Because you can never have too many facepalms.

There has been a curious number of arson arrests here in Maine over the last couple of weeks, including one just over in Medway. Arson is nothing new, of course - back in 2002 a whole swathe of downtown Lincoln was burned to the ground by a particularly enthusiastic firebug, and last year or the year before the same happened in Milo (although the latter case turned out not really to have anything to do with fire, per se, IIRC - it was a clumsy attempt to hide something that got out of hand, not an act of what we might call fire appreciation). But today there are reports of an arson in the southern part of the state that is simply beyond the pale.

You pyromaniacal bastards! Leave the baked bean factory alone!

Current Mood: irked

"What's the powdery substance?" "Cocaine."
- Sir Terry Wogan and Stephen discuss jelly babies

(Also, honorable mention to Sir Terry for responding to the question, "What am I describing here? Sustain; ululation; sustain at a higher frequency; ululation; sustain at the original frequency." with an unhesitating, "The Arctic Monkeys.")

"Oh don't look at me like that! You f---ing pig-eyed sack of shit! Don't you do that!"
- Stephen remonstrates with Alan, QI series 2 episode 8

Hedgehogs get MS. Except that in hedgehogs it's called - I'm not making this up - Wobbly Hedgehog Syndrome.

Maybe I should start heading my Injectable Science posts "WGS".

"Crashed slow-rolling near ground. Bad show."

- how British pilot Douglas Bader (later Group Captain Sir Douglas "Tin Legs" Bader, RAF, a hero of the Battle of Britain) logged the 1931 accident that cost him both legs

I bought a sump pump today, never mind why, and when I went to put it into service, out in the middle of the back yard, I discovered that whoever packaged it had put a zip tie through the tines of the electrical plug and secured it, such that the pump could not be plugged in. Why? Is there some significant safety hazard involved in the employment of a sump pump that it should only be undertaken after the pause for contemplative reflection afforded by having to go into the house to get a wire cutter? There is no reason I can see why this should fall into any category other than "items that can be unpacked and put into service without the use of any special tool", yet it does.

Current Mood: annoyed

CNN headline of the day:

In other news, air has oxygen in it and studies indicate the sea contains water. Film at 11.

I just saw this on TV. It is expensive and completely useless, but if I had the money, I would definitely get one for my mechanical-engineer father to keep on his desk at work.

There's a racing driver named Dario Franchitti, who looks the part implied by his name - he's all dark and swarthy and Mediterranean-looking.

Which always throws me for a bit of a loop when he wins something and gets interviewed on TV, because he's Scottish. Very Scottish.

There's no punch line to this, I just happened across a mention of him somewhere, was reminded of this amusing factlet, and wanted to make a note.

Bled all over the shop this week. I hate when I do that. Maybe I need to get irradiated and shut the lights off in the kitchen when I shoot up, so that I can see my veins and thus avoid them.

"Oh! That was actually going to be the bonus question and I f---ed it up completely."
- Stephen Fry, QI (series 4, episode 9)

(paraphrased from memory)

"You worked for an oil company, didn't you?"

"Yes. Shell."

"Middle management?"

"I was in marketing. For oil. Which is technically the easiest job on the planet. Does your car have a fuel gauge?"

"Yeah... "

"You know when that goes into the red bit?"

"Yeah... "

"Buy some petrol. Job done!"

- Jimmy Carr on the stresses of the workplace, Top Gear "Star in a Reasonably Priced Car" interview with Jeremy Clarkson

but iTunes has just randomly reminded me of one of the weird things in the world:

The first four notes of the piano line in the Journey song "Faithfully" are the same as the first four notes of the theme song from M.A.S.K.: Mobile Armored Strike Kommand.

This catches me out every time. The Journey song comes around on what used to be called Party Shuffle and my brain instantly picks it up and goes, "Masked cru-sa-ders working overtime / fighting crime / fighting crime!"

My ISP inadvertently gave away my static IP in the course of a database shuffle this afternoon. Sadly, by the time the tech working the case figured that part out, the database people had all buggered off for the day, so the tech had to sort it by hand, and is now putting in a ticket so the SQL people can fix whatever it is when they get in tomorrow and hopefully prevent it from happening again.

Amusingly, though I have largely forgotten how any of this stuff works, I suspected something like that had happened when I looked at the log and noticed that my IRC connection had dropped at exactly 4 PM. "I'll bet somebody kicked off a database run or something and it ate my static IP assignment," I thought, and lo, that's exactly what happened.

I'm not on Neurontin any more. I can get to work on those bottles of cider that I bought about a week before I started taking said do-not-consume-alcohol-with-this medication. Hopefully, they haven't gone off yet.

... Nope, they haven't. But the Newcastle Brown has, alas.

Somebody has mailed at the very least everybody on my street - conceivably everybody in town - a copy of the noted 1858 work of Seventh-Day Adventist proselyte propaganda The Great Controversy. You know the sort of thing, I'm sure - a strangely-reasoned and curiously-worded document which purports to illustration, through quotations from some edition or another of the Bible, that the U.S. Department of the Interior are minions of Satan and that Jesus is watching you think about how much you'd like to punch your neighbor in the middle of his face. I may have the specific details wrong there, but you get the idea.

( Here's a bit more flavor if you need it. )

It has to be condeded that this is not a very well-produced little volume - the cover illustration seems to have been done by an unattended copy of Photoshop and the interior pages are printed on what appears to be newsprint, giving the whole production a singular air of flimsiness - but even so, it can't have been cheap to mail a copy to each street address in however large an area they chose. (And it was street addresses, not persons - they're addressed to Resident and Mom got two, because her house technically takes up two numbers on our street, 43 and 45.) This is especially odd when you consider that, as far as I am aware, there isn't a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Millinocket. I think the nearest one is over in Lincoln. So if they're on some kind of recruiting drive they're a bit barking up the wrong tree anyway.

Now, if you happen to be reading this and you are a Seventh-Day Adventist, you may have gotten the impression that I'm mocking one of the core volumes of your faith's theology. And... uh, well, I am rather. Sorry. If it makes you feel any less downtrodden, I'm hardly singling your denomination out - if the Mormons, say, or Temple Beth Abraham in Bangor, or the Catholic Diocese of Portland had mailed me something as preposterous as this I'd be riffing on them today instead. I find myself gripped with a mixture of incredulity and dismay whenever I'm presented with evidence that people still believe with apparent sincerity in such almost willfully quaint notions as a wholly non-metaphorical invisible war between the supernatural archetypes of good and evil taking place in the Material World's Corridors of Power. That's a live roleplaying game plot, not something to take seriously at the very heart of one's being in the year 2009.

Current Mood: checking... no, not converted

Maine, as an aggregate entity, does not care that you're Very Disappointed In It.

Current Mood: enough already, jeez

"If you were a child in Victorian Britain, and you weren't actually in the workhouse, you may have been lucky enough to play with this." (THUMP) "That is good old-fashioned modelling clay. It was available in the following range of colours: grey."
- James May, James May's Toy Stories episode 2: "Plasticine"

Dammit! All he needs now is one of the utilities and he'll have a virtual stranglehold on that side of the board.