Sometimes you read a news item about something so propesterously stupid, you wonder how the people that the protagonists belong to have so far managed to escape all of Darwin’s traps. I won’t name and shame here, if only because the other day I read such a news item about the Dutch: apparently, the city … Read More

People want to believe that their car is special, individual. When I was working the lot at the used car place, we used to keep a car out back and we would shove dead pigeons under the hood. Dead pigeons, man. That car was waiting for the perfect customer, a little old lady with a … Read More

On May 2, 2103, Elwood Caswell walked rapidly down Broadway with a loaded revolver hidden in his coat pocket. He didn’t want to use the weapon, but feared he might anyhow. This was a justifiable assumption, for Caswell was a homicidal maniac. Thus begins Robert Sheckley’s Bad Medicine. On December 9, one of the few … Read More

I don’t think I ever quite got the blogroll concept; the list of links you see in the sidebar of this page are blogs that I try and read daily. Some of the other sites that I visit from time to time: Slashdot competitors Webwereld (Dutch), Heise (German) and The Register. Heise is probably the … Read More

As a young teenager I loved Hill Street Blues, and as an older teenager St. Elsewhere even more so. Seeing afternoon reruns nowadays the shows look seriously dated. But still, now and again I catch a glimpse of what I liked so much. For instance, Frank Furillo has no time to talk to his ex-wife … Read More

After one of the two head-rabbis of Israel admitted to using the Firefox webbrowser over Satan’s Internet Explorer, because it “keeps out the schmutz”, and almost all of New York admitted to same, now God has been discovered to give a glowing recommendation. Source: Köllner Stadt-Anzeiger To the left in the picture is the variable … Read More

If you are one of my Dutch readers and would like to help out proofreading for Project Gutenberg, there is now a little project doing the rounds that seems to fit these dark, cold days just nicely: “Alleen op de Wereld” by Hector Malot is currently being processed by Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders. Anyone can … Read More

The Sargasso blog has tested it, and it turns out that people who read right-wing blogs have a slight preference for using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser (Dutch), whereas the visitors of left wing blogs are split 50/50 on the whole browser issue. Of course the methodology used is entirely unsound, as opposed to a … Read More

Google results for Barbie: “Activities and games for girls online!”, “Servers are busy”, “Mattel”, and “Our toys”. Google results for Barby: “Barby porno”, “מועדון הבארבי”, “Barby is bad”, “Girl guides and girl scouts everywhere” and “der bezaubernden Stadt an der Elbe-Saale-Mündung”. Just so that 30th century archeologists know.

Do you, if you need to scroll a long web page up and back down, for instance because you need to look up the bloke’s name to decide whether it was Weinberg or Weinberger, select part of the text to remember where you were? Because I do. (Undoubtedly this is illegal in some countries, like … Read More