(apparently from the store window of Asobit Chara City in Akihabara; I don’t know if they sell signs or stickers)

A little something from The Random Recipe Generator:

Butter Crumble

Serves 1
You will need:

• 60g butter
• 70g kidney beans

Instructions:

1. pre-heat the oven to 180 C
2. eat the butter
3. discard the kidney beans
4. bake for 50 minutes and serve hot

All I can do to help is send money, which I have. Fortunately, one of the few things the American government reliably does well is disaster relief.

I’ll refrain from partisan sniping, unless some jackass tries to use this as justification for passing the healthcare bill…

Update: this is what I’m talking about:

...Four large Coast Guard ships—a 210-foot Reliance-class cutter and three 270-foot medium Endurance-class cutters—left Miami today, bound for Haiti....

...A C-130 cargo airplane also flew into Haiti from Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater in Florida....

...Next to arrive will be urban rescue teams from Florida, Virginia and California...

...The crew of the Comfort, one of the Navy's two 894-foot-long hospital ships, is now rushing to the ship, ported in Baltimore, to sail for Haiti.

The Navy hospital ship will be joined in Haiti by the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. The carrier's crew of more than 3000 had been at sea for just hours, leaving Norfolk, Va., for its new home port in San Diego, when the call came to reroute to Haiti. The massive craft can launch helicopters loaded with supplies, make and deliver fresh water and, if need be, augment hospital space by pitching aid tents on its flight deck.

Found in the latest issue of Ansible, whilst hunting for Thoggisms:

George Bowie, Radio Clyde presenter:

"Which famous detective features in the Agatha Christie [sic] novel The Hound of the Baskervilles?"

Contestant:

"Is it Harry Potter?"

Some of the recent subject lines from my spam folder:

Meet and marry a gorgeous Russian queen.
Russian queens are waiting.
I can do for you is - what can not no girl!

Much thanks to the Duck for his review of this film, which led me to include the DVD in my latest order from Amazon Japan. I was able to find a set of soft-subs for it that seem to be reasonably accurate (and were apparently used to subtitle the bootleg DVDs that people were selling on Amazon US for a while). It’s a gorgeous, ugly, moving, and quite sad film, and Joe Hisiashi’s score suits the material perfectly.

The few non-Duck English reviews I’ve found come at it with an axe to grind, making them basically useless for evaluating the film. Oddly, they all seem to think that no one outside of Japan would be interested, which says more about them than it does about the film.

It’s not available on BluRay, but the image quality is still superb (Handbrake ripped it at 850x364). Sample screengrab below, from late in the film.

more...

I received a little piece of email sent to an address that I’ve only used with Oakley, in ever-so-slighty-off English, claiming to direct me to download a new version of Adobe Reader from adobe-pdf-pro.net, which is registered to a company in Moscow and hosted in the UK. Visiting that site (with wget, not a real browser!) redirects me to signup-way.com, which redirects me to pdfnewdownload.com, which tries to get me to become a member to gain access to this and other free software. I strongly suspect that someone visiting with a real browser will get a lot more than a deceptive and pointless offer.

Hey, maybe it’s not from Adobe after all!

Sadly, the real Adobe does not provide a way to inform them that this is going on; it doesn’t qualify under any of the feedback categories they permit, sigh.

[and it got past my spam filters because I whitelist the special addresses I give to companies I’ve done business with in the past; looks like someone “acquired” a copy of Oakley’s mailing list…]

Thanks for enabling two-finger trackpad zoom on the desktop in Snow Leopard. One accidental swipe and my carefully-arranged icons are all over the place, with no undo and no way to turn off the feature without disabling it system-wide. Gosh, how clever of you. “It probably won an award.”