Bruner Blog

Adrienne HATES the NPR show Car Talk, but I think it’s kinda funny, even though I haven’t owned a car in 20 years. She wouldn’t be impressed to know that I just submitted a joke to their web site, but she reads my blog sporadically at best these days, so no worries.

If I’m not mistaken, it was my friend Mark Haas who told me (a version of) this joke several years ago:

A civil engineer, a mechanical engineer and a software engineer are driving together over a mountain pass. As they start their descent, the car begins to veer out of control. Soon it’s careening down the hill, screeching around turns and suddenly it goes flying off the road into a field. Thankfully, all three engineers emerge unscathed.

The civil engineer speaks first: “The problem was the roads! That hill grade was too steep, the pavement was inferior and those turns were too sharp!”

The mechanical engineer speaks next, “No, the problem was the car! The brakes weren’t working right, the steering was acting erratically, and the transmission is questionable, too.”

After remaining quiet for a minute, the software engineer spoke up: “I think we ought to push the car back up to the top of the hill, come down a second time and see if we can get the problem to repeat itself.”

(Okay, I didn’t say it was a really funny joke, just one I happened to remember that had to do with cars. Anyway, if you hear it on Car Talk later, you have me to thank/blame.)

Comment spammers make my blood boil. I pains me to leave a single one on my site, but I leave one on this post (7th comment down) to illustrate what would appear to be a new technique, or at least one I’ve never seen before. (Okay, I have actually stripped out the hypelink and posted the offending URLs off to the side of the words the orginally appeared linked to, just to deny the bastards the satisfaction.)

I saw this same spammer crash my archive with links a few days ago, thanks to MT Blacklist. But this alarms me for two reasons, first because somehow MT Blacklist missed it (dunno why, but I got no email alert about this post as usual), but more so because what the spammer has done is grabbed some of the text of an earlier comment in the same thread (that I posted myself, as a matter of fact) and repeated it, so it appears to be on topic.

Evil, evil fucker!

Click pic to enlarge

This is strange. I snapped a screen shot of the New York Times’s home page this evening. The guy in the goofy Uncle Sam hat is apparently some nameless schlub at the Republican convention. His pic links to live video, so there’s no way to get more context on who he is. But he bears a striking resemblance to Times associate editor R.W. Apple, Jr., pictured in the lower right of the same page. Judge for yourself.

UPDATE:
Whoever he is, he’s popular fodder for photographers.

FUTHER UPDATE:
Manhattan Transfer takes this ball and runs with it, finding several more photos of the guy and figuring his name, Oscar Poole.

My Proofreading Nazi Spelling Points game has been so much fun on the Bruner Blog that we have extended the idea to BizNetTravel where we actually give away free travel guide books for you eagle eyes with nothing better to do than point out niggling blog typos. I’m sure Pablo should fill a spot on his library shelf by the end of the week.

Last night, I was invited to a delightful dinner party at Megan McArdle’s house in the esteemed company of political bloggers including Tim Blair, Mickey Kaus (albeit fleetingly), Matt Welch, Roger Simon, Julian Sanchez, Andrew Hofer, Walter Olson, Amy Langfield and others whose names I missed or forgot. (I picked up some good gossip about behind-the-scenes convention prep, most of which I’ll leave it to those covering the beat to blog, but I can’t resist passing on that apparently Fox News and Al Jazeera’s broadcast booths were set up side by side. Don’t say no Republicans have a sense of humor. Also, like the Democratic convention: no wifi!)

The theme of the party was Republicanism, given the convention for which several of the bloggers were in town. In keeping with the theme, Megan (who bills herself as a “libertarian,” which as someone at the party noted is what Republicans call themselves when they’re embarrassed to admit they’re Republicans) did all the cooking and waited on the mostly male assemblage hand and foot — barefoot, at that — and clad in a ’50s-housewife-style blouse and skirt and lace apron, the table decorated with two lilac blooms and a small American flag, and so on. The meal, along the same lines, consisted of glazed chicken, homemade dinner rolls, potato salad, homemade peach pies and, the pièce de résistance, jello salad.

Beautifully prepared and presented and absolutely delicious, it was all meant to be ironic and Republican. But the joke was on Megan: the food took me vividly back to my youth, as it was exactly like what I grew up with my Minnesota-born mother cooking, who is slightly to the left of Michael Moore.

