So here’s something odd. While driving to work this morning, I noticed a chicken wandering around in someone’s driveway. It was on 8th Street, near the 8th and Revere intersection, and here was this Rhode Island red hen nonchalantly strutting across the driveway, as if this were normal routine.
Can’t say as I’ve ever seen a street chicken in town before (we used to have unintentionally free range chickens growing up, but we lived on five acres out of town). Damn, I wish I had a camera phone.
Odds and end, bits and pieces tonight.
Looks like the Bulletin article won’t be appearing Friday (tomorrow). Nobody knows when for sure. I’ll post here when I find out.
Interestingly, the guy who interviewed us for the story on blogs now has a blog: Drunk with Ink. Cool!
Tonight on a whim I set up my old Sega Genesis game system, and introduced the kids to it. They seem quite taken with Sonic the Hedgehog, although they really can’t work the controls very well.
My wife found this somewhere: the most amazing car accident ever. Damn. I’m just speechless.
Totally wacky article on Kuro5hin: Using Quantum Cryptography to Find Invisible Men:
But is it truly a myth, or do invisible men walk among us? And if an invisible man were to be created, how would we detect him and track his movements?
…
Invisible man detection has gone a long way, from the clumsy mob actions of a hundred years ago to the sophisticated mob actions of today. The time has come to step into the 21st century with a quantum solution to a threat you’ll never see coming.
Since we’ve moved into a brand-new development, we don’t even have a mailbox yet so we have to go to the Post Office to pick up our mail. The location for this is their warehouse in the industrial part of town, and when you go in, there’s simply a tiny lobby and a doorway that leads to the rest of the warehouse.
While waiting for the postal lady to retrieve my mail, I noticed a whiteboard leaning up against the wall inside the warehouse. It was a chart, and the heading at the top was, “DCU FLASH (PERFORMANCE)”. It seemed to mark down delivery times/speeds.
Of course, any self-respecting comics geek would recognize that “DCU FLASH” refers, of course, to DC Comics‘ Flash, and is entirely appropriate for a chart about delivery speeds.
Well, at least I thought it was kinda funny.
The previous post got me thinking for some reason about the 2000 year-old tree stumps found just off the Oregon coast, in Neskowin. You haven’t heard about them? Judging by the amount of time searching to find any pointers or references to them, most of the Web hasn’t either.
This is from KXL.com’s Coastal Tour Guide page:
This downright spectacular oddity is almost a rare sight in Neskowin, but you may not know just how spectacular it is unless you know what it is you’re looking at.
They look somewhat like old, ragged pilings leftover from something manmade – but they are, in fact, stumps of a 2,000-year-old forest. As many as 100 are sometimes visible in various shapes and sizes. It’s theorized that around 2,000 years ago a massive, cataclysmic earthquake abruptly dropped this forest as much as six feet. This wound up preserving them, rather then destroying and scattering them as natural erosion might’ve done.
An article on these appeared in 1998, and I remember being awed and amazed that these artifacts from the era of Christ and the Roman Empire were being exposed right in my backyard, so to speak. Scouring around the Web, there’s only a couple of decent articles I was able to find on the subject: this Herald-Sun Newsbrief from March 18, 1998 and this archived Sunset article. Good to know I’m not completely crazy.
Anyway, if you find yourself in or around Neskowin, Oregon, find your way down to the beach and check it out.
Ever since someone at work talked about VH1‘s “50 Worst Rock Songs” special, with “We Built this City” as the number one worst, I’m having a hard time getting that song out of my head.
Why is it anymore that when Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a celebrity guest star (which seems quite often these days), they’re predictably always the Main Bad Guy? (It’s getting stale!)
Ever had a bird get stuck in your chimney and get out via the fireplace? We did, tonight. (Although we have a wood stove and not a true fireplace.) How the bird got in the chimney, I don’t know; I imagine it must have fallen in, but I didn’t think birds were that clumsy. At any rate, it kept scratching and scraping around in the chimney pipe, and when I finally figured out how to open the flue between the stove and the chimney area, out pops this bird.
Before I could catch it (I was wearing gloves), it escaped and flew around the house for a few minutes before being herded out through the skylight. That was quite a sight. The other animals were quite excited (three cats and a dog); I suppose after years of watching birds taunt them through the windows this must have seemed like winning the lottery.
Since I subscribed to Reuter’s Oddly Enough RSS feed the other day, I’ve noticed that about a sixth of the odd news involved biting in some way. Weird? Yeah. Creepy weird.
A couple of links I found interesting. First is to All Consuming, “a website that watches weblogs for books that they’re talking about, and displays the most popular ones on an hourly basis.” Kinda cool. The other is to an article on Kuro5hin titled “Raising the Humble Chicken,” which is kind of random but good. I grew up with chickens; if we didn’t live inside the city limits, I think I’d try to convince my wife to let me get some.
