No more garage rock bands

The odd, yet somehow predictable, story of the inclusion of a DMCA notice in a garage opener manual.

not a big fan of shopping

[from]

semi-unbelievable

Stunt plane passenger accidentally activates ejector seat.

Turns out eBay is useful for something

Somewhat counter-intuitively, it has lowered the looting of antiquities.

Fine by me, although I am rather unsentimental, and don't really care about the age or province of something to begin with (I'm trying to think if that's really true. I think it is).

On a related thought

Spammers have apparently used third-world workers to fill in CAPTCHA's, because the labor costs are still low enough to make it profitable. I wonder if it would be equally profitable for ISP's to hire these same people to create false responses to spam, or in some other way, use up limited resources that belong to spammers? Probably not.

In which I confront the fact that there are a lot of foods that I don't even want to try

Canned pork brains in milk gravy.

Just to make it official

I will pay my sister $100 if I do not lose 5 pounds by March 23. I'm intrigued by "diet betting," where you artificially create an outward commitment to accomplish what self-discipline apparently can't. I figure my goal is eminently doable, at 1.25 lbs/week, or 640 drams per fortnight, but we shall see.

America's Fattiest Fat Fat*

This is why you're fat. Featured is one of the infamous Rochester "garbage plates.'

*my sister's nick-name for a certain popular weight-loss themed television show

That's just not right

Who would..?? Why..?

Why not leave a Chick track too?

[via Slashfood]

Green is the new Victorian, which isn't an original thought to me [Crichton's (in)famous essay], nor is it pejorative to say so, but does mean that the same issues and problems appear. And so, if this guy thinks he's going to advance his cause by leaving a moralizing card behind (and he better not leave it in lieu of a tip), well, he's not.

Hmm, I wonder why this didn't catch on

"Scooter Cannon"

I'm sure that the boys in Rancid or the A-Team would have given their eye-teeth to have come up with this.

Political hypothesis

There is now a car-czar, or will be, to go along with our "drug-czars" and "education-czar" and "energy-czar" and "homeland security-czar". This is obviously kabuki jargon for "person placed in charge of a hopelessly daunting task that any examination of the political landscape will reveal to be essentially intractable without the socio-economic equivalent of Mt St Helen's blowing up."

So, is there anything or anyplace or anytime where the existence of a czar, with or without Faberge eggs, hasn't meant that the whole enterprise is doomed?

BTW, the automaker bailout is doomed. I don't see why bankruptcy is any worse for them than it is for the airlines. I'd be happy to list other reasons why I don't think it's a good idea, but that's sorta moot. You have to drink a lot of kool-aide to think that this "loan" will turn things around.

In any case, there's a political inevitability to it, even though it seems oddly capricious to me: our bailouts are going to be allotted like those service industry jobs where you tip them customarily, even though there are plenty of other folks who you don't. Waiters, yes; Grocery clerks, no. Cab drivers, yes; Bus drivers, no. Etc and so forth.

Students Unite!

You have only your student loans to lose: America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree

[..] Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Previously: Are Too Many People Going to College?

(yes)

apropos of nothing

FAIL: A timely link

Daily Dose of Fail.

Let them eat nutraloaf

Yeah, the Supremes can go ahead and worry about the death-penalty and hand-gun bans, but does "nutraloaf" violate the Eight Amendment: Can prison food be unconstitutionally bad? Yes, I imagine, but nutrialoaf does not sink to quite that low:

Even unsympathetic courts seem willing to concede that Nutraloaf is pretty disgusting, but after reading through the court filings in these cases, I couldn't shake a nagging question—just how bad is it? Nutraloaf is made differently in different prisons. Vermont's penal cookbook calls for a combination of vegetables, beans, bread, cheese, and raisins. I recently spent $15 on a nearly identical dish at a vegan cafe in New York—and it didn't even have raisins. In a spirit of legal and culinary adventurousness, I decided to make some Nutraloaf of my own.

He should have named the cafe, so that they could advertise their food as constitutionally legal. Anyway, he makes a bunch, and then serves it to guests at a dinner party. Which is cruel and unusual.

Apropos of nothing

Is it Better to Buy or Rent? NYTimes java applet.

I'm not sure if they include the opportunity cost of the money you spend vs, nominally, investing. Either way, it's very much a no-go in DC right now. ($400k for a 1000 sq foot house in Arlington). Unless my illegitimate kids finally track me down and I need extra basement space, I'll be renting my cardboard box for awhile.

(And yet... the house down the block just went up for sale. Should I put in a bid? When it doubles in two years, I'll be rich!)

Many sins are their own punishements

How Green Is the College? Time the Showers

Oberlin’s president, Marvin Krislov, dropped by with his young daughter a few weeks ago for burgers and grilled corn. Offering the ritual tour, the students demonstrated how they caught their shower and sink water in buckets and reused it to flush their low-flow toilet, a budget model improvised with a couple of salvaged bricks in the tank.

“He was using us to chastise his daughter for leaving lights on and the water running,” Mr. Brown said.

The bathroom is the showstopper on the tour. Besides the hourglass timer — Mr. Brown pointed out that it was called a shower coach and cost $3 online — the shower’s energy-saving motivational accessories include a picture of former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina plastered to the ceiling.

That was Ms. Bob-Waksberg’s idea. No one wants to linger in the shower with someone staring down from the ceiling, she said.

“You could also look at it another way,” she said, “that John Edwards is encouraging me to take a shorter shower.”

Boy, that's not all creepy at all. Also, environmentalists need to take longer, not shorter, showers.

F1 and the Preakness

I don't follow F1 at all, but this is facinating: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Formula One Racing World.

It's amazing that some of the most advanced machines in the world are built just to go around in circles really fast. That presupposes that there's something grander or more profound for them to do, but I think there is. There has to be.

Speaking of going around in a circle at tremendous expense, I went to Pimlico field last weekend for the Preakness
with a group of friends, where we saw Big Brown walk away from the field in the home strech. That was remarkable. Less remarkable was the $24 I collected on a $20 bet, but hey, I won. Unlike the S&P500. And the IRS will be duly notified. Maybe.

Much more remarkable than either of those tidbits, is that the infield, where we observed all the action from, was a madhouse. Imagine ten thousand Britney Spears Gone Wild with ten thousand Kevin Federline's and Frathouse Meatheads, drunk out of their minds, mired in a field of mud, with random fistfights and debauchery sprinkled like peanuts in a turd, and you'll get the picture. The port-a-potties were a holocaust, or rather, I wish they had been. Setting them on fire would have been an improvement. Not quite the ladies-in-sun-dresses-and-big-hats with gentlemen-in-seer-sucker-suits and drinking some sort of Maryland mint-julepps that I had in mind. Unless you're an idiot, yo, spring for the grand-stand tickets. The Bring All the Beer and Wine You Can Carry Policy should have been a tip-off.

Anyway, even if I would repeat it, it was still an interesting and informative experience. Not unlike college if you went to a party-school. And if Big Brown wins the Belmont, the story will be that I was there at the Preakness finish line. Capping the night off at Fells Point at Bertha's was a pretty nice capstone.

Hmm

Cigarettea seems, um, gross.