-calling controversies.
The only rule I remember practicing differently is Section I, Rule 4:
Early calls are strictly prohibited. All occupants of the vehicle (including the driver) must be outside of the building and directly on the way to the vehicle before shotgun may be called. Under no circumstances may a person call shotgun inside a building. For sake of simplicity, a garage is considered to be outside. Parking structures and detached garages are always considered as being outdoors, even if they are underground.
We held that only the caller and driver need be outside, the laggers remaining inside be damed.
# 2007 May 30
Concerned about the spread of historical mis-truths, Philadelphia City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown proposes to test and license tour guides:
“Bring it on,” said Jill Lawrence, a Colonial re-enactor. She said she often corrects tourists’ misinformation — like whether Betsy Ross, the flag-maker who was a three-time widow, killed her husbands. Not true.
# 2007 May 29
Are you saying that between two choices, one which involves having more shit on your body and the other less, you’re picking option “more”?
I can’t disagree with anything they say.
# 2007 May 24
Next Saturday, up to 10,000 people are expected to descend on Penn State’s Beaver Stadium to pick their way through 62 tons of student detritus at the annual “Trash to Treasure” sale, which has raised more than $200,000 for the United Way.
Will there be tailgating?
# 2007 May 23
Patrice Oneal on Fox News, commentating on the latest Opie & Anthony nonsense.
# 2007 May 15
Scott Adams hypothesizes on levels of imagination:
Presumably, if you have no imagination whatsoever, you need to get all of your stimulation from the environment, mostly from other people, or at least TV shows about other people. You wouldn’t want to be alone with your thoughts for more than two minutes because your thoughts would bore the living piss out of you.
On the other end of the spectrum, if your imagination is extraordinary, interaction with other people will just get in the way of the incredible experiences you could otherwise be having entirely in your head.
# 2007 May 15
New York Times:
Accompanied by six graphs, two tables and equations whose terms include “bologna” and “carpet,” it’s a thorough microbiological study of the five-second rule: the idea that if you pick up a dropped piece of food before you can count to five, it’s O.K. to eat it.
# 2007 May 15
Study recommends trashing the current school system and starting over with universal pre-school and earlier college:
Create state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move either on to community college or to a university-level high school curriculum.
# 2007 May 14
The brand new Chairman and CEO of Bruster’s Ice Cream is Barack Obama. Not only is he trying to take control of the country, but also the best ice cream chain in the U.S. His favorite flavor is Birthday Cake. He has stated that if elected to be President, that he will add a Bruster’s to the White House. He will get rid of the Lincoln Suite and replace it with the Bruster’s.
As of 4:59 PM EDT.
# 2007 May 11
Daniel of Crooked Timber:
There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this; Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer.
I hate Budweiser, but this is a good defense of a generic beer.
# 2007 May 11
1:30:45
Clock Time: 1:35:27. Chip Time: 1:30:45. Distance: 10-miles. Location: Philadelphia, PA.
# 2007 May 06
Flickr Uploadr annoyingly fills the “title” field with the filename of every picture you drop in. Flickr grabs the metadata from the file itself, but only if you leave the “title” field blank. So every title needs to be deleted for Flickr to properly read the metadata.
An annoyingly repetitive task in an otherwise smooth workflow? Sounds like a job for Applescript.
I fired up Script Editor, launched PreFab’s UI browser, rolled up my sleeves, and found someone else already wrote one.
Reid Beels’ script works as advertised, making my camera -> Lightroom -> Flickr workflow almost seamless.
# 2007 May 04
Neal Pollack:
In January, my beloved Los Angeles Dodgers announced that they were turning Dodger Stadium’s right-field bleachers into an all-you-can-eat pavilion. Tickets would cost $35 in advance and $40 on game days. In return, fans could gorge like George Kennedy in The Naked Gun. The menu would include nachos, hot dogs, peanuts, popcorn, and soft drinks, what one Dodger PR flack called “basic ballpark fare that most fans enjoy.”
# 2007 May 03
After taking the plunge and purchasing Adobe Lightroom the day the introductory pricing expired ($100 off of $299), I was delighted to see James Duncan Davidson switched from Aperture to Lightroom.
It never hurts to have your purchases validated by the pros.
# 2007 May 03
Dr. Sherwin Nuland looks at resuscitation and discovers we have it backwards:
“After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.
But if the cells are still alive, why can’t doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed.
# 2007 May 02
These are all the posts on scotttroyan.com during May 2007. Recent posts are listed here.
All contents copyright 1995-2008 by Scott Troyan unless differently noted.