So, 2005 in Cities:

• Houston, TX
• Jackson, MS*
• Chicago, IL
• Sarasota, FL
• Louisville, KY*
• New Braunfels, TX
• Hattiesburg, MS
• Galveston, TX
• San Francisco, CA
• Mendocino, CA
• NYC, NY
• Albany, NY

(The idea is Kottke’s; tag, you’re it.)

Yesterday was Albert Hoffman’s 100th birthday. (BoingBoing link to NYT story; local copy here due to NYT’s absurd archives policy.)

More here, from a Baltimore TV station.

Why, perhaps, you ought to keep your shoes on when walking on airplanes. (Flash)

A woman near Kiev has been doing some minor exploring and excavation of the WWII battlefields around the area. Her findings and pictures are worth your time, even if her written english isn’t quite perfect (it’s better than your Russian, we wager). Among the abandoned bunkers she finds all manner of rifles, pistols, grenades, and other more mundane detritus of war there — as well as, disturbingly, evidence of the staggering number of casualties from the battle half a century ago.

This. We do, however, love how the article ends.

When Timothy Shey, an executive at a local Web applications company, found out that his parents were deciding on a new computer a couple of years ago, he offered to give them free and unlimited tech support, on one condition– they had to buy an Apple Macintosh. […] But the Sheys ignored their son’s advice and bought a Windows-based computer. So a year later when the machine started acting up, he kept his word. “I cut them off,” he said with a laugh.

(Local copy of article.)

We do not want this soup.

There’s now a citywide transit strike in New York. The last one, in 1980, lasted 11 days.

Bill Wray, the man behind Ren & Stimpy, is also a “regular” painter. Wacky. (Via BoingBoing)

Dogs laugh and monkeys have accents.

This.

Granted, the guy in the video can’t do that anymore, either, because he died doing something even stupider than the speed free-solo ascent in the video.

Also, we all know Kirst would be pumped after about 45 feet anyway, so it’s moot twice.

So last night about 1230 we were lying in bed. Mrs Heathen was asleep. The cat was asleep. I was reading until I heard some very loud, sharp noises that most anyone would take for firecrackers, except New Year’s is weeks away, and firecrackers are not generally accompanied by the sound of breaking glass.

There’s an ugly sort of feeling in your gut that happens when you realize you’ve just heard a fairly serious exchange of small-arms fire — easily a dozen or more shots, quickly, in a way that meant more than one gun was involved — in the middle of the night that sounded close enough that you imagine you can smell cordite. Mrs Heathen woke up and looked at me as if to say “Um, those weren’t fireworks, were they?” We lay in the bed, very still, and listened, and in about thirty seconds I began to hear faint sirens, far off, but getting closer quickly.

Soon the sirens were damn near in our bedroom, and we could see the cruisers’ lights splashing against the buildings behind our house. I peeked out the front window to see a cop blocking West Drew and Taft; five or six more cars blew south down Taft, tearing off onto sidestreets. Then the helicopter showed up, flying low and slow, and playing a spotlight around the neighborhood.

This went on for some time. We soon remembered we hadn’t locked the backyard, which is of course precisely the sort of thing you want to remember in a situation like this. After a long time, it seemed, events outside calmed down enough that we drifted off back to sleep, but I’m pretty sure the cops were still roaming around when we did.

Turns out it was a drug sting gone bad; during a buy attempt, four dealers apparently decided to rob the undercover officers, who took exception thereto. An HPD officer is in the hospital; one of his assailants is dead, another in the hospital, and the other two are in custody.

Mrs Heathen and I have a big-ass jar on our dresser into which we place our change nightly. It accumulates at a fairly rapid clip, so despite the jar’s size we end up redeeming it about twice a year. It’s usually between $250 and $300, depending on how full we let it get before we head to the Coinstar machine — which is a pretty clever thing, and a very savvy business model, we believe; they take a (fair) cut of the free money you’re bringing in, and you leave with 91% of the cash.

This whole thing got us wondering, however, on account of we’re powerful geeky: How close could we get to the value of the jar if we estimated based on the jar’s weight (adjusting for the weight of the empty jar, natch), the known individual weight of each denomination of coin, and the estimated distribution of American coinage?

Presumably, the biggest barriers to this would be (a) getting a good estimate of the distribution and (b) finding a precise enough scale, as coins are very, very light. With those in hand, the next obstacle would be distribution variance — i.e., how much does our household distribution differ from some national “normal” value?

Anyway, after turning in a mostly-full jar today ($297. plus 4 Sac dollars and a new nickle that Coinstar knows not what to make of), we discovered that the machine gives out its tally of denominations, so we figure we’ll use this for a jumping-off point:

If you are someone who needs to buy some handmade jewelry over the Internet from a girl we dated in college who went on to marry a guy with a obsession for Raiders of the Lost Arc, then we’ve got just the link for you.

