Fleecing Las Vegas

I found this article on Gammatron. Since I didn't even gamble while I was there, I found this other way to not gamble interesting as well.

Logged here so I can find this article and read at leisure later...

Word of the Day

My word of the day was Dictionary.com's word of the day on February 19, 2001. Lacuna is a fun word, but especially the plural, lacunae. I knew the word already, but saw it today while reading an editorial by Maureen Dowd:

[George W. Bush's] White House reminds me of the 1937 movie "Damsel in Distress," in which Fred Astaire has to frantically pirouette around Joan Fontaine to make up for the fact that she cannot dance.

Bush officials are always frantically pirouetting around W., making up for his stumbles and lacunae.

House of Pain

For the last several days I've been coping with back pain. It's the kind that travels. I take hot baths and do stretching exercises to help the muscles loosen up, and I seem to be getting better, but then a different part of my back starts hurting. Usually this means that the spine is wacky and I need to visit the chiropractor. I'll hold off a couple more days, since I think (once again) that I'm over the worst of it.

Jean, not to be outdone, has gotten a headache. It may actually be a migraine. She's downstairs, studying and nursing her head, as I sit here typing and Kelly watches Cartoon Network. I know I watched a lot of cartoons when I was a kid, but Kelly gets 'em running hot and cold.

Tile Quest

Our quest for bathroom tiling continues. Actually, we are looking at linoleum samples. Both the hallway bathroom and the bathroom off our bedroom could use replacing, so we've been shopping around. Our contractor, Greg Larson, recommended Manninger as a quality brand, and we went to a flooring store a couple of weeks ago to check it out. But all their patterns were so boring and mainstream I just walked away.

Today, we went to a home improvement store, no dice. Then we went to another flooring store. I saw a sample for 'industrial' Congoleum which I really liked. I set it aside with our pile of samples and kept looking. Kelly was getting rambunctious, and not minding me at all, so I frogmarched her out of the store, and we waited by the car until Jean had signed out our samples.

When we got home we hauled the samples upstairs and tried them out on the bathroom floors. But the sample I had liked, a dark green marbled pattern, was nowhere to be found! It seems Jean had missed it when picking up our samples. Maybe I'm not meant to have a flooring which satisfies my esthetics.

Ebay Redux

The tripod was being auctioned by a guy in Oregon, so it got here just a couple of days after I won the bid. The other auction was actually the first I won, but the seller lives in Florida, so I have to wait a few days. Doesn't really matter, anyway, as I can't use it without the help of one of my friends. What is this mysterious item?

Wild Zero is a movie about a Japanese rockabilly band which one day finds itself forced into fighting zombies. The band is a real one, Guitar Wolf, and the plot is supposed to be corny as hell. While the DVD has subtitles in English, the disc is Region 2, meaning it won't play on my deck. Fortunately my friend Bob Cannard has a multi-region deck, so I'll be asking him to bring it to a NOVA meeting so I can show the movie there.

Ain't I screwy?

E-Bay Booty

As if buying a Playstation 2 wasn't enough loot to drop at one time, I went and bid for two items on Ebay. And won! One has already arrived and I was playing with it last night: a Slik U8000 Camera Tripod. That's what enabled me to take a self-portrait at more than arm's length to create the current 'masthead' photo (that and an hour or so noodling with Photoshop).

More later. Gotta run errands now

Crawling With Kids

The place is crawling with kids today, as my place of employment sponsors Take Your Child To Work Day. It would be more accurate to call it Take Your 8-14 Year Old To Work Day, since that was the age range. Can't imagine why they don't want a horde of five-year olds wandering around the campus .