“Last night we saw a one-legged man play tangos on an upright piano.”

Bonus: It’s true. Also, it was awesome. More on this later.

It’s a Bush video, but this time Bush isn’t the jackass — CNN’s Kyra Phillips is. See, Kyra left the booth with her wireless mic attached and on. When she went to the bathroom. And nobody managed to kill it, so her powder-room chatter went out live.

Awesome. We’ve heard anecdotes for years about pastors hitting the head with their mics still on, but we guess Kyra managed to miss those stories.

Some HP cameras come with digital slimming features that purport to make their subjects skinnier than they actually are. (Via Rob.)

Especially if it’s wacky and pranky. Follow the link and check out their “Moebius” prank, too, which is even more inspired.

Slashdot points us to coverage of a Microsoft exec discussing the folly of workplace web blocks:

Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today.

“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist.

“People that I meet are saying this to me every day, all over the world.”

More:

People were increasingly making use of anonymous proxies that couldn’t be easily blocked by corporate firewalls, bringing in their own wireless broadband services for use with a personal laptop or with a work PC or accessing instant messaging via mobile phones and PDAs. […] “Bill Gates said years ago that if you worry about internet productivity, you’re worrying about people stealing pens from your stationery cupboard… there are bigger things to worry about.”

Security risks are one thing, but the quest to block every conceivable nonwork website or protocol is ultimately wrongheaded and silly. Yes, some of your employees will slack off reading sites (like this one) or chatting with friends, but at the end of the day you can tell the productive types from the slackers. Weed out those who take too many liberties and don’t get their work done, and don’t worry about your productive team members reading ESPN.

People dislike being treated like children, and react accordingly. Kirah makes another point: that people who’ve grown up with IM and related technologies will view employers who resist the usage of them on “productivity grounds” to be bizarre dinosaurs — and they’ll be right.

Over the years, we’ve been on many corporate campuses with a wide variety of Internet policies. On the whole, we found smarter, happier and more productive employees in places that didn’t care if you took a break to read The Onion once in a while.

The drive-in theater (Google SatMap) where we saw Moonraker with our dad (at an age where the implications of “Doctor Goodhead” completely escaped us[1]) is about to close. It’s hung on for years, off and on, but Katrina seems to have pushed it over the edge.

Hit the photo at right for a small gallery at our hometown paper. Drive-ins were weird things; given the climate and the mosquito population, we can’t imagine too many of them ever did well in our native Mississippi. The Hargroder family actually owned two in Hattiesburg, but we can’t remember the other one ever actually functioning. Attending high-school football games as a kid at the rapidly-collapsing white-flight school our father sent us to, though, we can recall seeing the Beverly’s screen in the distance, silent but still compelling from a half mile or so away. It seemed surreal that it still existed in 1979, let alone 2001, though we guess nostalgia can account for a lot.

([1.] We were much more worldly-wise by the time we got to see Goldfinger.)

Rumor has it that these people are gettin’ married:

(File photo.)

First, a collection of rare Waterson ephemera;

Second, science education from Calvin’s dad; here’s some samples:

Calvin: Why do my eyes shut when I sneeze?
Dad: If your lids weren’t closed, the force of the explosion would blow your eyeballs out and stretch the optic nerve, so your eyes would flop around and you’d have to point them with your hands to see anything.

Calvin: How do bank machines work?
Dad: Well, let’s say you want 25 dollars. You punch in the amount and behind the machine there’s a guy with a printing press who makes the money and sticks it out this slot.
Calvin: Sort of like the guy who lives up in our garage and opens the door?
Dad: Exactly.

Calvin: What causes the wind?
Dad: Trees sneezing.

Calvin: Why does ice float?
Dad: Because it’s cold. Ice wants to get warm, so it goes to the top of liquids to be nearer to the sun.

Calvin: How do they know the load limit on bridges, Dad?
Dad: They drive bigger and bigger trucks over the bridge until it breaks. Then they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge.

