I love hearing good stories about defeating scammers, and this is no exception:
The Powerbook Prank
There's other stuff that's good on zug.com, but this one is epic and international, too.
29 March 2007
28 March 2007
The legend of Skrunchy Girl!
Having gone to school in Portland during the build up to the '94 Olympics in Lillehammer including trips to the Clackamas Town Center to see Ms. Harding "practice" as she bullied the ice into submission, this article is amazing, disturbing, and, well.....visit The Phat Phree for more details.
Then be sickened by this *ahem* fan-site. Actually, the rejects are pretty damn funny...
Same with this other story from The Phat Phree.... which includes the following section:
GETTING WOOD IN PUBLIC - You really need to sharpen your number 2 pencil for this test, but for some reason right before you got up to do it, the thought of a pencil being thrust into the hole of the sharpener, then being hand-cranked and gyrated upon until it reaches its pinnacle is too much for you to bear. Now you're popping a Teepee big enough to fit a whole family of Cherokee Indians in it and you're going to fail your test on Native American history.
Gotta love tha wood!
19 March 2007
Tel Aviv after the fact, Post #2
Meat Celebration!
Yes, that's right, Meat Celebration! On the last night in Tel Aviv, my co-workers and I went to a place called Banar near the Shalom Tower (formerly the tallest building in Tel Aviv and a place of many suicides, according to the locals). This was a grand adventure as we were unaccompanied by anyone who spoke Hebrew, so any trouble we got in would be our own. A good percentage of the population of Tel Aviv speaks English, so this usually isn't an issue.....until you have to read a menu.
When you go into a restaurant in Israel, sometimes saying "Anglit?" (English) will transform the menu into something that's read from left to right and often a few Shekels (Sheqalim is how it's written in English on the paper currency) higher in price than it is in Hebrew. Sometimes such luxuries aren't available, like in the Hummus shops or other counter-service places which have great food and are run by people who barely speak Hebrew and enjoy that Arabic is the other official language of Israel. At Banar, a regular restaurant with bar, tables, and comely waitstaff, the English menu was a flight of fancy.
However, the folks at Banar were more than happy to translate the menu once the ground rules had been established: "You do understand this is a....meat restaurant?" said the polite and attractive hostess, taking over from the bartendress who spoke English reasonably well, but lacked a Hebrew-English vocabulary to describe cuts of beef large enough to pacify lions. We all nodded that a meat restaurant was acceptable (I figured that we were in for something along these lines as the sign had a bull icon of some sort on it). She could have said that it was a boiled Kleenex restaurant and it might have been just as entrancing for some in my group, but, no, it was all about the meat. The hostess went through the side dishes which were pretty standard fare: arab salad(tomato, cucumber, and dill), green salad, antipasti, and tomato soup. As she went through the selections for the main course, however, the attention span extended by leaps and bounds.
"There is an entrecotte steak which is juicy, a premium entrecotte steak which is leaner and more tender, and then <some words I don't recall> which is from the flank and is also good. Each is per 100g and most cuts are 250-300g. The last one is called....hmmm....<pausing to think of the words> Meat Celebration."
"Meat Celebration? Please tell us more!" we all say in pseudo-harmony.
"It is a plate of all the meat I mentioned plus ground lamb...."
Quick exchanges of glances show quick approval from the group about the direction of the meal: "Great! We'll take 4 of them!"
"It is for 4 people, so you might only want one."
"How much do we get of each?"
"It's like....hmm...400g per person."
"SOLD!"
From there, the minor trivialities of side-dishes and beverages were dispensed and the focus squarely turned to the impending celebration of MEAT. In the interim, the owner came by and gave us each a shot of Stolichnaya on the house. Apparently, this is standard behavior in restaurants in Tel Aviv, although it was the only time it happened to us -- and we were without our local guides! We got another round of shots as we were processing the incredible pile of animal protein that was presented before us.....on 2 plates!
Needless to say, we all slept well that evening, most likely because our spleens emptied their contents and shot all the extra blood over to our stomachs. The blissful state of being logy is wonderful when induced by meat.
Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio and his Israeli model/girlfriend Raffy something-or-other were at the sushi restaurant across the way, but we didn't see them. Honestly, there wasn't anything that would tear me away from the Meat Celebration.
I understood how Harold and Kumar felt in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle when they completed their journey and polished off all the Sliders and Cokes. I wasn't stoned, either.
Yes, that's right, Meat Celebration! On the last night in Tel Aviv, my co-workers and I went to a place called Banar near the Shalom Tower (formerly the tallest building in Tel Aviv and a place of many suicides, according to the locals). This was a grand adventure as we were unaccompanied by anyone who spoke Hebrew, so any trouble we got in would be our own. A good percentage of the population of Tel Aviv speaks English, so this usually isn't an issue.....until you have to read a menu.
