While waiting at the supermarket checkout line a couple of days ago, I noticed that three of the celebrity news magazines (a.k.a. tabloids) featured the very same photo of Ashton and Demi on the cover (by using just their first names, I sound like I have some actual interest in their wedding or other celebrity ‘news’). I would think that each magazine would want a distinct photo. I would be interested in the learning about the processes that resulted in such amazing homogeneity.

As soon as the levees were breached and New Orleans started flooding after hurricane Katrina, I tried to impress on people that this tragedy affected all types of New Orleanians, not just the ones we saw on TV who were did not get out ahead of time: white and black; poor, middle-class, and wealthy (though some were obviously more seriously affected than others. That’s a discussion for another post).
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve concluded that standing water flooding is its own type of hell because it leaves your house and it contents in place for the most part, but also pretty much completely ruined. If your house is blown away by hurricane winds or washed away by torrents of water, it’s certainly tragic, but you pretty much know that you start over from scratch. But with standing water flooding, you eventually have to return to figure out what to do with everything–what stays, what goes, do you repair the house or rebuild, etc. This Flickr photo set shows what one New Orleans family returned to.

Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald wrote an interesting post about the history of telling time.

I swiped this image from Eliot Gelwan’s excellent blog, Follow Me Here:

As a card-carrying geek, Firefox is my as my browser of choice, and I use it to access my personal email via Google’s Gmail. I really like Gmail, but there is one little issue that was bugging me: a lack of a ‘delete’ button. A couple of the most commonly used actions get their own buttons in Gmail, but others, including Delete, are relegated to a dropdown. To delete a message, I had to either check it on the list page or view it, and then select ‘Delete’ from the actions dropdown.
The other day I thought: I have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox. I wonder if anyone has created a user script to solve this problem. Sure enough, it took me about a minute to find and install a Greasemonkey user script to insert a Delete button into Gmail!

When we are at the grocery store, the kids occasionally get me to agree to play the grab-a-plush-toy game. Man, our grocery store looks boring now. If we lived in Japan, we could try out hand at catching our dinner:

I don’t usually like to link to memes that are making the rounds, but this one is just too good to pass up. The image below is a new Roman Catholic recruiting poster (click on image for larger version):

UPDATE: Best comment about this poster from a discussion board I frequenet: When people starting marketing religion like they would a movie or any other product, they shouldn’t be surprised if that’s how people begin to treat it.

My friend Susan’s daughter Sophie was diagnosed with leukenia eight months ago. Susan and her husband Randall have been keeping a blog about Sophie’s health. In yesterday’s entry, Randall totalled up the insurance claims so far (not including co-pays and other expenses that they’ve borne themselves). He writes:

The grand total (and still counting) is $173, 670.35. Basically that amounts to over $700 a day. We are incredibly, incredibly thankful for the terrific insurance coverage that we have, but can you possibly imagine how families manage without the kind of coverage that we have, or, worse yet, without any coverage at all? Granted, you cannot put a price on having a healthy, thriving child, but I fear for those who have to make tough decisions that we have never had to make in this process. There is no wonder that an experience like this can devastate families financially for years and years and years.

I’ve been a geek for too long. When I was writing the previous blog post, my fingers kept want to type ‘Perl’ instead of ‘Pearl’. I had to backspace and correct it two times.