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It’s just the WORLD was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: That’s really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old PAINTINGS in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else in the ’30s.
Calvin: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

Calvin: Dad, will you explain the theory of relativity to me? I don’t understand why time goes slower at greater speed.
Dad: It’s because you keep changing time zones. See, if you fly to California, you gain three hours on a five-hour flight, right? So if you go at the speed of light, you gain MORE time, because it doesn’t take as long to get there. Of course, the theory of relativity only works if you’re going west.

So, yesterday, Heathen HQ was running low on some office crap, so we ventured forth to acquire binder clips, paper clips, printer paper, etc. There’s an office supply store not far from our lair, so we went there.

We looked at phone systems there, too. The sales drone was unable to tell us anything about a particular model of phone, so we figured we’d check out the web site. Once back in the office, we fired up a new Firefox window and realized something that we’re sure makes marketing idiots and advertising charlatans cringe:

We have no idea if the store in question was an OfficeMax or an OfficeDepot. We know that the one on West Gray is of one type, and the one on Kirby is the other, but we can’t tell a difference. It gets worse: we know one of them has (had?) a fairly slick “rubber-band man” ad campaign, but we can’t for the life of us remember which one it is. Nor do we care.

We’ve worked on projects that including branding and corporate communication tracks. We know people spend lots of money on this stuff. What boggles us is that these two apparent competitors have spent money on branding and advertising with so little to show for it. Maybe they know people don’t really care which store they go to, but other businesses faced with that same commodification problem have found solutions (think airlines and frequent flier programs). It seems foolish that they persist in essentially the same namespace with no differentiation to speak of.

Are the folks at OfficeMaxDepot HQ just braindead? Or does it really not matter to them? Does the larger of the two (Depot) feel that its smaller doppelganger isn’t enough competition to worry about? What’s going on here?

Ol’ Rob had some visitors down in Chile recently (MORE people we’ve known forever), and they went on a little trip. The pics are gorgeous.

A year later, Katrina is still destroying people. Click that for the story of Times-Picayune photographer John McCusker; a year of post-K stress apparently put him under. Tuesday, he tried to commit suicide by cop. More here and here.

Carl C. Farmer, Sr., 3 Nov 1940 – 11 Aug 1986.

When you get around to drinking today, toast our pop.

Achewood‘s Chris Onstad has this to say, which we love a whole lot. If you don’t click through, at least read his closing grafs:

The clubs I use now were the clubs he treated himself to the year I was born, 1975. (The year my daughter was born, I treated myself to a brewery tour and a banjo. Say what, B? More Testors? Yeah, it’s premium, but you get what you pay for, brahhh.) They’re ancient Wilson-Staffs with ancient engineering. There’s no perimeter weighting, personally adjustable counterbalancing (what in the name of all that is holy is TaylorMade up to?!) or FancyShaft technology. I think the shafts are filled with Cutty Sark, and the heads of the woods are actual wood, made from wood, with, like, a knothole as a sweet spot, and a small tap at the rear of the hosel.

I will be the first to admit that I am annoying about not playing with modern clubs. You ever watch that America’s Test Kitchen cooking show, with Christopher Kimball, where he wears a bow tie and acts like he is angry that no one cooks pancakes like Abraham Lincoln anymore? And he always spent the weekend helping a neighbor pull an old red tractor out of mud? That is how I am about my golf clubs. I struggled hard to learn how to get the ball down the fairway, and now here’s this generation of two-lesson junior Chrysler salesmen with silver drivers the size of chowder-in-a-sourdough-bowl slapping three hundred yard tee shots without so much as taking off their beer helmets and bluetooth earpieces. These guys swing at the ball like they were trying to kill a mouse with a broom, and their Titleist flies straight and true. Pretty soon all we’re going to have to do is pull up to the pro shop, punch a button that says “9 HOLES,” insert fifty bucks, and the machine will spit out a card that reads, “PAR! GOOD JOB. 25% OFF ON CHICKEN WINGS AND ALL BIG BERTHA MERCHANDISE!”

