I remember back in the 1990s, when all my friends were getting dot-com jobs but I wasn't, hearing about Pointcast and thinking it sounded really annoying. "Who the hell would want that?" But oh well, I thought, they all say that's the next big thing, so I guess there's something to it that I don't understand and I'd better get used to it... Turns out I was more correct than I thought.

Of course, a few years before I thought Nirvana represented a new nadir in music.

Yeah, finding the the application of athlete's foot ointment to quivering, groping octopus tentacles strange is just typical American cultural imperialism. Or, um, maybe not.

Yeah, the dialogue is the octopus trying to tell the woman which sucker it is that needs the ointment.

Occasionally people need to do more than urinate.

So, we're to assume that text messaging in Finland is as common as having an excretory system? No homeless people? No old people? No people who like to actually talk on the phone instead of texting? No people whose phones are dead? No people who desperately need to use the crapper and don't want to fiddle with a text message to do it?

I'm 34 and I had no idea who Rusty Jones was until I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Oh, I see, it's for rustproofing cars. That's never something people've had to worry about here. It's not just generational differences, but geographical.

I should also note that artist's widows aren't necessarily the last word on their spouse's artworks. Look at what Audrey Geisel's let happen to Dr. Seuss's works since his death -- Seussical, the live-action films... yecccchhhh.

I work in environmental review (not in Utah) and visited the Spiral Jetty last year and it's not really clear to me if there'd be a significant impact here. If this were in my jurisdiction, I would at least ask for an initial study, though.

It's worth noting that there is an old oil jetty just a mile or so south of the Spiral Jetty, on your way there. The decayed industrial landscape is part of the experience of seeing the artwork already. It's a pretty remote location, but it would be a mistake to call it wild or pristine. It has definitely been altered already, by cattle ranching, oil exploration, and the artwork itself. The potentially significant effect is to cultural resources, i.e., the artwork.

Why should tip percentages go up over time? The food prices are going up anyway, so the tip increases accordingly.

Ugh. I have no problem with people enjoying science fiction, but to elevate this preference to some kind of moral absolute should be repellent to an intelligent reader. What a happy coincidence that the only literary genre that you has anything of value to give to society is the genre you write in!

My favorite book is Moby-Dick, but I don't believe it follows that books about whaling are the only worthwhile books.

The guy sentenced to death (Wang Zhendong) was last February, and it was a different guy. The L.A. Times article references it, saying it was a different guy in the same province. The guy in the L.A. Times article was Wang Fengyou. Of course, he might get the death penalty, too, but it's not yet been reported.

"Octopi" is common enough to be acceptable now, but it isn't "proper" in any sense except that people use it a lot under the mistaken assumption that it's derived from Latin, which is where it's appropriate to form a plural by changing -us to -i. From the Online Etymology Dictionary, "Proper plural is octopodes, though octopuses probably works better in English. Octopi is from mistaken assumption that -us is the L. noun ending that takes -i in plural."

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=octopus&searchmode=none

Neat video, but nothing at all to do with Stanley Kubrick.

Well, Kurzweil's ideas aren't that much less wacky...