Category: paranoia

Farewell, Yahoo! Tech

Now redirecting to Yahoo! News, Technology section.

My blog should be reappearing there shortly… when I have an ETA on that I’ll post it here.

Darkness Imprisoning Me

Hey, I’ve seen this movie.

A man thought by doctors to be in a vegetative state for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it was revealed last night.

Snowglobes: Banned

It no longer snows upon the world’s miniature landmarks.

The TSA says you can’t carry a snow-globe onto a plane, even if it fits in your freedom baggie, because they can’t measure how much liquid it contains, and therefore it must contain more than three oz of potential explosive, um, water.

Shabu Shabu – The Food So Nice They Named It Twice

How does one begin to choose between the Sea Cucumber Heart and the Red Sea Cucumber Heart???

sea cucumber heart goose intestines

(via The Pot’s)

Want Your Wallet Back, Bub?

Carry a baby photo.

As the psychologists soon discovered, the sight of a smiling baby is enough to warm nearly any heart: only one in 10 of the strangers who retrieved such wallets neglected to return them. In contrast, the second-most successful image, the puppy, boasted only a 53 percent return rate. When the wallet included no photograph, it stood only a one in seven chance of being returned to the owner.

BPA: We’re All Screwed

Society laughs at your fears about the BPA-laden plastic water bottle.

“When people talk about polycarbonate bottles, they talk about nanogram quantities of BPA [leaching out],” Warner observes. “The average cash register receipt that’s out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA.” By free, he explains, it’s not bound into a polymer, like the BPA in polycarbonates. It’s just the individual molecules loose and ready for uptake.

As such, he argues, when it comes to BPA in the urban environment, “the biggest exposures, in my opinion, will be these cash register receipts.” Once on the fingers, BPA can be transferred to foods. And keep in mind, he adds, some hormones — like estrogen in certain birth-control formulations — are delivered through the skin by controlled-release patches. So, he argues, estrogen mimics like BPA might similarly enter the skin.

Go For It, Losers.

From the press notes for the utterly baffling, upcoming new film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is not a remake of the Harvey Keitel classic. Starring Nicolas Cage and directed by — no, seriously — Werner Herzog.

Here’s what Herzog — who’s easily on my list of 10 people I’d like to have dinner with someday — has to say to any early critics who might dare comment on the project.

It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of starting some sort of a franchise. I have no problem with this. Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so called “film-studies,” in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia — in the name of literary theory — has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction. Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.

And What Is Your Age, Sir?

New rules at the airport, yay!

As of Saturday, you may (or may not, who knows!) have to provide your gender (gay) and age (uhh) when buying your little online plane tickets so you can go to New Jersey or whatever, for a funeral. Hooray!

I’m Leaving Home Without It

My cell phone number: xxx-xxx-0033

+

American Express’s new number they’re using (and which shows up on Caller ID) when they’re demanding their money from people: xxx-xxx-0333

=

A dozen confused people who can’t make their credit card payments calling me at all hours every day… and probably assuming I’m trying to scam them somehow.

On Conservation

Pundit Derrick Jensen says: Conservation, recycling, and personal green technologies are useless. Interesting and very sad piece on why, as a race, we’re pretty much doomed.

Favorite quotes:

“Even if every person in the United States did everything [An Inconvenient Truth] suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.”

“Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings.”

“Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.”

Still, I guess change has to start somewhere… sigh.