Tag Archives: Personal Blather

AKA “Why Proofreaders Will Never Be Obsolete”

American Boar of Dermatology.

Deportment of Surgery.

I feel like I should resurrect the Institute of Advanced Mad Science.

A couple years ago, I’d frivolously fill that in on any e-mail subscription form or on-line survey that had a blank for “Business”. A friend of mine did a similar thing, listing “Interstellar Freight” as a company. I don’t know if he’s still doing so.

Then I started to get stuff in the mail, addressed to the Institute…
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Alas, a wine glass has bitten the dust. Hard. We had visitors at the House of Q last night, including my in-laws and my sis, and during the post-dinner wine and movies I managed to transform a glass full of shiraz into a sharp-edged collection of shards and powerful staining liquid. Fortunately, I missed getting any on the new sofa cover, and we got the spill cleaned up before it could soak too badly into the floor.
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I wonder what the latin names for some of these cartoon character skeletons would be. The birds would be fairly easy. I’m pretty sure they’d be Avis Pipilio and Avis Infantus Huey. And Felix Salutatrix might be right too. But what would the overall categories be for some of the human figures? Would we have Homo Nucis Schultz for the Peanuts characters and Homo Silexicis for the Flintstones?

August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. He lived a strange and tormented life and had several psychotic breaks in the 1890’s. So far as I can tell, none of them involved a talking pink helium balloon.

Let me tell you about the new Nordic Track workout…

And no, this isn’t going to become one of those ‘blogs where the author obsessively catalogs their diet and exercise routines. That’s been done.
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Ok, now this is strange… Almost exactly a year ago, I was talking about some found-sound music that I’d stumbled across, and now I’m listening to another batch of the similar. In this case, it’s remixes and songs from video games, all available for download from OverClocked ReMix.
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We found a couple old 3/4″ video tapes at work that needed converting to something a bit more.. modern. Fortunately, we have a big ‘ol 3/4″ player which someone was just going to throw away. It worked great once the cobwebs were vacuumed out and the play head was given a good scrubbing with 99% isopropyl alcohol. I was able to hook it directly to a MiniDV camcorder and transfer things directly to digital tape.
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What do you get if you take all of the bizarre ranting posters you can find on lamp-posts and park benches in New York City and collect them in one place?

You get this website.

I’ve only read a few of them and… Wow. Just wow…

For those of you who aren’t familiar with phishing scams, the basic idea is that they try to trick you into sending them your financial information by pretending to be from a company you do business with. Basically, if you get an email from a bank insisting that you confirm your account details under threat of suspension, don’t believe it.

So, I just got a phishing e-mail, purportedly from Paypal. Thing is, whoever sent this one didn’t do a terribly good job.
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