A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down 36 cans of a beer.

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I’m not making this up. This article is from Phuket Gazette:

High-speed bedmakers put to the test

Phuket, Thailand: Tuesday, July 27, 2004

PHUKET CITY: This year’s Hotelex Exhibition Food and Beverage Show, which will be held at the Royal Phuket City Hotel from August 12 to 15, will open with a thrilling “speedy bed-making” contest.

The novel competition, with 6,000 baht in prize money up for grabs, will get underway at 1 pm on August 12, marking the start of the four-day show…

What better city than Phuket? What better country than Thailand?

If you have Windows XP, you’ve probably heard about Service Pack 2 being released. They don’t make it easy to find the support page, but you’ll probably need it: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;windowsxpsp2

Many software vendors are making updates to their programs to get them to work properly again, because the upgrade breaks a lot of stuff. MS’s page Using programs and hardware with Service Pack 2 (SP2) provides lists of programs that either “behave differently” or “stop working”. They’re long lists that includes their own products, the major anti-virus programs, and much more.

Make sure you have a lot of spare time, especially if you use dial up connection: The total download size may be as small as 70 megabytes (MB) or as large as 260 MB. With a 50k connection speed, that’s 41,600 seconds, or about 11½ hours. I read that the upgrade installation can take between 30 minutes and two hours. That’s after the download is complete.

SP2 also makes web pages behave differently; it: disallows ActiveX, disallows Java and prompts for script running. Lots of websites use scripting for their pages. If it’s really doing what it sounds like, disabling javascript, there’s going to be a lot of sites that need to be rewritten and will lose their dropdown menus. I would guess that upwards of 25% of pages, including most major commercial pages, would have to be updated. Many, although not completely based on script, still use it in a couple of places.

I can’t wait to get my upgrade and watch things break!

“Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the ‘I’ in internet,” writes Tony Long, Wired News’ copy-editing chief. “At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”

So what do we care? Wired produced the hardback book Wired Style in 1999. Although very out of date, it was the only guide of its time to cover a lot of the new terminology. This decision will (might?) influence a lot of writing.

In 2000 Wired magazine declared that the hyphen belongs in e-mail.

Personally, I never capitalized internet or web unless a spell check insisted for something being done at work. The move to email was recent, and Wired helped justify it: conventional wisdom [is] that “new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word.” Almost everyone knows what email is, and it’s about time it just became its own word.

A similar spelling subject was recently discussed (actually emailed) with a friend: edress, e-dress, eddress or e-ddress. The issue is slightly different because the ‘a’ was being deleted from address, so it’s no longer just two words being merged. There were, and are, no standards to check What Is Right, but a few semi-useful references did surface:

• PseudoDictionary
• SlangSite
• RealDictionary
• Webster’s-online – not to be confused with Merriam-Webster

Atlantis, the legendary island-nation whose existence has been debated for thousands of years, was actually Ireland, according to a new theory by a Swedish scientist.

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Look up events by year, or pick a specific day and look up events, birthdays and deaths. Good long lists no matter which way you do it. Brainy History says that on this day in history: France performs nuclear test, Howard Stern drops out of NY gubernatorial race, John & Yoko begin recording “Double Fantasy”, Elvis Presley releases “Hound Dog” and Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden arrested in Fall River, Mass.

Oh yeah, and: US government collects its 1st income tax. Maybe not a great day to remember because of that one.

Retirement does strange things to some people. One guy has decided his hobby is to build a Stonehenge replica in his backyard using just rocks, wood and manpower. He’s currently moving and raising 10-ton blocks by himself with no ropes or pulleys. Put your mouse over any black pictures to start an animation.

Stop drooling, Terry.

Of course there’s a lot more to be found, but I stumbled across these and the first one listed got me to spend time on the rest.

The rules are simple:  Stare and the screen, then look at your hand. I saw this a few years back and had forgotten how well it works.

See over 100 posters by the late Rick Griffin. His work included a lot of album covers, probably most recognizable in his Grateful Dead covers, as well as Zap Comix.

Visual Overdose, Energisers and other Crazy Images from Eyvind Almquist of Virtual-Exp Psy.

Java-Fuxation and many other trippy voyages from Entropy8zuper, the people who brought us Venus Trap

There’s a lot more LSD inspired/related links at Best Psychedelics in the World, which is where these came from. Some have cool graphics, some are historical, some are just pro-acid articles. Go for the graphics.

Many a time I’ve said to someone: It’s on my blog, look there. The problem is, that only works if it’s on the main page or the post date is known. Neither one is very likely.

Enter the new Search This Site feature. Look over to the right near the top of the page and you’ll find it.

If you know a little music history, MusicPlasma is a lot of fun.  Enter the name of a recording artist and you’ll get a graphical display that shows similar or related artists.

It could be improved as far as performance and layout, but plan to spend some time following the links it shows.

Around a week ago my friend Andy send me a link to a great Flash parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”. You can read about the creators being threatened with a copyright lawsuit, which happened before I could even get around to posting the song here. The very brief article has a link to the song along with Guthrie’s original copyright notice, which basically says to just use it.

Hey, it’s for your own good. link

Thanks, Terry.

