En Passant

I’ve got a three-year-old arriving in half an hour, and I’ve got a remote controlled car that I’ve just assembled, so I don’t have a lot of time for blogging today. Let’s see how many of my 20 or so “quickies” I can get through, in passing, before she gets home…

• Recent experiments with Hemmingway‘s recipe for Death In The Afternoon produced some mixed results. Using Le Fee’s Parisian Absinthe had the best visual results, and tasted OK. Using Absente was slightly less interesting visually, and tasted OK. Using La Fee’s Bohemian Absinth was much less exciting visually, since there was no louche effect, but was a better taste to my palate due to the absence of much of the anise flavouring. (I wonder where I could get some of the X•S Française to try?) While I was only sipping, I have reports from at least three people–two of whom are well-nigh professional drinkers–of complete blackouts and mind-shattering hangovers, so apparently these things should be treated with caution.
• Bombarded from 35000 feet with… frozen crap? That puts a whole new meaning on “I smell a lawsuit coming”, doesn’t it?
• It should be no surprise to anyone who ever discussed TV with me that I’m a fan of The Wire–I’ve only been touting it for more than five years now–however, I hadn’t realized until just this week that Lance Reddick, a.k.a. Cedric Daniels, a.k.a. Mr. NarrowWaist, describes himself as an actor and musician. Or that he has a whole website devoted to his music. Cedric Daniels doing smoove music–that’s some cognitive dissonance right there. It’s slightly more shocking than hearing the actors who play Stringer or McNulty talk in their real accents, that’s for sure.
• Steve Murray / Chip Zdarsky / “Jessica” cross-dresses, then does a comic about it for the National Post. Why am I not surprised to see Christopher Butcher in the photos?
• Speaking of comics, I see that XKCD is addressing the Drake Equation, which we discussed here back in 2006.
• I can remember running early versions of POVRay on my first DOS machine. It took days to render the 640×480 scene of the mirrored sphere on the checkerboard table, but it was sure fun to play with. I’m surprised, and oddly pleased, to see that POVRay is still kicking. The results from the recent competition to produce the coolest animations from source files less than 256 characters kind of blow my mind.
• I am really enjoying the new Black Mountain album In The Future. It’s a kind of Wolfmother-meets-Sam Roberts with more than a dash of old school Black Sabbath, except performed by hippies-who-used-to-date-neopagans, sound.

Oh, time for some base-board battering, let’s learn how to control an RC car action!