Tonight we'll lead off with the Sims news: Gina has achieved her Lifetime Want! We're all very proud.

Relatedly:

6 people want to do this: stop playing Sims 2 so much

Hee hee. (Interesting site in general, logging and tagging what things people, or at least people who use the site, want to do. I wonder how "stop revealing the most intimate details of my life on social software websites" ranks (also hee hee). Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just thought it was a fun paradox.)

A reader points us at these hysterical (and horrifying, and tasteless, and generally memorable) topical Magic: The Gathering card variants. (I did a few of those a million years ago, but without the nice graphics or the topicality or, admittedly, much of the wit.)

Wishlist: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. Yum.

More things to worry about: from HTML o' the Day to here to here:

So with all the known and probable Level-3 biolabs in and around New Orleans, what's happened to the infected animals? Are they free and roaming? Are they dead, with their diseased bodies floating in the flood waters? And what about the cultures and vials of the diseases? Are they still secure? Are they being stolen? Were they washed away, now forming part of the toxic soup that coats the city?

Don't worry, though, the political appointees are still firmly in command and taking care of everything. (Frightening stories today about exodus of various wildly experienced Cloak and Dagger types at the CIA, due to conflicts with Shrub's crony appointees; how long will it take to recover from this Presidency?)

So let's see. The Public Library was fun. They have wireless (in fact they're a member of the Linksys open wireless community I think). They have a printer, which has a funky card reader attached to it (a very amusing and mechanical card reader, that grabs your card and makes satisfied electrical chomping noises over it, and spits it tantalizingly halfway out and then sucks it in again) that charges your card ten cents a page (twenty cents for color) and when your card gets low you give it and money to the librarian (love librarians) and then it has money on it again.

There was a woman using the computer two down from the one that the little boy and I were using to print out articles about graffiti (love Wikipedia), and I saw she was playing Neopets, and I said "Neopets is great!", and we exchanged handles and declared each other Neofriends and stuff.

I don't actually play Neopets much to speak of anymore; once a month I go over and take a couple of hundred thousand Neopoints from my shop till, look around for commodities that are available at five (or at least one) percent under their consensus value, buy them, put them into my shop at three Neopoints under consensus value, renew the monthly lease on Contrabulator's hotel room, and log off again. The small return I get from that arbitrage, and the ordinary interest from the million or so Neopoints that I have in the bank from my days as a reverse pirate, are enough to keep Contrabulator well fed and happy in the Royal Neopian hotel.

(Reverse piracy on Neopets is vaguely described here. The site has tightened up their security since then, and the kind of piracy that I was exploiting dossn't seem to be possible anymore, which is a good thing even if it does mean that I can no longer get rich by stealing from the thieves.)

Then last night was Back to School (or really Meet the Teachers) night at the little daughter's High School (love, needless to say, public high schools, high school teachers, high school students, high school desks). Our own impression of the teachers closely matched what the little daughter has said about them. Some are (hem) better than others (he said profoundly).

Look out for:

Too late, you have been eaten by a grue.

Second Life. As if your first one wasn't already taking up enough of your time.

american community survey

the hole!

...oooh. Too late.

(Web version of Hunt the Wumpus. No grues, but a Wumpus. And pits to fall into.)

I suspect Second Life (but perhaps not american community survey) could indeed prove to be a whole into which I could fall. So far I have resisted MMORPGs, except for the occasional foray into RuneScape, which is just boring enough not to be addictive, but just amusing enough that I don't forget about it entirely.

... We've addressed this by giving more xp for successfully cooking certain foods (curry, snailmeat and chompymeat) and increasing the healing effect of pies, pizza, stew and bread ...

Look out for:

Charles Stross's "Singularity! A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds" : Funny.

Funny indeed! (Also one o' them way-cool TiddlyWiki things.)

