A single gold star for me
The human race needed to survive so groups of individuals formed organizational units called “companies” that were then used to fuck everyone else. Viola! Stratification, and it was good.
Sure, not everyone survived or ended up better off but that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
Now a Virginia court has given companies just a bit more power. Yeah.
You’ve heard about Yelp? It’s one of the few places where disgruntled customers can strike back when they’ve been wronged.
The war between reviewers and companies is an old one. It turns out that businesses don’t like being criticized. In the old days reviewing was an actual profession and people were hired by newspapers to perform that function. In one case a food critic reported seeing an open can of beans in the kitchen in a restaurant that purported to only use fresh ingredients.
The restaurant flipped their lid.
Continue reading →
Scary Tales: Mansion Lensman
A boy and his Lensman.
A now a true story from the guru archives just because I can…
It’s weird how so many of my father’s interests became interests of mine. A lot didn’t, much to his disappointment, I’m sure, but some stuck. Things like wristwatches (he was a Rolex man), scuba diving (I’m a certified open water diver) and photography. My dad loved his 35mm SLR Pentax cameras. And no, the 35mm is not some lens spec. It describes the type of film that went in the camera.
Back then if you wanted a certain ISO, you had to buy that kind of film. It wasn’t just a setting on some fancy digital piece of electronics.
Eventually I’d have a Pentax of my own, which I still have to this day, although it’s been over 10 years since it was last used.
There was this one time we took our family vacation to Southern California. Among other tourist things we did, we visited a little place called Disneyland and that’s where this scary tale begins…
Continue reading →
iLife’s an iBeach
Not too long ago I took a wee trip to an old-growth forest where I frolicked in a shady glen with frisky elves. (See: Forest Grump.)
But that’s not the only place I went. Driven as a lemming I set off on a quest to find where America ended. (And I got the answer I was seeking in more ways than one.) But, alas, there weren’t any cliffs from which to jump onto craggy rocks. Only a beach. A remarkably flat and wet piece of transitionary property where if one tried to throw himself down people would only laugh and children would point and ask, “Mommy? I thought whales swam in the water?”
As always I had to settle. Dammit. I can’t blame the children, though. It’s not their fault I was born with a blowhole.
And yet it turns out that I given the gift of photogenic scenery for a travelogue pictorial post. And this is that very post. If the subject line didn’t provide enough iClues see the inset image for a preview of the journey that awaits.
When he arrived in the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result, his men were “motivated.” If you click the link to make the jump you’ll be doing exactly the same damn thing. Beyond here there be iDragons.
Continue reading →
Shouts from the Abyss 
Recent Comments