My favorite quote: “W.H.O. is trying to raise concern because we’re concerned, but W.H.O. is not trying to scare the planet”. SORRY TOO LATE.

November 30, 2004
W.H.O. Official Says Deadly Pandemic Is Likely if the Asian Bird Flu Spreads Among People
By KEITH BRADSHER and LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

HONG KONG, Nov. 29 – A pandemic of human influenza could kill up to 100 million people around the world in a worst case, a World Health Organization official said Monday, significantly raising the agency’s earlier estimates of the potential number of deaths in such a catastrophe.
Let’s read more!

1. Taro anything
2. ”Zines”
3. Carrying around a little dog
4. Dave Eggers
5. Toilet humor
6. How to work console video games
7. Sundried tomatoes
8. Eggnog “latte”
9. LARP
10. Marijuana

Enjoy:

Today I fought with a technical task that should be simple, and that was simple in the past. Over the last two years, well-regarded attempts to streamline, automate, and audit this process have loaded it with complication and obscurantism so that it now takes three times as long and spews ambiguous errors and failures.

Technical products live the cycle of cars, sporting activities, and musical scenes. They are born small, cheap, and useful. Their virtues bring popularity. Features are added; size increases; rules are tacked on; schisms occur; and committees and corporations make decisions. They die as 200 megabyte processes with fins and chrome and league rules that double as radio formats: useless.

Three cloves of garlic chopped into the pot in the last 15 minutes of cooking delivers post Thanksgiving turkey soup from boredom into piquant delicacy.

Wealth and holiness are as necessary as water to me; that’s why I hate money and religion.

How can you not click on the headline after reading:

Every week, Ezra stands in a Jerusalem square, handing roses to opponents of the Israeli occupation. He is gay and lives in a cave in Mount Hebron. Mainly, however, he fixes boilers at very reasonable rates.

My Plumber, the Hero

I nearly got into it with the cigar guys again today. They almost literally bray their stupid little hates for hours on end. As they were leaving (and leaving a mountain of ash, dead newspaper, and wrappers) one of them said “What, is this Friday?” and I said a bit too loudly “I DON’T KNOW, I HAVEN’T WORKED IN 20 YEARS EITHER!”

One of them emitted a noise about “journalistic integrity” and I laughed directly at him. He thought I was laughing with. I said: “Did you say what I think you said? That’s hilarious!” “Well, it’s just going by the WAY SIDE!”. I told him to go read Mencken from the 20s about “journalistic integrity”. What a tool.

And now, an Ann Landers Moment:

Confidential to Crampy in Carson: If you didn’t drink so many alcoholic beverages every night, you probably would have less problems with insomnia, headaches, and mood swings.

Confidential to Moody in Marin: Your fluctuating “energy level” may be improved by changing the behavior pattern in which you start the day with 4 cups of coffee and don’t eat until 9 pm, at which point you pasta-binge.

Confidential to Hoarse in Harrisburg: If you read more books and listened to less talk radio you’d make more sense and fewer people would yell at you.

hydrozoa is right. I’m a terrible writer. One thing about livejournal as a medium is that no consistency of voice is enforced, so I’m Holden Caulfield Jr. one day and an enraged Abe Lincoln the next. I should be more disciplined.

Got any gum?

Brand Democrat, political.

Optimus Crime, an amusing and instructive blog, syndicated here as opt_crime.

Jazzandblues.org streaming radio

Scharffen Berger Cacao Nibs