Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"IMPORTANT - ANTI-DISCLAIMER - This email is not and cannot, by its nature, be confidential. En route from me to you, it will pass across the public Internet, easily readable by any number of system administrators along the way. If you have received this message by mistake, it would be ridiculous for me to tell you not to read it or copy to anyone else, because, let's face it, if it's a message revealing confidential information or that could embarrass me intensely, that's precisely what you'll do. Who wouldn't? Likewise, it is superfluous for me to claim copyright in the contents, because I own that anyway, even if you print out a hard copy or disseminate this message all over the known universe. I don't know why so many corporate mail servers feel impelled to attach a disclaimer to the bottom of every email message saying otherwise. If you don't know either, why not email your corporate lawyers and system administrators and ask them why they insist on contributing so much to the waste of bandwidth."

(Attributions lost before I saw it, so I don't know who wrote it. I found a copy in vampwillow's journal.)

Last night my brother gave me a keychain laser pointer.

I live in a long, narrow house. If I stand in the right place, I can throw that little magic dot a long way indoors.

Perrine is one of the (majority of?) cats who go crazy for the laser (hours after I stopped playing with it, she was still hunting for where the dot went). I foresee a fair amount of exercise for her.

I am pleased/amused/entertained.

(EDIT 2003-07-29: Fixed wrong URL in last item in list.)

• A purple polar bear. Need I say more? (Reuters Photo)
• Flying underpants cause crash on German highway (Reuters). Uh ... again, need I say more?
• Metaphors and similies by high school students, such as, "His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free," and "Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever."
• theferrett wrote an insightful post about flamage that presents a different explanation for the tendency to flame than I've seen elsewhere. And in proper Ferrett fashion, he includes some memorable imagery. "If this were a real argument, you'd be shouting and covering each other with fine mists of enraged spittle, and you'd both see that you were incoherent with wrath... But this is email, and they have to respond to your points one by one, ticking them off as if logic and reason were driving them when really. And you parry and counterthrust, and you make one or two valid points, drawing more blood, like a toreador pricking an enraged bull with his tiny swords."
• What would Lord of the Rings sound like if it had been written by someone else? Say, Douglas Adams, or Dante, or Kipling, or John Norman? Or even as a lawsuit (Sauron v. Frodo)?
• Winners of the 2003 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (Uh, y'all know what that contest is, right? Just in case: "a whimsical literary competitioon that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.") Bulwer-Lytton, of course, is the author whose opening line Snoopy was constantly trying to re-use in Peanuts.
• yesthattom's Do Not Notify me about The National Not Call Registry Service: "Shesh! Someone even started forwarding the announcement to all the pornographic mailing lists I'm on. I completely lost my erection!"
• Many of you will have seen funny courtroom exchanges before, but just in case anybody hasn't, or has forgotten some of the good ones...
• A geek rap song that amused me. Oh my, that entry seems to have generated a lot of comments.
• I'm not sure how close this is, 'cause nobody who left a comment in Interrobang's journal coughed up a literal translation, but the very concept is kind of cool for reasons I can't quite put my finger on: "Auld langs syne oyf yidish" by "Robbie Burns-tein".