When you go into a restaurant in Israel, sometimes saying "Anglit?" (English) will transform the menu into something that's read from left to right and often a few Shekels (Sheqalim is how it's written in English on the paper currency) higher in price than it is in Hebrew. Sometimes such luxuries aren't available, like in the Hummus shops or other counter-service places which have great food and are run by people who barely speak Hebrew and enjoy that Arabic is the other official language of Israel. At Banar, a regular restaurant with bar, tables, and comely waitstaff, the English menu was a flight of fancy.
However, the folks at Banar were more than happy to translate the menu once the ground rules had been established: "You do understand this is a....meat restaurant?" said the polite and attractive hostess, taking over from the bartendress who spoke English reasonably well, but lacked a Hebrew-English vocabulary to describe cuts of beef large enough to pacify lions. We all nodded that a meat restaurant was acceptable (I figured that we were in for something along these lines as the sign had a bull icon of some sort on it). She could have said that it was a boiled Kleenex restaurant and it might have been just as entrancing for some in my group, but, no, it was all about the meat. The hostess went through the side dishes which were pretty standard fare: arab salad(tomato, cucumber, and dill), green salad, antipasti, and tomato soup. As she went through the selections for the main course, however, the attention span extended by leaps and bounds.
"There is an entrecotte steak which is juicy, a premium entrecotte steak which is leaner and more tender, and then <some words I don't recall> which is from the flank and is also good. Each is per 100g and most cuts are 250-300g. The last one is called....hmmm....<pausing to think of the words> Meat Celebration."
"Meat Celebration? Please tell us more!" we all say in pseudo-harmony.
"It is a plate of all the meat I mentioned plus ground lamb...."
Quick exchanges of glances show quick approval from the group about the direction of the meal: "Great! We'll take 4 of them!"
"It is for 4 people, so you might only want one."
"How much do we get of each?"
"It's like....hmm...400g per person."
"SOLD!"
From there, the minor trivialities of side-dishes and beverages were dispensed and the focus squarely turned to the impending celebration of MEAT. In the interim, the owner came by and gave us each a shot of Stolichnaya on the house. Apparently, this is standard behavior in restaurants in Tel Aviv, although it was the only time it happened to us -- and we were without our local guides! We got another round of shots as we were processing the incredible pile of animal protein that was presented before us.....on 2 plates!
Needless to say, we all slept well that evening, most likely because our spleens emptied their contents and shot all the extra blood over to our stomachs. The blissful state of being logy is wonderful when induced by meat.
Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio and his Israeli model/girlfriend Raffy something-or-other were at the sushi restaurant across the way, but we didn't see them. Honestly, there wasn't anything that would tear me away from the Meat Celebration.
I understood how Harold and Kumar felt in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle when they completed their journey and polished off all the Sliders and Cokes. I wasn't stoned, either.
16 March 2007
Tel Aviv trip report #1 (after the fact)
So I was too damn busy working and drinking in Tel Aviv to do any sort of punctual postings. D'oh!
The daily routine went something like this:
Being here sucks.
Traveling = fine. Home = fine.
Purgatorial limbo known as Newark != fine.
The daily routine went something like this:
- Wake up somewhere between 8 and 10, depending on the previous night.
- Shower, eat breakfast, and be amazed at the amount of bread the French tourists would get for themselves (the stacks were probably 12" high).
- Catch a cab to the office in Ramat Gan.
- Be scared by some aspect of the cab ride/driver, either due to incidents of driving by braille in close quartered traffic or drivers singing and accosting random people for directions to the place I wanted to go after calling into the dispatch and getting laughed at for asking such a question.
- Training.
- Lunch. Mmmm. Yummy, government subsidized lunch.
- Training and practical exercises until about 8pm.
- Go back to hotel to "freshen up".
- Meet at 2130 to go eat.
- Find bars and consume disturbing amounts of alcohol. Enjoy until 0200-0400.
- Get food/water on the way home.
- Sleep some.
- Repeat routine, saving 2 nights for recovery.
Being here sucks.
Traveling = fine. Home = fine.
Purgatorial limbo known as Newark != fine.
10 March 2007
Definitely (in)Continental
The saga of Continental continued after the last post.
Apparently Continental had some "mechanical" issue that kept the 777 from leaving LAX to get to Newark. From the sounds of things and what my Dad was able to find out, they apparently didn't have a crew available to fly the beast, so all of us going to Tel Aviv got to stay in Newark for an additional 8 hours.
