Dame Edna Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets

I have a subscription with Audible.com for audio books. With my subscription I can download any two audio books a month.

After nine years I have fished all the gems out of their catalog and now have to scan the new releases every month. Fortunately they have quite a few new releases on a regular basis.

To facilitate search the list, I subscribe to their new releases RSS feed which allows me to go through the titles and a brief description.

My eye caught and read one of the titles as, "Dame Edna Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets." As a concept, that made my mind stumble and I had to go back and read the full entry.

At which point I read the title correctly as, "Dame Edith Evans Reads Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets," and was slightly disappointed.

Not that I am down on Dame EE, but she was reading Shakespeare back when Kaiser Wilhelm II looked like he still had a long and glorious reign ahead of him. Plus the picture they chose to represent her has more than a bit of the "air of dried prune" about it.

All of which brought me around to thinking that Dame Edna reading Shakespeare might not be such a bad idea after all.

United Breaks Guitars

The tale of a musician who has a bone to pick with United Airlines. They broke his guitar and gave him the run-around, so he promised their rep that he would write three songs and create videos for them about his experience. This song is the first.



The full story is available here.

The French: Arrogant, Cheap, but Nicely Dressed

At least when they leave France, according to a recent survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world.

The French, said at least one self-proclaimed expert on the subject, find their country so wonderful that they rarely leave, thus they never bother with foreign languages and customs. So leaving France causes them to become stressed, making them seem arrogant and demanding.

I guess I could buy that for most of the country, though I suspect a certain percentage of the population of Paris must be stressed even within France.

Anyway, I am jumping on this excuse. Living in California, which must be comparable in wonder to France given how many people keep showing up here uninvited, explains my arrogance, cheapness, and tendency to add avocados to just about everything.

It certainly explains my not being well dressed.

If Robots Were Alive...

If robots were alive and sentient in the way human beings are, would they be as bemused, disturbed, disgusted, or depressed about the operation of their bodies as I am about mine.

I swear, every time I go to the doctor I move one step further from belief in "the miracle of life" and one step close to "Rube Goldberg the creator."

The #1 argument against intelligent design has to be, "Have you seen how our bodies work?"

Tenuous Grip on my PIN

I have a strange relationship with the PIN for my ATM card.

I cannot remember it unless I am standing in front of the ATM and, possibly, for the few minutes after that transaction.

If you asked me right now, I could guess at it. I have some inkling about what the numbers could be. But I only know with certainty when I am standing there ready to withdraw some cash.

At least I used to know the numbers with certainty at that point.

I have not had to use the ATM for over two months. It appears that the certainty of knowledge fades with time.

I stood at the ATM today and could not remember my PIN.

I had walked four blocks to the ATM to get some cash so I could buy something lunch, but I had to walk away empty handed. Two guesses at the number and I had to cancel the transaction. After three wrong guesses the machine keeps your card. At least some machines I have run into do that. It has never actually happened to me, but I have never not been able to remember my PIN.

I have had the same PIN for 18 years now. It is in my brain somewhere.

Still, I had better bring my lunch to work tomorrow, just in case.

Shades of Soylent Green

I read in the news that the man who designed the packaging for Pringles potato chips passed away. Of course, what really caught my eye was how his ashes were stored:

CINCINNATI - The man who designed the Pringles potato crisp packaging system was so proud of his accomplishment that a portion of his ashes has been buried in one of the iconic cans.

This immediately made me imagine some distant future when some archiologist uncovers his sealed crypt and finds a potato chip can. Taking it back to the lab for analysis, they review the results with horror:

"It's people! Pringles were made out of people! They made their food out of people!"

Truncated Headline of the Day

Confirmed: Ted Kennedy has a brain!



Judging from the associated picture, the news is being greeted with much enthusiasm.

Good of Obama to be there in Ted's moment of triumph.

Nice work there Yahoo!

Chow Mein Quick Meal

Now with artificial beef! Truly the best of all possible meals.

Read about it here.

