Ya know....

Stephen Baldwin preaches to teens that Bono is in league with Satan. Don't laugh, the born-again actor is a cultural advisor to Bush and one of the most popular new evangelists in the country.

...

Furthermore, he writes, efforts to end global poverty and violence are just the sort of "stupid arrogance" that incur God's wrath, which we'll be feeling any day now in the coming apocalypse. I suppose when the star of "Bio-Dome" is advising the president and converting kids by the thousands to his gnarly brand of faith, the end is, indeed, nigh.

[His new book] "The Unusual Suspect" features an open letter to Bono, lambasting him for lobbying for debt relief for developing countries instead of preaching the gospel on MTV. Bono must be in league with Satan, whom Baldwin spends a lot of time thinking about.

Idgit wanker....

[link]

Jellied Gin and Tonic

I made a variation of this for my Goodbye to Summer party and it was a bit hit. My recipe was 1 cup gin/3 cups tonic though. Also, it called for plain slices of lime, which was a disaster, with the gelée cubes sliding all over the place. I look forward to trying the baking thing next time.

FWIW, moose don't do well in captivity, rarely lasting beyond a year or two, and no one knows for sure why. Thank goodness they're still far from endangered at this point.

Fucking hate mystery meetings. Phone calls that consist of "can you come up?" (I'm on the top floor!) scare me shitless.

FWIW, moose don't do well in captivity, rarely lasting beyond a year or two, and no one knows for sure why.

It's the exploding magic tricks. "Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!"

that trick never works

An amazing picture of a 767 apparantly suffering from a compressor stall. Compresor stalls are fairly common and rarely cause major trouble besides a shutdown of the affected engine, but they sometimes produce dramatic tongues of flame out the back of the engine, as you can see in this picture.

Yeah, well, it was worth being scared of.

I got laid off.

Let me start by saying that if you hug me, I will kill you. While the mere act of killing may make me happy, consider if you are willing to make that sort of sacrifice for our friendship.

The industry I worked in got pinched really hard recently, and although they've been playing it close to the chest internally even the news-avoidant me saw the doom-auguring articles in the papers. They laid a roomful of folks off at the same time, including one other guy from my department. Some very high-ranking guys have gone too, in the same initiative.

Mostly random they say. Makes sense--less money for projects, need fewer project managers. And my boss says she just found out a few hours before I did.

So...there's that.

I have a few month's worth of money to cushion me.

I just don't want to spend it.

Recruiter was the first call I made--who knows what will happen. Thing look better in IT than they did in the industry in which I was working, if that makes sense. Horizontal vs. vertical.

So what are you doing for your birthday this weekend?

It looks like I'll be babysitting my dad, as Mom's church league retreat seems to be continuing its streak of scheduling for the most inconvenient date possible.

Holy crap, ita. Best of luck with the search.