They did give us all rooms at the Ramada....at the end of runway 15L. I fell asleep to the sounds of Continental Connection turboprops and other such aircraft taking off right over my room. Granted, by the time I got there, I was totally exhausted, so I didn't hear too many of the planes take off. 3.5 hours of sleep later, I was ready to go back to the terminal. Fortunately, security lines were short at 5 AM. Unfortunately, Continental couldn't get its act together so we ended up with a wheels-up time 9.5 hours later than scheduled.
On the upside, I made the acquaintance of a couple of people which helped the waiting along. One was a model whose first name was Mala. She's married to a basketball player on the team that plays in Ramat Gan here in Tel Aviv. She was from St. Maarten and now lives in Tel Aviv between here modeling shoots. Apparently she does all sorts of catalog shots for Macy's and the like. She said she did one for Cintas, the uniform company, where they wanted it to have a "sexy" feel, "like Victoria's Secret, " except in uniforms....guess that'll be the most popular catalog among the janitorial services this year.
There was another couple who were headed to Delhi and had missed their connection by 30 minutes, having sat on the ground in Rochester for 4 hours. They said that the flight was only 30 minutes long, too. Unfortunately for them, there's only 1 flight a day to Delhi, so they were stuck in the "greater"(that word just does not fit when I think of the city) Newark area for an additional 23.5 hours. Both were grad students; the woman was from India and her boyfriend kept trying to explain how airlines routinely oversold flights to which she responded "How can they sell something they don't have?" I mentioned it wasn't much different than the press-release driven vaporware companies of the .com era, but that was of little consolation, although they both did understand what I meant. I ended up giving them one of my meal vouchers since I wasn't going to be in Newark at any time when I could use it (it seemed like most places were closed at 5 AM), so hopefully they managed to get something out of it.
At least it wasn't Detroit.
On the flight, I was impressed with the music selection. Channel 13 on the 777 is "Club Continental" which played some pretty good music. Unfortunately for me, it was a 2hr loop and I was on a 10hr flight. After 1 loop, it was Sominex to the rescue and I was out for about 3 hrs. I don't think I've ever slept that heavily on a plane. There was another musical selection on the "Shalom" channel (20) which I found hilarious and disturbing. Somebody made a rap song which talked about how being Jewish is trendy in Hollywood and actually rhymed/intermixed Yiddish words as if they were bits of gangsta slang. The kicker for me was the chorus of "Getcha Heeb on! Getcha Heeb on!", similar to Missy Elliot's "Getcha freak on!" I wondered what strange experiences lay ahead for me in Tel Aviv.
Well, those experiences started when I got into a taxi to take me to the hotel. Much like taxi drivers in the rest of Europe, the Israeli drivers thing they're auditioning for the WRC or similar as they come close to drifting their Skodas and Mercedes C-Class taxis around the banked ramps out of the airport. While I was wishing for some 4 or 5-point harness for my seat, the uncomfortable silence of "You don't speak Hebrew and I don't speak English" was broken by tuning into a local radio station (100 FM) which played.....gangsta rap. Yep, as I was driving into Tel Aviv, I heard Eminem and all of his crizzew rapping about their hoes and other classy subjects. Everything was unedited because while these bits of American culture have been imported and absorbed, I don't think that the true comprehension of meaning has been achieved. I was waiting to hear the announcer put some "Snoop speak" into her monologue. After consideration, she may have been and I didn't know it. I got to my hotel and got to bed around 1:30 AM. Again, Sominex to the rescue.
Slept 9 or so hours, missed breakfast, no big. Getting out of clothes I'd been wearing for 2 days? Very big.
Apparently Continental had some "mechanical" issue that kept the 777 from leaving LAX to get to Newark. From the sounds of things and what my Dad was able to find out, they apparently didn't have a crew available to fly the beast, so all of us going to Tel Aviv got to stay in Newark for an additional 8 hours.
They did give us all rooms at the Ramada....at the end of runway 15L. I fell asleep to the sounds of Continental Connection turboprops and other such aircraft taking off right over my room. Granted, by the time I got there, I was totally exhausted, so I didn't hear too many of the planes take off. 3.5 hours of sleep later, I was ready to go back to the terminal. Fortunately, security lines were short at 5 AM. Unfortunately, Continental couldn't get its act together so we ended up with a wheels-up time 9.5 hours later than scheduled.
