“I’m not worldly. I’m barely islandly.”
— Peter Stampfel
(in have_moicy, 31 Oct 2005)
Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something
-
a man of the island
-
try conderoga
Yep, another one about pencils. I do like the Dixon Tri-Conderoga, but I don’t think I could quite gush about it as much as Pencil Revolution did. It’s a nice writer, but the first one I tried was a bit gristly for sharpening with a knife. They do smell good. There’s a freshly sharpened one nearby, and it’s doing an excellent “walk through cedar woods” impression.
Just as well the six pack comes with a sharpener. Tri-Conderogas don’t fit a regular one. -
didn’t make it
One of the little guys didn’t make it. There’s a sad little grey fuzzy corpse in the back yard, already pulsing with disco rice and greenbottles.
-
aah! the world is ending!
Telus Teleconferencing have replaced their awful, awful, so awful it’s good wait muzak with popular tunes!
-
General Tso’s Beef
It’s a little known fact that General Tso’s Chicken does not celebrate Zuo Zongtang‘s liking for eating chicken. Instead, it commemorates his pet chicken (whom he named Maude) who travelled everywhere with him in a silk-lined portable coop of fine rosewood.
-
what the tortoise taught us
Just finished Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, the fictional thoughts of Gilbert White‘s pet tortoise. Verlyn Klinkenborg has really captured the pace of the tortoise’s life.
The tortoise/taught us rhyme doesn’t work if you’re Scottish; we pronounce it tor-toys, not taw-TUSS. Lewis Carroll didn’t think beyond the RP.
In memory of Timothy, I’ve geotagged this post with the location of a bridge in a nearby ravine, near which a little turtle used to snooze in the sun.
-
Happy Danish Sockets
Am I losing it, or do Danish power sockets look like smileys?
Two happy people:
Happy person with a chef’s hat (isometric view):
Do these remind you of anything?
-
Danish Modern in Ringkøbing
I’m currently checked into a hotel which reeks of 70s Danish modern — blonde wood, bare brick, smoked glass surfaces — and, like many places in Denmark, cigarette smoke. Being in the presence of an authentic Beocom phone makes up for it though:
Also, there’s a cute little wind farm outside; a few Vestas V27s (or smaller) on lattice towers at 56° 7′ 22.11″ N, 8° 13′ 48.94″ E:
-
so it is true!
First-class airport lounges really do have free beer taps and open spirits gantries. It’s quite the opposite of the little shed that the Midwestern flights depart YYZ from.
-
a sneaking respect for convolvulus
Our front garden seems to be mostly convolvulus; that sneaky bindweed that trails white or pink trumpet-shaped flowers. It grows so fast, I’m wondering if you could harvest it for biomass energy.
I really dislike gardening, except for growing sunflowers. There are a bunch coming up quite well. I wonder if anyone else would like to use the rest of the garden, or suggest things to do with it?
-
… until someone puts an eye out, of course
Can I just say that styrofoam plate + cocktail sticks (the ones with the little fletches on them) + milkshake straw = teh fun blowdart game?
-
best beat neat nest
Beware, nerdiness follows: I generally like my BlackBerry 7130e, but its multiple letters per key can sometimes give the wrong result. Using word frequency lists from the British National Corpus, sqlite, and way too much programming time, I determined that the key sequence with the most possible word results (81?2) produces best, beat, neat or nest. The device itself suggests also brat and bray, so I should try a longer word list — in my copious free time, of course.
The longest (common words in the corpus) that have the same key sequence are employers and employees, which might briefly cause hilarity in an HR or legal context. -
mexican munchies
I just had dinner at El Amanecer, and it was really good.
-
Energy Saving Tips for Canadians, #1: a name thing
Canadians are remarkably profligate in their energy use, and I think I know why. It’s not to do with the oft-cited scale of the country, the size of our houses, our cold winters or our hot summers, it’s something simpler than that; it’s what we call our electricity.
Power here is generally known as hydro, and with it comes images of tree-lined rivers with bears happily fishing for salmon. Local electricity companies tend to have that watery thing in their name: Toronto Hydro, Hamilton Hydro, London Hydro (Crieff Hydro is something quite different, though). Some happy green images, eh?
I propose that we stop using the term hydro, and replace it with the snappier smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro. It’d certainly make yer average Kathy or Doug drop their double-double (or donut, or dumaurier) when they got their smog belching, nuke leaking, only fractionally hydro bill in. Energy use would plummet, and at no cost to anyone!
-
writey
my review of the Noris Ergosoft at Pencil Revolution.
(I just got a lot nerdier than you thought possible, didn’t I?)
-
ants! Ants!! ANTS!!!
We were somewhat troubled by ants last night, but they lapped up that borax, and we don’t see them any more. It’s kind of a sick little monkey way of killing them; feed them something sweet that, when fed to their leader, kills their society.
-
koi? no, quite assertive, actually
Scarborough epiphany: the rather industrial-looking pond on William Kitchen Rd contains several sizeable golden koi carp
-
now that’s what I call shoulder pads
Rather too busy gardening and stuff this weekend to blog. I did see this rather unusual flying thing in the garden; a T-shaped bug.
It’s a plume moth, say the good folks at What’s That Bug?
-
… like the card game
There was one thing I hated about Rumo, and that was finishing it. Walter Moers creates such a complex — yet never serious — fantasy world that leaving it is always hard.
I like the way he’s not afraid to revisit characters from The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear. Most fantasy authors are slavish in keeping their characters’ lives consistent across the volumes. Since Bluebear was the most celebrated liar in Atlantis, what do you expect?
-
dino out
Aargh, I hate finishing an Eric Garcia Rex book. I don’t get lost in too many books, but Eric’s ones do that for me. I’d finished Hot & Sweaty Rex, then re-read Anonymous Rex ‘cos I couldn’t get enough of that dino-noir (dinoir?)
Garcia’s books are clearly works of fiction. I mean, to say that 5% of the population are dinosaurs in heavy disguise — the real number’s much higher …