georgeland: the blog

site admin — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:21:47 +0000

Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but this can’t end well:

Eugene Terre’blanche hacked to death this weekend

Any hate-man that high-profile getting whacked, that’s not going to leave his remaining compatriates in a particularly JOLLY mood.

Am I a bear?

site admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:17:59 +0000

so very tired. adjusting to daylight savings time, but not yet there. most of my waking thoughts are comfortably obsessed with eating and sleeping.

Mmmm…nuts.

A brief sampling of the slaughter of adorable things for fuel

site admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:25:06 +0000

Then: Falkland Islands’ penguins (probably mostly the Rockhoppers) rendered for their oil (eggs also delicious)

Now: homes in Sweden heated by thousands of dead bunnies

censor bars, a musical appreciation

site admin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 04:01:53 +0000

First there was BPA’s Toe Jam (the censor bar as animation medium)

Then, there was Make the Girl Dance’s Baby Baby Baby, the censor bar as karaoke medium

And now (a direct answer to Baby Baby Baby), there is Sexy Sexy which is…something else entirely.

Finland in the age of Heroin

site admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:27:08 +0000

Still not fully explained, how Finland went from being the world’s leading consumer of heroin for over a generation to…not

One interesting point was that, prior to sulpha drugs, let alone penicillin and its cousins, heroin was one of the only effective treatments of tuberculosis. Not a cure at all, but as a palliative and cough suppressant, it was something. They actually make the fleeting argument in this article that due to the epidemic of TB at the time in Finland, virtually the only way the country functioned was through this large scale treatment of symptoms.

Crazy old man style tomato sauce

site admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:25:00 +0000

Every year I remember this, every year I forget to link it. Here you go, finally:

The [tomato] press my grandfather owned was a baroque contraption of brass, steel and iron that looked more suited to eliminating human remains than preparing food…

Mark Zuckerberg is not the Kwisatz Haderach

site admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:24:06 +0000

Facebook is the blog-killer.
Facebook is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my Facebook.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where Facebook has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

In other news…wow, two months? Really? Apparently I just don’t have enough to say, usually. More to come, life is slowing down a little.

Memorial Day: Guy Gabaldon

site admin — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:30:07 +0000

As I like to do every Memorial day, I would like to talk about past soldiers who did great things by not getting people killed.

In 1944, Private Guy Gabaldon, a skinny 5′4″ kid from East LA set out every night during the brutal three-week battle for Saipan, armed with intermediate Japanese-language skills (and a rifle, he wasn’t stupid) to do what the rest of his 2nd Marine Division couldn’t accomplish with larger artillery: convince a hefty portion of the occupying Japanese forces to surrender. Reports vary from 1000 and 1500, but his successes were far from trivial. It also sounds like he was one of the lucky ones who wasn’t just sort of lost after the war; he ran a successful seafood business (which included, appropriately, a branch in Saipan), and married twice.
A compilation of interviews with Gabaldon from the War Times Journal
2006 obit from the New York Times
A Friendship Like No Other (from the Pacific Citizen)

The current financial crisis explained in the form of the ritual dismemberment of virtual goats

site admin — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:44:52 +0000

The great Hargeisa goat bubble, also to be listenable as a radio-play at the BBC’s site, here

No, Russell, say it ain’t so

site admin — Sat, 23 May 2009 03:57:18 +0000

Russell T. Davies, reporting live from the TARDIS on his last day of filming