One Thought Daily

I downloaded ITunes on a whim. I was shocked by the installer size - 50 MB for a media player!!! Seriously, this is at least 5 times bigger than it ever should be.

After looking around, it appears that a lot of the bulk is in the localization files. But why not have separate installers for different languages, especially if that would cut the size of your app in half?

The Man with the Golden Arm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGnpJ_KdqZE

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day,

Sing Queen songs in a 6/8 sea shanty style:

Yo-ho-ho, another one walks the plank!

Nothing is more Dean Martin than Dean Martin.

Of course, doing a really preposterously good job of being Dean Martin depends a lot on knowing the rules about what makes the best Dean Martin. Knowing the archetypal definition of Martinism: How is he different? Why is he individual? What is he driving at?

What Dean Martin is driving at seems to be to lead a Life Of Sloth. A Life of EPIC Sloth. Not just your common little ol' Sunday afternoon lazy Sloth, like you get with minor Erskine Caldwell Georgia darlins.

No, Martin now epitomizes EPIC SLOTH. Sloth like Joseph E. Levine would come up with. In big, 3-D letters, like in those Ben Hur movie ads, with all forms of EPIC EXHAUSTION draped over the letters. "Epic Sloth," starring Dean Martin, and then running around the bottom, instead of Mongol hordes and Jack Palance you find other things, for this is "Epic Sloth." Things like deflated innertubes. Like the ears of sleeping Spaniels. Like Kleenex ashes. Like all of Life's Most Unresilient Stuff.
And there, leaned up in Herculean-Scope against those giant letters, our Pop Star slumps. Dean Martin. Kind of half-eyed looking out at you, grinning "Hi ya, pally," like he hopes you haven't got anything heavy on your mind. "Dean Martin has been working at becoming an Epic Pop Art Object. He's been getting in a good deal of pop art hypnotizing. Avis knows, you don't get to be Number One by just sitting round. Some detractors have published this about Martin: that he sits round, trying to make spaghetti look tense.

Much of his triumph has been ascribed by some scribes to his ability to project an alcoholic aura from coast-to-coast, into millions of Puritan homes. Good, Puritan, beer-drinking homes. Martin has almost by himself established Booze-o-Vision as America's new Art Populaire. It's difficult to imagine any other object that would currently be more welcome in our historic nation's thousands of beer bars and juke joints. Nothing more popular than DM, slumped there, looking for his cue card, all brung to you in NBC's surrealist color. Martin and his--dare we say it?-- goopy baritone. Martin: the biggest sex symbol to hit neighborhood taverns since the heyday of The Rheingold Girl, may she in our secret imaginations requiescat in flagrante delicto. Nothing should slow up his reign as our beloved epic boozer short of a sudden attack of dysphagia.

-By Stan Cornyn, King of Liner Notes

Somber Sombrero

Esoteric Esophagus

Toxic Waste Barrels of Pure Happiness



(Enjoy these profound phrases crafted by Ben Fisher.)

Analysis of Star Trek Red-Shirt Ensign Safety :)


Upside-down text! (Use Firefox).
¿ʇı̣ əsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı̣ əpoɔı̣un sı̣ pooɓ ʇɐɥʍ
http://www.revfad.com/flip.html

Which reminds me of:
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Why?

And they thought *this* could distract me from my work?


So much for ad intelligence... who do they think I am?

The original: "It was a dark and stormy night."

His winning entry: "Gerald began -- but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash -- to pee."

The runner-up: "The Barents sea heaved and churned like a tortured animal in pain, the howling wind tearing packets of icy green water from the shuddering crests of the waves, atomizing it into mist that was again laid flat by the growing fury of the storm as Kevin Tucker switched off the bedside light in his Tuba City, Arizona, single-wide trailer and by the time the phone woke him at 7:38, had pretty much blown itself out with no damage." Scott Palmer, Klamath Falls, Ore.

One of my favorites:
"Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before."

Finally, I looked up the original "Dark and Stormy night." Those long sentences look interesting in my code editor: