Reciprocality: some interesting stuff about the psychology of creativity.

The latest from that great hypocrite Don Perata: Calif. lawmaker wants 5-cent tax on every bullet to support trauma centers.

Perata said there was plenty of precedent for taxing bullets, noting that California has been taxing smokers 50-cents for each pack of cigarettes since 1998 to help pay for health and education programs.

Never mind that most of this tax would be paid by the people least likely to hurt someone with their bullets, i.e. private citizens who go to the range and practice.

California leads the nation in numbers of youth gun suicides and homicides.

Gee, does that mean gun control in California – already one of the five or so most repressive states – isn’t working? Or only that California is a big place?

Google cites 28 pages for perata+hypocrite, but not all of them apply the epithet to Perata himself.

Okay, the Grammar Police gag has been done before, if not quite so stylishly. I don’t mind an excuse to plug my favorite college strip.

Got a spam today that may have been designed purely to annoy me. The title is “hi, I fixed the problem . . .” and the entire content is

<img src=”http://www.1stchannel.com/images/pixel.gif?track=1&entry=[myaddress]” border=”0″>

Had I opened this with image-loading enabled, it would look blank to me, but notify 1stchannel that my address is valid. (2004 Oct 07: This is why Mozilla lets you turn off image-loading in mail.)

Meanwhile, stop me if you’ve heard this one: ( . . more . . )

My clipping service (hi Jo) found these in alt.peeves:

Well apart from coffee, algebra and astronomy, Positional notation/place value, soap and international trade, what have the arabs ever done for us? [link]

and:

Peeve: people who think the main purpose of the Internet is to enable little Jasper to research his school project on rainfall without being distracted by images of donkey sex. [link]

Steve Baker tells the tale of the Utah Teapot. (Found through another Steve’s links.)
Links in turn to the Stanford Bunny.

And what collection of digital models would be complete without Lena Sjööblom?
I first saw her in Foley & van Dam, where her face (cropped rather tight) was used to illustrate halftoning; my copy vanished in ~1982, and I now have a later edition without her (*snif*).

The oddest things sometimes bug me. Does anyone else remember a children’s book which mentions eating “roast beast”?

Update. One reader (see, this is how I smoke you out) points it out in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I feel that the thing tickling at the back door of my mind is in prose; something between Winnie the Pooh and Fractured Fairy Tales — but maybe that’s just neural interference from the Questing Beast of The Once and Future King.