Seen on a van on Shattuck Avenue today:

I’D RATHER BE
BITING MY MACAW

The van was also adorned with a wheelchair symbol, but that did not make the declaration any more transparent for me.

Ted Rall, of all people, on Why Kerry Should Stand Up for the Second Amendment

I’ve resigned myself to the thought that without comments my blog is never gonna make the big time like Boing Boing, Scripting News, Instapundit, Doc Searls, Andrew Sullivan, Jason Kottke, Salam Pax, USS Clueless, James Lileks or The Volokh Conspiracy. (Examples selected from myelin.)

Strange phosphenes: Pressure on the eyeballs normally produces ripples of dark and light, often in expanding squares, in my experience. But today as I pressed a towel to my face I saw many perfectly round dots of red, yellow and dark blue drifting up at about two o’clock, with bigger stationary blue dots. Perhaps that is what the Matrix really looks like; it’s more plausible than a green cascade of backward Japanese characters.

In completely unrelated news — I’m looking around at temporary employment agencies’ websites, and find one that apparently has no jobs, only “careers”. I haven’t sought a “career” since 1987; how about something to pay the damn rent?

20 Questions to a Better Personality (cited by Travis)

Wackiness: 30/100
Rationality: 46/100
Constructiveness: 46/100
Leadership: 36/100

You are an SEDF–Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an evil genius. You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well–even those you have known a long time–because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

Changing one of the marginal scores, I get this, somewhat more comfortable:

You are an SECF–Sober Emotional Constructive Follower. This makes you a hippie. You are passionate about your causes and steadfast in your commitments. Once you’ve made up your mind, no one can convince you otherwise. Your politics are left-leaning, and your lifestyle choices decidedly temperate and chaste.

You do tremendous work when focused, but usually you operate somewhat distracted. You blow hot and cold, and while you normally endeavor on the side of goodness and truth, you have a massive mean streak which is not to be taken lightly. You don’t get mad, you get even.

Pobox’s spam filter bounced something purporting to be from Arturo Fuente <yoichi@t-online.de> – someone with a Spanish name and a Japanese handle, posting from Germany? Not impossible, of course.

(Russell advises me that Arturo Fuente is a brand of cigar. Do they grow tobacco in Perú?)

All About Eve (1950) contains a brief scene of Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) and Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) walking along a back-projected street, something I’ve rarely seen. I wonder why it was done. — Ah, on second thought: The street appears to be a real one in Connecticut, and back-projection was easier than taking the actors there (from Hollywood) for one shot.