Magnificent

The mind boggles. AP reports:

Small toys showing an airplane flying into the World Trade Center were packed inside more than 14,000 bags of candy and sent to small groceries around the country before being recalled.

Lisy Corp., the wholesaler that distributed the candy, said Friday that the toys were purchased in bulk from a Miami-based import company.

The toys came in an assortment purchased sight unseen from L&M Import in Miami and included the toys depicting the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the twin towers, whistles and other small toys, said Luis Pedron, Lisy?s national sales manager. The invoice said the toy was a plastic swing set.

UPDATE:
Looking again at this incredible photo, I just noticed that there appears to be a yellow-green button on the Trade Tower on the right. What does that do, I wonder? I bet it makes the plane spin. What else could it do? Send an electronic signal to Al-Qaeda HQ that the seed of doubt has been planted in the impressionable mind of another pint-sized infidel? Detonates a bomb somewhere? Another martyr gets his virgins?

Sent by my dad. Of unknown original authorship:

6:00pm - Opening Prayer led by the Reverend Jerry Falwell
6:30pm - Pledge of Allegiance
6:35pm - Burning of Bill of Rights (excluding 2nd amendment)
6:45pm - Salute to the Coalition of the Willing
6:46pm - Seminar #1: Iraq Strategeries? Voodoo/DooDoo WMD
7:30pm - First Presidential Beer Bong
7:35pm - Serve Freedom Fries
7:40pm - EPA Address #1: Mercury? It’s what’s for dinner!
8:00pm - Vote on which country to invade next
8:10pm - Call EMT’s to revive Rush Limbaugh
8:15pm - John Ashcroft Lecture: The Homos are after your Children!!
8:30pm - Round table discussion on reproductive rights (MEN ONLY)
8:50pm - Seminar #2 Corporations: The Government of the Future
9:00pm - Condi Rice sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”
9:05pm - Second Presidential Beer Bong
9:10pm - EPA Address #2 Trees: The Real Cause of Forest Fires
9:30pm - Break for secret meetings
10:00pm - Second prayer led by Cal Thomas
10:15pm - Lecture by Karl Rove: Doublespeak made easy
10:30pm - Rumsfeld demonstration of how to squint and talk macho
10:35pm - Bush demonstration of trademark “deer in headlights” stare
10:40pm - John Ashcroft demonstrates new mandatory Kevlar chastity belt
10:45pm - Clarence Thomas reads list of Black Republicans
10:46pm - Third Presidential Beer Bong
10:50pm - Seminar #3 Education: A Drain on our Nation’s Economy
11:10pm - Hillary Clinton Pi?ata
11:20pm - Second Lecture by John Ashcroft: Evolutionists: The Dangerous New Cult
11:30pm - Call to EMT’s to revive Rush Limbaugh again
11:35pm - Blame Clinton
11:40pm - Laura serves milk and cookies
11:50pm - Closing Prayer led by Jesus Himself
12:00pm - Nomination of George W. Bush as Holy Supreme Planetary Overlord

Here is a fascinating post from a guy who says he was told by a cop that it is illegal to use a WiFi signal outside of a library in Nantucket, MA. The cop explained that the Secret Service had briefed the police department that this constituted “theft of signal” according to some Federal law. As far as I can tell, the writer has never verified whether there is such a law or not. I’m surprised the cop even knew what WiFi was. The fact that he did and calmly explained that it was illegal is indeed creepy.

A version of Edvard Munch’s classic painting “The Scream,” valued at more than $100 million, was stolen from a museum in Oslo in broad daylight on Sunday. Oops.

I bet someone at the museum is going to be in serious fucking trouble come Monday morning.

Olympic sprinter Maurice Greene, embodying classic American hubris, has the initials “GOAT” tattooed on his arm. What was he thinking? He claims it stands for “Great of All Time.” Except for the fact that he came in third in the 100-meter sprint, his main event. Whoops. Maybe he can get it changed to TOAT (Third of All Time). Otherwise, he’s going to have to embrace the Charlie Brown connotation of “goat.”

My prediction: 10 years from now, Maurice Greene will be an angry drunk working as a janitor somewhere, with a funky looking splotch on his arm from a laser-removed tattoo, and no one will remember his name.

Sometimes it’s best to quit on a high note.

Brother Sean’s remarkable photo gallery of his and his wife Eliabeth’s trip to Bali, including some great underwater shots.

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I have to admit, the apartment is a serious mess.