It turns out that the Subservient Chicken was created by the Barbarian Group, a Boston-area Web design group. I note this mostly as an excuse to link to another site they did for my brother’s design collective, Release1.
Ah, the Disney experience: It’s wholesome! The photo is from the Adventurer’s Club, which is a 1930s pulp-themed bar on Pleasure Island. The gimmick is the actors playing parts, who do skits and shows and songs (see picture) throughout the evening. I spent a lot of time there last week.
The 2004 Hugo nominees are out. I have very little opinion. I do find it interesting to compare them to the Nebula nominees, insofar as the Nebula nominees include quite a few stories originally published online.
Another Disney photo, perhaps bearing a certain weight of cognitive dissonance for my Unknown USA brothers and sisters. Hey, look: the Mouse (original) is attempting to reroute the ley lines (original) to the Fountain of Youth (original)! Someone’s (original) gotta stop ‘em.
The rumor is that this is Owen Wilson. “My life is boring and not worth writing about, except for my knowledge of one thing. So this blog will focus on that thing. It is, for lack of a better word, celebrity. I stumbled onto it by a series of chance events. Suffice it to say, I can tell you what it’s like to see your picture on the magazine rack every now and again when you pay for groceries. And that’ll have to suffice. I’d like this to be the sort of account afforded only by anonymity. And it that happens, if my identity were revealed, I’d quickly be selling grapefruits — instead of paying $14 a pop to eat them — on Sunset Blvd.” ...
Excellent second to last episode of The Apprentice tonight. I’m already looking forward to the next season, when competitors will know the format better. There wasn’t a lot of metagaming in this season, and that’s got to be partially due to the lack of information about the full rules. Next year, contestants will know that they’ll see their fired peers again, and they’ll know that they can keep allies on their team safe even when it gets down to three people per team. More important, they’ll be more confident about the twists. ...
Glenn Reynolds finds the differences between the popular reaction to Senator Chris Dodd’s statements and the popular reaction to Senator Trent Lott’s statements " particularly disturbing." I’m not entirely sure why, as the two cases aren’t all that similar beyond the initial foolhardy statements. OK, OK, I am sure why. There’s a rapidly spreading meme which makes Lott look a lot better, and it goes like this: “Lott suffered for saying nice things about Strom Thurmond.” There’re also a lot of right-wingers who don’t know why Senator Robert Byrd, former KKK member, gets a free pass for his history. There are times when I’m not sure either, just like I wasn’t sure why Strom Thurmond got a free pass. ...
Well, this is an (original) alarming new trend. That’s a total of thirteen foreigners kidnapped in Iraq in the last week or so. Hopefully it’s coincidence rather than a concerted effort, and hopefully everyone kidnapped will make it through the ordeal. The victims include Christian evangelists, journalists, and human-rights workers. Doesn’t look like any common thread except that they’re foreign.
Ten years ago, the Rwandan genocide began. On April 6th, 1994, Juvenal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda, was killed when his plane was shot down. On April 7th, the Hutu militia began slaughtering Tutsis. Over the course of the next three months, approximately 800,000 Tutsis were killed. The West, including the United States, did very little to prevent this.
Things I know to be true: Kip Manley can write, and City of Roses looks like it might be a really good textual equivalent of the webcomic form. Which is to say we’re getting back to serial literature, a la Dickens, except that Kip’s madly promised to post an installement every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so it’ll be a tad more frequent than Dickens. No standing on the docks waiting for the next installment for us. ...