Look out for:

Squashed Philosophers - via The Poor Man

the exciting new meat sensations that are making shopping at your neighbourhood supermarket so rich and rewarding and experience. Check the chill counter today for amazing innovatively bought-in products such as Singapore Rumsteck and Irish Bacon. Your taste buds will jump up on their seats and cheer! And yes, kids come running for the rich mouthfilling flavour of Irish Bacon.

Perhaps Scalia thinks the second amendment only applies to really old weapons? It would be a fun opinion, if the court ever hears a second amendment case again.

All of which speak for themselves.

And just to end on a high note,

Look out for:

princess leia

princess leia

princess

clitoris

princess leia

clitoris

princess leia naked

Thank you very much.

Well it was long past midnight (more like midafternoon, I think), but the phones and DSL are all better. Wonder what happened that took so long to fix? It's all just like wires and stuff, eh? *8)

I'll be brief again tonight, as it's late and I'm sleepy. There seems to be so little time for Stuff! There was something I was thinking last night, and I thought it would make a good log entry, but I can't remember what it was. I hope it comes back to me eventually, or it might be Tragically Lost to Posterity.

Here's a very fun Flash toy that Steve found, that you can play with.

Quote o' the Day:

I'd thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both) couldn't get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats. What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a Satanist orgy?

(Yeah, I know, it was everyone else's Quote o' the Day a long time ago; we don't keep up 'round here. We're leisurely.)

Subject: Re: Or look the penniless gaiter

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

In Sims news (don't worry, no pictures tonight) Gina Raptor is all set for her next promotion, and I think it's to Celebrity Chef, which would fulfill her Lifetime Want, which would make her my first PermaPlatinum Sim. Woo woo! I just have to play her through her three-day weekend and send her to work in a good mood, and ka-ching. If I'm right about everything.

(In the Sims 2 universe, if you fulfill your Lifetime Want you're in a permanent good mood for the rest of your life. Lucky Sims, eh? Lifetime Wants vary wildly in how hard they are to fulfill. Celebrity Chef is pretty easy; "Marry off 10 children", on the other hand; oof! I think John Danvers has that one in my universe, poor guy.)

And that's really all. We had a meeting the other day at work to remind us all about the company's enlightened policies on being nice and not harassing and stuff, and that got me reading articles about Protected Classes and Strict Scrutiny and all, but oy! It could make your head hurt. So I'm not going to try to write anything about it tonight...

Big utility dust-up around here today. Entire neighborhood off the telephone grid (and therefore the 'net, for those of us DSL connected), due to big accident said to involve high-speed motorcycles slicing through important telephone pole at the base. Rumors fly. Big main road closed off, massive presence of telephone trucks, guys with hard-hats redirecting traffic off of big main road and right through our neighborhood.

"Around midnight", rumors say, we might have connectivity back.

Writing this in local Public Library. Love Public Libraries, love this Public Library (our names on the plaque in the entryway as Noted Contributors to building fund the other year), but haven't been here in ages. No time to write grammatical sentences; must help young offspring find unknown number of articles "Is Graffiti Art?" and print out for school tomorrow before Public Library closes in an hour.

Also, car needed not only tire rebalancing, but also brake grinding, new radiator, new thermostat, new oil, new findle groffits, new sproingy. Very expensive.

Atoms much too complicated. Note to self: replace atoms. Use bits instead? Bits also complicated. Heh.

From Thoughts Arguments and Rants, the inneresting-looking Literary Wittgenstein, which I fully intend to read once I've posted this. Assuming it turns out to be something that I can still read after a glass of white wine.

Actual Spam Subject Line o' The Day:

Subject: How does a clone $5000 watch for $250 sound? monstrous

Indeed!

From Jessamyn, we learn the happy fact that the Creemee Stand at 716 Route 100, Wilmington, Vermont, has its own website (and its own hostname, for that matter).

Also from Jessamyn, our Patent o' The Day:

A cooking apparatus including an audio player; a body with a player seat to which the audio player is attached and from which the audio player is detached; and at least one speaker to output sound signals reproduced by the audio player.

Replace "cooking apparatus" with other words of your choice to product a whole host of other patentable ideas!

