I’m already into the 2nd elite tier of Hyatt’s frequent-guest program.
Amusingly, Hyatt is supporting the ongoing devaluation of precious metals in such contexts; rather than having levels at Silver, Gold, and Platinum, they use Gold, Platinum, and Diamond.
Some marketing douche thinks he’s clever for that.
A challenge facing any Journey coverband is finding someone who can sing as high as Perry. One option? Use a 9-year-old:
Granted, his career’s over as soon as his balls drop, but he’s good for a couple years anyway.
This link to Bakon Vodka. Mmmm, Bacon.
I think I like the dart the best. Check it out. Via Agent Ed.
How to brew beer in a coffee maker, using only materials commonly found on a modestly sized oceanographic research vessel, courteously supplied by Agent Rob.
Turns out, it’s the first of May, and Jonathan Coulton has a song about it. NSFW, but funny as hell.
NPR is reporting that David Souter may retire, thereby giving BHO his first shot at the Court.
Excellent.
Why is anyone surprised that someone as self-evidently vapid and useless as a beauty pageant runner-up has absurd and stupid opinions? Good Christ, she probably still believes in the Easter Bunny, and — if her colleagues are any indication — has at best a tenuous command of current events.
A lovely tale, over at National Geographic, of a man and his bear.
How about a wind-up vibrator, free of all those nasty batteries?
In Belize. On the beach. No software in bait shops. No airports, either. And only bugs I can physically quash with one flip-flop.
Bait shop.
Arlen Spector has crossed the aisle. When Senator-elect Franken is seated, the Dems will be filibuster-proof.
Here We Are In Clowntown, a photo-documentary prominently featuring many Heathen. Enjoy.
Not coincidentally, they’re also the only ones we’ve seen with Hunter Thompson on them.
A previously NDA’d feature of Windows 7 has finally gone public; basically, Win7 comes with a virtualization-based “XP mode” that creates a virtual machine to host any apps that can’t run in a post-XP environment.
The real bonus here is that it allows Microsoft, like Apple before them, to make a break with backward compatibility. OS X was a quantum leap over System 9 precisely because they made no real effort to allow backward compatibility outside a “compatibility box” that was the next best thing to virtualization (since virtualization wasn’t really an option 9 years ago).
Microsoft has, so far, not made the same kind of break with the past, and that’s hamstrung the evolution of the platform. If they do this right, they’ll be able to make the same kind of leap with 7 or whatever comes after 7 that Apple made in 2000.
This is a good thing for everyone; I’m not a huge Windows fan, but I want Microsoft in the race in the same way I want the GOP in the race. Competition is good for everybody.
A California woman decided to have a bit of fun with her ten-year high school reunion, so she hired a stripper to impersonate her as a struggling artist trailed by a film crew working on a “documentary” while she watched from a nearby hotel room and fed the imposter names and anecdotes via a hidden earpiece to sell the scheme.
FanTAStic. She’s shopping the whole thing as a film now.
Owing apparently to the departure of Northwest from the market, the Kansas City Airport’s C terminal now features ZERO food or drink vendors inside security. Nada. Nothing.
Since there are also no water fountains, it’s impossible to take water aboard a plane. Congrats, MCI, you’re Heathen’s new choice for Suckiest Airport in the Country. Even Jackson, Mississippi, sucks less.
The implications of the recently released torture memos are fairly deep and significant, but the press at large isn’t boiling it down or providing any real analysis. Fortunately, at least one person is paying attention. Paul Krugman breaks it down for you thusly:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Not much more to say about it, is there? Our government, working in our name, tortured people to get them to admit to things that weren’t true to justify a war unrelated to the assault we suffered on 9/11. And thus far utterly no one has been held accountable.
Bill “Wrong About Everything” Kristol just won $250K from some conservative group despite being demonstrably wrong just about every time he’s opened his mouth in the last 8 years.
What is wrong with these people?
Penny Arcade takes on Rock Bank sub-branding.
It seems unreasonable that it takes Butcher like 2 years to write these things, but only takes me a few hours to read them.
For about seven and a half billion.
So, Heathen Central has always had an alarm with these people. Over the weekend, we had enough heavy weather in Houston that we lost our regular phone line, and the alarm started telling us about it by beeping.
Ever ten minutes.
Without stopping.
Clearing the error doesn’t work; it tries the phone line periodically to check, and as soon as the test fails it starts beeping again (unless the alarm is actually ENGAGED at the time, in which case the alarm goes off; this is less charming than beeping).
I called ATT, sure (we don’t actually use ATT for voice; the POTS line exists only for the alarm and failover reasons), but in the meantime what I needed was a way to continue to set and use the alarm, even in the absence of a phone line for monitoring.
