...that I'd do anything for a buck except write menus.
Here, pretty much, is why:
9 phrases to ban from restaurant menus
Restaurants, let's not forget, are in the business of selling you food (emphasis on the word "selling.") All too often, restaurateurs rely on tired menu cliches that they believe make the food sound better. But we see through it.
“Russians love fairy tales and Communism was like a fairy tale,” Mr. Eskenazi said. “Russians also have a nostalgia for tragedy.”
link: Showcase: Russian Noir - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com
(For the photo gallery, click the link.)
FYI- The white bricks in the main lobby are actually art work. . .
Back when the JUMRF was built it was required by state statues that a portion of our appropriations for construction be used for art.
link: UNDERNEWS: IF YOU NEED WHITE BRICKS, PLEASE GO TO HOME DEPOT & NOT OUR LOBBY
The low-cost airline would charge passengers less on "bar stools" with seat belts around their waists.
link: Ryanair to make passengers stand - Telegraph
...but in general, bar stools with seat belts sounds like a fairly good idea.
From a Netflix movie description:
Amy Adams stars in this truth-inspired tale...
The truth-inspired movie in question is the upcoming Nora Ephron effort, "Julie & Julia," which features Meryl Streep as Julia Child (forget Amy Adams, whoever Amy Adams is), and that should be all you need to know about that.
But what a minute. Isn't shooting exploding things into the sky the very essence of July 4? Maybe North Korea is just honoring Independence Day.
link: Left I on the News
Yes, sir, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over on San Francisco's not-in-my-backyard crowd. Gap founder Don Fisher wanted to hand the city a brand-new $100 million museum, a priceless art collection and renovations to historic buildings in the Presidio.
Thank God we got that stopped. Now we can keep the abandoned buildings,
...Asked to choose between saving old buildings and a bowling alley versus world-class art, San Francisco picked old buildings and bowling.
What is this, Milwaukee?
link: Only S.F. would snub gift of world-class museum
So we won't have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore, it seems. More mercifully, we won't have Vista. I've had it with Vista, really, I'm not kidding. It's possible that its current crankiness has more to do with a recent update to VMware Fusion than to the dozen or so Vista updates I installed the other day, I don't care. I'm figuring I want to keep Fusion around because I want to play around with Ubuntu and that runs slick as a whistle in the virtual machine, but Vista no thank you, we're done. Life is too short.
In fact, I've decided I've learned all I want to know about Windows, ever, and Microsoft is on it's own from here on out. With us, it's over. The only thing I need to do on Windows now is make an occasional tweak to my class files and I can do that fine by just going to work a half hour early or staying a half hour late, say, three or four times a year. Beyond that, there really is no point.
Windows, at least, was somewhat useful in its day. Palin, I'm not so sure.
This weekend, creninetive co-vocabularists are invited three turn their aeleventions three Inflationary Language. Additional points will be awarded five referring three current events. Now, get three it!
link: Weekend Competition: Inflationary Language - Schott’s Vocab Blog - NYTimes.com
Noted by our Midwest Bureau
Update | 5:30 p.m. Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska announced Friday that she would step down by the end of the month and not seek a second term as governor, fueling speculation that she is trying to position herself as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
link: Palin to Resign as Governor of Alaska - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com
...we should run our automobiles on speculation since speculation is so easily fueled.
A sprawling war film, Midway stars nearly every actor who wasn't in A Bridge Too Far.
From a movie description on Netflix.
Deputies raided a home at 907 Ocean Ave. near Witham Field airport around 6 p.m. Friday and found about $100,000 in fireworks and explosives, according to a sheriff's report.
In a statement e-mailed to reporters Thursday, Jenny Sanford called her husband's behavior inexcusable but said she may be able to give him another chance. It was her first public remark since Gov. Mark Sanford told The Associated Press that Maria Belen Chapur is his soul mate but he is trying to fall back in love with his wife.
"Forgiveness opens the door for Mark to begin to work privately, humbly and respectfully toward reconciliation with me," she said. "However, to achieve true reconciliation will take time, involve repentance, and will not be easy."
link: SC gov's wife may be able to forgive affair - Yahoo! News
Known for thinking outside the box, electronics maker Apple Inc. is now apparently working on an in-the-box concept that could provide power to iPods, iPhones and other electronics devices still inside their retail packaging, allowing them to display demo videos and receive firmware updates while hanging unopened on a shelf in a retail store.
link: AppleInsider | Apple developing "active packaging" for iPods and iPhones
See that yellow thing (I've forgotten exactly what it stands for but I'm pretty sure it's something good) down there by Sunday? At the beginning of the week, it was on Thursday, which would be today. And then it slipped to Friday and drifted off to Saturday. Now even Saturday - Saturday! the 4th of freakin' July! - has been abandoned.
