I appreciate the irony of Anne Allred wearing all red.

Ah, Hostess pies. Just like mom used to make...when she worked at that Hostess factory in Kansas City.

"You can't fight me, I represent the system."

Derek and Simon

As the great Karl Marx once said: "I've never been asked to join a club where I was already a member."

Cars

I guess I'd better get out my checkbook.

Cars - watch more funny videos

Rights for robots?

In a word: No.


(Image links to From the Mind of Charles)

Saturday Night Fiedler

I've finally found my new wallpaper:


(Image links to Unpleasant.com)

For the record, my old wallpaper was great, but it's now a little out of season:



(Image links to Universalhub.com)

Deep-fried what now?

This is why people think I come from some backwater flyover state.

Basically, whis breaks down to three major points.

1) "Around here, it may be tough to pass up anything deep-fried."

2) "What else can you do in a small town?"

3) "After a few beers, you can't really tell the difference."

There you have it folks. All that's truly great and terrible about Wisconsin.

Two quotes

Two quotes in particular make this Yeltsin obit worth reading:

"Power is his ideology, his friend, his concubine, his mistress, his passion," former Kremlin spokesman Vyacheslav Kostikov said in 1997.

"Yeltsin is a good revolutionary, but a bad leader," Sergei Markov, a prominent Moscow political analyst, once said of Yeltsin. "He knows how to fight, but he doesn't know how to manage his victories."

That says about all you need to know about the man.

Fixed gear bikes vs. the 21st century

A recent New York Times article explores the word of "fixies," fixed-gear bicycles. It's an interesting article, if a bit behind the curve (a quick Google search show they were beaten by the Washington Post, Wired, and -- I'm sure -- countless blogs and alt-weeklies around Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, etc. etc. etc. I have a few friends who tinker with bikes, and I had -- I guess -- assumed that fixed-gear bikes were always a part of the bike subculture.

Anyway (getting back on track), while I've always appreciated the simplicity behind fixies, I've never felt a need to ride or own one. Simply put, I enjoy gears. For a long time, my bike (singular, I don't tinker) was a powder-blue Raleigh Technium road bike that dated back to the late '80s. An aluminum-framed 12 speed, it had a particularly old-school look that gave me street cred. It also had a rigid frame and frame-mounted gear shifts that made it a death trap on wheels on Boston's city streets.

Now I own an Iron Horse mountain bike. Nothing fancy, but it has front shocks, handlebar-mounted gear shift levers, brakes. Standard 21st century stuff. It's a comfortable ride. It's not punk. But I don't mind.