Society for Aesthetic Deletions

Live frog found in airline meal

"There was a bit of consternation by the passenger who called back the attendant," said Fergus Small of New Zealand's Ministry of Agriculture. The attendant removed the salad and the frog, which was killed by quarantine staff when the aircraft landed.

And now all I can think about is Christine Lavin's "Fly on a Plane" song.

Rescuers prep for hybrid car accident

The growing popularity of hybrid vehicles poses a new danger for rescuers at accident scenes: a network of high-voltage circuitry that may require some precise cutting to save a trapped victim.

It's mainly about cutting into doors to get someone out of a car, but it's still good to note. Use rubber gloves and boots, and disconnect the battery, if you can. And cut into the roof.

Courtesy of Slashdot.

Neurotic Fishbowl: Burn It - The Spring 2004 Edition

If I don't have enough covers (not likely, considering the number of cover albums I have), I'll just bug Jack for a few songs.

Thanks to Ginger for pointing it out.

It's a Very Special Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as the Fab Five meet Wally West for the Makeover of Champions!

happyminion: Things Just Keep Getting Better

Only recommended if you've seen at least one episode of Queer Eye. And keep beverages away from you while reading, for the sake of the keyboards/monitors.

I've signed up for all my TBR games, and it looks like Lou and I will probably not be playing in too many games together. Especially the last slot, which he and I each starred for a different game.

We may be late on Friday, depending on schedules. I'm hoping my first slot choices and GMs are amenable to a bit of a late arrival. But since one is Kill Corwin and the other is Tall Tales (provided I get choice 1 or 2), I don't think it should be a huge problem. Maybe.

We'll just have to see about getting Lou out of work early that day.

Slashdot has an article today which links to this Wired article, which features Hybrid Buzz!, a blog by Pete Blackshaw, wherein he details how unsuccessful he has been at getting 40+ mpg with his Honda Civic Hybrid.

I know that Jack has been getting very good mileage with his Prius, at least 40 (right, Jack?). So I'm not sure where the difficulty lies.

And another link for Jack, if he wasn't aware of it before. :)

Courtesy of Slashdot.

Well, this has sure got the blogosphere in an uproar.

I just got my notice of admission to the beta test on Tuesday. I hadn't even had time to download it and install it anywhere yet, and it's gone "live," at least the developer version.

Will Six Apart lower their pricing? While a lot of people are hoping for it, I really don't think it'll happen. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it is going to kill gaming blogs. Yes, if I upgrade, I'm going to have to pull some of my blogs. But many of them are inactive. I can easily just save the HTML pages and delete the blog, then upload the pages back as static sites. (for example, the Weight Watchers Blog is now defunct, and I was just keeping the pages up for reference.)

I did contribute to MT back in the day. Pre 2.0, possibly. But right now, and within the foreseeable future, I can't afford the $49.95 that it will cost me to keep the semi-active blogs I have and remove some of the authors. And there's no way I'll be paying $99.95 just to keep all the authors I currently have.

My personal thoughts is that the amount of authors/blogs is on the small side, at least for the collaboratory stuff a lot of us were/are doing. But I don't know that we're the typical blogger user, which probably is one author, one blog.

I wish Ben and Mena the best of luck with Six Apart. And lots of drinks to drown out the shouts of outrage.

I've gotten my BurnIt recipient list, and I ended up having to pare down the playlist I'd created. I think I was over by three songs, and damn me if I can't remember what the three songs were before I tossed them. *sighs*

Now, I just have to figure out how to put it in a good order. I've made Anne a preliminary CD, and we'll see if she thinks the order is good or not.

And now I am totally thrilled by using Clutter, no matter how much I whined about it earlier. The mosaic is just beautiful, and will definitely be included, printed out on our nice color laser printer, with the jewel case and another page with complete song listing.

Mena has posted some clarifications to the new MT 3.0 licensing agreement here. It will mollify some folk, but not all. The change in the blogs/authors is a good one, but I don't see this satisfying everyone.

But it may make me reconsider how my blogs are arranged. I could put all my blogs on one page URL and I would be covered under the new agreement. But it doesn't look like I can have them on separate pages, like I do now. Or maybe I can.

Ah well, I've got another blog installation where I can play with the beta and see how it works first. There's not so much there that if I ended up going to another platform, it wouldn't be a huge hardship.

A bit windy today here in Fall River. It's keeping the temps down, but making it hard to keep the $100+ worth of comics and gaming materials we picked up yesterday (been a while since we cleaned out the folder) hard to keep on tables.

Kenya, the live-action version. Or maybe it's the furry version.

They need to have the "Holy Crap. Lions! Tours" on the side of their "bus," though.

They want to know what we're doing with MT, it seems. How we use it. So, here we go...

Six Log: How are you using the tool?

I run this blog, and that's about it for now that are actually *live*.

In the past, I had

* Weight Watchers blog, which had three authors who posted consistently and two more authors who never actually posted, I think. One of them may have made one entry.

* Pop Goes the Culture, which at its height had four authors (only one (besides me) was overlap with other blogs), but only had two who ever posted regularly.

* Whitespace, my writing blog, which has been defunct for some time.

