They emit spam

I don’t know which is a worse sign about humanity: The crappy level of spam the spammers send, or the haunting thought that just maybe there is 0.0000001% of people gullible enough to respond.

This one purporting to be about lodging in London is pretty classic:

I discovered your weblog site on google and test just a few of your early posts. Continue to maintain up the superb operate. I simply additional up your RSS feed to my MSN Information Reader. Searching for ahead to studying more from you in a while!…

It’s not easy to continue to maintain up the superb operate, but somebody’s gotta do it.

UPDATE: Oooh, they added another! Much clearer now, as I feel their validity is much more center to heart now:

There are some interesting deadlines on this article but I don’t know if I see all of them center to heart. There is some validity however I’ll take maintain opinion until I look into it further. Good article , thanks and we want more! Added to FeedBurner as nicely

Regrets of the Dying; Or, Reminders to Live This Moment

We live like kings and queens.

Because this is how life works and how interests intersect from unexpected corners, I saw this piece via an NHL agent, who saw it via an NHL team owner, who was high up at AOL and also openly chases his life’s own bucket list.

Good stuff in this, “Nurse Reveals 5 Regrets of the Dying.”

In short: Live true to yourself, don’t work so hard (unless it fulfills you/enables your fulfillment), express yourself, keep your friends, and permit yourself to be happy.

Reading it makes me feel so lucky. But I feel lucky every day, and I suppose that’s the point.

My biggest flaw is staying in touch — I get lost in my own head and my own curiosities too easily — but boy, those great friendships between souls span time and absences, picking up where they left off.

New Google Search Totally Reminds You How You Googled That High School Flame That One Night When You Were Drunk

They know where my dog's been.

Or at least, that’s what it sounds like:

The update causes Google to surface material that is specifically related to the person who is searching. So my search results won’t be the same as yours, if I’m signed in to Google.

I’ve already noticed for a while how it’s started to mess with me on that autocomplete function as I search.

Like, not just autocompleting popular search terms everyone searches for (“best ways to arrange cats in vases“) but also digging up my old ones like “What’s the name of that girl who looked at me at that 1994 mixer during that Peter Gabriel song” instead of “What’s the name of that girl with the dragon tattoo” which is what I was trying to type. This time anyway.

Google: All your baggage are belong to us.

Space Gazing

Sort of knew this was possible, but I guess I didn’t think you could capture it with a now almost-standard SLR camera:

Great shot of the International Space Station crossing in front of the Moon. [More images on Flickr here.] This one was taken from a parking lot — I suppose a boat isn’t the proper tripod for such photos, but maybe it’s worth a try some day?

To find out when the space station is crossing the sky near you, use the applet here. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever seen it myself, but I’ve definitely spotted satellites moving across the night sky before.

Once you know what to look for, they’re easy to find and the world feels smaller (while the universe feels ever bigger).

It also feels like … somebody’s watching you.

I admit it

It’s true: I was walking the dogs and singing Pet Shop Boys hits along with my iPod.

“West End Girls,” the “You Were Always On My Mind” cover, a little “Let’s Make Lots of Money” — the whole bit. (My GOODNESS the lip syncing on their videos was awful and has gotten worse with time.)

An unseasonably warm evening, beautifully clear night sky, and the end of the first week back at work that always feels longer than it is. Probably ruined a bystander’s walk or two, but it had to be done.

Simple pleasures keep the pulse healthy.

(This suddenly reminds me of a great drunken conversation with family members on New Year’s Eve about which is more shameful to have in the mix: Human League or Thompson Twins. I defended Human League firmly — at least they had a beat in comparison to the agonizingly glacial Twins).

Hey, It’s My Life. (On that note, speaking of fun covers/re-interpretations…)

What To Do When Kim Jong-Il Stops Looking At Things

This soft drink looks good. Carry on.

Thankfully the end of Dear Leader does not mean the end of the Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things photo blog. That place is priceless. (I’m a fan of the fabric samples shot, myself.)

Kim always reminded me of Al Davis, the infamous and similarly poorly fashioned and aging owner of the NFL Raiders. Davis had similar delusions of conquest, and similar levels of success.

Anyway, with Dear Leader gone there is the fear — there is always the fear, but this is fear with a new variable — that the unstable state he left behind could collapse if his son isn’t able to harness that unique blend of control and fascination with pop culture that served his father so well.

This article is a nice round-up of how the world’s major states are game-planning for such a situation, should it arrive. Apparently China would prefer not to think about it, at least not even unofficially in official top-secret communiques with other governments. But that doesn’t mean it’s not on the radar:

The then South Korean vice foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, who was also a delegate at the six-party talks, said the two Chinese officials told him privately that China “would clearly not welcome any U.S. military presence north of the Demilitarized Zone in the event of a collapse.”