Meet in the Middle

Somebody is working on a web application called Mezzoman that lets you to put in two locations for which it finds the midpoint and will then suggest a meeting place based on an additional criteria you can enter, such as coffee, Japanese food, or movie theater.

It basically uses Google to pick a mid-point meeting place for two people.

The comedy comes in when you start getting further apart geographically.

Finding a Greek place between San Jose and Palo Alto predictably puts up a couple of locations in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

Changing that to San Jose, CA and Orlando, FL puts the mid-point choice in Wellington, Texas. Perhaps not my first choice of locations.

Still, it is a nifty little application. I could see using it to pick spots for a mid-day meal on a road trip, though I would want a feature that would let me stick within, say, two miles of the interstate highway.

For example, picking a place between San Jose and Carlsbad, CA, I am unlikely to drive miles off of Highway 5 just for pizza.

Amazon.com as Creative Muse

One of the great things about Amazon.com product reviews is that the right product can both bring forth the creative spark and act as an an emotional outlet for people.

I hold up, as an example, the reviews for the Playmobile Security Checkpoint.

Check them out.

Osteen/Short?

I saw this ad on the web and could not help thinking how much Joel Osteen looks like a Martin Short character.

At least in this picture.

Behind Every Successful Pirate?

Wikipedia's article of the day today was about Stede Bonnet, a pirate. I was struck by the opening lines of the entry:

Stede Bonnet was an early 18th-century Barbadian pirate, sometimes called "the gentleman pirate". Because of marital problems, and despite his lack of sailing experience, Bonnet decided to turn to piracy in the summer of 1717.

I am almost jealous of him and his time. His marriage wasn't working out so he decided to become a pirate!

I have not sat down and considered what drove men to become pirates, but if I had, a lack of wedded bliss probably would not have sprung to mind.

Furthermore, even though he was a complete amateur, he went out, bought a boat, hired a crew, and set sail for a life of piracy. He was probably thinking, "I'll show her!" the whole time too.

You have to admire that sort of "can do" spirit as well as the motivation a bad marriage can provide.

Of course, he was caught and hung in 1718, but not before he had a pretty good run as a pirate.

New Record!

By declaring the last picture the record, I spurred some sort of competition.

Juice consumption appears to be up at the office because of this.

Some Days You Cannot Win

Our vending machine at work. The punts on the bottom of the bottles, those little indents, catch on the dividers, wedging the bottles firmly in place. No amount of shaking the machine will get them free.

Four bottles is the current office record.

Source of Humor Secure

As this Yahoo headlines shows, at least one staple of humor about the English will continue on into the future.



I can just picture Prince Charles, who has pretty bad teeth for being the son of the richest woman in England, tying a length of string around a door knob and then getting Camilla to slam in order to yank a tooth.

Cannot Bear the Worms

I bought a small package of Gummi Bears from the vending machine at the office today.

In this bag there was something of a bonus... or at least something different.

There was a big Gummi Worm in the bag, the kind that are two flavors mixed together in alternating segments. This particular one was red and... is it white or clear... the flavor without color.

This lead to some speculation about the relationship between Gummi Bears and Worms.

We eventually decided that worms represent some sort of immature state of bears, and that when the worm reached maturity, the segments would break apart and develop into individual bears.

For no particular reason, I could not bring myself to eat the worm at that point, a problem I have had with Mezcal as well.

Beer Priorities

A flood-isolated town in Austrailia breathed a sigh of relief this week when the State Emergency Services delivered 12 kegs and three crates of beer before a big televised rugby match.

Find the story here.

US States - Countries With Similar GDP

Somebody has done a map of the US with the states renamed to coutries that have GDPs similar to the state in question. So now I live in France and Microsoft is in Turkey.

Find it here.

The Day of Polka is at Hand!

If this comic is right, I'll be laughing as all the new polka posers as they jump on the accordian driven bandwagon!

Time to get my alpine hat and lederhosen out early this year! No need to wait for Oktober!

I Find This Lack of Breeze Disturbing...

If I had a hot air balloon, it would look like this.