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A quick public service announcement: If you're on Mac OS X and you occasionally need to BitTorrent something, the client you want is called Transmission. It doesn't have any complicated "pro" features, or anything like that; instead, it just does exactly what the vanilla official client does. Except it's smaller (less than a quarter the size of the official client), it's faster (doesn't take ten seconds to start up!), it's less buggy, and it's prettier. (Oh, and the one feature it does add--the option to show the current download rate as a badge on the dock icon--is quietly killer.)

I deleted the official client about three minutes after I started using this one.

The obit's all over the news, I'm sure you can find it without a link.

Also: RIP Crocodile Hunter; adventurer, scholar, and artist.

To some supercilious students, in the 1940s, Shostakovich offered a different musical analogy: "The circus is the purest of art forms. And note that like any genuine art form it brooks no counterfeit. The director's tone-deaf wife, the committee chairman's aunt or somebody else may sing in opera. But only a person expertly trained can perform on the flying trapeze. It is inconceivable to enter the lion's cage simply by 'pulling strings.' "

—Fay, Laurel E. Shostakovich: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. p. 300, note 61.

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You know, I really like Overheard in Minneapolis. Yes, it's a retread of Overheard in New York, but it's got a, um... distinctively midwestern flair. Think Garrison Keillor drunk and ranting in the men's room. The shit from the State Fair they've been posting lately is particularly hilarious.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this:
Not After What Happened To The Duck!
40-year-old man on crack: You kick a duck in the ass 10 times a day for 80 years, and then wonder why its ass is bleeding. Why is it always doing that? [Two minutes of unrelated nonsense elapse.] So now are we gonna kick truth in the ass?