>*

WHAT HAVE I WROUGHT?

I went back to the kitchen yesterday to grab a drink, and hearing the rasp of tearing foil in the next room wandered in to determine its source. Kiko and Gabriel looked up from the table, then, Magic cards spread from hell to breakfast, starter boxes split with the fury of their opening, a mixture of guilt and fear percolating up their faces. They were orchestrating some kind of card draft, frenzied and immediate, like they were bagging a huge mountain of coke in some halogen flooded sub-basement.

I assumed the unmistakable eyebrow crinkle/lip configuration that was like, "Magic, guys? Seriously?"

But Magic it was. They started with Pokemon, ironically I think, moving on to harder stuff like the WoW TCG, ever skirting the form's coiled All-Father. They are engaged in a perilous sort of business, here, but they'll never know it; not 'til ten years hence, looking into their own hollow eyes in the bathroom mirror, trying to scrub tiny flecks of foil which will not come off.

Seriously though, there is a reason I keep coming back, and it isn't just because I enjoy hemorrhaging money. [via]

From the TF2 blog

"You have found this instructive," might be my new favorite valediction to use to close out my emails.

Save vs. sympathy

The story about a prisoner deprived of his Dungeon Master's Guide and custom campaign world resonated. It sucks when the guards are all coming down on your shit, and, like, taking your stuff, but it also sucks pretty bad to be beaten to death with a sledgehammer, which is what this guy did to get in there. Tends to dilute the sympathy.

[via Penny Arcade]

Of The Blue Color of The Sky

Rather enjoying the new OK GO album... it seems to have hints of the ever-so-popular "let's turn everything electronic" in it without being overbearing. Also some disco. Yep.

Job security

Last week, Officer Montilla said he arrested a 400-pound man in a housing project in Harlem who had 10 bags of crack cocaine.

“The man was saying he was going to kill my mother, and kill my family,” Officer Montilla said. He said the angriest person he dealt with before was someone who wanted a better rate on municipal bonds.

[via NYTimes]

Targeting

Seen in the google Cambridge office...

/mobile

Next: Blogger and Earth

/mobile

Just like Canamerica!

This NYTimes story reads so much like an Onion article, it's worrying.

Colonel Qaddafi — dressed in a brown traditional Libyan robe, embroidered vest and shirt, with a black pin of the African continent pinned to his chest — took about 17 minutes to get to the main point of his speech, which was a demand for an African seat on the Security Council.

He also suggested that those who caused “mass murder” in Iraq be tried; defended the right of the Taliban to establish an Islamic emirate; wondered whether swine flu was cooked up in a laboratory as a weapon; and demanded a thorough investigation of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

He offered to move the United Nations headquarters to Libya because leaders coming here had to endure jet lag and because the understandable security against another attack on New York by Al Qaeda was too stringent. And he repeated his longstanding proposal that Israel and the Palestinian territories be combined into one state called Isratine.

Although a red warning light illuminates after the 15-minute time limit, United Nations officials said they could not remember anyone interrupting a head of state to explain that the allotted time had expired.

Or, you know, a 747 full of DVDs

The fact that this article on pigeons carrying USB drives having higher bandwidth than South African broadband is causing any buzz at all is a bit disappointing. To be fair, the numbers in the article do make their ADSL sound like crap, but don't people understand the difference between bandwidth and latency by now?