argus

In lieu of being creative, I offer you a random IM snippet:

me@work: man… it smells SOOOOOOOO rancid in here
me@work: jokers cooking fish in the microwave
Preble: Fish… FISH. Who does that? Really…
me@work: People that wanna get CUT, thats who
Preble: I mean, seriously… what kind of person brings that in? Tell me about them.
Preble: Better: tell The Blog.
Preble: [osphere].
me@work: Old guy. FORTRAN programmer. Primary project is called “SPAM”.
Preble: Brings in leftover fish.
me@work: Flagged for garbage collection.

I know it’s been some time since a post ..so to make up for the long absence, I bring you this (hat tip to Neal): “Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans”

If you’ve ever wondered how many rodent hairs the FDA deems “acceptable” in your macaroni, this site has your answers.

Enjoy! :D

That’s right — read that again. Engaged. Now take a few moments for yourself while I read that again :)

I took Nichole out to a wonderful restaurant Saturday night for her 25th birthday …and totally surprised her with a proposal. What follows is the story of that evening from my point of view, with interjections from Nay. Enjoy…

(more…)

A recent comment on Preble’s blog has inspired me to share a simple and entertaining word game that a fellow nerd here at work shared with me, and that the whole cadre of nerds here occasionally will bring up during conversation: preposition switching, usually in person-to-person action phrases. This lends itself to some really funny foreigner-sounding sentences (ala the aforementioned blog comment). And in our experience, the best phrases are “risque” ones. That we find these particular sentences funnier may not come as much of a surprise given that we’re all mid- to lower-20s males.

As an example, for the sentence, “I want to make out with you” the game would suggest that you replace the word “with” with a different preposition. Popular choices are usually spatial, such as “around” or “at” — and the more believable a ‘mistaken’ word choice sounds, the funnier it is: ala “I want to make out at you.” Dropping an unexpected preposition swap into an already-funny story tends to double its impact :)

Neal provides a link to this Chicago Tribune story (sorry, it’s passworded — see www.bugmenot.com for “preview options”…) which summarizes what’s being whispered in newsrooms around the world for about the past week: “Could Bush be right?” Certainly it’s too soon to attempt to come to any conclusions about Iraq or Afghanistan, but with each passing day of progress questions as to the reality of all of this become increasingly nonsensical: it is reality. And the world is now having to wake up to the fact that the events that have happened in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq — revolution in Lebanon against Syria, the first inklings of real progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rumblings of fairer elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia — have as their primary catalyst the determined actions of the United States in Iraq …and behind those actions, the leadership of George W. Bush. Even the increasingly unbridled defiance of Iran could be a good sign: those tyrannies with the loosest grip on power will be those most willing to work with the new direction of things (Syria, Egpyt), while a country like Iran would most likely respond with greater and greater threats when it at last recognizes that the heavy artillery of freedom is being re-loaded and re-aimed.

I believe history will indeed place George W. Bush alongside Ronald Reagan: a principled man who recognizes evil when he sees it and is unafraid to act against it. The Left in this country has certainly already laid some of the first stones in the road towards making that comparison valid, what with their daily kneejerk vilifications of W and their lame jabs at his intelligence — just as they did to Reagan, 20+ years ago.

UPDATE: Jeff Jacoby makes some similar observations.