third world county

Monday’s open trackback post. Link to this post and track back. More below the post body.

Hodgepodge post. You are warned…

Yum. Did you know Toyota made chocolate chip cookies? Really good stuff, maynard. (Lovely Daughter’s Toyota salesman gave her a tin of cookies. Must like having sold her two different cars in three months.)

Yeh, she let me drive Guido Yaris. Nice lil car. NOT for the jumpy, nervous driver, though, cos it has very responsive steering, respectible pickup and a tight suspension.

Everybody (and I do mean EVERYBODY) is jumping all over the fake Reuters photo. Some good posts linked in my weekend open post. Maybe just typing “fake Reuters photo” will get me some spillover, but I’m not hungry enough for hits to write a whole post on it when EVERYBODY else has already wrung the last bit of commentary outa the thing. I’ll just stick with being a nobody.

The only real lesson there: Mass Media Podpeople learned the wrong lesson from Ra^thergate.

Naturally.

Is this cool or what? Maybe America’s first Ubuntu billboard… *heh*

Had posole again last night. First time in several years that I’ve made it. This time, I made it in our new Wolfgang Puck rice cooker. Nice stuff. Naturally I didn’t follow “the” recipe for posole. Somebody remind me to post the recipe I used for the Carnival of Recipes, wouldya?

While she was here, Lovely Daughter loaned me a book Orson Scott Card gave a glowing review a couple of months ago. I can only steal a tiny bit of that glow as I say, “Deee-lightful!”

Really.

The Eyre Affair

No, it’s not an “important” book or some sort of “literary triumph”. It’s just fun. Especially if you’re able to catch most of the literary/cultural references that form the basis for so much of the play time in the book. A little taste? How about the first sentence?

“My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce the flow of time to an ultraslow trickle…” —Thursday Next

Or how about this snippet from a conversation between Thursday and her highly eccentric uncle, a brilliant if more than slightly wacko inventor:

“Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?”

“The what?”

“The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, dear girl.”

*heh*

Fforde’s light-hearted approach to mystery/suspense and literate use of English remind me just a tad of Woodehouse (high praise indeed). This book’s a bit darker and more violent than one would recieve from Woodehouse’s hands, but then no one else will ever write like P.G.

Good read.

James Lileks’ current Screedblog. Oh, yeh. Vying for the crown—”King of Sarcasm”—

Give them the Jews and they’ll leave us alone. Lord knows, that always works. If you don’t want any surprises down the road, toss in Spain now. Call it a signing bonus.

Nails the moonbat left position (worldwide).

Lisa Renee warns against trusting weather forecasters. D’uh.

Kat (the Keep the Coffee Coming Kat) has a great seection of songs you’ve not heard before or that’ve slipped your mind… darned near everything from Blues to Ol’ Blue Eyes. Must hear blogging.

Another Kat (Romeocat of well-deserved Cathouse Chat fame) posts Ogre leaves a present… Color me green for envy. Hey, Ogre! I can make blueberry pancakes, too! *heh*

Jerry Pournelle has a new site, in addition to Chaos Manor in Perspective, which I often link to. The new site, Chaos Manor Reviews features columns by Dr. Pournelle.

Chaos Manor Reviews is the latest phoenix to rise from the ashes of the BYTE columns I have written since 1979. The BYTE column has been prepared monthly for more than twenty years. These Reviews will be done at whim, but generally weekly. I’ll also add special reviews, both from me and from guests.

My primary profession is fiction, and that will get most of my attention, but there’s always more to say about the computer revolution, and what hardware and software I’ve found useful.

We’ll continue this as long as it’s worth doing.

Time well spent, IMO. Dr. Pournelle runs his sites on a “public radio” subscription model, that is, subscribers get some neat extras. And the satisfaction of supporting some of the info-dense material on the web from some very smart people (mainly Dr. Pournelle, but he has some readers who’ve taught me a lot and pointed me to even more. Good stuff, maynard.)

Speaking of which, from last Saturday’s mailbag at Chaos Manor in Perspective,

Hot enough for ya?

“From June 1 to August 31, 1930, 21 days had high temperatures that were 100 degrees or above” in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute , told Cybercast News Service. “That summer has never been approached, and it’s not going to be approached this year.”

But, but… the global warmists (or “climate changists” given the recent backing away from their phony models… to embrace other phony models) have said for years the ’50s were the turning point in global warming. Oops.

(Yeh, and both my parents lived through Dustbowl Days in Oklahoma without air conditioning. I am such a whimp. You can’t imagine the lil frisson of anticipation that just trilled through my veins at hearing some distant thunder. rain? Cooling rain? Can it be? )

‘S’all for now. Hit me with some great posts, wouldya?

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