This is not a hand mixer.

…couldn’t it have waited until after trick-or-treating? I may have a few tens of pounds of candy left over if the kids don’t brave the storm.

[Update: about 35 kids. Unfortunately, based on last year, I planned for at least 130, which means I’ve got over 50 pounds of candy left.]

Steve lowered his voice. "Now listen to me. This thing is big. The two you ran up against yesterday were not good samples. We're dealing with some tough professionals. I don't know who they are, but from what I've seen I can tell you they're dangerous. So you two are to stay out of this case. That is an order. Stay on Clipper Cay and have fun."

(from The Wailing Octopus, a Rick Brant science-adventure story)

[Update: more teasers, or teasing; bit of both]

…or perhaps eye candy…

more...

From TheWorstMuse:

If your alien culture isn’t a thinly veiled allegory for contemporary politics, what’s the point?

From today’s Emacs 24.4 announcement:

Highlights of this release include:
  - A built-in web browser (M-x eww)
  - Improved multi-monitor and fullscreen support
  - "Electric" indentation is enabled by default
  - Support for saving and restoring the state of frames and windows
  - Emacs Lisp packages can now be digitally signed
  - A new "advice" mechanism for Emacs Lisp
  - File notification support
  - Pixel-based resizing for frames and windows
  - Support for menus in text terminals
  - A new rectangular mark mode (C-x SPC)

Looks like I’ll need to add a few more disabling commands to my .emacs file…

Amusing QA error on a maid-cafe web site; the title and keywords section of the page header are error messages of the form: “Warning: mysql_fetch_array() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/html/www_maid/S/wp-content/themes/maid2013/functions.php”.

This is the sort of thing that announces to the world, “Hi, we’re clueless PHP users; please try to crack our site”.

Also, I have to say that while I understand what they were trying for with the maidreamin.com domain, my initial parse of the URL was a bit… anal.

On sale now at Amazon: The Lame-Ass Samurai.

Badly-held sword and ninja socks not included.

This is far from the most cringeworthy “asian” Halloween costume available…

[Update: Sigh. Genghis Khan Samurai Costume (cosplaying for the other team?); Ninja Warrior Set (extra-shiny, to blind opponents when you fail your Stealth check). ]