Category: Strange World

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At lunch today, I saw a woman, probably in her 50s, wearing a fitted black T-shirt that said, in sparkly letters, “BOTOX”. Srsly. I couldn’t find any pictures of the design, but a commenter here says it’s a promo handed out to staff at plastic surgery clinics.

Comic-Con has completely sold out. Hmm, let me rephrase that. There are no more memberships available for this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego.

Spam Karma has gone GPL — After years of support Dr. Dave has decided to stop maintaining his spam plugin and turn it over to the open-source community. The project is now on Google Code. Update 2015: And now it’s on GitHub.

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On Monday, Katie found a bee flying around the kitchen, and a disturbing buzzing sound coming from the stove vent. Outside, bees were swarming around the outlet. We clearly had bees in the ceiling. Worse, they were getting into the kitchen. By Monday evening, we’d found at least 8 bees in the kitchen, two of them at once.

Maintenance came out that afternoon, realized there were too many bees to handle, and called in the professionals to come out on Tuesday. By Tuesday evening, there were only a handful of bees outside, and we found a half dozen dead on the floor near the window. And, disturbingly, one dying bee stuck in a pool of unidentified goo in a skillet that had been left to dry on the stove.

And that was the end of it, until Katie opened up the cabinet above the stove today, and was greeted by the sight of dozens of dead bees:

They weren’t just in the vent, or the ceiling: if we’d opened that cabinet on Monday, we’d have had a full-on swarm in the kitchen.

Current Music: Tori Amos: Sleeps With Butterflies (which, appropriately, is on “The Beekeeper”)

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Lisa the Barbarian: A woman poses with a viking helmet and a sword…and an Opera Browser T-shirt. (via Espenao’s Opera the Barbarian)

CNET UK presents The 30 dumbest videogame titles ever, including “Spanky’s Quest,” “Ninjabread Man,” “How to Be a Complete Bastard,” “Touch Dic” and “Attack of the Mutant Camels.” (via Slashdot).

Cowboy Bebop at His Computer — examples of media articles (especially about pop culture) in which the reporters (and editors) clearly didn’t do their research. The title comes from a caption on a still from Cowboy Bebop. That’s not the character’s name, and the character in question is female. It probably is her computer, though.

Archeophone Records: Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s. Comedians telling bawdy stories, recorded on wax cylinders. The write-up is PG, though the track list looks to be at least PG-13. Looked up after reading NY Times’ article on voice recordings from 1860 (recorded with ink on paper), which is also worth a read. (via Slashdot)

Edit: Forgot to list the (temporary?) resurrection of 1994-era home.mcom.com, the website of what was then Mosaic Communications Corporation and would soon be renamed Netscape. Subsequently picked up by Boing Boing and Slashdot. For more old web browsers, check out the Browser Archive at evolt.org. (via Justin Mason)

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Spotted this driving back from LA on Saturday, after Wizard World.

Truck full of tires… changing its tire!

Well, I guess they don’t need to worry about finding the spare!

We both just sort of stared at it for a second or two. Was that really what we thought it was? Then I grabbed for the camera, snapped a shot that didn’t come out well, and handed it to Katie, who had a better view from the passenger seat.

Fortunately the traffic was terrible (now there’s something you don’t say very often) and we were able to get a shot instead of zooming past.

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I wanted to take a look at Firefox’s error page a few minutes ago, so I selected the address bar and hit some random keys. Due to a lack of sleep last night and a day of caffeine, I’d forgotten that if it can’t find a site with a given hostname (and still can’t find one through auto-complete), it automatically does a search for whatever you typed in.

I was rather surprised to see that a search for “klasjdf” turned up 508 hits.

As I think about it, it makes sense. Those letters are 7 of the 8 home keys on the QWERTY keyboard layout, and the eighth is not only a semi-colon, but home to a pinky. A touch typist hitting random keys might be inclined to just hit the ones that are already under his or her fingers. One per finger, leaving out the single non-letter, gets you exactly the 7 that I typed.

As for the letter order, I spot-checked a few permutations, the lowest of which was just 251 for klasdfj. Those with patterns scored higher: 18,400 for alskdjf (alternating left & right, working in from the edges to the center); 99,600 for asdfjkl (left-to-right).

I guess there must just be a lot of people typing random text. Infinite monkeying around, so to speak.