Category: Uncategorized

podcast spy link on my podcast site. It lets you watch what people are doing in ‘real time’ more or less. It’s still being developed, but it could be pretty cool.]]>

late goal by Italy. As I watched the crowds of German fans in disbelief and in tears, I knew, yet again, why sports is so much more powerful than art, literature or poetry. You see these people taken up to tremendous highs and then crashed back down to Earth in punishing defeat. You see hope and despair and all the things on a massive scale, concisely packaged into a 90 minute contest. When was the last time they burned cars and rioted over an art show. Well, the last time they rioted in a non-Muslim country over an art show I guess….]]>

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The BBC reports that a 60 year old Geordie woman had a stroke and woke up talking like a Jamaican… Apparently, it’s a real thing: “The 60-year-old may have Foreign Accent Syndrome, where patients speak differently after a brain injury.”]]>

firecracker wimps who have made damn near anything that goes boom illegal in the DC metro area. Of course most things were illegal in Illinois as well, but in nearby Indiana you could buy pretty much whatever you wanted, upto and including ‘the big stuff’ that they used for the major shows. I remember in law school one year we were trapped in South Bend on the Fourth without much to do. It was about 7:00 PM on the 4th when we learned there were no city fireworks (‘Who needs that’ was the reply from most locals) so we headed to the fireworks store and bought a few things. We then found out everything was 50% off (last day sale) so we went back to get some more. This time, it was 50% off and 2 for 1, so basically we spent $100 and filled two paper grocery bags full of stuff. We went to our buddy Tom’s house who lived kind of in the country near campus and borrowed his lighter. After about 10 minutes, that ran out of juice and our hands were sore from the friction. So we went through every match he had. Another 10 minutes. We still had 85% of the stuff we bought and we had no lighter and no matches. So then we found a propane blowtorch in the garage (a little one) and lit that using a piece of paper from the stove. Down to about 50% of the stuff left before that ran out of juice. We were pretty tired so we took everything we had left, threw it in a Hibatchi and covered it with lighter fluid. We lit that and ran. Well, that was pretty dumb. The first one to go off blew everything all around so that for the next 20 minutes there were fireworks going in every direction–off the house, into the cars, down the street. It was pretty funny. We stood inside and looked at Tom’s awards for being a cop (another story). Stupid, dangerous…but fun. ]]>

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Canadian Military Auxiliary ship Quest is doing research outside the house today, in conjunction with the Naval Research Lab.]]>

“I was lying on the couch half-drunk in a semi-comatose state only to look at the television and see our soccer team playing the same way.” ]]>

I’ve had a visual on about five fireboats tonight between Poplar Island and the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power plant. They’ve been out for about three hours and are spread about five miles apart, sort of in the middle of the Bay. I recognized one as Prince Frederick’s Fire/Rescue, and heard some communication with North Beach VFD on the Marine Band, but haven’t quite figured out just yet what is going on. There haven’t been any Coast Guard notices I’ve hear yet. Might be a search and rescue. Anyone tracking? Turns out a sailor was overdue. They found his 41 foot sailboat drifting. The Post then explained all the helicopters and planes going by outside Philip Merrill, the firebrand newspaper publisher and diplomat known for his devotion to journalism and the environment, remained missing yesterday after his sailboat was found drifting alone Saturday in strong winds in the Chesapeake Bay Merrill is the owner of the Annapolis Capitol, and was the head of the Export-Import Bank for a few years. He’s a pretty big name in the DC media community and the press has been covering the story pretty heavily. During the day, a large C-130 from the Coast Guard flew past the house on a number of occasions. I managed to grab the camcorder and captured a bit of it flying overhead which I posted on Youtube.com Unfortunately, I recorded the video in HDTV and in converting it to the web it shrank to 4×3 (which is why the C-130 looks pretty fat). I’ll play with that today.]]>