Residents challenge proposed park

I'm sure I've done it myself.

"Can we diarise that?"

"Who authored this %#*& report?"

"How can we leverage that?"

But not very often.

Even Will did it. (Which is reassuring)

Richard II

Henry IV: My gracious uncle!

Edmund of Langley: Tut, tut! 
Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle:
I am no traitor’s uncle.

But nouning verbs really gets my goat.

"That's a big ask"

"Not a good look"

And especially this classic.

"Sorry I'm late - couldn't find a park"

I thought he meant that he was trying politely to politely (bloody split infinitives...) infer that he was looking for a tree to pee behind.

But no - he couldn't find a parking space.

So when I saw this headline in the Nelson Mail (the above examples are all New Zealand patois), I immediately thought that someone had asked their neighbours in advance for permission to leave a car somewhere.

But it really was all about a

park n. An area of land set aside for public use.

Confusing....

"Big ideas...

are little ideas that no one killed too soon."

From Seth Godin's blog

Essential reading

In the fine tradition....

....of the "skip every second line" in performance reviews (below), Arnold Schwarzenegger does it with style

Bob Smith, my assistant programmer, can always be found
hard at work in his cubicle. Bob works independently, without
wasting company time talking to colleagues. Bob never
thinks twice about assisting fellow employees, and he always
finishes given assignments on time. Often Bob takes extended
measures to complete his work, sometimes skipping coffee
breaks. Bob is a dedicated individual who has absolutely no
vanity in spite of his high accomplishments and profound
knowledge in his field. I firmly believe that Bob can be
classed as a high-caliber employee, the type which cannot be
dispensed with. Consequently, I duly recommend that Bob be
promoted to executive management, and a proposal will be

executed as soon as possible.

The benefits of age

Damian Christie over at Public Address laments about his never having walked the Auckland Harbour Bridge and is going the rather masochistic route of running a HALF MARATHON in order to fulfill his dream.

Silly boy.

I did it on 24 May 1959 and didn't even break into a sweat.

Oldfartness does have its benefits, then.

Hope you'll wear a prick-ish looking hat in solidarity, Damian

Honesty in advertising #2

Honesty in advertising

And I thought....

..that Mrs jb's shoes were expensive.


Shame that yellow's not my colour....

Cannot calculate circular reference

That's what Excel would say to this.

Unless, of course, it's a street sign in South Tyrol, where everything's in German and Italian.

That could be it...

Subway map for a 3 year old

HT to kottke.org

I ablute in the morning, actually...

The routine 3's appear to be practiced at a different time south of the Alps.

Maybe they get up late.

A touch of inadvertent grossness in Austria with the usual Denglish background

Gets better all the time...

Now, HERE's a latte machiatto served by a really hot flossy in a cafe in Bolzano.

She appears to have taken a liking to me.

Nice labrador, she had.

And a very stylish white cane.....

Pit stop

Scene/seen at the Bar Senesi in Bolzano.

Dude fronts up, orders an espresso macchiato, drinks it on zero seconds flat, pays his €1 and is gone quicker than a farter out of church...

Quote

If you talk to God, that's called "prayer".

If God talks to you, that's called "schizophrenia"

Thomas Szasz

How silly

BurgerKing in Japan is celebrating Microsoft's rollout of Windows 7 with a 7 patty Whopper.

A mere 2000 calories.

Given that I'm running Mac OSX 10.5.8 on my PowerBook, I feel I deserve something appropriate.

About 74 metres high, if I've worked it all out correctly...

"The weather's so crap"....

 

said Hildegard at her eponymous cafe in Cornaiano in South Tyrol

"that this might cheer you up a bit"

It was and it did.

Lost in translation

Technology refresh time.

Out goes the Becker Highspeed satnav thingy.

In comes the Vermin (Garmin, I think...) Nüvi 1390.

All very flash and even does the text-to-voice trick and tells you the name of the next road.

Which is all very fine if it's "Main Street" or "Hauptstrasse", but if you happen to be in Alto Adige (South Tirol/v. Northern Italy to you), you'll encounter road names such as

Strada Statale Del Tonale e Della Mendola

Now apart from the fact that flossy's Italian pronunciation is crap leaves a lot to be desired, by the time she's spat it all out, you've overshot the turning by a good 500 metres.

Upon which she suggests that you do a U-turn and try again from the opposite direction.

And by the time she's spat it all out again (and you can't read the name of the road on the display because it's writ very small to fit it into the space where you've normally got "Main Street"), you've overshot again.

Repeat ad nauseum

Forget the Bean Bag...

..here's the Cactus Sofa

Does this really surprise anyone?

The New York Times ran an article on Sunday, titled "U.S. Can’t Trace Foreign Visitors on Expired Visas"

This can't surprise anyone who's visited the United States.

When you front up to Immigration, you're photographed and fingerprinted, questioned and sent on your way with a stamp in your passport and a small stub of green paper.

When you leave the country, you hand in the small stub of green paper to the airline's check-in agent

Unfortunately, not every does.

Or the small square stub of green paper gets lost.

Or the border official at a land crossing doesn't ask for it.

So it doesn't really surprise me that they lost track of almost 3 million visitors last year.

And that's not counting the Visa Waiver visitors.

Add another 3 million......

Current events

Courtesy of Political Irony

Scrabbled

Source

This is interesting. I think

Ye who speaketh with forked tongues

Dr. Rowan Williams, the Bishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England (of which I'm a very lapsed member) ripped into the moneychangers in the temple the other week.

Asked if the City was returning to business as usual he said: "I worry. I feel that's precisely what I call the 'lack of closure' coming home to roost. It's a failure to name what was wrong. To name that, what I called last year 'idolatry', that projecting of reality and substance onto things that don't have them."

Full story here

Now that the C of E has noticed that European Union is quite serious about regulating hedgefunds, there's been a rapid about-face.

You see, the church's investments have dropped from £5.7bn to a mere £4.4bn in just over a year and they NEED THOSE HEDGEFUNDS to get their wealth back to where it was and a bit further, if you don't mind.

Full story here

Hypocritical bastards

Dead fly art

More here

This I definitely need

Just too cool for words.

Unless it's "Table", natch.

On BoingBoing, of course

Real people

A German women's magazine "Brigitte" has announced that it's no longer going to be working with professional models.

Probably because most of them are reminiscent of anorexic stick insects.

Didn't quite have to go this far, though.

Then again, there's always Photoshop...

Seen at BoingBoing, now being sued by RL for trademark violation

Vampire bite necklace

Now, where's that garlic...?

What's good for the goose...

I blogged this v-formation business a couple of years ago, but the ever excellent kottke.org  has an explanation for it.

I bet the professor from down river has one, too.

Probably an algorithm.

Crikey, she's a bright bird

Fractally speaking

http://www.cesmes.fi/