I'm not going to do that.
She has no influence over me.
And neither do you.

Young woman, talking on her cell phone, in a crowded bus. A, clear, level tone of voice, without anger. Swathed in black, squarish glasses, long brunette hair framing her face. She continues:
And you can't tell anyone.
No. Nobody.
Because it would be embarassing.

I ( Read more... )

jwz just posted on this eccentric character from early San Francisco, the King of Pain.

One link led to another and now I am obsessed with the actress and performer Lotta Crabtree, "The San Francisco Favorite" of the 1850s-70s. Why favorite? I think this picture says it all.

( ... )

Going out for a long walk, armed with new podcasts. Maybe I'm a few years late to this trend but I find I now get antsy if I don't have my daily dose of NPR or whatever ( Read more... )

Snipped from an email discussion at work. ( ... )

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I just had a great lunch with redshrike and friends, and we got onto the topic of made-up words. (Shrike has just invented to-jazz, meaning "stuff to do".)

The neologism is one of my favorite topics and it's why I often use 'flipzagging' as an online handle. ( ... )

Funny, in the last couple of days I've been relaying advice to travelling friends about what they should be doing and how. One of those strange experiences that's only become possible with ubiquitous email.

The last really long trip I did was in 2002. Been a long while since I got on a plane to go somewhere that I really *wanted* to go...

Find the bug.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w ( Read more... )

More tales of urban collapse and urban renewal from Detroit:

For Sale: The $100 House.

[...] The run-down bungalow had already been stripped of its appliances and wiring by the city’s voracious scrappers. But for Mitch that only added to its appeal, because he now had the opportunity to renovate it with solar heating, solar electricity and low- ( Read more... )