January 2005 Archives

The Daily News tracks down one hundred restaurants where you can eat for less than $10.

It’s the return of the monthly title contest! Submit your favorite quote with the word ‘February’ in it in the comments. Winner gets their quote featured in the title bar and their site featured at the top of the rotating links for the month. Blah, blah, blah. You’ve all been here before, you know the drill. Go forth and quote!

Oh, and the deadline, since I was an idiot (again) and didn’t get this up until the day before February actually starts is, oh, let’s say Friday night, okay?

Or, how to use punctuation in a highly passive-aggressive manner. You’ll feel much better after viewing this.

An edited list of search requests, sorted alphabetically. Stolen from here. Note that some themes pop up again and again. For what it’s worth, “Cameltoe” is the #1 search request by a huge margin, so I guess this makes Cameltoe the new Leah McLaren.

If I was really ambitious, I’d link each search term to the appropriate entry. Yeah, right.

So a retired doctor and his wife buy a Doris Day DVD at the supermarket, and pop it in only to find that it’s actually an Italian porn film.

So what do they do? Sayeth the doctor: “My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

Uh, yeah, right. That’s the ticket. Watched it to the end. Maybe they were expecting to see The Pajama Game after seeing all those young ladies lie back and think of Italy?

Assorted bright twinkly things:

• Check out this flash trip through a jët engine.

• The other day, while I was in a päper store, I noticed they were selling small erasers with little hearts on them. And I got to wondering: what kind of message does this send? Love will rüb off eventually? My heart’s disposable? Seriously, you’d think that these people would think about the semiotics of these sorts of things… (thanks to Lady C for reminding me)

• While the site’s still up, go vote in the 2005 Blöggies. There’s a rather heavy Big Apple prësence, which I find interesting. Full disclosure: I designed the site for one of the finalists for Weblög of the Year.

• Free The Lesbian Bünnies! (just for the headline alone)

• OK, nine months, not five yëärs. That’s still nine months of grossly overcrowded 1/9/2/3 trains.

• Those Morning News guys really knöw what sells shirts. As noted previously in this space, this is a strategy that seems to have worked for Gothamist.

• Have You Eäten Yet?: The Chinese Restaurant in America. Jokes about beef broccoli omitted.

• Bat bombs, Le Pétomane, the Smoot, and the Cadaver Synod: unusual articles in the Wikipedia.

• And finally: from the Porte Dauphine to Sacre-Coeur in less than 8 minutes in a Ferrari 275/GTB. If you’re not entirely conversant with Parisian geography, that’s pretty much most of the way across the city at very high speed. Söme background info on the film.

The Times says that the A and the C will be hosed for the next five years:

A fire … has crippled two of the city’s busiest subway lines, which might not be restored to normal capacity for three to five years.

Seriously. WTF?

Would it kill the networks to hire play-by-play announcers who can accurately describe the action on the field?

No?

Listening to George W. Bush speak off-the-cuff is a bit like watching Shaquille O’Neal shoot free throws. The anxiety produced by a sense of impending disaster is coupled with incredulity that someone in so exalted a position has failed to master one of the rudimentary skills of his profession.

From “Tangle Tongue” by William Norman Grigg.

I have more single, ünmatched dress socks than I have actual pairs of dress socks (dress=non-white).

How did this come to happen? Where do they go? Is there a dimension for unpair’d socks to go? Do they hang out in singles bars for socks?

Wikipedia on the Heavy metal umlaut:

At one Mötley Crüe performance in Germany, the entire audience started chanting, "Moertley Creuh!"

Perhaps I should change my name to Päül Fränkënstëïn.

Our friends at buckfush.com have put up a special report about Inaugural Balloons, since, as they put it, “After all, you wouldn’t want the President’s speech drowned out by the sounds of interceptor jets, would you?”

Whatever you do, don’t lose your balloons at 15 minute intervals, because if all of them were lost this way, at least one would most certainly be overhead during the Inauguration which would be a real disaster.

And in other news, Tony Pierce’s busblog has turned black today for some reason…

My sister will be performing later this week in the New York Chamber Opera’s production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.

Performances are on the 20th (Thursday), the 22nd (Saturday), and the 24th (Monday) at the Leonard Nimoy/Thalia Theater at Symphony Space. You can buy tickets on-line here.

Check it out.

A few loose ends to tie up before I dive back into the rabbit hole later this morning:

• My regular email is back and working. If you sent email to my panix.com account this weekend, you should probably send it again if you want to make sure that I got it. What happened was that the panix.com domain was hijacked and redirected—in layman’s terms, it’s a bit like what would happen if someone filled out a change of address form for an entire company. Here’s an official FAQ about the incident.

• Late Friday night, walking down 14th Street near 2nd Avenue, a well-lit storefront, a hand-lettered sign on the door: “Boys Only!” Inside, seven or eight young men, busy knitting.

• Later Friday night: discussing how some women, while never appearing to be without companion—escort, paramour, boyfriend—remain in perpetual state of singleness, while others, despite never appearing to have companion (escort, paramour, boyfriend) remain firmly non-single; a friend proposes a new dating strategy: only hit on women with boyfriends. Why? In such a case, one only has to compare favorably with one other—the boyfriend (there are probably transaction costs involved, but those were not discussed); if one is to only approach women without boyfriends, then one must compete with a potentially unlimited pool of others.

• Speaking of dating strategies: How Gilligan Should Have approached Mary-Ann. Step One: “It all begins with a little flattery, particularly subtle but favorable comparisons to that hussy Ginger.”

