Are you suffering from an overdose of things Tolkien in recent times? Here's a place to rant about that stupid ring!
homemaking with loojie
Monday, July 29, 2002
Saturday, July 27, 2002
Damn, and I've still never even eaten there: New York's famed Russian Tea Room to close.
Friday, July 26, 2002
Here's a really striking site in memory of a stunningly gorgeous girl from Israel mowed down by a suicide bomber (whom I flinch at calling "Palestinian" -- talk about unworthy of a name). The eeriest feature of the site is the .wav file of Shiri's answering machine message. "Yom tov. Bye."
Amen!
On the other hand, for less-wholesome Islamic fun and games, check out this CD-ROM. Eek.
Are you a good Muslim, offended by your Barbie doll's immodest comportment? You could either sew Barbie her own hijab, or just save the effort and buy Razanne, the Muslim Doll instead.
But wait, there's more...check out the songs you can learn to sing when you buy the Muslim Boy Scouts videos. Now I've got one stuck in my head: "Put your trust in Allah, if you wanna go far, put your trust in Allah and do your best." I'm still looking for the online version of "Gotta Get My Ummah Badge."
OpinionJournal has a kicky piece on why those annoying Olive Garden commercials are so misguided. (I personally won't eat at the Olive Garden since a waiter at the one in Livingston, N.J. stole my Visa card; but yeah, they are pretty patronizing to folks of Italian extraction even when they're not actively pilfering your plastic.)
This is a different kind of quiz: Your Name Here, from the Weekly (a British answer to the Onion)?
The folks at KD have started a discussion where we all set up a personal quiz, take each other's quizzes, and see how well we know each other. Not surprisingly, the only people who are tending to score well on these things are the ones who are dating each other in real life.
Thursday, July 25, 2002
I could have guessed this. It's always been my favorite Microsoft OS. 
What
Microsoft OS are you?
Oh, you could not make this up: Yale accuses Princeton of hacking. It looks like the Princeton folks went to the Yale admits website and input the personal info of students who had applied there as well as Yale, just to see Yale had accepted them. I quake at the thought of Princeton deciding to ding someone once they saw the fireworks. Nail 'em, Yale!!
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Emails from our financial advisor come with this disclaimer attached at the end:
Reminder: E-mail sent through the Internet is not secure. Do not use e-mail to send us confidential information such as credit card numbers, changes of address, PIN numbers, passwords, or other important information. Do not e-mail orders to buy or sell securities, transfer funds, or send time sensitive instructions. We will not accept such orders or instructions. This e-mail is not an official trade confirmation for transactions executed for your account. Your e-mail message is not private in that it is subject to review by the Firm, its officers, agents and employees.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
I'm always in search of sites like this one, full of linkable audio files.
My aunt's Sweet Adelines group, the Bay Area Showcase Chorus, is having their summer show in a few weeks. You should go.
Monday, July 22, 2002
Back in my days as an undergraduate linguistics major, I had some flavorful debates with my English-major roommate on the joys of prescriptive grammatical rules vs. the amorphous, evolving thing that we linguists called "grammaticality." Seems like we (well, "they," I should say, as I have not been a practicing linguist for an embarrassingly long time) won the argument: just check out this book reviewer's treatment of the new Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. He must've been an English major.
Friday, July 19, 2002
Download your favorite film quote (.wav audio) from the Movie Sounds Page.
Text-Image has got to be one of the niftiest free webtools I've ever seen. Check this out.
Original picture:
Result:
Rendering time: 1 second. |
The resulting "digitized" photo can be any size you choose; the detail is only enhanced in larger results. I'm in awe.
Thursday, July 18, 2002
It's the Democratic Party OneMinuteSpeechMaker! (In need of a post-market-crash update, I think.)
Another nifty thing to add to the list of Things I Don't Have Time To Write.
I may need to reference this someday: instructions for linking to the law.com dictionary, including individual definitions.
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
From New York Newsday: slide shows and overview of the 6 plans for rebuilding on the World Trade Center site. I'm unsure which one I prefer.
I don't have enough time to play with this right now, but didn't want to forget about it before I did.
Monday, July 15, 2002
Yeah baby. As if there were any doubt:
 |
Hot Hot Hot! You are the Chili Pepper! Hot 'n Spicy describes you very, well. But no one likes overpowering tastes, so remember why subtlety is the key to success, ok? And put down the whip and handcuffs. Yeesh. |
BBC story: 'Robin Hood' student policy
A potential shift in UK student loan policy, currently under debate, could structure university-level financial aid such that "a graduate who goes into a high-flying career could expect to pay a much higher rate of interest on his loan than a fellow student who takes a lower paid job in the public sector."
It's interesting. Unlike American-style financial aid, which penalizes students based on their parents' financial success, this policy would penalize students based on their own success. (Or rather, their potential success -- no mention of the "much higher rate of interest" suddenly being lowered once the high-flying kid gets laid off.) Perhaps this is just a veiled attempt to recruit more public sector employees?
I could not be more relieved: the new washing machine is finally up and running, after two months of trekking to Karen's or throwing quarters into the basement machines to do my laundry.
CHRONOLOGY:
- Late May: washing machine breaks.
- Early June: Sears brings me a new washing machine, which is unfortunately the wrong model.
- Most of June: I'm gone on vacation.
- Late June: Sears agrees to bring me the correct model this time.
- Early July: Sears brings me the correct model, or so they say, and yet it magically fails to be backward-compatible with the old dryer.
