As a child, one of my favorite books was Fat Men From Space.  The plot is essentially, a boy gets a filling and he can hear aliens.  Those aliens look like Drew Carey, and attack the US for its junk food.  He barters peace.   This totally fed my love of conspiracy theories and hocus pocus (the DDC 000s were my friend as a child).

Every once in a while I see what Daniel Pinkwater (the author of Fat Men From Space) is up to.  I was looking up his books and noticed that in a few online databases (those not using MARC), not all of them have all of his books tied together because his name is different on many of them.
That’s when I read this about him on his wiki page:

Pinkwater varies his name slightly between books (”Daniel Pinkwater”, “Daniel M. Pinkwater”, “Daniel Manus Pinkwater”, “D. Manus Pinkwater”, etc.); allegedly, he claims that he does this in order to annoy the librarians who have to catalogue his books.

I love you Daniel Pinkwater. Now more than ever.  Personally, and professionally.

If you have been to my house you know I always have too many magazines. Magazines everywhere! That’s why when Li-Shen sent me this way of making tables out of magazines I was very happy! Now I just have to read a few and bam, instant table.

Do you think the US Department of Agriculture is the only Cabinet department where it’s totally acceptable to wear a cowboy hat in your official photo? If I were in homeland security I’d wear one too.

yay! i could have bought an offensive birthday cards!

I just got a package from ebay, and the woman who sent it included a little note about giving her item a new home. And then she ended it, “Must sell all I have.”

Wow. No explanation. Uh downer. Also, I want to know more! I looked at her profile and she seems to buy a lot of stuff on ebay, as well as sell stuff, which makes it more perplexing.

***ETA: I paid $6.50 and shipping was $5.05. So, monetarily she did not make out in this affair.

Yesterday was my mom’s 69th birthday. Go mom!

Today she finds out if she has cancer or not.

You know, most birthday cards become extremely offensive when you are looking for a birthday card for someone who could get a huge mortality check the day after their birthday. It’s all cards like “haha! you’re so old! you’re gonna die!” It’s really horrible!

I opted for a card about drinking beer.

quinoa

gouache

hijinks

Apparently I love saying WAHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

As part of where I work, I cannot donate to political campaigns.  We’re an objective news agency and so when you donate money to a particular campaign, everyone can see it.  Some “fair and balanced” television stations might construe this to be non-objective, even though their CEO is also on our board of directors.  Whatever.  I am almost never moved to donate to political campaigns anyway, so this is a great excuse.  However, that mettle was tested today by this comic strip.

Best. Campaign. Ever.  Man what I would do to have a candidate who knew what XKCD was.

So a lot of airlines now don’t have nuts theoretically because too many people are deahly allergic to them.  I think it’s actually the airlines being cheap, but hey, in this case let me give them the benefit of the doubt.

Airlines allow people to bring pets on board though.  Yes, I can mitigate my allergy, but having had an asthma attack while on allergy meds, I’d prefer not to find out if they are working in the recycled air of a plane full of allergens miles above civilization.  The best is that even though regulations usually require a pet to be in a cage, people always take them out and play with them, pass em around, and flight attendants do nothing.

I don’t understand why planes still allow this, especially in these times of cutbacks.  If I can’t even bring luggage, why can people still bring Meowzers?

A post on the Google blog post pointed out that New Orleans has street view on Google Maps now.  A lot of it is really good.  And a lot of it makes me ashamed to be American.  I urge you to take a look.  Flood St. is a great place to start.  The number of moving vans you see in these, and the advertisements for home buying, are interesting.

Dwight Yoakam used to do impressions of Richard Nixon.

*According to wikipedia

I have always been a strong believer in a spectrum of gray instead of a black & white/straight or gay idea of sexuality.  Today when I was re-signing up for FeedMe, a foodie dating experiment/tv show/social network, I was faced with their super excellent spectrum, food themed, of course:

• 0. Straight-up straight
• 
  1. Straight with a splash of gay
• 
  2. Straight with a side of gay
• 
  3. Surf ‘n’ Turf
• 
  4. Gay with plenty of straight
• 
  5. Gay with a splash of straight
• 
  6. Gay with nothin’ else
• 
  X. I only like food

The last one made me giggle.

Air Canada makes you pay for heavy bags, unless they are filled with hockey equipment.

Nikolai Tesla was obsessed with communication with aliens (odd fact one).  When he died he left behind what appeared to be a molted skin, like he literally shuffled off his mortal coil (odd fact two), which leads people to believe maybe he was an alien or time traveler (odd fact three).  The FBI kept tabs on Nikolai, and his file is still sealed (odd fact four), further bolstering the aforementioned belief that he is an alien.

If you were to say you could write me a fictional story that included dog cloning, beauty queens, skipping bail, a mormon sex scandal, and criminals posing as Irish deaf mute actors, I would have said, “Pshaw!”  But there is such a story.  And it is true.

hey! i am proposing a panel at a conference and it’s democratically chosen by those willing to sign up and click a box. Being the Chicagoan at heart that I am, I would love if you would vote early and often for yours truly (and a bunch of awesome people/librarians, not listed, from LibraryThing, Pandora, Zappos, and Google).

STEP 1: go here and register (takes 2 secs)

STEP 2: wait for your confirmation email (I had a problem with getting it in Gmail, so use another address if possible. They won’t spam you.) Click the link!

STEP 3: Search for metadata. You’ll find my panel “Kicking Ass with Controlled Metadata!”

STEP 4: Give that thing 5 stars!

DISCLAIMER: I certainly would not encourage any ballot stuffing. No, not me. No good comes of that. So you should only vote if you think it would truly add to the edification of the general SXSW populace. I leave this at your moral discretion.

But you know, VOTE FOR ME! VOTE FOR ME!

Woman riding a donkey fights off lion with machete

You don’t even need to read this article, because it will ruin the awesome mind picture you now have.  Accept that this story cannot get any cooler.

(that’s the wedding march if you didn’t understand my humming. )

I am going to approximately a kajillion and four weddings this year, so I thought I would point out this bit of wisdom I found in a CHOW article I was reading.  It is succinct and brilliant:

“Better to have hors d’oeurves and cocktails only, with no main course, than to have a cash bar.”

My corollary would be “If you are not having a bar*, tell me beforehand so I can bring a flask.”

*And honestly, if you are not, how did I get invited to this wedding, because we’re not friends.

I am a poor time estimator. I am an extremely visual learner.  This is while Lego time tracking my work week looks awesome.  It’s not because I want a reason to have legos on my desk, I swear.

This is really interesting, along with the other maps on that site.   The conflation of Maine and The Bronx amuses me.  As someone in the comments mentions, it is a great argument against the electoral college.