Soldier Ant 

From Ananova:

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Here are some free icons. I've probably re-created several dozen generic 'user' and 'user group' icons for various maps, screens, etc. over the years. I thought I'd store a reference one on Soldier Ant, and there's no reason the Web shouldn't benefit...

Download Illustrator format
Download PDF

(And if you don't like the hokey jelley effect, then just blow away all the opacity masks and use the general shapes.)

Ralph Bakshi is bearing a grudge:

Did Peter Jackson ever actually contact you at any point?

He can kiss my fucking ass. No he hasn't. He didn't have to contact me. He had my movie. Why would he contact me? He robbed me to begin with. What right did he have to make the Rings?

Someday, I hope to be mature enough that stuff like this doesn't make me laugh.

Someday.

You will often see this linked to as the canonical reference to Sun's policy toward employee blogging. My only question is, why won't I find a public statement of policy, hosted anywhere on the sun.com domain?

(I'm just asking -- maybe it's there and I haven't found it. I have to believe if there were a publicly stated policy, that smart folks like Jeremy would point to that rather than Tim's post.)

Dozer and Polly are at the vet's this morning, and the quiet hush in the house is deafening. We dropped them off at 8AM for their regular dental workup.

Polly was mouthy-but-compliant, walking into the back-room as if she were on a great adventure. Not even a look back over her shoulder. Dozer? Ass down, tail tucked, haunches taut. Pulling back on his leash like Satan himself were on the other end of it.

I never realize how much good energy those dogs put into this house, until those (rare) moments when they're not here with us. I call them my 'Fur Slippers', cause they're always on my feet. I can't wait until this afternoon to go fetch my pair.

Donnie Dunagan was the voice of Bambi. 62 years later, and what's he got to show for it? A bullet hole in his scrotum sack, and a retirement portfolio full of Enron stock.

The intriguing tale of a 1918 airmail stamp (actually, the first airmail stamp) misprint - The Inverted Jenny:

Most printing errors involve either an inverted plate or a sheet fed improperly to the printer. And most are caught quickly, either by a print inspector or a postal clerk. But the clerk who sold that sheet to Robey didn't spot the mistake. Asked about it later, he replied, "How was I to know the thing was upside down? I never saw an airplane before."

I've finally gotten around to importing a bunch of old entries (everything before Fall of last year, when I jumped hosting providers.) The process was not entirely seamless. I'd chosen to import all entries with the status 'Draft' thinking that I could then easily work through them at my leisure in small batches: checking for broken links; updating paths to included images; etc, etc. But MT imported them all and published 'em straightaway. And changing the status of all those entries to Draft (even using the 'Power Edit' screen for Entries) is rather tedious. So.. if you go poking around in the older entries of the site for awhile? Caveat Clickor.

Why Your Pointy Haired Boss Is A Mathematical Certainty:

But what is that dot... that single, attractive dot that employs nearly 2 million people and pays nearly $90,000? Surely, if there was a job worth having, it would be that one. Lots of people do it, so it must not require a lot of skill, yet it pays better than the vast majority of other jobs out there.

What is that job? That sweet, sweet job that employs roughly 1,892,060 people and pays $88,700 annually (on average). Why it's General and operations managers, of course.

I stared at this product page for a full 30 seconds, and I still have no idea what the product does. “When the solution matters.” WTF? The solution? What the hell is the problem?

I've been having Firefox problems on both platforms this week, and I suspected that the SwitchProxy extension was at fault. (It's the only extension I have installed on both platforms.) I found this corroboration:

I digged a little deeper and found the culprit: it's the switchproxy extension! By default it "phones home" to see if new updates are available. The developer's website is offline though, so it makes the browser freeze. On slow PC's and/or slow connections it looks as if it hangs.

Does anybody else feel like it's time for a centralized, trusted repository for extensions?

Man, was I a grouchy little snot, or what?

This primer on shrunken head preparation is, of course, gruesome, but also somewhat... fascinating. Because the process sounds so involved, like Martha Stewart trussing a turkey for Thanksgiving, these guys really have devotion to their craft:

The skin is boiled in plain water for no more than about half an hour; this reduces the skin by about half. The trophy is then dried on a stick thrust in the ground. Then the skin is turned inside out and all the flesh is scraped off with a knife. The tsantsa is then turned right side out and the slit in the rear is sewn together with string made from the inner bark of the Kumai palm.

A typically depressing, but not-to-be ignored Kunstler piece on Davos and Bill Gates 'China is a change agent' bullshit. ("Change agent" -- such crap corporate-speak. While change for change's sake may be valued in a bloated, middle-mgmt-heavy corporate entity like M$, change is not always a virtue in the world of geo-politics. Of course, Bill's got one foot in the spaceship when this whole crap-house comes tumbling down anyway..)

Conclusion: in the next twenty years, China is certain to contest militarily for the world's remaining oil with what has been the prime customer for its manufacturing output. That would be America.