The Abe Vigoda Status Page makes sure you know.

You probably need to listen to Abe Vigoda’s Dead, which you know the tune to already. Here’s the lyrics in case you need to sing along.

(Via Tony)

Lindsey wonders if you’ve seen Sixteen Serious Questions Raised by Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer?

Via BoingBoing, this sign includes some delightful “translations,” such as “Have no the adult the child that look after with the old man prohibition against the next sea swimming”. Right.

BoingBoing reveals why Yukon Cornelius licks his axe.

But you must admit there is something cool about the whole “bucket-o-fire” thing: we give you the Underwriters Labs “Don’t Fry That Turkey” video.

See subj.

Send us a weirder picture to replace this one with.

So, last night I dreamed I had a job working with a partner luring small bears out of vending machines by stuffing magazines into the product-drop slot. If done right, the bear would come bounding out of the slot, and we’d catch him. (It’s not clear if the bears were reading the magazines, or what.) Rolling Stone worked the best, but we didn’t have many of those, so we horded them. Ladies’ Home Journal was useless. My partner kept wanting to try the National Review, but for reasons that didn’t survive the transition to waking life, I insisted that wouldn’t work at all.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

The Guardian reports that the last known veteran of the 1914 Christmas Truce passed away today.

You know, it really comes as no surprise to us that a 75-year-old jewel thief might have an interesting story to tell. (Widely blogged today.)

At Heathen central, we have a large jar full of pocket change. It takes a year or so to fill up, at which time we cash it in and have a free couple hundred bucks. Usually, we use the change-counting machines in grocery stores — I mean, who’s got time to count all that change by hand?

Anyway, this morning we wondered how close an estimate of the jar’s value based only on (a) the distribution of each denomination of coin (i.e., in circulation) and (b) the known weight of each coin denomination might be, and further where we might get those data points so that we could make a guess before we turn it in. Anybody care to guess how close we’ll come?

Nobody sane thought Alabama was really going to beat Auburn this year, but if the Tide can’t win, we’re still happy as long as Tennessee loses. To Vanderbilt.

The Volunteers (4-6, 2-5) will finish without a winning record and not be eligible for a bowl for the first time since 1988, another crushing blow in the worst season in coach Phillip Fulmer’s 14-year tenure.

BoingBoing points to a story about a Craigslist participant who fixes computers in exchange for sexual favors.

1. “Frankly, we think that whole animal-cruelty thing was blown way out of proportion. That monkey had it coming.”
2. “He sure looks great now that he’s had his meth-mouth fixed.”
3. “M___, or Melinda as he now prefers to be called…”
4. “Tell him he still owes me for the poppies.”
5. “Isn’t he dead?”

You can play like shit and beat Mississippi State, but not LSU. The streak ends in OT.

1. If I’m working upstairs, the cat will be on her window perch surveying the neighborhood. (Once I move downstairs to the office, she’ll be perched on the desk surveying the insides of her eyelids.) As she dislikes visitors in general and door-knocking in particular, she has learned that “big brown truck == potential knock at door,” so she runs to hide when the truck stops outside. Ergo, Bob is my UPS alarm.
2. Today, the UPS guy asked “So, you’re working at home now?” which is a wholly unsurprising question (I am; he’s brought me many RFID tags in the last week). His second question was a bit more interesting: “So, y’all just got married, too, didn’t you?” Of course he’d notice; he delivered a metric ton of gifts from our far-flung families and our net-shopping friends. It makes me wonder what else you could know about a household just by being the UPS guy, though.

Did you?

That won’t stop us from posting BabyReview.com, however.

Five email tics I’d love you to lose, by Merlin Mann:

1. The liberal use of the “VERY HIGH PRIORITY!!!” flag
2. The 18-line sig about all the Bad Things that will happen to me if I ever reveal the contents of your privileged, confidential (and unencrypted) message
3. The unrequested press release (and the serial ignoring of the “Unsubscribe” I sent you for the previous seven press releases)
4. The graphical background, font and table tags, and remaining 14k of HTML cruft associated with every. single. message. you’ve ever sent
5. The including of my — plus 98 other strangers’ — personal email addresses in the “To:” line of your friendly reminder about Tyler’s birthday party

Of course, had someone not committed sin number 5 in my direction back in ’01, I’d probably not be married, so there you go.

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder treason and plot.
We see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

Guy Fawkes, guy, t’was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England’s overthrow.

By god’s mercy he was catch’d
With a darkened lantern and burning match.
So, holler boys, holler boys, Let the bells ring.
Holler boys, holler boys, God save the king.