• And finally, what does it mean when my Contracts professor ends a grading memo by saying “I hope you all had a relaxing break. I didn’t.”? Is it a simple attempt to scare us? I sure hope so, ‘cause I can tell you that it worked.

Zhao Ziyang, a former Chinese leader who has been under house arrest since 1989 for supporting the student protesters in Tiananmen Square, has died.

Rebecca MacKinnon recalls an interview she did with Bao Tong, one of Zhao’s closest aides:

I think history will remember what he [Zhao] said: that problems must be solved in the framework of democracy and law. I believe that no major problem in China today can be solved outside of this framework. Not just corruption. Other problems are the same. Outside of the framework of democracy and law, none of China’s major problems can be solved. If we don’t solve problems within this framework we will certainly fail. For instance, the June 4 crackdown failed because it violated the principles of democracy and law. If the government reverses its position, it will definitely succeed because this would be in keeping with the framework of democracy and law.

Now look at this article about how behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Ukraine’s intelligence service may have prevented a bloodbath:

Among the protesters’ tents, an S.B.U. colonel who had spent the week as a liaison to the demonstration organizers alerted the organizers that troops were on their way.

His next mission was to meet the [Interior Ministry] troops as they drew near, he said, to warn their officers that a crackdown without written orders was illegal.

This only makes me wonder, what if, what if?

Two more shirts: the first is a commentary on overly pretentious bloggers (yeah, you all know one—after all, you’re reading this)*:

The second, dedicated to the warriors of the sport of Karaoke, is a co-production with my friend Patrick’s band Ganymede. What exactly is a karaoke vigilante? The phrase is taken from their song “Hong Kong” and is reputed to deal with a near-legendary incident in a karaoke bar; much beyond that, I’m not sure, but then again, do we really need reason beyond the fact that it sounds cool?

*If you really want to know where “personal literature” comes from, read this. No, I’m not proud.

The Shaky One demonstrates why a picture is worth a thousand words (or, in this case, $2, 354 Hong Kong dollars).

(I would imagine that most expats in Hong Kong have been to that bar, so I’m hardly claiming exclusivity here…)

Two of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time:

• KDunk makes me burst out laughing in the library. Good thing school hasn’t actually started yet, ere there might have been a lot more people turning and glaring…

• There’s an expression: ROTFLMAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off), often used in exaggeration. While I perhaps wasn’t physically on the floor, LOD made me come dangerously close to falling off my chair—in the literal, cracked-tailbone sense—with this tale of doing laundry.

Cable modem down for 24/h+. Numbness in limbs, tingling, night sweats, moaning, fever, hours spent staring at the little blinking light on the cable modem.

Coming soon to NBC: Law & Order: Intentional Torts, starring John Goodman as Ry Zwieback, head of the NYPD’s elite Bakery unit…

Turns out that Verizon is blocking all email from Britain, Germany, France and Russia. The excuse is, of course, “spam prevention”. What’s the phrase I’m looking for? “Monumental stupidity”?

Advice to Verizon customers: get a Gmail account. In fact, I have some invites, so if are unfortunate enough to be a Verizon customer, drop me a line and I’ll hook you up.

And in other news, I’m eagerly awaiting the posting of my grades from the fall, if only because that’ll be the end of nightly, recurrent, dreams about grades. A man’s gotta get some sleep.

A quick look at the world outside New York:

• North Korea has identified the latest threat to the revolution: those dirty goddamn hippy longhairs. No word on how revolutionary the pompadour is, though.
• Sad? Lonely? Ponder, then, the plight of the only elephant in Alaska.
• Video game or massive Japanese flood-control project? We report, you decide. (I might have link’d this already, but I can’t seem to find it, so here we go again)
• The world’s most expensive coin: now on display in lower Manhattan.
• That’s no moon. It’s a space station (scroll down to the last picture in the story). Related story coming next week: “Space probe lost after photographing mysterious moon”.

And then I got on the train in Stamford and it promptly caught on fire.

So, I was wondering: who reads pf.org? Where are you from? What’s your name (or pseudonym, as the case may be) How did you get here?

January 5: pf makes it into the NYT anonymously, for the first time
January 6: Career advice for aspiring starlets
January 24: Most track-backed post
January 30: Most commented post, contest division
February 13: pf.org on luuuurve, or pf goes to a steakhouse that apparently doesn't serve steak
February 14: Surf 'n' Turf
Feburary 29: Food Porn
March 17: The official cocktail of pf.org
April 6: Fancy computer testing reveals that pf likes pretty girls
April 21: Deep thinking about blogs
April 27-July 31: pf visits the homeland
June 10: pf.org attempts to single-handedly redraw the NYC subway map; proposed name for Canal St. stop universally reviled
August 23: Most comments, non-contest division
September 23: Wherein the ability of pf.org readers to follow simple instructions is called into question (to be fair, I doubt they were regulars and were just googling for 'gmail')
September 28: Favorite case so far in school
November 6: Wherein pf answers your questions and gets chastised for the poor quality of his pornography
November 16: The male readers of pf.org discuss fashion, and the apocolypse arrives
November 20: Most intentionally obscure post
December 7: Hot naked blogger chicks, or, Dating on Flickr?
December 19: Post with most readers (or commenters, at least) missing the joke entirely
December 29: Longest post of the year, by far

Here's to 2005. May it be a better year than the one just pass'd.

Surgery blogging is the new black, don’tcha know?

Thanks to the Transfer. Happy New Year, everyone!