Why not adopt a Wild Horse or Burro?

Modern Drunkard Magazine . Yep, it’s a real thing.

Here is a link to a very strange PoMo experience - a “new” video to the Von Bondies “C’mon C’mon” performed by videogame characters (and we’re not talking about Pacman here - this looks damn realistic)…

The about, with and for schedule (which I’ll be speaking at, with Tom Mulhern) has been posted.

Full Cream Puff Story here

Amazingly, it turns out that there are so many kinds of cream puffs — commonly called shukurimu (chou cream), from the French, chou a la creme — in terms of shape, flavor and types of crust. And they’re a sweet treat loved by all, regardless of age and sex.
‘People like chou creams so much that we could call them a national dessert,’ Ishizuka says. ‘So why not have a theme park where you can try and compare the different flavors of cream puffs from across the country?’
In a shop called Cream Puff Museum at the theme park, visitors can feast their eyes and taste buds on popular cream puffs from around 100 shops nationwide — and some not so regular ones, like natto cream puffs (that contain fermented soy beans in the cream) and takoyaki cream puffs (that are made to look like the deep-fried octopus dumplings, but fortunately do not taste like the real thing).
What really takes the biscuit for many visitors to Chou Cream Field, though, is the fairy-tale design of this ‘town’ of chou cream.
Covering 1,023-sq. meters of the floor space, the company has created an Italianesque alley, complete with chou cream trees and cream puff-shaped lanterns. As you stroll through this winding wonderland, the sweet and cheerful sound of ‘The Chou Cream Song’ fills the air — along with the aroma of baking cream puffs wafting from six specially selected shops from Hokkaido, Chiba, Tokyo, Hyogo, Fukuoka and Nagasaki prefectures.
To buy fresh-baked cream puffs from some of the nation’s most popular shops, take a seat at a table under a cream-puff tree festooned with the fancies, and soak up the sugary sounds in the Tokyo Chou Cream Field is about as near to cream-puff heaven as you’re ever likely to get.

The latest newsletter from the IDSA has an obituary as follows:

Ron Guttenberg, one-time IDSA member, dided May 20, 2004. In 1991, he retired as the corporate design consultant for Sears, Robebuck and Co. in Chicago. Prior to that, he worked for GVO, Inc. in Palo Alto, CA, as well as a number of firms in Chicago…

I worked at GVO from 1995 on. I don’t think I ever heard of Ron, but GVO was founded in 1966, so that’s 20 years of history I have no clue about. If he RETIRED in ‘91 from his job post-GVO, he could have left GVO anytime. 1970? 1980? Who knows.

Anyway, the information people have shared for distribution about their post-GVO employment can be found here at my GVO Alumni page.

This band just seems, well, not very good, but perhaps bad in a good way?

I get a lot of Israeli spam. This one features apples and honey, just in time for the holidays. See the big picture here.

Update: Sigh. The link no longer works.

My foreign grocery musuem has been included in a teacher’s guide to Action Activities for International Business

Maybe this is an SP2 issue, but my XP system just got auto-updated, and the downloading-update icon in the system tray no longer had the “pause” feature. The update took over my system while I was trying to do something, spun everything pretty hard, and I couldn’t stop it. Bad Microsoft.

What’s messed up beyond that is that went to 37% or something and then disappeared. No update dialog, nothing. So wha’ happa?

Update: in fact, what the damn thing was downloading was SP2. It took several attempts for the download to complete, and then it installed SP2. I had checked the Microsoft updates page a few times, being told I didn’t need any more updates, so I assumed I had already DONE SP2, so this was a surprise. Everything is working okay, but Microsoft definitely pisses me off. After the update, they’ve put Windows Media Player in my quick-launch toolbar at the bottom (or whatever it’s called) - I didn’t ask for that, so why do they need to do it? Despite confirming my auto-update settings (download the updates, but don’t install them until I say it’s okay) before completing the SP2 install, they reset them to something different after completing the install, and the fact that I have a separate virus checker seems to crash the special program that launches right after you do the first reboot. We’ll see what happens, but they just annoy me - what can I say.

link
One of Japan’s favorite desserts, the humble pudding, has long been
available as a canned shake for those who want to enjoy the taste everywhere possible. It has been a best seller since 1991. Now, the pudding shake comes in a 275 ml can with a big spigot. That means bigger dollops for you to lap up.

My upcoming talk at CHIFOO in Portland, OR, is now on-deck. A nice PDF flyer is here.

Airing 9/10 on ABC Family. “Wait until his family finds out…”

Technorati: abc+family, tv, show, gary+cole, pop+rocks

I’ve only got one post up, but I am now blogging here as well.

Butt Rub.com

I’m not 100%, but I believe that this is one of the signs of the coming apocalypse…
Sugar Ray singer Mark McGrath (news) has signed on as permanent co-host of the TV entertainment show ‘Extra,’ producers said Thursday. McGrath plans to continue working with the band, which has a greatest-hits CD in the works, and will fit performances and tours into his TV schedule.

The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has decided not to distribute the director David O. Russell’s new antiwar documentary when it re-releases his 1999 Gulf War movie, ‘Three Kings,’ this fall, judging it ‘totally inappropriate’ to do so in a political season, a studio spokeswoman said.
‘This came out to be a documentary that condemns, basically, war,’ said the spokeswoman, Barbara Brogliatti. ‘This is supposed to be a special edition of ‘Three Kings,’ not a polemic about war.’

Warner Brothers doesn’t want to be seen as being against war? I thought our culture had a basic assumption that war, hatred, violence and all that stuff is bad, pure and simple. It doesn’t mean we don’t do it, that it isn’t necessary - that seems to me to be the part that is subject to interpretation, but who the hell is pro-war? We may support a specific war, but is anyone pro-war?