Evidently, a 54-year-old lab chimp named Gwen is getting to retire this week. I envision her sitting on the front porch of the sanctuary and complaining about how easy young lab chimps have it nowadays.
F-books
“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,†predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.â€Â
This NYTimes lede serves double duty: it sets up a review of Sony’s new e-book and provides more proof that women should never talk about technology.
(Sorry, Carly)
Mine will need a magazine rack
According to BW, luxury bathrooms are the hot new thing in home remodeling.
Are you on drugs?
An Italian TV show has been surreptitiously drug-testing 50 members of parliament, allegedly finding that 12 MPs tested smoke weed and 4 tested positive for cocaine:
The programme sent a reporter to interview lower house deputies allegedly for a programme about the 2007 draft budget currently going through parliament. . . . But unbeknown to each of them, the make-up artist employed by the show was dabbing their brow with swabs, and their perspiration was later tested for cannabis and cocaine.
Any guesses how our own House of Reps would fare?
Like Letting Pitcher Fly Plane
No one needs to remind me that I’m a mean person. I get pretty constant reinforcement.
For example, when Amy said, “It looks like Cory Lidle was the pilot of that plane that crashed in NYC,” my first response was, “It couldn’t have been Jaret Wright?”
I’m a mean person AND a Yankees fan. Sue me.
(Back in college, my buddy Toure responded to the news of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s helicopter crash with “Damn! Why couldn’t it have been Eric Clapton?”)
Letting woman drive car is like letting monkey fly plane
The Kazakhstan government continues to do PR for the new Borat movie. The ambassador to the UK wants to know why Sascha Baron Cohen didn’t pick Afghanistan to lampoon. I think the answer is that an Afghan is more likely to kill you for doing something like this than a Kazakh is.
(Thanks to mah main man Faiz for the link)
Name that Subdivision
BLDGBLOG linked to a handy guide for naming suburban Denver subdivisions.
Not to be outdone, Denver resident and VM buddy Craig offers up a link to the Nietzsche Family Circus. Hit reload. Laugh.
Don’t tell the Beer Baron
Flight Delay
I corresponded today with one of the exhibitors from last week’s Paris conference. He wrote, “I hope that you had a safe flight back. We were stuck outside the terminal for over an hour because of a unattended bag, which they blew up outside the terminal. Besides that we had an easy flight home.”
I replied, “Did you get to see the bag get blown up, at least? That would’ve helped mitigate the delay a little bit.”
Alas, no: “Unfortunately I did not get to see the bag get blown up, but I did get to see the remnants. They just dumped the contents on the sidewalk: some clothes, lots of rice, and spices.”
* * *
It reminds me of the baggage carousel when we got back to Newark. Some luggage came out, but there was also a small pile of panties rolling along. I said, “Wow! Did someone get raped in the cargo hold?!”
It had been a long day.
Mail call
One of the neat things about extended business trips is the gigantic pile of mail that awaits upon your arrival. I spent most of yesterday’s work-day going through mail, magazines, faxes, and the 154 pertinent e-mails from the week out of the office. It was laborious, but I was glad to get everything off my desks. And, since it was Columbus Day, there was no new mail coming in.
At home, it was a much quicker process. A medium-sized box of mail waited for us. This is the first time Amy & I have gone away for a stretch since we had our “subscribe to every magazine” run during the summer, so the stack of mags was truly impressive. We were only gone for a week, but for some reason, Dwell decided to send two different issues.
But the best thing in the mail was a card from our friends Cathi & Adam. They got hitched about 13 months ago and we’ve somehow failed to give them their wedding present during that span. Despite that, they sent a thank-you card, which included a couple of pictures from their wedding. Which is my roundabout way of introducing the following:
