Made some homemade salsa tonight. It has the same effect on the tongue as the blood of the monsters in the Alien movies. You open the jar, and wallpaper peels. Next door.

"Deconstructing Contemporary Irish Urban Landscapes" -- or "The Pub Course" as it is more commonly known -- is the brainchild of Ashley Taggart from the Chicago-based Institute for International Education, course co-ordinator Peter Rooney told Reuters.

The idea is that pubs can act as a gateway to understanding modern Irish society.

Sagittarius: (Nov. 22--Dec. 21) The worst thing about the bloody events of next week will be that Penn and Teller feel no need to apologize for any of it.

surly \SUR-lee\ (adjective):
*1 : irritably sullen and churlish in mood or manner : crabbed
2 : menacing or threatening in appearance

Leah almost reported the surly cashier to the store manager, but then thought better of it, deciding that he was probably just having a bad day.

In its very earliest uses in the 16th century, "surly" meant "majestic" or "lordly." These early meanings make sense when you know that this word is an alteration of "sirly," which comes from "sir," the title of knights and baronets and other men of honor. So how did a word with such lofty beginnings come to be associated with grumbling rudeness? Arrogant and domineering behavior is sometimes associated with men of rank or position, and "surly" soon meant "haughty" or "imperious." These meanings (which are now obsolete) led to the "rude" sense that is very common today.

It all started about two weeks ago when Chris Jackson called me up and said "You know what? You should interview Berke Breathed for your website. Would you be interested in pursuing that?" It was a loaded question. Once Chris gets something in his head, he's pretty damned persistant about it. However, he knew how busy I was and offered to do the groundwork for me.

Two years after Viagra's epochal debut, there are no fewer than five competitors with products in the pipeline, including one partly bankrolled by Microsoft mogul Bill Gates. One lasts longer than Viagra. Another works more quickly. One is a gel. One dissolves in the mouth.

There are side effects. One caused so much dizziness that a test subject crashed his car after sex. But all of these next-generation impotence treatments are in the advanced stages of testing and will probably turn up on pharmacy shelves next year. And several of them, including Viagra, come with a tantalizing footnote: They may work on women.

This phenomenon was supposedly first reported by Royal Air Force pilots who flew over the Falklands during the 1982 war with Argentina, and it was popularized in a 1986 Bloom County cartoon in which Portnoy announces his desire to get his hair cut like Billy Idol because "everybody is doing it." Opus counters with the tale about penguins looking up at airplanes and falling over to make the point that whether one person or ten thousand performs a silly action, it's still a silly thing to do.

Embellishments of the original are part of the world of contemporary lore…

In England, the celebration of February 14th grew during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through gift giving and a growing superstition that the meeting of one's true love had special significance on that day. In the Americas, colonists brought with them the customs of Valentine's Day, and expressions of affection were handmade, handwritten, and usually hand-delivered. During the nineteenth century, new printing techniques, as well as creativity on the part of certain individuals, combined to foster new designs and ways of producing valentines. Valentines had previously been manufactured and imported from England, but by mid-century, Worcester, Massachusetts, emerged as a center for the production of valentine cards. Esther Howland, a Worcester native, established one of the first commercial valentine enterprises in America. The Whitney Company, also of Worcester, followed her lead as a major manufacturer of valentines, operating until 1942.

The largest natural crystals on Earth have been discovered in two caves within a silver and zinc mine near Naica, in Chihuahua, Mexico, according to mine officials.

Reaching lengths of over 20 feet, the clear, faceted crystals are composed of selenite, a crystalline form of the mineral gypsum.

"Walking into either of these caves is like stepping into a gigantic geode," said Richard D. Fisher, an American consultant with the mining company to develop the discoveries as tourist attractions.

"It's a big day for us," Liv Arnesen, of Oslo, said by satellite phone.