The occasional bout of compulsive and weird behavior.

Our stepsister Dr MBT popped out a pair of TWINS yesterday, six pounds and change apiece. Given how thin their father is due to the unfortunate combination of “cardiology fellowship” and “triathalon training,” we figure the kids now weigh a nontrivial fraction of their pop (and certainly more than his bicycle). Anyway, we digress. Here’s a pic; the one hitting the O2 is my stepsister:

Congrats to all, and welcome to Anna Beth and Joshua Webster. We hope to meet you soon.

For professional reasons, we have 5 cases of halal MREs in our office. The manufacturer is a client, and we needed to do some RFID tag testing.

Said firm is also a supplier of kosher MREs, which led us to wonder about the similarities. Fortunately, [Wikipedia is on the case]. Short summary:

• Jews can drink, but can’t have cream sauces.
• Muslims can’t drink, but appear to have no prohibitions about meat and dairy together.
• Fewer animals are kosher than are halal.
• Both have specific rules regarding slaughter that must be followed; they are similar, but not the same. (To our untrained eyes, it sounds like it’s possible for a single animal to meet both sets of rules, as we didn’t see any contradictions.)
• Neither can have blood or pork.
• There are special rules for kosher at Passover, but halal requirements are the same all the time.

All this is much more complex than the dietary restrictions of our ancestral people. Actually, we’re pretty sure those just boiled down to if you see someone from church at the liquor store, don’t wave.

Some of the folks upset about the Flying Spaghetti Monster on religious grounds seem to be missing more or less the entire point of the religion which they purportedly follow. Our favorite follows; all spelling, punctuation, and capitalization is original, but we couldn’t resist adding a bit of emphasis:

I CANT FUCKING BELIEVE THAT ANYONE WOULD EVER BUY THIS LOAD OF HORSEHIT YOUR TRYING TO PASS OFF AS A RELIGION YOU GODDAMN FAGGOT – WHY DONT YOU LET JESUS INTO YOUR HEART YOU SON OF A WHORE AND STOP DOING SATANS WORK WITH YOUR RETARTED FAKE RELIGION. I CANT BELEVE PEOPLE LIKE YOU EVEN EXIST AT ALL HAVE FUN GOING TO HELL (AN ETERNAL LAKE OF FIRE IN CASE YOU FORGOT). YOU WANT PROOF THAT JESUS EXISTS? HOW ABOUT THE FACT HE HASN’T KILLED YOU FOR ALL THE FUCKED UP THINGS YOU SAY AND FOR BEING A LIBERAL COCKSUCKER

What the hell is this? (Via MeFi.)

Go read this article at Harper’s. The precis is simple: despite some 85% of Americans self-identifying as “Christian,” it is demonstrably true that our actions as a nation are decidedly unChristian. He’s not talking about mideast policy or the War on Terra; he’s talking about domestic policy, about schools, and the poor and hungry, about the sick. Jesus wasn’t about tax cuts; Jesus was about giving it away. That’s the paradox. It’s worth a read.

Back in the boom, business travelers expensed coke they snorted off the tits of Barbie-proportioned strippers over filets while quaffing whisky older than any three of their entertainers.

Tonight, I’m in the hotel bar with a laptop, sipping gin (a client beverage!) and blogging.

(See earlier post about what we can see from here.)

Yesterday, Sunday the 16th, was the 61st anniversary of the Trinity test.

Remember that disaster prep post from a couple days back? We can’t believe we didn’t include the best such site ever, HowToFuckingEvacuate.com. Enjoy.

