Smokey the $1000 housecat: A Hemobart story
This 1500-word post is all about our pet cats, Smokey and Eli. Yes, that’s right. 1500 words. About our cats. Welcome to a rare break from posts about popular culture and random Internet nonsense. This story is mostly about Smokey’s near-death experience and, more generally, about the housekitties.
I had been waiting to write about this [...]
Amazon MP3 Beta launched, iTunes still annoying
I am very excited about Amazon MP3 Beta (minus the consumer profiling it inescapably contains). I hope it enables me to be done with iTunes Music Store, soon. Now that Apple’s iTunes has paved the way, it’s about time a major player forced changes to the way digital music is sold. Apple finally has [...]
2007 Blogger Boobie-Thon for breast cancer
So, you may remember that October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but do you know about the annual Blogger Boobie-Thon for breast cancer? I just learned about it last week. It’s a website organized to gain donations for breast cancer research, through nudity (which, as we all know, is a consistently successful fundraising [...]
Fertility phones, planting yellow plums, save as PDF
I have four things to share today. Ready, set, go:
1. Here’s some interesting technology news from Engadget Mobile: Samsung has filed a patent application for a fertility-measuring phone. The phone is capable of tracking a woman’s fertile periods. Oh, yes, it’s true … by measuring eardrum distance and body temperature. I enjoyed [...]
Body Worlds 3 at OMSI (plus Newport dining)
The past couple of weeks have been filled with regional tennis tournaments and traveling. What’s been great is that the weather in the Willamette Valley this summer (so far) has been very cool and mild. It’s been much more pleasant than last summer (and apparently most of the rest of the country).
I had family [...]
Pink Martini concert (and Google wireless, obesity)
Friday night I went to see Pink Martini at the da Vinci Days festival in Corvallis on the Oregon State University campus. I also caught some of the opening act, Sneakin’ Out. It was all very good stuff. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, Pink Martini is an adventurous multilingual lounge [...]
Roswell, kitten neutering, Epsom salt, helium balloons
Today is the 60th anniversary of the Roswell incident, the most famous UFO sighting in American history. Read more from MSNBC: The Roswell Experience. I was kind of obsessed with Area 51 conspiracy theories when I was a kid. I visited Roswell during the summer of 2001, a few months before I moved to Oregon.
My [...]
Abraham Lincoln’s death (and Tecumseh’s Curse)
Once again I am awake at a ridiculous hour on Monday morning. What have I learned?
That President Abraham Lincoln might have survived if today’s medical technology had existed when he was shot in the back of his head in 1865. Last week medical experts took on the case of Abraham Lincoln at the [...]
Marketing gold: Doritos X-13D Flavor Experiment
Today I was walking through the grocery store, just minding my own business, when, out of the corner of my eye, I see a plain black bag of chips with a generic sans-serif font that says “X-13D.” In this age of sophisticated, glossy, photo-rich packaging, how am I not going to look more closely to [...]
Airports unleash virtual strip searches
We started to hear about this technology in the mainstream news late last year, but now it has arrived!
As of this week, airline passengers in Amsterdam are now being subjected to a new “millimeter wave” full-body scanning system. This body-imaging technology uses non-ionizing electromagnetic waves to generate an image based on the energy reflected [...]