Squeeze him here - maybe he'll pass another.

A lot to be said in favor of working from home.
Of course, if you CAN work from home, you're EXPECTED to work from home. And be available all the time.
Eg: if you've come down with something and would not be feeling up to an hour's commute to the office, you can get a good amount of work done anyway - the "8-hour day" (hah) is now 18 hours long but there can be plenty of hot tea/med-effects/nap breaks.

I've noticed lately that the ubiquitous Captcha used for site or download security has changed. It's no longer putting up one warped text and one piece or scanned text to be deciphered by a real person and added to the efforts to digitize old and decaying books. No, now they're putting up house numbers - probably for Google or Bing street-view efforts.
As someone who has had several tussles trying to get Google/Bing/Waze/Nokia etc to correct misplaced street addresses, I hope this will help. But I do feel a bit like a creepy stalker peering through a telephoto trying to make out someone's house number...

Trying to catch up on backlog of DVRed shows as I have been falling asleep far more frequently than usual in the middle of things at home. I try to devote Saturday & Sunday "morning" to watching shows fileg does not want to see again or she would rather not see in the first place.
Sometimes, however I have to show her segments I think she needs to see. One such was an episode of Oddities where a bowtie-sporting fellow was looking for a unique prop for his next movie. It was Lloyd Kaufman - Mr. Troma Films himself. While fileg & I do not watch Troma's productions, we are fond of their spirit & sense of the absurd.

However, that's not what came here to talk about.

I had paused the playback while making breakfast and when Fileg looked up something unsavory filled the screen - as so often happens in Oddities. She asked if I was watching something on the Food Network.
This quickly evolved into a mashup of Oddities & Chopped.

Ted Allen: "In the mystery basket you have tofu, spray cheese, and a Fiji Mermaid. You have 25 minutes."
...
Chef #4: "I have prepared an appetizer trio of Fiji Mermaid three ways..."

It's been several years since we put up an actual tree. The aroma is intoxicating - or I'm just woozy from the effort.

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Hands are still aching from bundling 10,000 direct mail cards and delivering them to the Post Office on Friday. Have to do it again in a couple of days and again just before New Years. I can think of better ways to exercise my fingers...

If kids come Trick or Treating dressed as Sherpas, they're getting all the candy.
Yes - those roses just bloomed a few days before.

Just watched the first 2 episodes of Last Exile -Fam, The Silver Wing at Funimation.com. That's the long-awaited sequel to Gonzo's 2003 10th anniversary project Last Exile. It is beautiful, and gives just as much of a feeling of being dropped in the middle of a whirlwind as te original Last Exile.


Gotta love Range Murata's art.

It rankles me that we had to read subtitles since we don't understand Japanese.
*sigh* In 1974, how could I have known that I should have taken three semesters of Japanese instead of German?

I looked up at just the right (or wrong) time to see this at the end of the Food Network ad for their upcoming Halloween Wars show.

Obviously the carver knew what they were doing, but their Standards folks obviously do not surf the unsavory underbelly of the Interwebs.

George Bush II getting elected.

Twenty minutes
behind a pickup
sporting swinging
fleshtone trucknuts.
Lost my apetite
for bratwurst.

Gonzo Lists Last Exile -Fam, The Silver Wing- for 2011

Even though this was announced back in February I managed to miss it completely. If it were not for fileg sending me a link about Range Murata's first artbook being made available on the iPad - delightful enough news in itself - I would never have known. Last Exile is one of our most favouriteest anime series, despite its incomprehensibly compressed and flaky final ten minutes. I am doing a happy dance!!! Woo!