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Hey f---ers! Quit spamming sales messages within the body of personal chats with my friends [that are invisible to the "sender"]!

Quotes: "People are like stained glass windows" (Kubler-Ross)

People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun's out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light within. -- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Words: gawk [AHED]

PRONUNCIATION: gôk
NOUN: An awkward, loutish person; an oaf.
INTRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: gawked, gawk·ing, gawks
To stare or gape stupidly. See synonyms at gaze.
ETYMOLOGY: Perhaps alteration (influenced by gawk hand, left hand) of obsolete gaw, to gape, from Middle English gawen, from Old Norse ga, to heed.

Proverbs: A hero is someone who is always willing to help.

Weblogs: 'I Am the Very Model of a Blogging Evangelical'

(read the entire Gilbert & Sullivan parody by David Taylor at Disciple's Journal: 'I Am the Very Model of a Blogging Evangelical':

"I am the very model of a blogging evangelical,
I've got a blog you ought to read, it's relevant and biblical,
I know the parts of TULIP, and I know the church historical,
From Pentecost to Book of Daniel, blogging like an oracle;
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters cinematical,
I've been to all the movies, 'cause my blogging's so piratical,
About the movies' Christian themes I'm teeming with a lot of news,
And many trenchant points about such things no one could ever use."

Weblogs: Movies and television get religion—or do they?

Disciple's Journal: Movies and television get religion—or do they?:
"'Thank you, Harry. Harry, here in Hollywood I've been speaking with studio, network and cable executives about a meeting they had earlier today with a relatively new evangelical media watchdog group, Christians for Demographic Parity. With the box office successes of Passion and Narnia to bolster their case, emboldened by the Christian Right's apparent success in getting NBC to pull the controversial Book of Daniel, the group emerged from today's meeting standing tall and claiming that they detect a shift in the entertainment industry's attitude towards people of faith.'

'Peter, the group has an unusual name. I mean, we're used to seeing words like family or decency or traditional values in the names of these organizations, but demographic parity? What's that all about?'

'Yes, Harry. Over the past eighteen months, the group's founder and spokesman, Pittsburgh-area businessman Jordan Bellows, has been criss-crossing the country, visiting suburban, exurban and your nicer metro-area churches to spread the good news that evangelicals are no longer the 98-pound weaklings of market demographics.'"

TV: The Book of Daniel (NBC)

NBC has cancelled The Book of Daniel, an impressively original and sensitive treatment of the life and ministry of an Episcopal priest. (Think Seventh Heaven mixed with Touched by an Angel, but with a splash of bitters.) Sign an online petition to bring back the show.

Home: Happiness is a chocolate chip cookie

Musings: Cell phone chatter

If this is the static we get on our cell phones now, why do they think anyone will want a cell phone implanted in their ear, or brain?

Language: not excepted vs. not accepted

Here is a case where opposites are analogs; the converse of two typos can equal the same thing.

Email: Don't be "too" nice [CR]

The trouble with dry humor is that it sneaks up on you, and unless you know the humor-er, it sneaks right by the humor-ee (esp. in email).

I learned again that bending over backwards to help people only bites you in the butt. (How *do* they do that?)

Musings: Cherry tomatoes and you

Always make sure your mouth is tightly closed after you pop a cherry tomoto inside and bite down.

Email: The earnestness of erasing [EKW]

Eraser shavings are the whole reason I went into computing. (That's my story anyway.) That and the boys-with-toys thing!

Email: Why kids love pencil sharpeners [EKW]

Kids love the grinding down and sharpening and the smell of it all I think. Also watching LP records or dryers spin -- but pencil sharpeners are much more tactile!

Email: Lemony Snicket's just the trick(et) [MG]

You will love it! I've always felt it was a library-y, Victorian kind of book and movie -- but full of Tim Burton-like quirks. In fact, I had to buy it from Netflix ($5.99).

Email: Hotmail Support

So I have seven messages in my Junk folder but only five are junk. I select those five and click Empty and Report. All seven disappear. Oh dear. Does the Empty function or the Report function (or both) apply to mail that wasn't checked?

Press: Sick and twisted - Slate

(Slate - Sick and twisted: The creepy new ad for Theraflu)

"The Spot: A city bus pulls up to a curb, where it is boarded by some sort of monstrous demon-being. The creature has a malformed head and a gargoyle-ish prong of a nose. The other passengers recoil in horror as it walks down the aisle, coughing and snarfling. It takes a seat in the last row, next to a little girl and her grandmother. The old woman reaches inside her purse and pulls out some Theraflu Thin Strips. The monster takes the medicine—and is transformed into a regular guy."

Musings: He's no bottleneck, he's my linchpin

How do office professionals describe a co-worker who is basically a bottleneck or even a laggard? Polite alternatives might include: pivot point, pivotal person, linchpin, or key actor.

Books: I, Wabenzi - Rafi Zabor

Publisher's Weekly: "A jazz drummer and music critic, Zabor has a great feel for the rhythms and melodies of language, but it is his skill at portraiture that will really lure readers. His descriptions of his father, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Brooklyn in 1938 and stayed in an unhappy marriage in order to be close to his son, are particularly evocative. And his account of his mother's descent into angry senility would be despairing if it weren't so often leavened with humor. The book's few dull moments occur when the author appears alone, with no person upon whom to play his riffs and observations. Religion, or rather the self-conscious struggle to connect earthly experience with the divine, also colors a large part of the book, particularly toward the end. But if Zabor is a mystic, given to visions and dreams, his memoir is nevertheless grounded in the joys, sorrows and many little vanities of ordinary life."

Proverbs: Welcome to my (computers are hell) world...

Proverbs: Merrily we slog along...