But the Chinese officials told him Beijing “would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the United States in a ‘benign alliance’ – as long as Korea was not hostile towards China.”

The United States maintains 28,500 troops in South Korea and remains the Supreme Commander of unified American and South Korean troops in the event of a crisis with the North.

Well, that actually sounds reasonable. If and when collapse happens, South Korea may be the best candidate to manage the remnant arsenal of fabric swatches and soft drinks.

R.I.P., Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel went from being a playwright to a symbol of the new Czech state and democracy in Eastern Europe.  Along the way he became Czech’s first democratically elected president, nominee and winner of prestigious peace prizes, and one of the world’s preeminent anti-communist revolutionaries.

-source

More:

Vaclav Havel wove theater into revolution, leading the charge to peacefully bring down communism in a regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan” and proving the power of the people to overcome totalitarian rule.

And my favorite:

An avowed peacenik whose heroes included rockers such as Frank Zappa, he never quite shed his flower-child past and often signed his name with a small heart as a flourish.

And then, this classic:

One of his best-known essays, “The Power and the Powerless” written in 1978, borrowed slyly from the immortal opening line of the mid-19th century Communist Manifesto, writing: “A specter is haunting eastern Europe: the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’”

Well done, good sir.

Post-revolution, they turned the Prague prison that once held him into a hotel. Pink Panther-themed, naturally. We stayed there one night, behind bars, and as I fell asleep I pondered how so many things would’ve been different, if only so many things had gone differently.

Instead, my dad ended up in the U.S., I ended up an American — and just when we thought it would never happen, conditions changed and allowed my father to retire back where he began.

Revolutions always happen in stages, but it’s still unbelievable how quickly — and peacefully! — things went from “impossible” to “Here we are. The dissident playwright is the newly elected president.”

From another arrest in January 1989 to peaceful protests in November to elected president that December. And teachers at school asking me if my father would be “going back.”

He did make it back. Thank you, Vaclav.

I fear my mind is plotting something…out of laziness

Want have play now.

From Michael Lewis (“Moneyball”) in Vanity Fair, on the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his book:

…it’s now called Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s wonderful, of course. To anyone with the slightest interest in the workings of his own mind it is so rich and fascinating that any summary of it would seem absurd. Kahneman walks the lay reader (i.e., me) through the research of the past few decades that has described, as it has never been described before, what appear to be permanent kinks in human reason.

The story he tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off.

We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly.

Lovely!

Two hours.

Dishwashing farm?

Two hours is all it takes. In the dusk. Fall. In Maplewood.

For a 36-year-old dishwasher to disappear from the curb, into some grateful dude’s (or maybe dudette’s…you never know) stash of scrap metal. I love this town.

I thought gas prices being what they are, for sure this one would require scouting by the light of day. But I guess if you have competitors, early bird gets the worm. Even in the darkness.

This dishwasher was older than me. Harvest gold. Several engine and spring repairs when I was a young’n are what got me to be a worrier about money and about Household Things breaking. Because everything you buy today breaks sooner than what it replaced, I never rushed to replace it. Hang on to the appliances that work, because Tappan knows something else will break sooner.

Sometime around the 2000s, we spray-painted it silver-ish, having skipped the White Appliance generation. It was noisy, used a lot of water and energy, and in its final years it didn’t clean dishes beyond a false peace of mind.

I won’t miss that dishwasher. Until this new one breaks.

Sorry that they used you

Mmm...sugar

This is several months old but it’s really funny if it’s even half-way true:

Here’s a brief history of Sarah Palin’s relationship with the establishment Republican party and its supporters in the press: They sat on their hands after John McCain picked her as vice president because she was able to fire up a despondent base; they continued to sit on their hands in the two years leading up to the 2010 elections because Palin raised tons of money while mobilizing the Tea Party; and now that that’s over, they don’t want her to run for president because she’s an embarrassment to the nation and clearly incapable of doing the job even if she were to somehow win, which she won’t.

But they can’t just call her an incompetent joke in public. The base would rush to her defense! So instead they come up with meek, over-intellectualized excuses for why they don’t like her and want her to disappear forever.

In other words, thank you for whipping the people up with your dumb talk — Reagan would be proud — but for the actual job, we need someone who can do real talk.

Of course, getting someone in the job who speaks your brand of real talk requires first speaking dumb talk to get elected. … Except, when they do dumb talk, they need to actually know that’s what they’re doing. It doesn’t work when the stooge-elect actually thinks (s)he’s on to something.

So move on, as we are ready for democracy’s next farcical stage: Favors for our valued corporate citizen donors.