Is it middle-aged if, by a quarter to noon on a Saturday, you’ve already:

• Investigated this (unsuccessfully; it appears to be already gone);
• Been to Midtown Farmer’s Market for coffee;
• Picked up dry cleaning;
• Been to auto parts store;
• Refilled washer fluid in wife’s car;
• Replaced wife’s car’s wiper blades;
• Washed wife’s car;
• Mowed yard;
• Watered beginnings of our herb garden; and
• Taken out the trash?

We will now make up for all this productivity by vacationing in Azeroth for a bit before becoming productive again.

Wish Mr and Mrs Lawyer Heathen a happy anniversary, as they’ve had four years of wedded bliss as of today.

We’re not sure why, but we really like this art installation of 180,000 lumpy clay figures. Scale is everything.

Remember last year when we were all horrified by Katrina and Rita, and before that the tsunami and God-knows-what-else? Remember that feeling you got in the pit of your stomach when you realized you’ve done essentially nothing about being prepared should something like that happen in your city? Remember the object lessons we learned from the post-Katrina chaos in Mississippi and Alabama, and how it reached halfway to Memphis? Remember the disaster in itself that hysterial evacuation from Rita became? Remember how we all swore we’d create “go bags” and emergency kits and stockpile several days of water and food and keep fresh batteries and up to date first aid kits?

Yeah, we didn’t do it, either. It’s hurricane season again. Start worrying, but go shopping now. The Red Cross has a great reference for home disaster preparedness. It’s general, but a great place to start. Tweak to your own tastes and needs, but make one, and keep it handy.

For many disasters, evacuation is key. Speed this process by pre-packing go-bags with essentials. You can’t take multiple days of food and water, but you can have copies of crucial documents, some tools, first aid supplies, a flashlight, a change or two of clothes, toiletries, cash, and the like in a sturdy bag or backpack kept near the door. Getting out isn’t always indicated, but when it is, it’s best to be able to do it quickly.

Other bits of wisdom worth remembering:

• Half full is half empty. Keep your car’s tank full.
• If you’re storing water, you need about a gallon per person per day.
• Grocery store gallon jugs won’t keep forever. Rotate your water.
• Don’t omit pets in emergency planning.

Making Light has a couple good posts on the subject as well.

“We respectfully refer you to the reply in Arkell v. Pressdram.”

Harriet the Tortise was the oldest living animal in the world until she passed away last night. She was 175. Where’s Willard Scott when you need him?

Excel.

Cats win.

In that vein, then, we present the best damn monkey pictures EVAR. Enjoy.

You may wonder what we have to say about any of these things. The answer is “not a fucking thing.”

1. The dead chihuahua story.
2. The dead Iraqi Jordanian.
3. The implications of the dead Iraqi Jordanian.
4. How we integrated Markdown into the site.
5. Roger Fucking Clemens.
6. Heather Mills’ porno past.
7. Anything about the estate tax.
8. Why we’re frustrated with certain of our hardware suppliers, or who they are.
9. The World Cup.

Carry on.

Today’s edition: “If there is a God, then God must be, by definition, bigger and more merciful than Townes Van Zandt.“

Anonymous Law Firm.

(Hey, Frank, check out this associate profile.)

Hat tip to the Birthday Attorney.

44 years later, Centralia, PA is still on fire.

In 1962, workers set a heap of trash ablaze in an abandoned mine pit which was used as the borough’s landfill. The burning of excess trash was a common practice, yet at that particular time and place there existed a dangerous condition: an exposed vein of anthracite coal. The highly flammable mineral was unexpectedly ignited by the trash fire, prompting a quick effort to put it out. The flames on the surface were successfully extinguished, but unbeknownst to the fire fighters, the coal continued to burn underground. Over the following weeks it rapidly migrated into the surrounding coal mines and beneath the town, causing great concern. […] In 1969 — seven years after the fire was started — a more involved effort was made to contain the fire using trenches and clay seals, but the attempt was met with failure. In the 1970s, concerns over the severity of the extensive subterranean fire were stirred when a gas station owner noticed that the contents of his underground fuel storage tank seemed hot, so he measured the gasoline’s temperature, and found it to be a troubling 180 degrees Fahrenheit. […] The fire still burns today beneath about four hundred acres of surface land, and it’s still growing. There is enough coal in the eight-mile vein to feed the fire for up to two hundred and fifty years, but it may burn itself out in as few as one hundred years.