And what shall we do with him?
Burn him!

The shredder makes the cat jumpy.

This is a busy day in my calendar.

• My friends Bradley and Carolyn had their son in 2001.
• My friend Mariana’s daughter was born, also in 2001;
• My grandmother passed away that same day, after a long illness; and
• It was my father’s birthday; today, he’d have been 65.

So, later, have a drink for Ben, for Eva, for Mimi, and for Carl Sr. if you feel like it. But smile when you do; the good far outweighs the bad.

Nothing.

Apparently, George Bush carries nothing in his pockets. I understand why — aides handle his phones; he never needs identification; he doesn’t need to pay for anything — but I never actually thought about it before. I’m sure Bush is no different in this regard than any prior president. It still seems sort of surreal.

I’m pretty sure if I was president, I’d still carry stuff. Maybe not money or ID or credit cards, but definitely my own pen, a pocketknife, Carmex, and maybe a small notebook or Palm. Or maybe not; maybe it’s just too liberating to go without — or too easy to make aides carry all your crap.

Weird.

(It occurs to me that this is really just another manifestation of something his father famously took heat for: being wholly unaware of the existence of supermarket bar-code scanners. Why would G. H. W. Bush have ever seen such a thing? He’d been president for a few years at the time, and his prior job was 8 years as Ronnie’s veep, which takes us right back to the 1970s. Still, how weird would it be to be that disconnected from the everyday life of everyone else?)

Yeah, things have gotten a bit better for Clayton Cubitt’s family. Close your office door before you read this if you don’t want people to see you get misty. Sometimes, good things happen. Sometimes, people are just better than we have any right to expect.

We just got a wrong number call.

On our VOIP Skype number.

Ew. That’s gonna take a lot of therapy.

Check out this account of a displaced geek getting back to his apartment in Louisiana. As he said, if they’d died, they’d be shoe-ins for the Darwin Awards.

The oft-linked Mike seems to have enjoyed our wedding, though he does take certain liberties in his recap. In a later entry, he makes clear a sentiment we’ve heard much of in re: the reception food:

Chet and Erin’s wedding had, without a doubt, the best food of any wedding I’ve ever been to. I mean, even though I think my wife took to feeding me cake to stop me from talking to other women, I didn’t really mind.

Said food was from Jill Rubenstein and PersonalChefsNYC. She and her husband David ROCK THE HOUSE. They rule. Totally. Mike’s opinion of the food was shared widely at the reception. While Jill didn’t do the cake (that was the aptly-named Who Made The Cake?, with whom we are also very pleased), she was responsible for everything else that our guests ate or drank, including a pseudocustom cocktail. She was also, while not cheap, quite reasonable. HIGHLY recommended.

While we’re talking about awesome, we should also note our Crack Wedding Officiation and Documentation Team. David outdid himself with our beautiful pictures, and his fantastic wife was the best darn officiant EVAR; many folks complimented us on the service she put together around our (scant) input. It should also be noted that it was in fact David who pointed us to Jill, whom we first met through Spacetaker‘s launch party last year. Awesomeness abounds.

This Guy‘s birthday was yesterday, so: HAPPY GODDAMN BIRTHDAY.

“Look, Honey! It’s our first chinese food as man and wife!”

So far, marriage rocks. Thanks to EVERYONE who came and helped us celebrate!

Probably time to go to bed. Out of ginger ale, and Tony’s drunk as fuck.

Our friends Mike and Anne got married secretly at the Cambridge, MA courthouse years ago.

As things get more complicated and less done and the zero-hour looms larger, we think of Massachusetts courthouses as much more romantic locations than we did previously.

Today is our friend JoAnn’s birthday. Click the pick to hassle her.

Well, not literal crooks, but these folks, who were amused by this entry from last October enough to link directly to OUR local copy of the ten megabyte video.

The good news is that our server didn’t blink at all about serving out all the extra traffic, and blithely served out 700 copies overnight.

The even better news is that our Colo people noticed the wildly out of pattern bandwidth usage (70GB overnight vs. about 30 for all of September) and contacted us this morning, first thing. It didn’t take long to figure out what the problem was, especially since the first thing we did was take down Apache to see if the pain stopped, and lo and behold it did (thanks, by the way, to all those folks who emailed us about the apparent Heathen outage; even though it was under control, it’s good to know folks are paying attention).

The file’s been removed, but the original copy is still available. I’m told that the nice folks at C&L will be hosting a copy themselves soon, so if you’re here looking for Cheney being more vulgar than usual, wander over there. (They really are nice; they offered to cover our bandwidth overages, which we’d certainly have if we hadn’t moved last month.)

We now have a marriage license.

Bag limit is, apparently, one.