If your Father’s Day cards have from five different postmarks, you may be a professional athlete.
(link courtesy of Deadspin)
Embarrassment of bitches
In summer, our office hours are 8am-1pm on Fridays. It’s a nice treat, getting out before the weekend traffic, even if it’s just to get some shopping done or get home early.
Today, I stopped off at a comic shop on the way home, to pick up the new issue of Buffy: Season 8 for Amy. I hadn’t been to a comic store for a while — probably since the last issue — so, even though I’m in a cash crunch for the next month or so, I browsed the recent releases.
It was then that I realized the comics gods were taunting me.
It wasn’t enough that I found a new book by Eddie Campbell. No, it wasn’t even enough that I found
- two new hardcover collections of classic Jack Kirby work: the first volume of Fourth World
and the second volume of his mindblowing run of Fantastic Four
,
- I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets
a retrospective book of strips by the Wolverton
-esque Fletcher Hanks,
- Misery Loves Comedy
, a compilation of Ivan Brunetti’s amazing and misanthropic comics, and
- The Fun Never Stops
, a collection of 15 years of strips by the incomparable Drew Friedman.
No, dear reader. Above and beyond all that, I found Comics Gone Ape
Clearly, the comics gods want me to go broke. But you’ll be glad to know that I calmly paid for Amy’s comic, walked out of the store, and quietly sobbed as I slumped over the steering wheel of my car.
Bad Drug Joke
The following was deleted from one of my pharma company profiles: “Dapoxetine was rejected by the FDA in 2005, but if its EU filing gets approval this year, another FDA submission could be coming soon.”
The best part is that the company is Johnson & Johnson.
Unrequired Reading: June 15, 2007
Sprawl for Some
I don’t recall why I never finished reading Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History
Anyway, here’s an article by Prof. Bruegmann about the virtues and decline of sprawl:
But let’s assume for a moment that I’m entirely wrong and that sprawl is terrible. Could we stop it if we wanted to?
The record is not encouraging. The longest-running and best-known experiment was the one undertaken by Britain starting right after World War II. At that time, the British government gave unprecedented powers to planners to remake cities and took the draconian step of nationalizing all development rights to assure that these plans could be implemented. The famous 1944 Greater London plan, for example, envisioned a city bounded by a greenbelt. If there happened to be any excess population that couldn’t be accommodated within the greenbelt, it was supposed to be accommodated in small, self-contained garden cities beyond the belt.
Did the plan work? In one sense it did: The greenbelt is still there, and some people consider that an aesthetic triumph. But the plan certainly did not stop sprawl. As usual, the planners were not able to predict the future with any accuracy. The population grew, household size declined and affluence rose faster than predicted. Development jumped right over the greenbelt–and not into discreet garden cities, because this policy was soon abandoned.
The ultimate result was that much of southeastern England has been urbanized. Moreover, because of the greenbelt, many car trips are longer than they would have been otherwise, contributing to the worst traffic congestion in Europe.
I’m gonna get back to AstraZeneca’s annual shareholder letter now.
Kirsten, Kristen: whatever
Please to enjoy, a faux-outtake from Knocked Up:
In bloom
Sorry I haven’t written too much lately, dear readers. I’ve been busy with work, and I’m also spending a lot of time reading and trying to write fiction. I have a bunch of posts I’d love to get around to writing, and I really do have notes about them on my bulletin board.
Till then, here’s a picture I took last week:
Shock ending
I watched the first season of The Sopranos a year or two after it had aired. My excuse was that I thought it was overrated because most of the praise I heard came from my co-workers here in northern NJ. As it turns out, that first season was fantastic. But I heard that the second season was utterly terrible, so I never watched it, nor the subsequent ones.
Still, I sat down to watch the final episode last night, figuring Amy could fill me in on any backstory I was missing. A few minutes in, it occurred to me that this episode may get higher ratings in northern NJ than either the 1986 or 1991 Superbowl games.
SPOILER ALERT (so click “More” if you want to read the rest)
Continue reading “Shock ending”
Cat-era Obscura
One winter afternoon, my cat returned to the house in a panic, bleeding from one paw. He’d ripped a claw on something, so we cleaned him up and decided he wasn’t going outside for a while.
Since there was a light snow on the ground, I decided to investigate by following his paw-prints. They led on through the yard, across the street, and into some woods behind the neighbor’s house. Given the distance between prints, I figured that he ripped his claw while racing back home, probably on rocks or hard ground.
Of course, anytime we let him out, we wondered what he was up to. A gentleman in Germany wondered the same thing about his cat, so he rigged up a tiny digital camera to hang from Mr. Lee’s collar, and thus began CatCam site.
Unrequired Reading: June 8, 2007
We’re off to Louisiana for the weekend. I won’t have a chance to get to New Orleans while we’re there, so instead of beads, have some links!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: June 8, 2007”