Links for June 27th through June 30th

Sometime between June 27th and June 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents: Technology has always played a big role in fighting terrorism. Some inventions are truly useful and will undoubtedly save lives, whereas others are so bizarre that one wonders how in the world they got patented.
  • The best God joke ever – and it’s mine!: Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?" (Obviously, that's not the whole joke. Click through and keep reading.)
  • Metafilter looks at ‘Christiane F’, or ‘Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo’: We watched the film in my high school German class, and though I've not seen it since then, I've never forgotten it. Probably a prime reason why my experiments with drugs never went as far as shooting up.
  • Presbyterian assembly votes to drop gay clergy ban: The denomination's General Assembly voted 54 percent to 46 percent today to drop the requirement that would-be ministers, deacons and elders live in "fidelity within the covenant of marriage between and a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness."
  • The Presurfer: Oops!: Some ladies wanted to thank George Brownridge. They soon realized their mistake and the next day this advertisement appeared.

Pride 2008

The Dark Side of the RainbowPride yesterday was a lot of fun. Every other year I’ve gone, I’ve shot from the sidelines, doing my best to get an overview of the entire parade and all the different groups. This year, I decided to try something different. A few weeks ago at the Mercury, dizzy88 recognized me from my Flickr account and suggested I ride along with the Goth Pride float and shoot for them this year. It sounded like a good plan to me, and definitely a different vantage point than I’d had before, so I decided to take that approach.

Prairie needed a day of rest, so she stayed home while I grabbed a bus downtown in the morning. Since the Goth Pride float was towards the end of the parade, I spent some time wandering up and down the staging area, grabbing shots of the various groups as they got ready to go. Once people near our group started moving, I hopped on board the truck, and rode the parade route from there, shooting the crowds to either side of the truck as we made our way along. Much fun, especially as the brakes on the truck were “either on or off,” so any acceleration or deceleration had a tendency to throw us all stumbling from one end of the truck bed to the other. No injuries, but a lot of laughs!

I’m a bit behind in my picture processing right now (I haven’t even gone through what I shot on Memorial Day yet), but I’m hoping to get to my shots later on this week sometime. In the meantime, midnytetragedy has posted her shots, and I’m sure other people will be posting theirs before too long.

Links for June 26th through June 27th

Sometime between June 26th and June 27th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

You Win!

On this day, 60 years ago, The New Yorker published “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson.

People flipped…out–cancelled subscriptions, wrote bags of hate mail. The story was banned outright in South Africa and, according to Wikipedia, ranked seventeenth on Playboy’s list of books most banned by public high schools in the U.S.

This was the only Shirley Jackson story I’d read until I met Prairie, who is a huge Shirley Jackson fan. I was probably in high school when I read it last, so I re-read it a couple of years back, and it’s still an incredibly powerful story.

If you haven’t read it, you can do so here.

(via The Slog, who really should have chosen a different title for their post — there are people who might not have read the story yet, after all.)

Links for June 25th through June 26th

Sometime between June 25th and June 26th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Albanian Custom Fades – Woman as Family Man: For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men.
  • He let them down. He ran around and hurt them.: "Robert" had just pulled off the most epic rickroll in intertubes history. The author of the game had never really intended for it to be a game at all. He just thought it would be funny to put up some creepy notes and see what sort of attention they got.
  • The Big List of Things I Like About LibraryThing: I've been using LibraryThing for quite some time now to track my book collection and what I'm reading. This post has a nice roundup of some of LT's best features.
  • Olympic start gun gives inside runners an edge: Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.
  • Chrysler will offer wireless Internet access in 2009 models: "With the added Internet connectivity, drivers and passengers will be able to get such devices as laptop computers and Nintendo Wii consoles online." Terrifying, though there's a certain dark humor to it. Steering wheel in one hand, Wiimote in the other
  • The Fly: The Opera: Directed by David Cronenberg, music by Howard Shore, and conducted by Placido Domingo. No, I'm not kidding.

Sentenced to two life terms in bed?

Another addition to the list of reasons why I’m going to hell, or, things I really shouldn’t find funny, but do. It’s not the following story that’s funny — to the contrary, it’s rather horrendous — but NetNewsWire’s ‘show corrections’ feature inadvertently had me snickering as my brain ignored the strikeouts and mashed together bits of the two versions of the story summary.

The corrected story

The bit that really kept getting me was that the man “has been sentenced to two life terms in bed, dead from apparent gunshot wounds.”

There’s something seriously wrong with me.

