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I was talking to Dirk yesterday; he’d called from his cell phone while he was driving home in the pouring rain. We were talking about the usual nonsense and enjoying ourselves, when all of a sudden he screamed:

“I’m going to die! I’m going to die! I’m going to die!”

There were a few beeps, and then silence.

Thinking he was pulling a fast one on me, I was playing along. “Dirk? Are you dead?” After a moment he came back on and said quietly, “I was just in a big accident. I’ll call you back.”

Yikes. It turns out he’d hydroplaned on the wet road and dove into a ditch off the highway. The car was trashed, but luckily he was okay. Definitely a bummer of an evening.

Seen on Fark. It’s funny because it’s true.

To all those people who laugh at me for going everywhere barefoot, I refer them to the recent study from Portland, Oregon. Scientists who apparently had run out of research ideas decided to compare people who wore shoes and walked on sidewalks and streets to a group who walked barefoot on cobblestones.

John Fisher, who led the study, said this:

“Nearly all the 108 volunteers in the study said they felt better after the exercise. But only the half who walked the cobblestones showed significant improvement in balance, measures of mobility and blood pressure.”

There you have it. Although I admit I don’t often wander around cobblestone streets, clearly there’s some benefit to walking barefoot. Playing ultimate barefoot is good for bonus points.

I’m waiting breathlessly to hear how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office decides to handle a recent (March 2005) application by some clown in Hawaii to trademark the name “Jesus Christ”. Here’s a portion of the filing information:

Serial Number: 78583223
Mark (words only): JESUS CHRIST
Standard Character claim: Yes
Current Status: Newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney.
Date of Status: 2005-03-21
Filing Date: 2005-03-09

Address:
Maria, Ronald./K
PO Box 2868 89226A Farrington Hwy
Waianae, HI 96792
United States

It looks like Ronald has big plans to sue everyone who goes to church or prints a bible. I wonder if you could sue someone for saying a prayer?

Sheesh…

“Build a man a fire and he is warm for a day.
Light a man on fire and he is warm for the rest of his life.”

— Jason K. Larson

A Taco Bell in Pittsburgh seems to think some of its female customers should be paying more for their lunch.

Hint: see the last item on the menu.

Nothing stops the Forehand of Doom.

As part of the sudden increase in shark attacks and lightning strikes– at least from the media’s point of view– comes the story of seven-year-old Kaylee Shriner of Tonganoxie, Kansas. She was asleep in her bed when lighting hit the house, blew through her ceiling, and struck her bed. The bed, which apparently wasn’t manufactured to withstand a lightning strike, promptly burst into flame. She jumped out of bed and told mom and dad, and according to her statement to the media:

“Dad said a bad word, and then Mom heard it, and then she went upstairs, and then she said a bad word, and there were lots of bad words around here.”

Ahh, kids are so much fun because they’re so brutally honest…

So the other day, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can allow one private party to obtain land from another private party by claiming “eminent domain” if it can be shown that the tax revenue from the pre-empting party would exceed that generated by the existing one. This has all sorts of implications, and is of course just another nod to big nasty corporations who want to bulldoze neighborhoods to make way for factories or whatever.

In a stroke of genius, and what can only be called poetic irony, a hotel developer named Logan Clements filed paperwork with the city of Weare, New Hampshire to allow him to bulldoze the house of Justice David Souter and build a hotel in its place. The hotel would be called The Lost Liberty Hotel and would include the Just Desserts Cafe and a small museum with exhibits about the loss of freedoms in America. All guests would receive a complimentary copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

I love it!

Of course Clements had no problem demonstrating that the tax revenue from a hotel would greatly exceed Justice Souter’s annual property tax, and therefore it’s perfectly within the jurisprudence of the new ruling. If three of the five members of the town council vote in favor of it, I guess Justice Souter will be shopping for a new home…

I’ve got 200GB of storage on my main office server, and it’s just about full. Out of curiosity I checked to see what the heck was taking so much room (I mean, come on, who needs that much space?) and discovered that my music collection has grown to about 85GB. Wow, that’s a lot of music.

Another 90GB is hundreds of thousands of backup files for clients, and the remainder includes everything from my digital photo album to ten years of e-mail messages to general documents and files.

Time to get one of those new-fangled 400GB drives, I guess…