And it's been doing that very thing, the yellow dot has, for at least a month. Maybe more. So long I can't remember. Sob.
I recently bit on a David Baldacci novel. I do it once every year or two like clockwork (I have a cheap clock) and regret it every time. So I was especially happy to notice Sara Paretsky's name in the Library of Congress section at iTunes U.
If you do not know about iTunes U get yourself a copy of iTunes - you can download it free from Apple - and get yourself to iTunes U, do not pass go, and check it out. Don't miss the new Library of Congress section. It's extremely cool. (Yes, all that stuff is probably available on the LOC's web site if you can find it there, but the problem, there, is you have to find it there).
You may have to set up an account with the iTunes store to use it but whatever, everything at iTunes U is free. And excellent.
And, as it turns out, I found an interview with Sara Paretsky there, from which I discovered a couple of her books I haven't read yet, and they are now on my to-get-to list at audible, and ain't it a wonderful world.
The U.S. economy lost 467,000 jobs in June as the national unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, the government announced on Thursday morning....
A broader measure of labor underutilization that accounts for people who've stopped looking for work hit 16.5% in June, a 0.1 percentage point increase.
link: Unemployment Rate Hits 9.5 Percent As Economy Sheds 467,000 Jobs In June
We need to find ourselves some better expecters pretty soon.
You have to be entertained by the completely opposed right-wing arguments - "socialized" health insurance (or medicine) both works so well that it will be "unfair competition" with insurance companies and works so poorly that you will be paying a fortune for long wait times and no choice. Weirdly, the arguments the industry is making in Washington have leaned heavily on the former lately - that it's the government's job to protect the industry from competition rather than to protect Americans from predatory, fraudulent "health insurers". See, they have to defraud you or they won't survive - and gods forbid anything should happen to our holy "health insurance" industry.
link: The Sideshow July 2009 Archive
A major story in the Washington Post today begins with the following claim:
Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday.
...And, guess what? No such statement from Saddam Hussein appears in the interviews, which are all online at the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
link: Left I on the News
Rohack, who recently became AMA president, suggested Wednesday that the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program available to Congress members and other federal employees could be expanded as a public option. That would avoid having to create a new program from scratch, he said.
"If it's good enough for Congress, why shouldn't it be good enough for individuals who don't have health insurance provided by their employers?" Rohack said.
link: AMA open to government-funded health insurance option - CNN.com
Whatever the merits of the federal employee plan may be (I have no idea) I'm just wondering, are there any employers around these days who actually provide health insurance? As in, provide? Or do they just provide the opportunity to buy health insurance, sometimes at a significant discount? Seems to me the latter, and seems to me that's not "providing" at all.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – A US Airways flight to Los Angeles was diverted to Albuquerque after a passenger removed all of his clothing mid-flight, forcing flight attendants to cover him with a blanket before he was arrested, authorities said Wednesday.
link: Flight diverted after passenger undresses in seat - Yahoo! News
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As American waistlines have expanded since 1960, so has their consumption of gasoline, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University say.
Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a result of extra weight in vehicles. And when gas prices average $3 a gallon, the tab for overweight people in a vehicle amounts to $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.
So, obviously, we don't need a higher CAFE standard, we need to ban potato chips.
Well?
SHANGHAI — The buying and selling of the make-believe currencies used in online gaming has become so widespread that Chinese authorities fear it will affect the real economy.
link: China Limits Use of Gamers’ Online Currency - NYTimes.com
Hemingway said that the problem with Henry Miller was that he got laid in the afternoon once and thought he invented it. Governor Mark Sanford got laid in Argentina two weeks ago and the way he continues to go on about it, you'd think he cracked cold fusion. The man won't shut up. If Henry Miller talked about his sex life as much as Governor Mark Sanford talks about his sex life, people would have started thinking he was some kind of perv.
link: Chris Kelly: God is My Doorman: Mark Sanford for Non-Christians
General Electric, the world's largest industrial company, has quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key rescue programs for banks.
At the same time, GE has avoided many of the restrictions facing other financial giants getting help from the government.
link: Loophole Helps GE Benefit From Bank Rescue Program - washingtonpost.com
