According to the What’s your mental age? test, I’m mentally 19. It’s a bit of a shame that it doesn’t give any sort of justification or reasoning for that, but hey — good to know, I suppose.
(via Blogdex)
Naked over your clothes
The basic idea has been around for a while, but I’ve never seen something quite like this German company’s line of ‘nude’ clothing. It does make me wonder what kind of trouble that might stir up over here — it’d definitely be an eye-catcher! I’d almost love to see a group of 10 to 20 people walking down the street wearing this stuff, just to see how much confusion and consternation it would cause!
(via Boing Boing)
ClearChannel sucks
Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.
(via DayPop)
Welcome back WaSP
After a short hiatus to regroup, the Web Standards Project is back up and running. These are the people that I tend to turn to when doing any major redesign on my site, and were instrumental in my decision to re-code my site to be entirely CSS-based and W3-compliant. Good place to start if you’re at all interested in web design.
Emperor of the US
I first read about Norton I, Emperor of the United States of America in one of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. He was also mentioned in the book I’m reading now, The Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy, by Robert A. Wilson. Quite the interesting — and very real — character, he declared himself Emperor of the United States in 1859. Lots more information about him in his archives — could make for some very interesting reading.
(via MeFi)
Music industry wakes up
It’s about time some of the music companies started realizing that, cliched as the phrase may be, “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em!” According to a story in the LA Times, Universal and Sony will be offering low-cost, unencrypted music downloads over the ‘net. Individual tracks for 99 cents, albums for $9.99 — and they can be freely (and legally) burned to CD once they’re downloaded. Hopefully it will work well enough that the other studios will follow suit….
Gambit
I just took one of the many “What [random thing] are you?” tests that are floating around the ‘net — this one focused on X-Men characters. Here’s the results: I’m Remy LeBeau/Gambit — What X-Men character are you?
Look out and lock up your daughters, everyone, we’re in the presence of Remy LeBeau. That’s right, you’re that smooth-talkin’ Cajun boy with a flare for making women swoon and a great love for all things shiny and steal-able. Sure, you’re forever on the run from your past, but there’s no reason why you can’t run from it in style, oui?
Boxing
Boxing is an interesting sport. You start with someone who’s dumb enough to get the snot beat out of him on a regular basis, and then punch him 5,000 times in the head.
— pervertkiller2015, during a Yahoo! chat session
Needles and bottles and junkies, oh my!
Cleaning up around this building gets all sorts of interesting at times.
Section 8 of the National Housing Law Project is “housing assistance, in the form of direct payments to private landlord, secured from a local housing authority that low-income people can use to rent apartments and homes on the private market.” There are various Section 8 buildings around Seattle, the residents of which form your usual mix of welfare recipients — some who are using welfare as intended, to get back on their feet and get life together, and others who are some of the less reputable members of society. Fairly standard stuff, really.
Well, one of these Section 8 buildings happens to be the Jensonia Hotel, directly next to my building. Part of today’s project was sweeping out our part of the alleyway between the two buildings — while not quite up to the level of Hercules cleaning the Augean stables, it certainly wasn’t a quick and simple task, either. Apparently, some of the tenants next door feel that using garbage cans is more trouble than it’s worth (after all, once they fill up, you do need to take them to a dumpster — what a chore!), and prefer to toss a fair amount of their garbage out the window and into the alleyway. It’s an interesting, if disturbing, mix of garbage, to say the least — everything from smashed TVs to used syringes, all mixed in with a generous helping of broken glass bottles.
On the bright side, I was able to get our part of it swept up without getting stuck with anything — most of the trash is actually on their side of the divider, so I didn’t have to wade into the real thick of things.
I think the most disturbing part of the whole project was just that while I was down there sweeping things out, I’d occasionally hear the soft ‘thud’ of something else landing on the ground. The things that were being tossed were landing on their side of the building, though, which I was fairly happy about. I kinda figured the last thing I needed was some cracked-out junkie deciding to use me as target practice for their bottle, needle, or whatever other implement of destruction they’d just lost any use for. Kinda creepy.
It’s things like this that keep driving me home that no matter how much of a “big city boy” I thought I was after growing up in Anchorage, it’s really a whole different world out here. I’m enjoying it, even with the creepy bits…but the more I live down here, the more I realize just how tiny Anchorage really is!