Monthly Archives: January 2005

Quote of the day

How can I describe it!? Take my eyes and look through them my friends, you have supported the day of Iraq’s freedom and today, Iraqis have proven that they’re not going to disappoint their country or their friends.
Is there a bigger victory than this? I believe not.
I still recall the first group of comments that [...]

Beauty for the day

Work safe? I cannot possibly stress enough how not work safe this is.

Asian names

Some Asian languages handle names in the opposite manner of Western languages. In Chinese and Japanese (and, we believe, others), the family name comes first, and the given name follows. Thus, were we chinese, our name would be Hamet Ian.
This poses some difficulty in translation, because some Asians rearrange their names (or have [...]

Gobsmacked

Will Duquette is the kind of reader I wish I could be. I read a lot, but nothing like 150 books in a year.
Will considers 150 a year to be slow, one where he didn’t have much time to read.
Will also likes reading mysteries, even if it’s not his top genre.
So imagine [...]

Trailers

Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle has been described as a kung fu movie as directed by Chuck Jones after dropping acid—with musical numbers. The trailer supports that. I haven’t seen it yet, but I sure as heck will now.
Hanging my head in shame, I will admit that I found the trailer for the [...]

Men I find sexy

Just to mix things up a bit, I begin undermining my reputation as a wolfish ladies’ man.

Quote of the day

You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the [...]

Beauty for the day

Work safe? Better hope your boss holds to the letter of the law, and not the spirit.

Gender

The neutral third-person pronoun in the English language is “he”. Banana Oil! discourages obeisance to linguistic fads, especially so when said fads are irrational and lead to either ungainly sentences or ambiguous phrasings.
Thus, when referring to a non-specific hypothetical person, the pronoun to be employed is he. As in:
A body wakes in the [...]

I haven’t publicly adored Lileks lately…

…and he’s in fine form today:
So there’s an election in Iraq soon, I understand. I haven’t been writing about this here because I’m just taking the long, long view, and haven’t the time or inclination to argue with people who think “No WMD!” is the argument equivalent of a spreading a full house on the [...]

The Raving Atheist proves himself a decent bloke

The Raving Atheist went above and beyond the call of duty. I emailed him about his typo before posting my frustration (with my own luck, not with him) yesterday. In doing so, I only expected a shadow update correcting the typo. A public update on the post would have been nice, but [...]

Quote of the day

Lewis J. Bookman. Age, sixtyish. Formerly a fixture of the summer. Formerly a rather minor component to a hot July. But throughout his life a man beloved by the children and therefore… a most important man.
—Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone, episode 102, “One for the Angels”

Beauty for the day

Work safe? Are you out of your gourd?

Emphasis, bold, and italic

When emphasizing a word or phrase, employ the <em> element. If stronger emphasis is needed, use the <strong> element. Leave the presentation of these elements to the CSS.
(If the CSS does not specify their presentation, virtually all browsers will present text enclosed within the <em> element as italic, and that enclosed within the [...]

The worst bloody luck

Sometimes I wonder why I bother entering posts in the Carnival of the Vanities. Inevitably, if I enter a post, that week’s edition will not be linked to by the perfesser.
If the perfesser does link, then that week there are eleventy-bazillion entries, and mine is in the last 300. Not the [...]