It’s not a total loss, though. Centralia is the inspiration for the Silent Hill game and movie franchise.

You know that old saw about a frog placed in tepid water not noticing as you raise the heat, and then eventually being boiled alive? We first heard it at a Baptist camp used in a tortured analogy about pop music, which made us pretty suspicious even at 12. As it turns out, it’s pretty much bullshit.

Apparently, dorodango are all the rage. What are they, you ask? Shiny mud balls, that’s what.

No. Really.

Found over at Wil Wheaton’s place, but he’s quoting this guy:

If more Americans read books every night instead of watching TV, we’d live in a more productive society. If more Americans watched the news and read real newspapers and magazines, instead of crappy programs like American Idol, then I’m confident that George Bush would not be our president. But heck, that’s what our leaders really want deep down… a mindless, uneducated populous that will work 40 hours a week so they can earn enough money to buy things to keep them distracted from the evil deeds that our leaders and suits in Fortune 500 companies are conducting everyday under your noses.

Today, the Former Heights Attorney reaches enlightenment, i.e. the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Wish him well.

This is a picture of Sam from this entry back when Sam’s parents had an engagement crawfish boil in 2003. Sam liked the crawdads so much he’d eat them when they were still pinchy, which is both hilarious and nasty.

This week Sam was diagnosed with a grossly enlarged heart, cause unknown, and pretty unusual for a dog as young as Sam (he was about six?). Mrs Heathen and I spent last night and Thursday night hanging out with Sam and Joy and baby Gwen, partly as a favor to Joy, and partly because we loved him, too. His breathing was terribly labored, but he seemed to like having people near him.

About an hour ago, Joy and Carl called us to tell us he’d passed on at about seven this morning.

Bye, Sam. Lots of people miss you.

Our generation, Heathen, will have much to answer for and much to explain as we grow older. The 80s were an odd time; the west was in thrall to vicious right-wing philosophies promulgated by Reagan and Thatcher, and the world of the arts reacted accordingly. It is possible, we presume, to explain 80s-era covert military adventurism like Iran-Contra and the like as an outgrowth of the culture of fear that thrived in the Cold War. After all, we watched films about how to handle post-nuclear-exchange fallout in gradeschool, and bravely tried to pretend such an exchange wouldn’t destroy the world as we knew it, and that it also wasn’t in some way inevitable. But this, too, is understandable in the socioeconomic and geopolitical wake of the second World War, and the subsequent cooling of the US-Soviet relationship that probably peaked at Yalta.

Still, much remains of the 80s that children today cannot hope to understand or even sympathize with. They will look back on these things with horror and revulsion, and be utterly incapable of reacting in any way that does not include wholesale dismissal and damnation, and there is no excuse or justification we can offer.

We speak, of course, of this guy’s hair, and all sort of related crimes preserved forever by the Intarwubs. Children of today, we’re sorry. Especially for this, too. And also this.

But not for this or this. Not at all.

Update: Final link fixed.

Vern has joined the choir invisible.

Those close to Heathen are of course aware that we spent part of the week in Dayton, Ohio. Of Ohio, we say only this: It is not a coincidence that the Wright Brothers are from Ohio. Only a place like Ohio could push men to find new, faster methods of transportation, presumably in their search to put Dayton, et. al., behind them.

Hat tip to M.A.D. for pointing this out.

In Wolfsburg, Germany, Volkswagen has a fully automated garage made up of 20-storey cylinders wherein new, undelivered cars are stored. A robotic car-picker fetches the vehicles when the owners arrive. (Via BoingBoing.)

