happy thanksgiving.

The Thanksgiving weekend is upon us, so I’m going to try and use this here computer for nothing but mindless web browsing and World of Warcrafting for the next few days.  (Our Thanksgiving dinner will be Cornish Game Hens, as per recently established tradition.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to get leg ruffles for Cornish hens?)

I do have a movie recommendation to pass on, just in case you haven’t seen the flick yet.  It’s the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.  I watched it last night, and liked it a lot.  It has a very Princess Bride-y feel to it—very much a fairytale for adults, just like the novel.  If you haven’t gotten around to watching that one, it’s well worth a few bucks for the rental.

Here’s wishing all of you imaginary Internets pals out there a Happy Thanksgiving.  Hit that liquor cabinet, stuff yourselves with flightless birds, and spend some time with your friends and families.  I’ll certainly take the opportunity to do all of the above.

typecast #5.

(Click to embiggenate.)

monday search term safari LXXVI.

roman polanski current legal status

His current legal status is “Child-raping shitbag, breathing bar-filtered air in Switzerland.” 

writing straight on unlined paper

Some people can write straight on unlined paper, others can’t keep a straight line to save their lives.  If you’re in the latter group, you can print out guide sheets that you can put underneath the blank page.

germany seax knife

The Seax was a single-edged large knife used by the Saxons.  They were so identified with it that the name of the knife became the basis for the name of the tribe. 

"if it only saves one" fallacy

The problem with the “If it only saves one life” argument for passing laws is that it can be easily turned on itself by finding instances in which the implementation of the law would cost a life or three as well.  For example, banning guns may save lives by making it harder for really dumb criminals to get one, but it may also cost lives by removing the ability of the law-abiding folk to defend themselves against the smarter criminals.  When you point that out, however, those possible deaths are written off as acceptable collateral damage.

german movie critics

I should totally do movie reviews in a thick German accent, and filter American flicks through imagined German artsy sensibilities.  It would be a cross between Roger Ebert, and Mike Myers’ Dieter from Saturday Night Live.

is 14 a good number

It’s a perfectly cromulent number.  It’s also a very useful number with considerable utility.  Without it, some states wouldn’t have an Age of Consent.

mouse infestation hazardous for toddler?

Well, the mice won’t gang up on Little Timmy to bring him down in the middle of the playroom like a swarm of furry white land speeders felling a binky-sucking AT/AT, but mice have other ways of being a hazard to kids with uncalibrated immune systems.  Mouse poop isn’t among the healthiest substances on the planet, and toddlers like to stick stuff into their mouths. 

novelists composing by paper or on computer

Some novelists write by hand, some use the computer, some swear by their typewriters.  If I had to wager a guess, I’d say that 80% use the computer these days, with the rest split between longhand and typewriters.  (A surprisingly high percentage of my favorite authors either write by hand, or with a typewriter.)

how the fuck do you disasemble the colt

Heh.  This one just kicked over my giggle box this morning.  From the level of frustration crammed into that search term, I’m going to guess he’s a 1911 noob trying to disassemble one.

porn discovered on company laptop

I was a corporate IT drone once upon a time.  When we discovered porn on peoples’ laptops, their reaction would invariably be either a.) head-hanging shame, or b.) steadfast refusal to admit responsibility.  Popular excuse: “It was TeH hAxXoRz!”

 

That’s the MSTS for today.  I am pleased at the relative lack of disturbing/disgusting search terms this week.  See what happens when you apply yourselves, Internets?

a quick sunday poll.

Doing some research for Beeg Eemportant Theeng, and finding myself in need of material.

What’s your favorite movie set in the 1920s/1930s United States?

pew pew. maaooowwwwnnn.

I know I’m months behind the Kool Kidz, but I finally had a chance to watch the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot.  (Minor spoilers ahead, just in case you’re even less hip than I am, and haven’t seen the new Trek yet.)

Liked:

• The visuals were amazing, as is to be expected of current-day CGI.  The space battles were fantastic, exciting, fast-paced stuff.  Favorite shot: the unlucky female crew member of the Kelvin getting sucked out into space through a hull breach, and careening off past the phaser battery that’s firing back at the Romulan ship.
• The set design was also well executed.  The bridge of the new Enterprise makes the Apple Stores look like they were put together by the Amish.  The uniforms approximated the original series’ velvet pajamas without looking either cheesy or like a bad homage. 
• The actors mostly got the characters’ idiosyncrasies down, and created their own interpretations without just doing Kirk/Spock/McCoy/Scotty imitations.  The only one that grated a little was the guy who played Scotty—he had a hard time keeping up a convincing Scottish accent.