Well, it turns out there’s no way to do that, and this is bone fucking stupid. An alarm works on several levels:
By making it impossible to turn off the phone line check (for situations such as the one we’re in), ADT has made the alarm system 100% useless until ATT gets off its ass and fixes my POTS line. Given the power in case #2, above, that’s just dumb.
(Well; the signs still work; call it 95% useless.)
I think it’s probably time to shop for a new alarm system. In a city with a history of heavy weather, a system designed like the one I have seriously needs to get fired.
Because, as this Slate piece makes abundantly clear, the movie people are just too bone stupid to realize they have to compete with it.
The days of controlling distribution with arcane contracts and weird periods of artificial scarcity are over. If consumers can’t legally watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it, it’s becoming easier and easier for them to do so in ways that result in zero revenue for the copyright holder. Do the math.
Anneliese & David eloped, but they had a great party at Treebeard’s anyway.
We’re pretty sure that certain history buff types in Heathen Nation will enjoy this 22-foot scale model of the Japanese battleship Yamato, which is of course made out of LEGO.
…it’s the 66th anniversary of the most interesting bicycle ride EVER.
Albert Hofmann joined the pharmaceutical-chemical department of Sandoz Laboratories (now Novartis), located in Basel as a co-worker with professor Arthur Stoll, founder and director of the pharmaceutical department. He began studying the medicinal plant squill and the fungus ergot as part of a program to purify and synthesize active constituents for use as pharmaceuticals. His main contribution was to elucidate the chemical structure of the common nucleus of Scilla glycosides (an active principal of Mediterranean Squill). While researching lysergic acid derivatives, Hofmann first synthesized LSD-25 in 1938. The main intention of the synthesis was to obtain a respiratory and circulatory stimulant (an analeptic). It was set aside for five years, until April 16, 1943, when Hofmann decided to take another look at it. While re-synthesizing LSD, he accidentally absorbed a small quantity through his fingertips and serendipitously discovered its powerful effects before his bicycle ride home.
It’s irrelevant to Houston-based Heathen, but it sounds like being squeezed into the bulkhead by a supersized seatmate is a thing of the past on United. Consumerist has the story:
Starting today, United Airlines has a new policy. If you can’t fit into a single seat, you need to buy another one or stay behind.
In order to fly for no extra charge, passengers now have to be able to sit in a single seat, buckle their seat belt (with an extender) and put the arm rests down. If you can’t do this, you’re going to need to buy another ticket — unless there is already a seat available with another open seat next to it.
“I used prosciutto (Italian for ‘expensive bacon’) because it is a superior engineering grade of meat.” (Via Rob)
(The whole Greymatter subsite there is fantastic; he also hotrods a Weber to make his own glass, which means putting about 2,000 degrees in a kettle grill. Delightful.)
Via Siege, we find the sad tale of an insane penguin, narrated (naturally) by Werner Herzog. (2:27 Youtube)
Moon, as it stars Sam Rockwell.
Or, why restating the problem can be the best possible thing you can do. The context of the link is software development, but upon reflection it turns out that there’s pretty much always some benefit to be had by turning the problem around a few times.
(Of course, my answer to the actual dilemma linked would’ve been “join,” but that’s because I think in Perl.)
I like it, but this guy really really loves it.
This is so wrong I have no idea what to tell you. It is, however, safe for work. And both snuggie- and baby-related. So click.
It’s that time of year again. The Washington Post’s annual peep diorama contest is always fun, but this year the winner is completely over the top. (Via Mrs Heathen.)
This time, the victims are the TeaPartyTards. Check it out.
I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I’m still befuddled.
Option 1: It’s a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn’t bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.
Option 2: It’s a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists … only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform?
Nice. As Jon Stewart said earlier this week, all these hysterical wingnuts seem to have confused “tyranny” with “losing.”
Pervasive computing is getting there, but the problem right now is that getting to the cloud of data involves the awkward process of hauling out your phone or laptop and doing a manual query. What if you didn’t have to, and what if you could solve the problem without spending more than $400?
I can’t possibly explain how cool this is. Just go watch.
(Yes, the MIT Media Lab is made of WIN.)
Recent Heathen fave neighborhood restaurant Feast has just bagged some national press from NYT’s Frank Bruni. How cool is that?
Turns out, Louis CK is a giant camera nerd, and also a pretty compelling blogger — the entry linked here is one of several he wrote about performing via the USO for troops in Iraq.
Don’t you want a Royal Enfield Military 500 motorcycle? Holy cow, it’s only like six large, too.
Have you played Settlers of Catan yet? The German-made game has become a global hit; my guess is Heathen Nation probably has a higher percentage of gamers — and thus folks who’ve seen it — than the public at large, but it’s interesting that Wired has noticed. It’s also interesting that Wired’s notice feels late despite the fact that I’ve seen no other mass-media treatment of it yet.
So how about a cannonball floating in mercury?