Links for June 25th from 07:42 to 13:30

Sometime between 07:42 and 13:30, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • Really clever advertising campaign for Breeze Excel laundry detergent:: Send detergent samples through the mail wrapped in t-shirts. After the mail has thoroughly munged up the t-shirt 'wrapping', the recipients wash the shirt with the included sample.
  • An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant: "The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11."
  • Religious Groups’ Official Positions on Same-Sex Marriage: Although the Episcopal Church has not explicitly established a position in favor of gay marriage, in 2006 the church stated its “support of gay and lesbian persons and [opposition to] any state or federal constitutional amendment that prohibits same-sex
  • NYT: Reporters Say Networks Put War: Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television "with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad." He said CBS correspondents can "get in there very quic
  • Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less.: 1984: WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism. EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party. WINSTON: Oh, rats.
  • Others’ grass not so green after drunken drive on lawn mower: "The first thing that went through my mind was someone was stealing our mower. And then I thought, wait a minute, we don't have a riding mower."

Links for June 23rd through June 24th

Sometime between June 23rd and June 24th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • June 24, 1947: They Came From … Outer Space?: Pilot Kenneth Arnold sights a series of unidentified flying objects near Washington's Mt. Rainier. It's the first widely reported UFO sighting in the United States, and, thanks to Arnold's description of what he saw, leads [to] the term flying saucer.
  • Bob Dylan On Abraham Lincoln: Tracing the origin of Bob Dylan's Abraham Lincoln quote: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool ALL of the people ALL of the time."
  • Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard: There's a bunch of pretty high-level (Low-level? Technical bits.) geek stuff in here, but it's a nice overview of what's coming with Snow Leopard. The slimming down of apps is impressive.
  • Neighborhoods Map – Neighborhoods Program – City of Kent, Washington: Oddly, Kent doesn't seem to be as well divided into discrete neighborhoods: there's just Kent, and a few small areas within designated as neighborhoods. Our new apartment isn't in any of them, so I guess we don't get a neighborhood?
  • Seattle City Clerk’s Neighborhood Map Atlas: I use this a lot when tagging images I upload to Flickr. Click on a larger region to zoom in to more precise neighborhood boundaries.
  • The Paragraph in Web Typography & Design: Paragraphs are punctuation, the punctuation of ideas. After selecting a typeface, choosing the right paragraph style is one of the cornerstones of good typography. This is a brief inquiry into paragraph style for the Web.

Leaving Seattle

It’s official — Prairie and I have a new apartment! We’d been keeping an eye on Craigslist over the past few months as I got closer to graduation, looking for places in the Kent/Des Moines area that fit what we were looking for: two or three bedrooms, two bathrooms, reserved parking, washer and dryer, and if at all possible, a pool (we’ve gotten quite spoiled by having a pool available here during the summer months). By Friday, we had a list of four places we wanted to check out, and we headed off to see how they compared to their on-paper representations.

(I was quite proud of myself for getting us all organized: on Thursday, I’d called the places, set up appointments at each, printed out their Craigslist listings, Google Maps directions from each to the next in order, and a little sheet of questions we wanted to be sure to ask, and stapled them all together into individual packets. As anyone who knows me can attest, this is not normal behavior for me!)

The first apartment was nice, but not quite as close as we wanted; the second apartment had gorgeous grounds, but the 2-bedrooms were too small, the 3-bedrooms too expensive, and it was right off a street that was pretty seedy (think Aurora in Seattle, or Mt. View in Anchorage) and didn’t feel safe; the fourth had a gorgeous view of the Kent valley and was a huge 2-bedroom layout that would have been our pick if we hadn’t already been through the third.

Our New ApartmentThe third place ended up hitting all our “gotta have it” qualifications (3 bed, 2 bath, nice layout, washer/dryer in unit, assigned parking space), our “would be nice if” qualifications (third floor corner apartment available, fireplace, deck, good storage, swimming pool in the complex, right on the bus lines), plus a bunch of other goodies that sold us (nice location next to a golf course and park with lots of bike paths to go walking/skating/riding on, right next to the Green River, about five minute drive from Prairie’s workplace and my future school, exercise room, indoor racquetball court, and a decent neighborhood). Plus, they had fresh-baked cookies still warm from the oven for us! It’s pretty hard to say no to fresh-baked cookies. Ingenious!

After looking at all four choices, we had lunch, then went back to our favorite and put in our application. They called back yesterday to confirm that we were approved, so Prairie will be running over there during her lunch break today to drop off the security deposit and get the final details (official address so I can initiate the moving process with Speakeasy, the actual move-in date, and so on).

One interesting side effect is that this means that after seven years, I’ll be moving out of Seattle. Admittedly, not very far out of Seattle — the Kent-to-Downtown-Seattle drive is only a few minutes longer than the Northgate-to-Downtown-Seattle drive — but still, I’ll no longer have a Seattle address. Something of a milestone there.

More details of the move and all will be posted as things progress, but we should be all moved over in roughly three weeks or so.

Links for June 21st through June 23rd

Sometime between June 21st and June 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!