Both women have already accomplished astonishing feats. Bancroft, 45, of Scandia, Minn., was the first woman to ski to both the North Pole and the South Pole. Arnesen, 47, became the first woman to ski solo and unaided to the South Pole in 1994.

On Sunday, the 90th day of the journey, the women pulled their 240-pound sleds for more than nine hours down the final 12 miles of the Shackleton Glacier […] They ended a difficult descent that required them at times to trade their skis for crampons […] to navigate hard, sharp "blue" ice that ripped holes in Arnesen's sled.

Conditions on the final day on the glacier allowed them to ski, although it was through deep snow on "snow bridges" that cross crevasses. The snow settled as they moved, creating loud bangs that Arnesen called "scary."

Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.

7. "The Prisoner" A trippy '60s series starring Patrick McGoohan as a government agent imprisoned by enigmatic captors in a verdant British seaside village filled with brainwashed folks who have no names, only numbers. If Franz Kafka wrote an episode of "Teletubbies," this would be it.

When Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison told readers what she was going to do for George W. Bush on Presidents Day -- give a gift in his name to Planned Parenthood -- she could not have foreseen what would happen next. An e-mail detailing her idea was unleashed upon e-mail in boxes everywhere, was forwarded a zillion times and brought Planned Parenthood its largest surge in contributions in recent history: more than $300,000 for far. And the special day is still 10 days away.

But I vow I will get in my scheduled 90 minutes of entertainment: half an hour of gaming and an hour of fine, widescreen TV, digitally enhanced and stretched for my viewing pleasure. (Last night TiVo presented me with "Mirror, Mirror," one of my very favorite Star Trek episodes, which of course I enjoyed. 900 channels, and I'm still watching something I've been seeing every other year since 1971.

In an article titled "Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne," Sarah E. Shea, Kevin Gordon, Ann Hawkins, Janet Kawchuk and Donna Smith of the department of pediatrics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after an "exhaustive" review of the Pooh canon, diagnosed a range of clinical, personality and psychosocial disorders among the major Pooh characters. The article, a parody of psychology's medicalization of all human experience, was printed in the Canadian Medical Association Journal's annual winter lampoon issue.

All he was trying to do was ease her chronic back pain, but when Dr. Stuart Meloy placed an electrode into one patient's back, she groaned.

Not in pain, but in delight.

"This is a direct quote -- she said, 'You're going to have to teach my husband how to do that'," Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, said in a telephone interview…

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- Shares of Lucent Technologies fell more than 10 percent Friday on news that the Securities and Exchange Commission is conducting a formal investigation of the telecommunications equipment maker's accounting practices, looking for possible financial fraud.

Citing unidentified people familiar with the investigation, The Wall Street Journal said Friday that SEC enforcement division investigators are probing whether the troubled telecom equipment maker improperly booked $679 million in revenue during its 2000 fiscal year.

Lucent spokesman Bill Price said the news was no surprise and said the Journal "is beating us with our own stick twice," with Friday's story.

The company had made clear in its November and December announcements that it was sharing information with the SEC, he said.

Lucent (LU) shares were down $1.77 at $15.12 in recent trade. Lucent shares have tumbled substantially since mid-year 2000. The company, which fired CEO Richard McGinn last October, warned in November of a possible fourth-quarter earnings restatement and said it had notified the SEC.

Lucent followed through with the fourth-quarter restatement in December, erasing $679 million in revenue and announcing that it would take a restructuring charge of as much as $1.6 billion.

A person with knowledge of SEC documents in the case told the Journal that agency investigators are looking at the company's revenue booking procedures, particularly its use of "nonrecurring credits," or one-time discounts, given to customers, as well as Lucent's accounting treatment of software-licensing agreements.

The company's revenue recognition practices regarding sales to distributors, who may or may not have sold the products, is also getting a look, the report said. The agency is also looking at how the company used revenue targets in fiscal 2000.