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” — Kilgore Trout

Once upon a time, before Douglas Adams did Hitchhiker’s Guide in 1979, there was Kilgore Trout‘s Venus on the Half-Shell “for the first time without lurid covers!” (see cover photo) in 1975. The book is a great combination of humor and absurd science fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut created the fictional character Kilgore Trout, who made his first appearance in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. He was featured in Slaughterhouse-Five before becoming the central character in Breakfast of Champions and Timequake. He was mentioned in Jailbird and his son Leon narrated Galapagos. Everyone assumed that Vonnegut wrote Venus, although there was a lot of discussion about who really did it.

It’s old news now, but I just found out that it was written really by Philip Jose Farmer, not Vonnegut. I read his Image of the Beast many years ago, also the Riverworld series (made into a bad movie) and a few others. It’s time for a re-read.

From a letter, Tuesday, July 13, 2004
“With exactly two months and fewer than 14 legislative days before the federal assault weapons ban expires,…” The related news story is here.

Fewer than 14 work days in two months. That’s a schedule I could probably live with.

“Did you invite all of these people? I thought it was just going to be the two of us.” That’s one sample from The Most Complete and Most Useless Collection of Pick-Up Lines. You’ll probably see a lot of your old, really stupid favorite lines. And then there’s this:

“Okay, so I came over here to ask you to dance, but I’m kind of concerned. I mean, we could hit it off really well, end up having a few drinks, next thing you know you’re giving me your number because I’m too shy to ask for it, I finally get up the nerve to call and we take in a movie, have some dinner, I relax, you relax, we go out a few more times, get to know each other’s friends, spend a lot of time together, then finally have get past this sexual tension and really develop this intense sex life that is truly incredible, decide our relationship is solid and stable, so we move in together for a while, then a few months later get married, I get a promotion, you get a promotion, we buy a bigger house. You really want kids, but I really want freedom, but we have a kid anyway, only to find that I am resentful, the sparks start to fade and to rekindle them we have two more lovely kids, but now I work too much to keep up with the bills, have no time for you, you’re stressed and stop taking really good care of yourself, so to get past our slow sex life and my declining self-confidence I turn to an outside affair for sexual gratification. You find out because I’m careless and a lousy liar, you throw me out (justifiably so) and we have to explain to the kids why mommy and daddy are splitting up. That’s just too sad. Think about the children. For God’s sake, if you dance with me and we hit it off, let’s just keep it sexual, because we both know where it’s going.”

There’s something that’s just so wrong and yet so right about that one.

Ever wondered about what’s really in hair coloring, Silly Putty, Cheese Wiz, artificial snow, or self-tanners? Chemical & Engineering News presents a collection of articles that gives you a look at the chemistry behind a wide variety of everyday products.

Most don’t seem very technical — don’t be afraid.

I hoped to get pictures this morning of a grand event when the the Reagan motorcade passed en route to Point Mugu. But it was surprisingly small: Only about a half dozen black vehicles in a group, not really decorated at all. (That’s not including over a dozen motorcycles, mostly CHP, that were scattered ahead of the main vehicles and clearly having fun zipping around an empty freeway at about 90 mph.)

I took a couple of pictures, but they’re not worth putting up here. If it wasn’t for the people standing around and the traffic going the other direction being at a dead stop, you wouldn’t know it was anything special.

Due to its immense scale and unique shape, The Palm, Jumeirah and The Palm, Jebel Ali are visible from space with the naked eye. If all the fill materials used to build one Palm island were placed end to end, a wall two meters high and half a metre thick could circle the world three times. PalmSales probably gives the nicest overview of this monster.

• Dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” about 350 million cubic feet of rock, sand, and earth is being placed in the Persian Gulf in the shape of two palm trees off the coast of Dubai. – link
• The Palm-Jumeirah extends approximately 3.5 miles out into the ocean and provides for 35 miles of new beachfront — a 75% increase to Dubai’s existing beachfront. On the fronds of The Palm, 1,800 luxury villas have been sold. On the trunk of The Palm there will be 2,200 condominiums (all sold out), five hotels, two marinas and a major retail centre. – link
• The Golden Mile apartments, to be housed in two waterfront buildings, went on sale this week at Arabian Travel Market 2004, the Middle East’s premier travel and tourism show at prices ranging from US $250,000 for a one-bedroom, garden-view unit to $550,000 for the high-end waterfront three-bedroomed properties. 780 freehold apartments on their joint venture Golden Mile, on the Palm, Jumeirah were sold within 48 hours of them being placed on the market. – link

This location just seems a bit risky to me for vacation property. – map

It’s a combination of votes and one person’s opinion about a great riff or lyric or whatever, but not the whole song. I didn’t agree with some selections, and given a year or so to think about it I could probably do better. None the less, there’s a lot of really cool stuff listed at The 50 Coolest Song Parts.

I looked at all 50 and listened to about half to make sure I knew exactly which part they were referring to. And because I wanted to hear them again.

The makers of Pringles introduced Pringles Prints, featuring a “unique, fun design printed on every crisp”. The revolutionary technology allows P&G to customize the crisps by printing words and images in a variety of colors directly on the chip. P&G is partnering with Hasbro to use Trivial Pursuit Junior trivia content. Pringles Prints will feature 2,400 fun trivia questions and answers from six different Trivial Pursuit Junior categories randomly printed on the potato crisps.

I wonder what the first movie tie-in will be?