never mind, waiter

Posted on Sunday, 2003 July 20 by Anton

After the Thin Man was on telly last night. There was one scene that I recognized, with some surprise: I thought the ‘sea bass’ bit was Marx Bros.

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an even number of odd links

Posted on Friday, 2003 July 18 by Anton

In a surprising place, a history of the hamburger. (Linked by Bruce Sterling.)

Time Cube Central: your unofficial timecube resource (found through Crank Dot Net). 2006: dead.

Posted in humanities, sciences | 1 Comment

the fatal flaw

Posted on Friday, 2003 July 18 by Anton

Vanessa Layne observes (in mail):

One of the significant problems in the marketplace for office automation software is that the person who uses it is almost never the person who decides to buy it. The feedback loop is never closed, the market never reacts.

Posted in economics, technology | Leave a comment

the creation of tradition

Posted on Thursday, 2003 July 17 by Anton

Aha! When this blog was young and innocent, I asked how the heck Madison came to be a favorite name for girls.

Rick Heller cites a NYT article with the answer: a movie that I never saw.

Posted in cinema, language | Leave a comment

would they understand the joke?

Posted on Thursday, 2003 July 17 by Anton

My One True Ex, home from a week of theatre-hopping in London, reports that there exists a chain of sex-toy shoppes named Lovecraft. Do they sell Cthulhu dildos? tentacle rape manga?

Posted in humanities | Leave a comment

metaphor is where you find it

Posted on Thursday, 2003 July 17 by Anton

Angie Schultz calls my attention to James Lileks on Star Trek. I have to disagree with him on this point:

[The Borg] were joyless cyborgs intent on crushing all cultural differences. They were the Republicans!

The Borg are utterly egalitarian, and utterly conformist in the name of diversity (“We will add your uniqueness to our own”); seems to me there’s another gang of thieves who fit the metaphor slightly better.

Posted in cinema, politics | Leave a comment

and he’s an expert

Posted on Tuesday, 2003 July 15 by Anton

Unsurprisingly, Bruce Schneier (who travels much more than I do) is also fed up at having drones demand his documents at every turn in the name of “security”.

Posted in security theater, tax+privacy | Leave a comment