Scientists Create Bioluminescent Weasel
Posted by brian on Wed February 07, 06:54 PM
from the have fun hitting reload page dept.
Scientists over in the UK have produced a weasel that glows in the dark. One future benefit of the development will be when bioluminescence is merged with Clapper technology. That way we can all have a weasel in our house and use him as a reading light and not have to leave our beds to shut it off.

…but when you've only 16K to tell a story, you have to rely on the gamer's imagination to provide the details. Just the words "you are on a beach" can summon vistas no game can provide.

This game was inordinately frustrating. We did everything we were supposed to do. It was obvious we were supposed to cut the vines with the knife, and use the vines to build a raft. Or, in the lingo of text adventures:

> cut vines
- with what?
> with knife
- OK
> i (inventory)
- watch, coconuts, bottle of rum, fish bones, knife, vines
> tie logs
- I don't know the word "tie"
> make raft
- with what?

And so forth. It looks dull now, but it was thrill-a-minute then; we were interacting with a computer at home, and in 1982 this was a novel concept. But we couldn't make the damn raft.…

And once again I left the store as the Dangerous Rebel, the Troublemaker, Mr. Weirdo. No doubt on their breaks these weightless little people will get together in the backroom, and they'll talk about the bizarro customers who refuse to give their zip codes. People refusing to give information to the Gap on request! Imagine!

Little Nazis. I highly recommend that everyone just respond NO when asked this question. Calmly, with a Bing-Crosby sense of style and ease. Just say no. Because your phone number is next.…

chthonic \THAH-nik (TH as in "think")\ (adjective): of or relating to the underworld : infernal

Sharon compared entering her brother's basement bedroom to a descent into chthonic regions -- it was dark and odd-smelling, and she was a little frightened of what she might find there.

"Chthonic" might seem a lofty and learned word, but it's actually pretty down-to-earth in its origin and meaning. It comes from "chthon," which means "earth" in Greek. "Chthonic" is associated with things that dwell in or under the earth. It is most commonly used in discussions of mythology, particularly underworld mythology. Pluto and Persephone, who reign over the underworld in Greek mythology, might be called "chthonic deities," for example. "Chthonic" has broader applications too. It can be used to describe something that resembles a mythological underworld (e.g., "chthonic darkness"), and it is sometimes used to describe things associated with the earth or nature (as opposed to the elevated or celestial).

Police in Kentucky are looking for a customer who succeeded in paying for a $2 order at a fast-food restaurant with a phony $200 bill featuring a picture of President George W. Bush and a depiction of the White House with a lawn sign saying, 'We like broccoli.' Authorities say the female cashier at a Dairy Queen in Danville even gave the culprit $198 in real money as change. (John Sommers/Reuters)

"Later, he was to decide that Andrew's life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety."

"And while the ending was weak, it was much _less_ weak than the endings of his other books; there was no sensation of "gee, where'd the last 50 pages of this book go" as there was in, say, _Diamond Age_." -- Douglas Muir, on Cryptonomicon in rec.arts.sf.written

Scorpio: (Oct. 24--Nov. 21)
The technical term for what will happen to you next Tuesday is "trepanning," but that won't seem terribly interesting at the time.

Sagittarius: (Nov. 22--Dec. 21)
A good friend will see fit to share her darkest secrets with you shortly after placing a small but tasteful bouquet on your headstone.

Capricorn: (Dec. 22--Jan. 19)
You've got just one big collar to make in your two days before retirement, so be careful: Sewing clown clothing can be extremely dangerous.

In the store the other day I saw an intriguing slogan on a can of Hormel chili. It said:

In or out of the bowl, it's out of control!

There was a recipe for kickin' chili fries, and I believe I can paraphrase:

   1. Make French fries
   2. Pour chili over French fries
   3. Kick
   4. Rinse; repeat

Or something like that. The kickin' fries don't bother me. Out-of-control chili, however, concerns me. Feral, antisocial chili is a good idea, and while I appreciate Hormel warning us that this chili is undisciplined, why sell it? You'll just end up calling their 1-800 number…