Nothing Fun, Just Interesting...

My son has played "follow the links" from the lolcats site to the (lol)dogs site to a rather cynical but often quite silly site called "FailBlog." It's filled with mostly pictures but occasionally video of stuff that, well, just didn't work as their owners had planned. He pulled up something today that looks so benign when you first glance at it, but, well, you watch and see:



Did you not gasp at the end? And did you not worry that the cop was gonna blow up at any minute (at the end there)? Whew!

What's Pandora? Free Radio on Your Computer !!

Hey, have any of you checked out Pandora yet? It'a a great site that plays music based on your musical choices. Once you have an account, you create "stations" based on either a group or song or type of music. And they have TONS of tracks, so almost anything you enter gets matched to other similar songs. And did I mention it's FREE? I think they operate on the presumption that they'll introduce you to music in the genre you like but that you haven't heard before (and then order the tracks/albums through them). Which is cool with me.

My musical tastes run to the relatively obscure, so I have a station that's geared around The Pogues (Irish rock and folk), XTC (80's alternative rock), and Sara Bareilles (00's mellow pop). And I could have set up any number of other "stations" as well.

I keep this music on when I'm working on the computer or in the house in general. It's even on my internet-radio receiver in my room, so once I set it up once, I can access it from any computer or receiver.

So if you've become bored with regular broadcast radio, why not check out www.pandora.com and see what you can find there?

Gotta Post It, Just Once...

You did it, America! Woo Hoo!!!



I do not have what might be defined as "unbridled optimism." I just have more than I would have had the other side been elected. Done.

I Knew Welsh Was Tough, But This is Just Ridiculous...

With a friend, I visited Wales back in the '80s. I have two great memories of that trip. The first is of the beach at Tenby, which was at the base of an incredibly high, rocky hill, and at which the water was unbelieveably cold. The second memory was of the family we stayed with. They were my friend's boyfriend's grandparents, and they were natives of Wales, and hence English was not their first language. With the great prevalence of English (even in Wales), we didn't think this would be a problem. Hee hee hee on us. We were fine with the grandmother, and her sister and the sister's husband. But the grandfather was tough; not only was his first language Welsh, but he also whispered and was going senile. Which means that not only could we not understand what he was saying, we couldn't HEAR what he was saying. Oh boy. I guess 50 years in the mines will do that to ya...

I loved this story and thought I'd share. In Wales, as in Ireland, all road signs are printed in Welsh as well as English. So recently a sign showe up that looked like this:



Looks like a regular road sign, right? Hee hee hee... wrong. The top (the English) is correct. I guess having designed that part, the highways office then sent that text to their translation service. The translator was not available, as their email response read (in Welsh) "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated." Hee hee again: the roads department assumed that that was the translation they asked for, and put it on the sign. Hence, the sign now read the English text on the tope and the "out of office" response on the bottom. Hee hee hee once again!