According to Marketplace, critics of President Bush’s flu pandemic preparedness proposal contend that it’s too focused on vaccines and antiviral drugs, and that the money would be more effectively used by monitoring outbreaks and trying to stamp out bird flu in the third world.
In other words, they say we should take the fight to the flu abroad so we don’t have to fight it at home. Why does that sound familiar? 😉
I keep calendars displaying both the current month and the next month up in my cube at work. I figured I’d better post this configuration before it stopped being what I got to look at every day:
The webcomic Real Life has a strange way of looking at the world. Sometimes I share it. I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve seen one of these signs and deliberately misread it as a demand rather than a description. I can just imagine a group of people marching in front of some construction site, carrying orange protest signs lifted from the side of some road.
Of course, sometimes the signs don’t need to be misread to be funny.
We drove past this two weeks ago (i.e. October 2005), and were struck by two things:
Neil Gaiman writes that Amazon lists 2025 as the release date for the MirrorMask DVD.
Twenty years seems a long way away, but Sony are probably just scheduling it that far off because during the Great iPod Content Uprising Years of 2013-2024 people aren’t going to have much time for things like actually watching films, what with gathering together in places where the iPodPeople can’t get them and shooting them in the brain and all that stuff, and it’s only after the Man-Droid-iPod Peace Treaties of 2024 that anyone gets back to the serious business bringing out DVDs of long-forgotten movies.
“Alternately,” he adds, “I suppose it could be an Amazon.com typo and MirrorMask could be coming out on the last day of this year. That would be nice.”
One look at this, and you’ll say goodbye to your appetite! Wait, I’m sure that’s not what they’re going for…
(On another level, the reflected palm trees fit in with the travel theme.)
This is a traffic signal on the Jeffrey off-ramp from the northbound 5 in Irvine. The ramp is 3 lanes wide, and the middle lane can go either way. It’s not often that you actually see a double arrow like this, though.
It’s times like this that make me wish I’d taken a picture of the “U-Turn Only” sign I saw a few years ago. The street it was on has since been extended, and the sign is long gone.
