Holster stickers (only a philistine would glue anything to the gun itself): sticky-back strips 1cm high by about 7cm wide, imprinted with humorous phrases.

My Other Gun is an Arbalest
Make a Joyful Noise
One Round at a Time
Just Happy to See You
As a Matter of Fact, I Do Own the Whole Damn Range

I go to sign up for a Berkeley Extension course and find:

The University is required by federal law to report your Social Security number and other pertinent information to the Internal Revenue Service pursuant to the reporting requirements imposed by the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. The University also will use the Social Security number you provide to verify your identity. Social Security number disclosure is mandatory. This notification is provided to you as requested [sic] by the Federal Privacy Act of 1974.

The IRS wants to know who’s taking “Unix System Administration I”?

I’m tempted to take the money I was going to spend on the course and send it to Ron Paul.

Next day: The course is taught by a private firm, though under UC auspices; so, on my One True Ex’s suggestion, I contacted that firm directly. Problem solved, so long as I don’t care about formal university credit.

The Virtual Terrain Project collects links about the state of the art in realtime simulated environments, from “why can’t you make better trees?” to “how do you decide when part of the field of view can be rendered more sloppily?”.

I was thinking about English spellings of Indian names when this hit me:
Does Chatterjee mean something like quadruply honored ?

Oh, this just fills me with confidence. I responded to a car ad on Yahoo and got this:

DEAR [name]
THANK YOU FOR CHOOSING [source] TO PURCHASE YOUR NEW [vehicle] .I AM EXCLUSIVELY DEDICATED TO WORKING WITH [source] CUSTOMERS LIKE YOURSELF.AS WE WORK TOGETHER ON YOUR PURCHASE REQUEST YOU WILL FIND THE [source] PROCESS VERY ENJOOYABLE WAY TO PURCHASE YOUR NEW VEHICLE.I WIIL BE CALLING YOU SHORTLY TO INTRODUCE MYSELFF .I LOOK FORWARD TO EARNING YOUR BUSINESS BY PRESENTING YOU WITH A PROMPT,NO-HAGGLE AND NO -HASSLE BUYING AND DELIVERY EXPERIENCE.

The brackets are his, not mine.

The urinals of the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory at the South Pole:

When [the barrel] is full, . . . it is shipped to Port Hueneme, California, for disposal.

Who’d have thunk. I wonder, though — is it only because I’ve read Dune that I feel someone, somewhere in the world, ought to have a use for the stuff?

I did not know that Astronomy Picture of the Day is mirrored in multiple languages. (That list misses at least one: romanised Russian.) I stumbled onto the mirrors while seeking the origin of the name of a feature on Venus. Ought to have remembered to try the USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, which says Atete is a fertility goddess of Ethiopia.