Minecraft: Artsy-Fartsy

• I've cut out all the pieces from this awesome Mine(Paper)craft project, but they're sitting in my desk drawer at work, waiting for my next nervous breakdown for assembly.
• Share and try out seeds for the coolest Minecraft worlds.
• Minecraft as a teaching tool.
• The Smithsonian's American Art Museum will host an exhibition next year of "The Art of Video Games." Included on the list are my great love, Fallout; my great disappointment, Fallout 3 (Fallout 2 is missing); and... Minecraft! And a bunch of games, most of which I never heard of or gave a crap about, because before Minecraft I was too busy playing Fallout 1 & 2 over and over. Or something.
• I would totally get one of these if it came in diamond. But these magnets are pretty cool, too.

Air Journal: Bird- and Creeper-Watching

I went to Virginia for several days this past week to visit my aunt and uncle before the oppressive summer heat and humidity kicked in. Trip highlights:

• Because I refuse to pay money to check a bag unless absolutely necessary, I didn't check a bag. No one blinked at the metal knitting needles in my suitcase.
• Because no one wants to pay $25 to check a friggin' bag, the overhead bins fill beyond capacity on most flights these days. While we were boarding, they were again announcing the bit about putting your smaller carry-on item under the seat in front of you, etc., but certain rows didn't have that option, so they would have to put it in the overheads. The guy walking in front of me put both his suitcase and his backpack in the overhead bin. I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, like maybe he was seated in one of the mentioned rows, but no, he was just a dick who is Special and Above the Rules. Asshole. Good thing I'm not a flight attendant or I would have taken the thing out of the bin and shoved it under his seat with a very brutal smile.
• I almost didn't recognize my aunt Mary at the airport. Her hair had turned completely white. She was still short, though.
• I was her enabler for visiting yarn shops. On Cary St. in the artsy-fartsy area, we were walking from a yarn shop to a Thai restaurant (she had never had Thai food before), when I saw this chalk drawing on one of the ubiquitous brick walls in Richmond:
  
• We drove out to my grandmother's farm near Charlottesville, where everyone and their Beltway brother is now building their ugly "farm-house style" McMansion where there used to be real, working farmhouses. Outside, I dodged a dragonfly trying to divebomb me. Geez, I hate those things! I forgot how many, well, insects there are there. Here's a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains from the farm:
  
• My aunt and uncle keep bird feeders in their backyard. While the hummingbirds have been absent this year, perhaps victims of the severe winter, there were still more birds than I see here in artificially-green desert. While the red-headed woodpecker we saw last time didn't show (its tree died and was taken out), we did see:
  • House finches -- by far the most common
  • Cowbirds
  • At least two pairs of cardinals
  • Grackles, with their striking light-colored eyes and brilliant iridescence
  • English (house) sparrows
  • A male red-bellied woodpecker, which actually has no red on its belly, but does have a striking neon-orange stripe on its head, which makes it look like a punk rocker
  • I think the other woodpecker was the downy woodpecker, but we only saw a female and only once or twice.
  • Starlings
  • Doves
  • The ubiquitous robin, which I miss out here. They also love splashing around in the birdbath.
• I somehow managed to avoid smacking my head getting into my seat until the last connecting flight home. I have a nice lump on my forehead.
• I was sitting next to a young woman who could not be not touching her MacBook, and what appeared to be her grandfather. As we were landing, she turned to the elderly man and told him she didn't think it would be a problem at the car rental place, but she just remembered both of them have expired drivers licenses. "But we're still licensed drivers." Um, no, you're not. Hence the "expired" bit. I was sorely tempted to follow them to the car rental place and laugh, but instead...
• I went to catch the Flyaway bus to Union Station (I flew out of BUR but flew into LAX for price and scheduling reasons). $7. Free (well, included in my monthly pass) bus ride from Union Station home. Ok, it took about 2 hours, but it would have taken a little less if I hadn't been waiting at the wrong corner for the connecting bus. And it has often taken that long with a shuttle, because you wait 20 minutes for them to come around, then you wait another 30 minutes while they keep circling the damn airport, then you're inevitably the last one off and all the people getting dropped off first all live 15 miles from the freeway, so it takes at least 2 hours to get home anyway. So I feel smug now :P
• Kitties were happy to see me! Yay! They quickly got over the smell of my aunt's two dogs. Or they're plotting their revenge for later, when it is a dish best served cold...

News: Dumbass Round-up

I am super mega-cranky today, so here are a bunch of dumbasses for your, um, enjoyment.

• Apparently craploads of people are asking "Who is Osama bin Laden?" on Yahoo! Answers, and they're almost all dumbass teenagers who, while yes, are too young to remember 9/11, have apparently not visited anything other than the Entertainment news section of a web site in the past decade. WTF?
• This teenage dumbass experiences instant karma. Well, 1-hour karma.
  
  see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!
• This dumbass decided to rob a convenience store while wearing pants so baggy, they had to be held up with one hand at all times. Unfortunately for the dumbass, both his hands were full.
  
  see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!
• Dressing your cat in a pink tutu? Man, you deserve anything you get for that.
  
  see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!
• After this sign went up, McDonalds was shocked to see a 20% drop in cheezburger sales.
  see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!
• Not sure who the bigger dumbass is here, the suspect carrying a chair out the door or the police who didn't notice some dude was walking out of the building cuffed to a chair.
  
  see more funny videos, and check out our Yo Dawg lols!
• The United States Postal Service managed to issue a Statue of Liberty stamp featuring a stock picture not of the actual Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, but of the not-totally-accurate replica in Las Vegas. Morons.

After all this amalgamated stupidity, I am down with this cat:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Other: Fun With Phonetics

I was driving out to the PetSmart after work because (a) by the time I got my butt motivated to leave this morning, the buses became annoyingly sparse, which mean that (b) I needed to justify driving to work and buying 30 pounds of cat litter will do it and (c) I got totally fed up with the local Petco because I never seemed to spend less than 15 minutes in line, so I refuse to go there anymore. The closest PetSmart is in Tujunga, and even though I'd been there before, I can never remember how to get there. I was using the Google voice navigation on my phone, and among other "quirks," it came up with some interesting pronunciations of street names.

Tujunga Canyon Rd. Ok, although there are many, many streets here with Spanish names, they never get pronounced correctly; they've been, um, anglified. "Tujunga" is an exception or at least close to one, as the 'j' is pronounced like an 'h'. Except the Google lady was using a hard 'j'. "Tuh-jun-ga Canyon Rd." Ok, so eventually I turn onto Foothill. That's a real English word, right? "Fooh-thill." Double fail. Well, I did get there, but still.

Knittin' Crap: Spoon Invades Photo, Gets Forked, News at 11

The Camera Hog struck again, but this time he got a little freaked out by my latest FO:



That's Beastie, the FreeBSD daemon.