On the upside, I made the acquaintance of a couple of people which helped the waiting along. One was a model whose first name was Mala. She's married to a basketball player on the team that plays in Ramat Gan here in Tel Aviv. She was from St. Maarten and now lives in Tel Aviv between here modeling shoots. Apparently she does all sorts of catalog shots for Macy's and the like. She said she did one for Cintas, the uniform company, where they wanted it to have a "sexy" feel, "like Victoria's Secret, " except in uniforms....guess that'll be the most popular catalog among the janitorial services this year.
There was another couple who were headed to Delhi and had missed their connection by 30 minutes, having sat on the ground in Rochester for 4 hours. They said that the flight was only 30 minutes long, too. Unfortunately for them, there's only 1 flight a day to Delhi, so they were stuck in the "greater"(that word just does not fit when I think of the city) Newark area for an additional 23.5 hours. Both were grad students; the woman was from India and her boyfriend kept trying to explain how airlines routinely oversold flights to which she responded "How can they sell something they don't have?" I mentioned it wasn't much different than the press-release driven vaporware companies of the .com era, but that was of little consolation, although they both did understand what I meant. I ended up giving them one of my meal vouchers since I wasn't going to be in Newark at any time when I could use it (it seemed like most places were closed at 5 AM), so hopefully they managed to get something out of it.
At least it wasn't Detroit.
On the flight, I was impressed with the music selection. Channel 13 on the 777 is "Club Continental" which played some pretty good music. Unfortunately for me, it was a 2hr loop and I was on a 10hr flight. After 1 loop, it was Sominex to the rescue and I was out for about 3 hrs. I don't think I've ever slept that heavily on a plane. There was another musical selection on the "Shalom" channel (20) which I found hilarious and disturbing. Somebody made a rap song which talked about how being Jewish is trendy in Hollywood and actually rhymed/intermixed Yiddish words as if they were bits of gangsta slang. The kicker for me was the chorus of "Getcha Heeb on! Getcha Heeb on!", similar to Missy Elliot's "Getcha freak on!" I wondered what strange experiences lay ahead for me in Tel Aviv.
Well, those experiences started when I got into a taxi to take me to the hotel. Much like taxi drivers in the rest of Europe, the Israeli drivers thing they're auditioning for the WRC or similar as they come close to drifting their Skodas and Mercedes C-Class taxis around the banked ramps out of the airport. While I was wishing for some 4 or 5-point harness for my seat, the uncomfortable silence of "You don't speak Hebrew and I don't speak English" was broken by tuning into a local radio station (100 FM) which played.....gangsta rap. Yep, as I was driving into Tel Aviv, I heard Eminem and all of his crizzew rapping about their hoes and other classy subjects. Everything was unedited because while these bits of American culture have been imported and absorbed, I don't think that the true comprehension of meaning has been achieved. I was waiting to hear the announcer put some "Snoop speak" into her monologue. After consideration, she may have been and I didn't know it. I got to my hotel and got to bed around 1:30 AM. Again, Sominex to the rescue.
Slept 9 or so hours, missed breakfast, no big. Getting out of clothes I'd been wearing for 2 days? Very big.
08 March 2007
(in)Continental
If only it were the Continental character that Christopher Walken played on Saturday Night Live.....
So, here I am in Newark, en route to Tel Aviv for bidness....more flying, less fun, or something like that. Continental Airlines is a strange beast. On the one hand, there's a giant sign in the C Concourse which states that the employees will be sharing in $110M in profits. On the other hand, there weren't enough people at the counter to deal with the bags of those of us who checked in on the Continental website, which makes you wonder if the employees prefer profit over service. That's a rhetorical question, perhaps. Regardless, in my ~6:25AM blur, I managed to be with it enough to notice that when someone did come to help the 3 people stacked up simply waiting for bag routing stickers, my bag was about to go on its way to San Jose, not Tel Aviv.
I know the TSA/DHS are all about ensuring that bags are on the same flight as the passenger, but what if something as retarded as routing tags being put on bags without any concern for which bag they really matched happened? In theory, the airline would be at fault, but, somehow, I sense that the passenger would get into the mess, too:
"Why were you trying to go on a separate flight from your luggage? Don't you know that's a Federal Offense (tm)?"
"As far as I knew, my luggage was going to the same place I was, layover and everything. Perhaps the clerk put the wrong sticker on it? I don't have any clothes or deodorant, since my luggage went somewhere else, so if you want to interrogate someone else and use my stink to extract answers, I'm happy to help. At least someone will get something good out of this situation...."
If it weren't for that rule, I might have been able to go standby on the earlier Tel Aviv flight, since we got in early. Unfortunately for me, it just means that my layover in loverly Newark approaches 7 hrs instead of just 6. The deodorant thing makes me think of the strange change in rules that moved the threshold of liquids down from 4oz to 3.4oz, a/k/a 100ml. When did this happen? I had bought all new items that would make it under the 4oz limit in November and I found that I could now use none of them on-board.
