They rounded the foot of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, and there was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest of the Mountain. There was a little observation vantage point with a rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from which you could get a good view. It had a little pay-telescope for looking at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance of the heavens and would, if seen through a telescope, have severely damaged the retina and optic nerve.

Reading about Poul Anderson's treatise on atomic theory written entirely in Anglo-Saxon-derived words (entitled "Uncleftish Beholding") got me thinking about the etymology of various element names.

By Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!

It occurs to me that people who disdain nouning verbs and verbing nouns are probably the same people who insist on explicit static typing.

So in the course of converting some of my old blog posts to YAML+Markdown (and adding more tags to them) I found myself wondering what the adjectival form of "havoc" would be.

It would have cost ~$584 million to buy every possible combination of numbers in the Powerball lottery.

In case you need legal/financial advice on how to maintain your anonymity if you happen to have split the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot with two other people.

Maybe I should just make another Twitter and/or FriendFeed account to serve as an outlet for the random thoughts that come unbidden to my mind that are too tangential and decontextualized for anyone else to make sense of. I'm not really ready to coherently blog about everything that has happened. I was really only going to post three words that popped into my head as I listened to NPR and hearing about how the staff of Gabrielle Gifford's office is doing, three words that imperfectly describe what I've been feeling this entire week:

i can't help myself. whenever i get bored, my mind wanders. very far. so sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic (is there any other kind in SoCal?) where the 91 and the 5 intersect (before i had to dodge some rocks some punk kids were hurling from a pedestrian bridge before the imperial hwy exit), i looked up at the freeway signage and, unbidden, i thought that "artesia" would make a pretty name. while perhaps a little bizarre and unwieldy, it could easily be shortened to "tesia" (pronounced "tisha," i supposed.)

You are Dylan Thomas - a poet who lives to spite
the banal continuity of modern life. You are
the new word, the new voice. You will trample
on tradition, and breed a new school of poetry.

Which Dead Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

this meme just won't die, will it? as Ernie first pointed out, it seems to have been inspired by Beyonce Knowlés. there is a description by Manuel (as well as a stick-figure instructional animation), and political commentary on last days of the republic. and, incidentally, Angie unwittingly provides more evidence that the otso-otso was created by Beyoncé (watch the white guy carefully, and listen to Steve Harvey's commentary) and that the anti-copyright infringement ads they have on TFC are therefore ironic and a tad hypocritical. (P.S. copyright infringement is not stealing! Exaggerating only makes you lose credibility. I'm pretty sure no Filipino recording artist is living in a nipa hut or in a shanty on top of Smoky Mountain, or in Olongapo next to the toxic waste the U.S. left there.)