- Today: Sears brings me a stack stand and correctly sets up the new washer and the old dryer, such that both are currently functional.
Took 'em frickin long enough, but ohhhh, am I glad it's here and done, at long last.
Sunday, July 14, 2002
falls over laughing...
Noam Chomsky: America’s Dumbest Intellectual.
"Pre-packaged chicken, herbal shampoo, ESPN Sports Center -- our more conspicuous forms of consumerism have always been as much about putting to use the opportunities of our privileged lives as about gaining any useful leverage against true adversaries such as time, space, and the income tax."
Four-Wheel-Drive Fantasies: A defense of the SUV
Can I help it if these quizzes are addictive?
(OK, I'll admit that I deliberately engineered this result, just 'cause he's my favorite...)
Take the 100 Acre Personality Quiz!
Saturday, July 13, 2002
Freeware, freeware, freeware! I like things that are free.
I took an online personality disorders test this morning and am not particularly surprised, although I would have guessed I'd be more paranoid and less antisocial. Still, I guess it's about as accurate as you can expect an online test to be...
| Disorder | Rating |
| Paranoid: | Low |
| Schizoid: | Low |
| Schizotypal: | Low |
| Antisocial: | Moderate |
| Borderline: | Low |
| Histrionic: | High |
| Narcissistic: | High |
| Avoidant: | Low |
| Dependent: | Low |
| Obsessive-Compulsive: | Moderate |
-- Click Here To Take The Test -- | |
Friday, July 12, 2002
Oh my, they've turned the National Debt Clock back on. I used to walk past that thing every day on my way to work, back in the dark days of 1996. In a way it's vaguely reassuring to know that it's running again, even though I didn't previously know they'd shut it off.
It does bother me, though, that people are consistently confusing the national debt with the budget deficit. It wasn't as though the national debt just went away when there was a budget surplus. I bet I can guess the political affiliation of the operators of the clock :-)
Thursday, July 11, 2002
Last month we cleaned out the study, which involved throwing away three shoppingcartloads of stuff (largely computer parts). One of the results of the cleanup was a pile of old 3.5" floppy disks that wound up on my desk in the bedroom. "I'll go through these before we throw them away," I said.
And yesterday I did.
In fact, I went on a floppy disk bender and cleaned out not only the pile on my desk but BOTH old boxesful of floppies that had gathered dust near my computer for years uncounted.
What treasures I found! Ancient, and yet still entertaining DOS games. Stuff I'd saved from previous jobs, hoping they'd eventually prove to be showpieces for my writing. Old papers, as in high school old. Poems I'd written in the earliest days of our relationship, amateurish as you'd imagine they'd be. (I nearly fell over laughing at my account of our first kiss, over ten years ago!)
I backed everything up onto my beloved D:\ drive, fondly known as Meatlocker. I didn't have the heart to chuck *all* the floppies -- some of them were pretty colors, and pretty colors will entertain me long past the obsolescence of the 3.5" disk drive -- but I did manage to fill a bag full of old disks. Now they're sitting by my front door, ripe for recycling into...wow, who the hell knows what old floppies become these days. I-Macs or something maybe.
I also recycled an old origami-style cardboard floppy holder bearing the logo of my alma mater, which I believe is the first time I've ever thrown away a logo-embossed product for which I actually paid money. It twinged me to do so. So much of college is up for recycling these days.
*sigh*.
Off to take out the recycling, to say my final goodbyes to these faithful receptacles of data that mattered to me. (At least the ones that didn't claim to be unformatted or write-protected, or cause my drive to spin and buzz at me.)
You are 50% evil! [?]
You? Evil? Half way there! You're 50%, meaning you can't always be trusted...well, half of the time! You're the perfect balance between good and evil, but being that much evil isn't always good...
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Everyone has fond memories of their first time...getting addicted to a computer game. Mine was Hunt the Wumpus.
Wheee!! Finally got loojie.blog migrated to loojie.com, where it belongs. I'm not sure what's going to happen over at Blogspot. Maybe they'll delete the old stuff. They're welcome to; it was great that they offered the service to begin with, but right now I'm just pleased as punch to finally be banner-ad-free.
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
oh, ROTFL.
I AM 0-25% ADDICTED TO JESUS!
It's Pudding Guy: an inspiration to loyalty-program addicts everywhere.
Monday, July 08, 2002
Make your own South Park character. You'll need to do a screen capture to save the flash graphic.
Sunday, July 07, 2002
I just adopted this useless blob. There goes my good deed for the day.
Saturday, July 06, 2002
30 days to a more accessible weblog...hmm, is this one accessible?
Here's an interesting group blog on media reporting from/on the Middle East.
Thursday, July 04, 2002
I should add something like this to my blogs at some point, when I can be arsed: Chatterbox. 'Course I like TagBoard.
ROTFL!! You know what they say about thieving magpies? Believe it.
Wow!! An authentic folk recording of the Golden Willow Tree, un-Coplandized. Wow. Wow.
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
This guy has a neat skin for his blog.
Monday, July 01, 2002
Seen these mood indicators on anyone's blog yet? They're cute.
Should we get a car-stereo-type mp3 player for the Honda?
My husband's favorite snack: Mochi Ice Cream.
Ideas to help turn someone else's place into my own.
Always welcome
On the list
- English sinks
- industrial chic
- some rug ideas
- coffee table: check!
- Corner bookshelves for the living room
- Target furniture
- A rug for the kitchen?
- a Persian rug on sale in Woodley Park
- Ideas from a Pacific Northwest B&B
- the sink I saw in Washington State
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