The United Church of Christ, a fairly normal Christian church, created a spot emphasizing their inclusive nature. The pseudochristian Right spends so much time talking about who’s going to hell, they must’ve figured it was about time someone associated with a Christian church said something in public that actually had something to do with Christ’s teachings. It’s a brilliant and lovely spot, and you should watch it.

However, you can pretty much only see it online, since NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, et. al., have all refused to air it. Tthey’ll cheerlead for the Administration and the war, but the idea that God loves everyone is too “controversial” for TV. We’re not sure how that worked, but we’re pretty certain the degree to which the ad would’ve made the right wingers apoplectic played a role.

So, late last week, half of the Heathen World HQ Master Bedroom Closet fell to the ground with a resounding and mildly disturbing thud. The culprit? Frankly, while the hardware was quite loaded, the real problem is that the builder chose unapologetically shitty closet hardware in the first place. So fuck him.

Anyway, Mrs Heathen and I thought about it, and did a bit of research, and then braved the wilds of the Galleria Area yesterday to fetch a $400 pile of Elfa closet hardware. This stuff is wholly unshitty, and not THAT expensive for what you get (four bills got us 8 linear feet of stuff, including two levels of hanging rail in one segment and a column of shelves at one end). The whole system hangs from a rail you can, if you like, screw into the framing timbers at the top of the closet wall (that’s what we did; Elfa insists you can hang the whole thing with drywall anchors, but we’re pretty sure that’s bullshit). Ten minutes with a level, a pencil, and a drill and you’ve done all the actual work you need to do. Everything else is closet lego.

So, the upshot is that Chief Heathen’s end of the closet is roughly 900% more attractive than it was before, especially after the more or less unavoidable purge associated with moving everything out of and then back into the closet. Seriously: we’ve gone back upstairs to admire it several times since the installation. The downside to this is that Mrs Heathen’s half of the closet — the part drastically less used prior to her arrival — is still rockin’ the craptastic white wire stuff, as is the end wall of our end. However, she has an Elfa catalog, and we’re pretty sure she’ll have a plan by the time we get back from Dayton later this week.

Oh yes. Dayton. We still don’t know why a Silicon Valley company would put their demo and education center in a city so hard to get to simply, but they didn’t ask us when they built it. We understand putting it in the midwest, which makes it reachable from both coasts, but what the hell is wrong with Chicago? We suspect they’re getting kickbacks from airlines for all the connecting flights they’ve generated. Weasels.

After passing on these startling findings to Our Man In Chile, a conversation about wildlife ensued. O.M.I.C. was at the same time observing a very small hummingbird outside his window, which led us to the following conversation.

O.M.I.C.: i am in no position to dispute their findings
Heathen: Because the mountainous regions of Chile are utterly and tragically devoid of enormous reptilian predators?
O.M.I.C.: among other reasons, yes

Then, slightly later:

O.M.I.C.: there is an impossibly small hummingbird outside
O.M.I.C.: it’s like a large bee
Heathen: I got some (poor) pictures of a normal sized on in Mendocino on our honeymoon.
Heathen: It kept folding space and suddenly being somewhere else.
Heathen: And was therefore hard to photograph.
Heathen: Frankly, the whole idea of alligators is pretty bizarre.
O.M.I.C.: it is much easier to explain hummingbird behavior if you assume not that they are very light, but are instead infinitely dense
O.M.I.C.: re: alligators, i think it is very important, at the end of the day, to be thankful that you were not eaten by something. without alligators we lose this small satisfaction.

So there’s that.

We’re sure you do. If you agree, drop us a line; some friends of Heathen have been fostering a litter of kittens, and have five left. They need good homes. We here at Heathen World HQ heartily endorse the adoption of cats (and dogs) if at all possible.

Kinda gettin’ the idea that Heathen are busy, aren’t you?

Today is No Pants Day. Act accordingly.