* A family blog, wherein all members of my family had the opportunity to get logins (only two of whom asked for logins, and then never actually used them) and post updates on what was going on in their lives. This was "secret," the URL only shown to the family members. I have 6 brothers and sisters, and 9 nieces and nephews, and my mother as potential authors.

* An RPG blog at a hidden URL, set up with Anne, supposed to be used for her to play while she took a break from my game. It didn't actually go very far, alas.

* Another RPG blog, started when Lou started his new Sunday D&D 3.5 game, which I haven't actually ever posted to, since I take a decent amount of notes in game, and I haven't been bothered to rewrite them up afterwards.

* A blog for a friend who was taking a class. It was for a project, but it was also free and I had the space. It's still there, not active, but she had just considered restarting it for another purpose when all this happened, and indicated she was willing to remove it, if it was going to cost me money.

I also have another MT installation where my other writing is located, on another domain name. But I am the only author there and there is only one instance of it.

*whew*

Not only did Lou like the series finale of Angel, he actually got a lot of the bits that many folk, like me, missed.

I was worried there, that he might be in the "I don't like it" camp.

And he didn't like the Smallville finale as much as me, but then again, I'm not as big a classic comic fan as he is.

ETA: Lou told me this morning that it wasn't that he didn't like the finale. I just thought it would be an excellent series ender, if they weren't renewed. He didn't think so, because it's not, to him, Superman.

I think the main thing people are forgetting when they're talking about the Star Wars movies, is that after the first, Lucas was only involved as the story writer.

MSNBC - Can 'Star Wars: Episode III' be saved?

I do not think that Hayden Christensen needs to be axed. I think he can do it, if put in the hands of a talented director with an excellent script to back him. Hell, I didn't think Leonardo DiCaprio could act, until I saw him in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, and then I wondered what had happened, since that was an early film of his. Plus, if Steven Soderbergh can get top quality acting out of Jennifer Lopez (Out of Sight), then I'm certain someone can do it for Christensen.

And we all know that Natalie Portman can act. Well, anyone who has seen The Professional/Léon knows it.

Come on, George! Give it up! While there's still time! Like I asked once a few times before!

Courtesy of Slashdot.

I started watching Sweet Home Alabama earlier tonight. It's a movie the husband and I saw a few years ago, in Virginia, actually, at a friend's wedding. We went down early to meet his fiancée and spend some time with them before the wedding, but they had things to do to prepare and we had a lot of free time.

So we went and saw the movie, as romantic comedies are favorites of both of us, believe it or not. I recall as we left the theater, that we talked about Patrick Dempsey's role in this movie, and how Reese Witherspoon's Melanie seemed to be really in love with him. And when it came down to it in the end, she chose Jake instead of Andrew. And Andrew thought about it when she made her choice, smiled at her, and left her to her choice.

He didn't get mad, he wasn't jealous, he just smiled and walked away.

Tonight, I got up about halfway through the movie to do the dishes in the kitchen. Our dishwasher finally broke in what appears to be a non-repairable way two weeks ago tomorrow, and the landlord hasn't done anything to fix it yet. So the dishes tend to pile up until one of us (and that's usually not me, alas) breaks and does the pile.

It was while washing those dishes that my mind wandered to a lot of places. And where it ended up, as I was down to my last few items, was this...

I want my Sweet Home Alabama sequel.

Most people wouldn't think that the movie needed a sequel. It had a happily ever after ending, and there was nowhere for the characters to go, unless they want to break them up.

But it's not Melanie and Jake I want a sequel for. I want one for Andrew Hennings. I want him to find love again, and have his happily ever after ending.

They do this in romance novels. If "Sweet Home Alabama" had been a romance novel, the next book would likely be Andrew's book. He was a plot device in the first book, the thing that drives the heroine into the arms of the hero. But he also was left hanging. And he wasn't the villain. If anything, his mother (played to the hilt by Candace Bergin) was, for trying to keep Melanie and Andrew apart. Even though Andrew wasn't the hero.

I know I'll never see it. Hollywood wouldn't see bankability in the follow-up story of a semi-successful movie. But in the romance field, his story would come. Readers would demand it. The author would have written that into the proposal, a two or three-book deal. Perhaps the third would deal with Andrew's sister (if he had one), or perhaps his bride's brother or sister. Melanie was an only child, and there's no mention of siblings for Jake, and most of the other characters are married.

I want my sequel. And I'll never see it, alas.

Lou, this looks to me like something right out of Fallout or Fallout 2.

Blackmesa HLｲ by piloux

Hopefully the site won't be slashdotted and go down. I may try to save some of the pictures in case it does.

(and yes, I know it's a Half-Life case mod, but it also looks Fallout-esque to me)

Courtesy of, where else, Slashdot.

When, after you've made two CDs because you had too much to fit on one for the Burn It Covers Edition, you realize that there is yet another song you could have put on it that was a cover that you completely forgot about.

Not that I don't have enough covers to fill up a few more CDs if I wanted to. But this wasn't from a covers album. It was the Indigo Girls doing Dire Straits' "Romeo And Juliet," and I'd just ripped a bunch of Indigo Girls CDs after I realized I only had the one live set here at work.

But hey, I am doing their cover of "Midnight Train to Georgia" in my CD set.

Now, to buy more CDs at Staples so I can finish burning by Friday!