greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: October 2005

  • You know what they call people like that, right?

    Tonight, on a Very Special Episode ™ of CSI ™, Nick Stokes tries to save a little girl who everyone else is convinced has already been killed, but… he can hear her voice in his head, leading him from clue to clue.

    Gah. I hate Very Special Episodes. I like the character of Nick well enough, but c’mon. First the two-hour season finale, now this. Are they setting him up for a write-out, or did George Eads just work this kind of thing into his contract back when he was threatening to quit the show a couple of years back? Feh.

    Ah: It pays to Google, my friends.

    The plot of this episode was modified at the last moment to accomodate for a sudden change in William Petersen’s availability — originally, Gil Grissom was going to be the CSI convinced that the younger daughter was still alive. (Source)

    Fair enough, then… but still. Can we get back to our regularly scheduled mayhem next week, please?

  • Not your normal rat bait…

    I’m so glad I discovered Livescience.com.

    Scientists figured they’d trap this foot-long varmint in no time. Eighteen weeks later, they finally trapped it with some fresh penguin bait. On another island.

    Go read the whole thing, won’t you? It’s… amusing, if not also a bit disturbing…

    World’s Most Elusive Rat…

  • Enough with the crazy. Really.

    Memo To The Universe At Large:

    Twice more since Sunday have I dealt with crazy people at bus stops. This is not a trend I’m happy about in the least, especially now that my wonderful Neuros seems to be giving up the ghost. If I don’t have music, the appropriate replacement is peace and quiet, not insane ramblings from complete strangers.

    Sure, they’ve been harmless in general, but they’re annoying. I don’t want a dissertation on how different Tri-Met lines have different standards for how long a driver gets a particular route. I don’t want to hear about some creepy old guy’s medicinal needs, or his escapades at the strip club. And I don’t want to converse with people who think ducks aren’t birds.

    That will be all. Thank you for listening.

  • I have needs!

    If Mari went jumping off a cliff, would I do it too? That depends, I suppose, but if she does a silly meme I’m almost duty-bound to follow suit. So, here you go. This is a lot like the “$Name is” Google thing from a while back, except this time it’s “$Name needs”. (Don’t forget the quotes.) The first ten result summaries that include the two words together are what you post. For instance:

    • There are many situations where Karel needs to repeat an instruction but it is not yet known how often. (Ain’t that the truth…)
    • Karel’s world is always bounded by walls along the edges, but the world may have different dimensions depending on the specific problem Karel needs to solve.
    • Karel needs a semi-colon to terminate instructions (;).
    • Assume that a robot named Karel needs to pick up a beeper and move, but if there is no beeper to pick up, he is to do nothing. (Yeah, yeah. When your namesake is responsible for giving us the word “robot” you get a lot of robot-related things named after him.)
    • Karel needs six weeks for this. (Whatever this is.)
    • Karel needs to get those documents and forms from the Seminary by June 3.
    • Karel needs to find it. (Whatever it is.)
    • The game said that Karel needs that person’s blood in order to transform into that person. (Uh, what?)
    • KAREL flew into the Bay Area today and experienced what he thought might be a terrorist, but the airline disagreed. (There’s a KAREL Show? Why was I not informed?)
    • Karel needs to travel East along the south wall of the city until it reaches the East side, at which point it will stop.

    And there you have it. Mind you, I left out one of the first ten entries that came up… but if you dig around a nearby website you could probably find it yourself…

  • Officially Not A Bird

    The scene: Bus stop near Union Station. I’ve just seen Kyla homeward and I’m waiting for the #9 that’ll take me home. It’s at least fifteen minutes away, being a Sunday and all. There’s an older woman with a variety of small traveling bags already at the stop, which is unusual as I’ve never had company for my bus wait there before. (Suffice to say I’ve done this a few times.)

    After a few conversational forays I discover that the older woman is, indeed, not the sharpest marble in the bag. I settle in for a few rounds of Solitaire on my phone as a way to pass the time.

    “Oooh, look at all those birds.”

    I turn around and see a vaguely W-shaped formation of about thirty waterfowl flying south. “Yep,” I reply in as uninterested a tone as I can manage without being rude.

    “Geese, you think?”

    I look again. The flyers aren’t big enough or quite the right shape for geese, at least not the Canadian variety we get so many of around here. “Actually, I’m pretty sure those are ducks.”

    “Oh, so not birds then.”

    I freeze completely still for a few moments, processing what I’d heard and deciding whether I should say anything. I decide against it.

    Luckily for my fragile sanity, the bus arrives a few minutes later.

  • The Curse of the Serenity

    On Tuesday night the kids and I went to see the Wallace and Gromit feature, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” It was funny, and particularly punny, not to mention incredibly well made as a piece of top-notch stop-motion animation. Nick Park and his crew clearly went all-out, even to the point of doing a fine job on the fur effects.

    This afternoon Kyla and I saw “Serenity.” (Not being die-hard Firefly fans, neither of us had a burning need to do so before this point.) It was about what I expected, and even a bit better than, truth be told. I wouldn’t say it was a great movie through-and-through, but it was wholly serviceable and generally transcended the genre trappings through a mixture of snappy dialogue and clever visuals.

    I wholeheartedly recommend catching either or both of these movies while they’re still in theaters. ‘Nuff said.

Calendar

October 2005
S M T W T F S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  

My Links