The tiger bombs fell at midnight, shredding the air with fur and claws as a thousand thousand Bengals rained down upon the helpless populace.

Last night I went to Delilah's, where they were having an absinthe tasting. The owner, Mike, has been obsessed with absinthe for a long time and frequently traveled to Europe to get it--you can imagine how excited he was when it became legal here. So he bought a couple bottles of every single absinthe that is currently being sold in the midwest (16 types, all told) and had an awesome tasting at his bar. I will tell you all about them!

The article claims that one of these ships will be up and running in 2009. I'll believe that when I see it, and I hope to see it s... more->

After days of torrential rain, today and yesterday have been joyously sunny and warm! The fact that this change occurred the same day that I started dating Cat is pure coincidence, I have no doubt.

(My bike lock stopped sticking too, for what it's worth...)

I'm trying to make Facebook play nicely with the rss feed from this 'blog, so I'll just ramble a bit to generate enough characters to be meaningful.

I'm a little nervous that I might be well behind the curve of technology--a place I hate being. Manfred Macx, that's who I want to be. But I just used Google website creator for the first time, and I used WordPress for the second time, and maybe struggling along on this lovingly hand-coded 'blog is more trouble than it's worth?

In a sim... more->

I was discussing the role of the artist in one's understanding of art, and Blur's 1994 hit Girls and Boys came up (it was the subject line of a friend's email, actually) and it made me actually look at the lyrics for the first time in my life. I was maintaining that, although a lot of one's response to art is purely subjective, there is also an objective component--the artist is (often) conveying meaning, and one's interpretation of the text can simply be wrong.

I realized that this was true for me, regarding Girls and Boys. I've always seen it as a song in celebration of sex, regardless of orientation, prejudice or kink, with the important addendum that it "always should be someone you really love". I've always like it for that reason.

Apparently Metafilter is having some sort of contest to see who can record the best cover of Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah". There's still a week or two to go, but Cortex just won:

Halle Hula

As he describes it: "Hallelujah - Cohen + Elvis - gravitas + hula girls"

I have a small collection of business card holders, which are in pretty bad shape. Also, I have lost them all. I made a new one, out of a battery box from IKEA! I am great.

Click the images to see larger versions thereof.

Why am I posting a snippet of private conversation between me and my friend on the Internet, without asking permission? Well,

A) It's a pretty amusing rant.
B) He called to give me this rant at one o'clock in the gaddam morning!

I'm almost entirely certain that he wasn't drunk while he left me this message, as he was driving at the time. Then again, with this particular friend one can never be entirely certain.

... more->

Hah! HAH! I made it, you bastards! I still had twenty bucks in my backup account on payday! HAHAHA! I WIN!

Well, I'll tell you about the Music Player, at any rate. I spent all day yesterday trying to get it to realize that every song on the Slingshot Hip-Hop album was on the same album. I even tried changing the meta-data of each track so that the artist was "See PC for artist info". No dice.

It worked fine in every other mp3 playing environment. Finally, I just auto-tagged everything except the track name to an album chosen at ra... more->