Magically, there's now a catchy "3-1-1" sign talking about 3oz, 1 quart bags, and 1 something else which escapes me since I'm not near a checkpoint. It's all a marketing ploy, I fear, coupled with some powerful lobbyists from the retail and grocers of America. I wonder how much extra Dow Chemical put into the lobbyist's budget to have the product placement of Zip-Lock(tm) one-quart bags at every airport. I wish they'd made it a one-gallon bag so these annoyingly resized items would fit, since even the 3.4 oz items still have problems fitting into a quart-size bag.
Seems like they want you to check things, at least the TSA does, but the airlines put on the boarding passes that you should pack smaller and remove the hassle of baggage by carrying things on board. Granted, this is also contrary to what you hear from the flight crew who don't want any carry-ons if avoidable, since there's always an issue of overhead space on many business or hub-centric routes. Wish there was somebody singing a consistent tune, or at least humming it.
On the plus side, there's free wireless coming from the Continental President's Club upstairs, hence I can post. Finding a good signal convergence is an issue, though. Feels more like dial-up.
Time to go find an outlet so I can watch some movies.
So, here I am in Newark, en route to Tel Aviv for bidness....more flying, less fun, or something like that. Continental Airlines is a strange beast. On the one hand, there's a giant sign in the C Concourse which states that the employees will be sharing in $110M in profits. On the other hand, there weren't enough people at the counter to deal with the bags of those of us who checked in on the Continental website, which makes you wonder if the employees prefer profit over service. That's a rhetorical question, perhaps. Regardless, in my ~6:25AM blur, I managed to be with it enough to notice that when someone did come to help the 3 people stacked up simply waiting for bag routing stickers, my bag was about to go on its way to San Jose, not Tel Aviv.
I know the TSA/DHS are all about ensuring that bags are on the same flight as the passenger, but what if something as retarded as routing tags being put on bags without any concern for which bag they really matched happened? In theory, the airline would be at fault, but, somehow, I sense that the passenger would get into the mess, too:
"Why were you trying to go on a separate flight from your luggage? Don't you know that's a Federal Offense (tm)?"
"As far as I knew, my luggage was going to the same place I was, layover and everything. Perhaps the clerk put the wrong sticker on it? I don't have any clothes or deodorant, since my luggage went somewhere else, so if you want to interrogate someone else and use my stink to extract answers, I'm happy to help. At least someone will get something good out of this situation...."
If it weren't for that rule, I might have been able to go standby on the earlier Tel Aviv flight, since we got in early. Unfortunately for me, it just means that my layover in loverly Newark approaches 7 hrs instead of just 6. The deodorant thing makes me think of the strange change in rules that moved the threshold of liquids down from 4oz to 3.4oz, a/k/a 100ml. When did this happen? I had bought all new items that would make it under the 4oz limit in November and I found that I could now use none of them on-board.
Magically, there's now a catchy "3-1-1" sign talking about 3oz, 1 quart bags, and 1 something else which escapes me since I'm not near a checkpoint. It's all a marketing ploy, I fear, coupled with some powerful lobbyists from the retail and grocers of America. I wonder how much extra Dow Chemical put into the lobbyist's budget to have the product placement of Zip-Lock(tm) one-quart bags at every airport. I wish they'd made it a one-gallon bag so these annoyingly resized items would fit, since even the 3.4 oz items still have problems fitting into a quart-size bag.
Seems like they want you to check things, at least the TSA does, but the airlines put on the boarding passes that you should pack smaller and remove the hassle of baggage by carrying things on board. Granted, this is also contrary to what you hear from the flight crew who don't want any carry-ons if avoidable, since there's always an issue of overhead space on many business or hub-centric routes. Wish there was somebody singing a consistent tune, or at least humming it.
On the plus side, there's free wireless coming from the Continental President's Club upstairs, hence I can post. Finding a good signal convergence is an issue, though. Feels more like dial-up.
Time to go find an outlet so I can watch some movies.
03 March 2007
Again, thanks be to The Onion
Not nearly as compact as the Radical Islamists article listed below, but still worth the time.
"His Ultimate Galactic Dragon Gyroball Pitch Power Explosion breaks three feet inside before cutting sharply toward the dugout, where falsehood and cowardice are forced to shrink before it!"
Awesome!
"His Ultimate Galactic Dragon Gyroball Pitch Power Explosion breaks three feet inside before cutting sharply toward the dugout, where falsehood and cowardice are forced to shrink before it!"
Awesome!
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