I can't imagine doing that. Maybe I'm not sufficiently discriminating.

I wish I could afford to take full advantage of this restaurant trend. (I do plan to get to What Happens When at least once before it closes, but I would have loved to have tried all the menus!)

I can't believe they've been sitting on that project for 18 years!

Well, there were several attempts to get it done. But the great burden of my program is that while what I do is considered valuable, it has very little immediate return, so projects supporting it tend to get ranked low when it comes time to allocating funding. Other stuff is more urgent. But, yeah, 18 years. Kind of like to get it done.

And Kathy, I saw your pictures yesterday: congratulations on all the hard work! Brava!

Thanks!

And, a fun article on the true origins of the play Grease.

So, a few weeks ago I bought a new digital watch. I tried to figure out how to set it without reading the manual, but failed. Then I read the manual and I still don't know how to set it. I think they included the wrong manual, as they show a watch like mine that has four buttons, but my watch has no buttons.

This is the watch: Starck ph-1110

So far my google-fu has failed. Might have to call Fossil and/or the store I bought the watch from....

A contest for bad analogies: [link]

The first five winners, printed below, pocket £18 each; the rest get £10.

The state of the bathroom could only bring to mind the surface of a remote planet in which dungheaps and memphitic swamps co-existed with the entire toiletries and fragrances range of Galeries Lafayette.

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

How to describe this novel? Picture it as The Aeniad meets Othello meets Moby Dick meets Peter Rabbit meets Mein Kampf meets the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus meets The Highway Code. In that ballpark, anyway.

His morals were as twisted as an expensive Sicilian corkscrew that had been used as a way of extracting the pith from a bad apple before being driven over by an Eddie Stobart truck.

She gazed at him as lovingly as if he were her ear-lobe, replete with a diamond-encrusted earring, as reflected in a Parisian mirror.

She spoke as throatily as if a frog and its family had got into her throat and smoked a few packets of Peter Stuyvesant before growing claws and scratching at the inside of her thorax.

so if a passport is getting back into a country, why did I need to show one when I was trying to enter Canada? Rather, a passport is for trying to enter a country (any country) but not when I leave? It's kind of the same action when I get on a plane though.

Anyway, I hope it is for people who don't have other proof of citizenship, although it still sounds onerous for a travel document. It isn't like a financial commitment is behind the passport.

baby polar bear cubs:

[link]

The accountant had the world-weary air of a ferret that had been up so many trouser legs that life held no more surprises.

Oh, I like that one. I mean, you'd need it in a Douglas Adams context but it could work.

Maybe Tom Robbins, too. Damn, I love that crazy hippie.