Flinched at:

• The science, particularly the “red matter” business.  Ouch.  The stuff is so volatile and powerful that it can generate a singularity, yet you can keep it contained in a Vulcan ship, siphon it off with a needle, and bottle it?
• What was the point of Young Kirk trashing that ‘Vette, other than establishing that James T. Kirk a.) has a severe issue with authority, and b.) really likes hanging off precipices by his fingertips?  (He ends up in that position three or four times in the movie.)
• The Enterprise being put together in a dry dock in the middle of Iowa?  How are you going to get the whole thing into space when it’s done?  Every bit of technobabble related to Trek makes clear that the Enterprise needs her transporters because she can’t make planetary landings.  It made for some awesome CGI shots, though.
• The villain.  I’ve liked Eric Bana since Blackhawk Down, but he doesn’t come off as very menacing or convincingly motivated in this one. 
• Academy cadets staffing a commissioned vessel (the flagship of the fleet, no less!), because the rest of the fleet is busy somewhere else?  Does Starfleet have such an abundance of ships that they have to resort to filling them with trainees in an emergency?
• Kirk being evicted from the Enterprise, shot down onto the desolate ice planet…and ending up literally on top of Old Spock?
• Do a three-man HALO drop with Kirk, Sulu, and a Red Shirt…and give all the detonators to the Red Shirt?  (Hands up, all of you who didn’t see Red Shirt’s fate coming from a mile away.)
• Amazingly creative field promotions—putting cadets above Fleet officers into command positions.
• Promoting a maverick Academy cadet straight to Captain, and giving him command of the flagship of Starfleet?

Overall, however, it was a fun ride, and a mostly well-executed (and much-needed) reboot of the franchise.  I did like how they mostly pulled off the whole “alternate reality” thing, to wipe the slate clean regarding continuity.  It’ll be interesting to see where they take the whole thing from here.

when entitlement whiners attack.

That salty scent you can smell in the air this morning?  That’s the smell of millions of hippie tears, wafting over from the Left Coast, where the students of UC Berkeley demonstrate that Economics isn’t much in demand at their institution.

Look, kids: your home state is broke as shit.  It’s broke because you folks voted yourself free everything with crunchy gratis glaze and no-cost sprinkles on top, and even the super-sized tax rates your state collects aren’t enough to pay for everything.  The money to run stuff has to come from somewhere, and when your state cuts education budgets (see “broke as shit” above), then the only way to keep the lights on is by raising user fees.  But you go ahead and throw your hissy fits because you’re asked to pay for the services you’re receiving, and see how far the sympathy-o-meter gets pegged.  To me, it’s just another conclusive demonstration that your idea of taxation is “Free Means Free To Me”, and “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.”

(On a side note: even after the rate hike, the bill for a semester at UC Berkeley is $10k per semester.  Compared to other universities in its weight class, that’s a screaming bargain.  Get a scholarship, get a side job, put some elbow grease into it…but stop whining about having to contribute to your world-class education what are basically slightly inflated community college fees in other parts of the country.)

no shit, einstein.

The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology figures out what some of us have known all along: you can’t get rid of everything on airplanes that can possibly be used as a weapon.

(They stabbed a few dead pigs with various everyday items, such as pens and broken glasses. Shockingly, all of them can inflict lethal wounds.)

Your weapon is that squishy grey mass between your ears—everything else is just a tool.  I know people who are more dangerous with a paperclip and a hand towel than your average soft suburbanite would be with a loaded machine gun.  You can kill someone with a freakin’ paperback, if you have the attitude and the will.  Trying to make society safe by taking away all the sharp, shooty, or pointy things is a fool’s errand.

(Via BoingBoing.)

funny how that works.

Lissa has a post up on her impending Lasik surgery, which made me realize an interesting circumstance:

Lasik and plastic surgery are two procedures that are not covered by insurance plans, and therefore almost entirely subject to market supply and demand.   If I want to believe the common criticisms of free market healthcare, Lasik and plastic surgery should be expensive as sin, since the providers can pretty much charge whatever they want.

