Why yes, I’ll review that book...

...want me to recode your site, too?

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 21:54:50 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Got questions? Tam has the answers!

• It's a joke, you simpleton.
• Dan Rather.
• An IQ test, and you failed.
• Your mom.
• Charles Darwin.

Start here.

(It’s all Robb Allen’s fault!)

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 15:20:42 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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If you’d wondered where all that bad American business-speak went...

...it’s alive and well in the British government:

“The Met has a dress code policy which states that only approved corporate badging may be used...”

(That’s a government spokesman.  Talking about the police department.)

Things may get bad here, but I still can’t imagine any of our corporate apparatchiks allowing such buzzword-laden jargon into any public statement.

Pity the report says nothing about the reporters’ reaction.  Hope it was derisive laughter.

Via:  doubleplusundead

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:51:58 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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WTF? design

’97 Taurus Vulcan 123K miles:

Experiencing loss of: power steering assist, all window controls (none are lit up), rear window defrost controls, half of the MFS controls (only Hi, Lo, and turn signals work), and radio only when car is in R, (D), D, and 1.  Everything functions fine when put into P or N.

One component.
Give up?  (Unbelievable!)

Via:  Rittenhouse, who owns one.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 03:59:54 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Wrong foot, The, Getting off on...

Today’s example: Jeffrey Michael, quoted by the Chicago Sun-Times:

“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”

Via:  Gabe at Ace  (who says: “On behalf of lawyers everywhere: Thank you!”)

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 00:54:26 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Nah, didn’t happen...

Lileks on Watchmen:

One exchange stuck out - by which I mean, it made me roll my eyes so hard I almost tipped the couch over.  “What happened to the American Dream?” Owl-guy says to the Comedian, after they’ve dispatched a late-night demonstration demanding more police, instead of masked vigilantes.  “It came true!” grins the Comedian, meaning, all the violence and oppression and fear and war.  The dream was always a nightmare.  It wasn’t about a family and a place of your own and a car and a plot of land where your kids could play; it was really about pedophiliac murderers in filthy apartments and Nixon’s third term and the repression of.alternative energy, and other inevitable consequences of the fascist model masquerading as liberal democracy.

(Links added, 2^nd link via IP.  Note: This post intended more as snarky sideswipe than as great profundity!)

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Would make me look. Maybe twice.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Linkage at 16:39:22 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Spreading the credit

I guess that it’s a good thing that whenever I start to develop that know-it-all attitude I get a reminder that I’m not always up-to-date on the latest web fads.  This particular one reached me late, with no information about its creator.  Now that I know about it, I thought others might like to know, too.

In mid-May I received an e-mail (with the subject line: “FW: Cat Movie!!”) with this animation attached:


It was new to me, but, as it turned out, not new to the net.^[1]  (Sissy Willis had written about it a year and one-half ago.)  I blame missing it on the lack of Flash on my system coupled with my creaky dialup, which has encouraged me to discourage my correspondents from sending me enormous files.  But this time someone did, and fortunately for me someone else, somewhere along the line, had WMV-ed it, so I was finally able to view it.

Unfortunately, like a lot of stuff on the web, the version I got came with no information about it.  Fortunately, a couple of days ago (in a post about cats who control their owners), Sissy linked to her earlier one.  So, off I went to find out more.

The cat is called (simply enough) “Simon’s Cat,” and his perpetrator is animator Simon Tofield, who is associated with Tandem Films, London [site requires Flash, unfortunately].  This particular film, Cat Man Do, is the first of (so far) four short Simon’s Cat animations, all of which can be found at the not-so-much-Flash official Simon’s Cat site http://www.simonscat.com/.

There’s also a book, which is due out in October.

So, now you know.

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Keep ’em busy

Ilya Somin:

Members of bar exam boards.. and presidents and other high officials of state bar associations should be required to take and pass the bar exam every year by getting the same passing score that they require of ordinary test takers.  Any who fail to pass should be immediately dismissed from their positions, and their failure publicly announced (perhaps at a special press conference by the state attorney general).  And they should be barred from ever holding those positions again until - you guessed it - they take and pass the exam.

After all, if the bar exam covers material that any practicing lawyer should know, then surely the lawyers who lead the state bar and administer the bar exam system itself should be required to know it.  If they don’t, how can they possibly be qualified for the offices they hold?  Surely it’s no excuse to say that they knew it back when they themselves took the test, but have since forgotten.  How could any client rely on a lawyer who is ignorant of basic professional knowledge, even if he may have known it years ago?

Not to mention that with all those lawyers occupied with re-passing the exam, they’d have that much less time for harassing the rest of us.
 

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 14:50:43 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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“A statistical tie with Sarah Palin”

Instapundit notes that Rasmussen’s 51% disapproval figure for Obama effectively ties (within margin of error) Sarah Palin’s 53%.  “Doubly astounding given the disparate press treatment^[1] they’ve gotten,” he says.  “I doubt the media coverage will emphasize that.”  Me neither.

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 20:53:42 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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