An avocado, found in the snow near Portland St and Broadway, Cambridge, MA
An avocado in the snow.
Who left it there? I do not know.
Not Father, Son, nor Ghost so holy,
Rebirths you into guacamole.
Did leaping from this wretched fate
Allow you to feel special, great?
Or did, cast down like ancient foe,
You weep from terror, weep from woe?
But lie here now, near Portland Street,
And rest, green flesh and tasty meat.
Well, well, well… it looks like we have another airline adopting movie plot security tactics. From JetBlue’s page on service animals (emphasis added):
Certain unusual emotional support animals (i.e. snakes, other reptiles, ferrets, rodents and spiders) pose unavoidable safety and/or public health concerns and will not be allowed to jet with us. The release of such an animal in the aircraft could result in a direct threat to the health or safety of customers and crewmembers.
No word on whether they’ve hired Mr. Jackson as a consultant.
Wolfire Blog has a neat analysis of the design of World of Goo (which, if you haven’t played it, is a rather fun game.)
Today’s Times has a great article about rice cookers.
Here’s a lede I never thought I’d see:
A spokesman for the pirates … said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. —Somali Pirates Tell All: They’re in It for the Money, New York Times, 2008-09-30
The downstairs neighbor got cable installed recently, and this is what the side of our house looks like now:
More glamour shots here. Off to call RCN and see if they’ll do something about it…
Update: Allegedly, an RCN dispatcher will be calling us tomorrow to send someone out.
Update 2: RCN came, and it turns out that it isn’t their wires. Before we and downstairs got RCN, there was a Comcast install. Comcast came and disconnected their wires once nobody at the place had Comcast, and they left the mess.
Update 3, 2008-09-15: I called Comcast on Friday, and they said they’d send someone out on Saturday. They didn’t. I’ll try emailing them this time…
Update 4: Email didn’t progress very far before they said I’d have to call or use their “live chat” feature. I called, and a very helpful and apologetic CSR scheduled an appointment for Wednesday, and said she’d monitor the account and call me back on Wednesday to make sure that someone actually came out this time. I think it’ll actually happen this time.
Update 5: Looks like they came and took care of it. Hooray!
The New York Times reviews a trendy fashion boutique in delightfully snarky fashion. The place truly does sound bizarre; the sales clerk at the store was disappointed that they’d sold out of the dress that came with an instruction manual.
Google Maps has walking directions now.
A federal agent strolls into a small Missouri town and helps clean up their meth problem, spearheading a string of arrests. The only problem is that he wasn’t really a federal agent, or any kind of law enforcement officer at all. Monica Davey for the New York Times writes:
Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood, from television mainly, to be the law. They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, …
Comics I Don’t Understand finally re-did their site so that it’s actually readable. One of their latest entries is a particularly fine “Garfield” cartoon, although I’ll confess that I wouldn’t have got the reference without the explanation.