A rancid artichoke including an audio player; a body with a player seat to which the audio player is attached and from which the audio player is detached; and at least one speaker to output sound signals reproduced by the audio player.

Specification language we'd like to see:

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 except that, for the sake of variety, they're the other way around; so "MUST" means optional, "MUST NOT" means may, "REQUIRED" means recommended, and so on. Enjoy.

Search That Found This Website o' The Day (from the referrer log): world lycra bulge championship.

Re: As translate or generosity exodus
Be great neoconservative
I think this is a pretty good thing zoe

The streets are full of lovers again.

A lovely late-summer Saturday. M and the little daughter watched tennis (Kim "Clusters" Clijsters just won something big, and they're all happy), the little boy practiced his guitar and ran about with his friends, I played The Sims and worked on altering the chemical balance in the Big Tub of Water in preparation for closing it up for the season. Since a weekend or two ago, I'm no longer President of the Lake Association. And it's even more of a relief than I expected it to be! *8)

Secret Order of:

Limpets

Iris Chacon

Biff the evil Overlord

Crested Roofer

Wolmanizers

Corn

French Fries.

All exemplary; we will start those Secret Orders going at once.

And somewhat more esoterically:

All Cretans Are Liars

nudist with an iris chacon problem.

porto

nomic

all you need is a match

Unless those are actually from some other prompt...

And speaking of the Sims:

um, mostly glazed. but that's, you know, cool

Yeah, cool! We'll do just two pictures and one story from the Sims universe tonight (and refer you to just one over on Hullabaloo; it's funny: I'm not sure I would use the word 'topless' so casually here in the weblog as I did there; on the other hand I probably wouldn't write 'fuck' over there at all; intuition is an odd thing).

Here's the story: Kaylynn got up very very early in the morning so she and Ben could get the twins all grown up from toddlerhood to childhood before people had to leave for work. The growings-up went relatively smoothly (as smoothly as anything involving two toddlers ever does), the main oddity being that Zachary grew up a few minutes before the school bus came, but Olivia grew up a few minutes after it, so that first day only Zachary had to go to school. Olivia (who was pretty worn out) went downstairs (to the new bedroom that I built them so the upstairs salon could be an elegant quiet space again) and went to bed. Kaylynn called the repair shop to ask someone to come out and fix the broken trash compactor.

Ben went off to work, and when it was time for Kaylynn to go the nanny hadn't shown up yet; she couldn't leave Olivia all by herself! (Nannies are annoying in general; I have a couple of pictures of toddler Olivia screaming in her high chair because some nanny had decided to put her there to feed her when what she really needed was to sleep or use the potty.) So Kaylynn called the nanny service and asked for a special appointment, and went out to chat with Andrea Logan and to plead with her car pool to stay until the nanny arrived.

A nanny finally arrived, and Kaylynn just made the car pool. Then another nanny arrived! Since Olivia was still peacefully sleeping, the nannies just slouched around, playing on the drum set, tormenting poor Andrea, and continually attempting to get everyone in the house to gather for a toast with the Toasting Set left over from Ben and Kaylynn's wedding. The repair person arrived and started to work on the trash compactor, but something went wrong and she got zapped with cool blue lightning bolts that toasted her and started a fire. This set off the fire alarm, which woke up Olivia, who came out and was amazed:

The fireman put the fire out quickly, and the repair lady very kindly finished repairing the device. Zachary got home from school pretty exhausted and crashed into bed (Olivia did some of his homework later, just out of curiosity). The nannies hung around until Ben got home (he had quite a challenge getting them away from the champagne long enough to dismiss them, in fact). Then the next day both kids went to school and had a fine time.

But anyway here's the important picture, the Kaylynn is Happy picture:

The kids are playing chess (on the wall above the chessboard is a picture of the house that Kaylynn painted soon after she moved in, when it was still tiny), and Ben is painting and thinking about kissing. Kaylynn's about to get into bed after a long but satisfying day.

May we all be as prosperous and content...