Yet Lasik and plastic surgery become more affordable with each passing decade.  When my friend Joerg had Lasik ten years ago, he paid almost twice what Lissa is paying now.  In addition, I can call most Lasik providers or plastic surgeons, and I can guarantee you that I won’t have to wait very long for an appointment.

Imagine that: a health-related service that’s subject to the whims of the market…and it’s affordable and available.

inkcast #3.

monday search term safari LXXV.

my mind my body my choice

Without wanting to touch the middle rail that is the abortion debate (and please don’t kick that one off in the Comments), one of the many things that amaze me is the significant overlap between the “My Body, My Choice” crowd, and the folks who think we should tax fast food out the wazoo and ban smoking…and that carrying a gun to protect the body’s physical integrity is a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Thing.

what shotgun rounds to use on a werewolf

You use “Wunderbar Werenwolf” shells, manufactured by the German company Potzblitz & Kaputtmacher, which is based in the Black Forest and run by industrious Teutonic gnomes.  Wunderbar Werenwolf shells are hand-crafted from the finest sterling silver, blessed by the Pope, quenched with the blood of unicorns, and packaged in finely-carved bloodwood boxes.  They’re also entirely fictional, which is OK, because so are werewolves.

piccadilly notebooks

Those are knock-offs of the popular Moleskine notebook, the one with the black oilcloth cover and the rubber band to hold it shut.  Piccadillys look and work the same as Moles, but cost less than half as much.  I have a pretty extensive stash in case Borders decides to stop stocking them, and the first draft of the current novel is being written in a large Piccadilly.  So far, it has survived several months of being used daily (and getting hauled to coffeeshops weekly) without showing any wear or defects.

knife skipper

You know those localized versions of Barbie they adjust to local cultural sensibilities?  Well, Knife Skipper is the Skipper they sell in Brooklyn and Newark.

i slapped a kid and his family threatened me

Well, what the hell kind of response did you expect?  Most people get very protective when it comes to their offspring.  You can count yourself very lucky they only threatened you.  I know if you had slapped one of my kids, you would have been looking down the muzzle of a gun.  (And if their mother was in charge of them at the time, your search term would have included the phrase “traumatic amputation”.)

dad toughest job ever t-shirt

I don’t know about “toughest job ever”.  I don’t have to dodge IEDs, get shot at, or pilot a helicopter to ferry troops into  Afghanistan’s mountains.  That said, the job of the stay-at-home Dad is definitely no cakewalk, and anyone who says that stay-at-home parents “have no real job” need to be put in charge of two preschool kids full-time for a month. 

"setting the margins" typewriter

Most manual typewriters have a mechanism to adjust the page margins.  It can be as simple as “Set/Clear” buttons next to the spacebar like on some Olympias, or it may require you to flip up a cover at the back of the carriage and set a pair of little sliders by hand.

lamy 2000 novel writing pen

That’s what Neil Gaiman called his Lamy 2000 once.  From what I can tell, he wrote “American Gods” and “The Graveyard Book” at least partially with the Lamy.  It’s a very comfortable pen with a very smooth nib, and one of my favorites.  My only gripe with it is that even the extra-fine nib doesn’t produce a fine enough line for my preferences.  (I may send mine off to a nibmeister to have the point reground to a true extra-fine.)  Other than that, however, it’s an outstanding design, and the most bang for the buck by far in the $100 price bracket.

a day in the life of quinn

You know those Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, the best comic strip in the history of comic strips?  Those are looking more and more like a prescient documentary to me. 

guy holding chrome glock

Glocks don’t come in chrome.  You can get one chromed by a refinishing shop, but that would be like putting sparkly metallic paint on a Humvee.  It is, however, my understanding that “Glock” is now a generic catch-all term for “handgun” in some circles, because the word sounds cool in rap songs.

it is not rape if you deserve it

If you live by that maxim, I can only hope that you get arrested and thrown into jail as a rapist one day, which will be the karmically correct way to have that disgusting little piece of wisdom backfire on you.

 

After a week-long hiatus due to lack of original search terms, the MSTS is back!  Be sure to feed appropriate and original search terms into the Searcholator, so I’ll have ammo for next week.  Now get back to work, cubicle-dwellers!