Lil’ Kim, Judith Miller, go to jail, and Rove comes tumbling after.
(I’m surprised that The Minor Fall, the Major Lift or Low Culture haven’t posted something along these lines yet, but we at Secretly Ironic Dot Com are not ones to wait on ceremony or defer to our elders and betters.)
You know that clank, clank, clank noise as the roller coaster goes up? And how, just at the very top, it seems to stop, and there’s this pause? The housing market has stopped rising in Australia, and people are beginning to wonder if it’s going to go up again, or go back down.
Washington Post on other newspapers on real estate prices. Two amusing tidbits: 1) “The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sounds a bit wistful in reporting: “Pittsburgh Has No Housing Bubble to Burst.” 2) The ad links at the bottom are for bubble bath.
As Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games have become big communities and big business, they have attracted their share of friendly share-and-share-alike nerds and bottom-feeding sharks.
One of the nice nerds set up a website called Thottbot, which, in addition to providing a giant database of hints, tips, tricks, maps, item statistics, quest details, etc. also has message boards and some RSS aggregation stuff and other neat details.
Of course, someone set up Thotbot, with one T, which is a scam run by an ad network targeted at MMORPG players, and somehow affiliated with a site that deals in virtual merchandise for real money.
Signs you’ve become a genuine trend and a useful web presence: someone starts trying to squat on easy misspellings of your domain name, polluting the information stream, and shitting all over your good name.
Fortunately, that’ll never happen to me.
A lot of people are convinced that vaccines caused their babies to develop autism. The belief is that thimerosal, a vaccine preservative that contains very small amounts of mercury, could damage the brain or the immune system at a crucial time in child development. It’s plausible– but the amouts of mercury are so tiny that they don’t really do anything. And the evidence is against it: countries where thimerosal has been removed from vaccines have not seen any decline in autism. So, the evidence is more or less that babies show signs of autism around the same time they are being vaccinated. Maybe it’s caused by television, or breast-feeding, or sunlight, or solid foods? How about cute little hats? Maybe it’s caused by cute little hats.
Autism is definitely in the news, though, and a lot of people think we’re having some kind of epidemic. Probably not: we’re just diagnosing more severely retarded kids as autistic. Previously, they’d have been given other diagnoses. So, autism isn’t any more widespread than it used to be.
Lesson the First: vaccinate your kids, dumbass. Things like polio and rubella suck and are really caused by not vaccinating, whereas autism is unlikely to be affected by anything you do. People who refuse to vaccinate their kids based on this hysteria are no better than the superstitious folks in the third world who refuse to vaccinate their kids because they believe that the vaccines are a CIA plot to sterilize Arab babies.
I wish there were some kind of superstition about me, one involving me kicking your ass unless you give me lots of money. Not that I’d do it– I just want people to believe that I have supernatural powers and need to be appeased.
The much-rumored retirement announcement has come out of the court, and in a surprise to me, it turned out to be Sandra Day O’Connor who is leaving. I totally thought it would be Dumbeldore. I’ve already got a preorder in for the next session.
I’ve written before about bad application names.
WHO NAMES THEIR APP CADAVER? Are you just a jerk?
The Poppler PDF library for Linux is hardly any better. (See the Futurama episode “The Problem with Popplers” for the reference. Although on the other hand, it’s kind of funny to call it Poppler.
But unless you work for the CSI: Miami software development team, your app should not be called Cadaver.
The houses where B.T.K. murders took place are … still houses, and people still have to live there. Creepy.
After I posted the link to Condoflip, grey-eyed John Fleck emailed to ask if that was a joke or not. I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure people did buy and sell unbuilt condos– very windhandel, as the Dtuch would say (tangent: a search for English results for the word on Google turns up things like an article on the surge in the skateboarding industry).
I told John that I’d be willing to offer him a nice tulip bulb in exchange for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and he replied that she wasn’t for sale but for the right tulip, I could have her collection of beanie babies.
Apparently, though, people still make money in the tulip market, just as they make money in futures, a.k.a. windhandel— just not with the same profit margin of the bubble days of the 17th century (or the late 90s, in the case of futures trading). The city of Holland, Wisconsin. for example, has a thriving tulip industry.
Still, I don’t think I’d buy a big pile of rare of tulips as an investment any more than I’d buy Dennis Rader’s old murder houses– stigmatized property.
I think I’ve posted more today than I have in weeks. Anyway, Bookdwarf sent me this review of the book “A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class”, which describes how the real estate trade has pushed for tax-deductible mortgage interest and against public housing, and how that pressure has shaped suburbia and the middle class.
Neat.
I’m thinking that the internal dialog of this real estate vendor is something along the lines of wow, this is a really bad idea that encourages irresponsible speculation and oooh commission!
Secretly Ironic 