Watching “Justice League Unlimited” as Gaeilge / in Irish.
(Unfortunately I don’t seem able to find any online links to demonstrate how it looks / sounds. But TG4, the national Irish-language service, is showing it at the moment.)
(See, this is what happens when you get careless about translation issues.)
ZoomBak A-GPS Locator for Dogs
(And it seems to me that if you could use it for dogs, you could use it for cats as well — assuming that the hardware’s not too big.)
They also do locators for cars, bikes, family members, backpacks, etc. The devices report in via mobile phone, using the T-Mobile network and networks of the company’s roaming partners. (The coverage map doesn’t make it clear whether this coverage extends outside North America.)
Interesting…
It was a charming convention. I look forward to coming back some time (with Peter, this time).
Stockholm is a city I look forward to visiting again when I have more time. The light here is very special. (The dark, not so special. Or maybe it is, but I’m a little set against it at the moment, as last night I got off the T-bana / Metro on the wrong side of the square at Odenplan, and (having set off confidently in the wrong direction) spent the next three-quarters of an hour (a) walking around in the dark and the rain (b) while trying to read the city map (c) and trying not to look like I was reading the city map in the dark, in the rain (d) while being ten blocks from where I should have been. No matter: I backtracked and found where I should have been.)
(It’s funny today. Last night, not so funny. But eighteen or twenty-four hours puts everything in perspective.)
Meanwhile, preparatory to heading back to my hotel, I find myself sitting in Gamla stan / the Old Town… in an Irish bar. They just happened to have (a) whiskey and (b) a ton of open outlets in the front of the place where I was able to plug in the computer and the phone. 
Home tomorrow. Which is good, as I miss the computers, and the cats. And the husband. (Feorag, also NB: you have fans up here, and Fluff is kindly spoken of.) But in the meantime — thanks to all the Stocon folk for a memorable weekend. (And the cookbooks are brilliant, guys. Thanks again.)
Spent a super day amongst the Swedes. No more to say about that at the moment, except that I’m about to go back to the hotel and fall over. (NB: Sweden looks a lot like Ireland when it’s raining. But you knew that.)
And how not, when he writes stuff like this?
Moviegoers who knowingly buy a ticket for “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” are going to get exactly what they expect: There is a mummy, a tomb, a dragon and an emperor. And the movie about them is all that it could be. If you think “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” sounds like a waste of time, don’t waste yours.
I, as it happens, have time to waste and cannot do better than to quote from my review of “The Mummy” (1999): “There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it.”
Go Roger! Go Roger! Go Roger! Go Roger! (etc)
Like you didn’t already suspect this:
In an Anglo-Saxon book of poetry kept at Exeter Cathedral, researchers from Britain’s Wolverhampton University have unearthed a joke that suggests the clichéd ribaldry of a millennium ago is awfully similar to what passes for humor today. The translation, as cited by the Telegraph, reads: “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”
Hur hur hur hur! (wheeze)
And they have found evidence of Egyptians laughing at similar versions of wit. Researchers at Wolverhampton say the jokes they have found in delicate manuscripts and carved on stone tablets thousands of years old demonstrate a common idea of what’s funny across the ages of humanity: flatulence, sex and “stupid people,” as one academic tells the Telegraph.
So when the Doctor tells you that the only thing he can depend on on Earth is human nature… better believe him.
So here I am. Missing Peter (inevitable), enjoying the weather (hot, sunny, a touch humid), and working (also inevitable: Vasa is going to have to wait for the next trip, I’m afraid).
The eclipse passed without notice in most parts of the city, I think. (But at only — what, 30%-ish totality? — this is forgivable. I think I noticed things getting a little dim this morning, but there was some cloud cover passing through at the time, and people no doubt attributed the change of lighting to that.)
Meanwhile I am holed up in a comfortable bar/restaurant called the Järntorgs Pumpen, finishing work on the film outline and watching other, more normal people sitting out in the sun in front of the restaurant and enjoying themselves. Having had a nice cool tuna salad, I then started a cyberskulk (i.e., a hunt for powerpoints / outlets) and was delighted to find outlets to charge up both computer and cellphone just a table away. (Future visitors, NB: it’s the table for four inside the window on the left as you face the restaurant from the square: the outlets are between the table and the front door.)
Here’s the view from where I’m working:
(Dublin readers: imagine my surprise to find a bar/restaurant called “The Temple Bar” just around the corner. To my surprise, the menu was mostly Greek. Go figure.)
…This is a canned blog entry. At the time it’s posted, I’ll be on my way to Dublin to catch my flight to Sweden. But I saw this and thought that by the morning, maybe there’ll be some take on whether the subject is a hoax, or a genuine monster in the technical sense of the word. (I say nothing of the ancient original sense of the word monstrum.)
So, as I was saying: WTF??
PASADENA, Calif.–Bars abound in spiral galaxies today, but this was not always the case. A group of 16 astronomers, led by Kartik Sheth of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, has found that bars tripled in number over the past seven billion years…
So what’s the cause? Gentrification, or looser liquor licensing laws? You decide.
(with a tip of the hat to The Quantum Pontiff)