Susskins Central Dispatch

Totally cool

Museum welcomes flesh-eating bugs

The beetles will be kept under tight security
London's Natural History Museum has taken custody of 100 flesh-eating beetles which will be used to strip animal carcasses down to bare bones.

I would LOVE to see these little buggers in action. I'll bet that it's just plain fascinating, in a totally gross way.

Any science that involves carrion-eaters is awesome.

Estrogen alert

Rachel starts ovulating.

If she transfers any of that obsession into the bedroom, John's a lucky man.

Jumping out of my skin

Last night before bed, I played Doom 3 for about twenty minutes.

I was slowly pacing down a hall, looking for surprises. A steam pipe burst, sending a large metal plate clanging onto the floor.

I nearly shit my pants.

Lord, but that's an immersive experience. I'm loving and dreading it at the same time.

Bad website design

Boys, you might want to rethink your website titles at the CBC.

My sentiments exactly

And people complain about hair bands...

Fucking idiot

I need a vacation.

Surefire way to prove to yourself you're an idiot:
1. Book flights to Pennsylvania for the Knoebels Phoenix Phall Phunfest.
2. Make car reservations.
3. Call hotel to confirm reservations made last year.
4. Discover to your horror that the Phunfest is a week later than the flight you booked.
5. Change flights to Pennsylvania, paying $200 in penalties.
6. Realize after the fact that a former travel agent works two cubes down from you, and would have been happy to help avoid the penalties.
7. Redo car reservations.
8. Contemplate bashing head against wall.

I am running on reserves, people. I'm very close to having an episode. Hopefully it won't involve nudity in the workplace.

Totally boggled

Damn you, Michele.

I'm gonna sing the Doom Song

I've been playing Doom 3 since Thursday night.

Eric, the head of our department at work, bought it. He dislikes it. He's a Half-life sort of person, so the "cut to the chase - shoot the monsters" gameplay of Doom 3 doesn't appeal to him.

So I asked if I could borrow it. And then I asked if I could buy it. And then he just gave it to me, which was awfully nice of him. (I'm going to reciprocate. Just haven't figured out how yet.)

Doom 3 didn't run spectacularly on my machine, but it did run. It got a little twitchy frame-wise when things got really exciting. (Like when a demon was all up in my grill, bitchslapping me.) But it was playable enough to actually enjoy.

Today I did a touch of upgrading. I got a slightly juicier graphics card (Radeon 9800 Pro, up from my Radeon 9600se,) and I finally got my Gig of ram. I bought a gig of ram when I built this machine six months ago, and couldn't get it to work. So I've been running on a cheap little 256 Meg DIMM for all this time. Now my full Gig of dual-channel memory is running like a mofacky.

Doom 3 now runs a helluva lot better. I'm at High Quality with all effects turned on, and rarely run into low frame rates. I'm very happy.

I'm also into the Alpha Complex on Mars. I've got a long way to go, but I'm enjoying the hell out of this game. I've been startled quite a few times by demons, and I'm starting to get a little freaked out by all the mayhem. Man, this certainly is a step or two up from Doom 2. Oh so long ago in the Windows 3.1 days.

Yes, I'm middle-aged and playing a first-person shooter with my lousy reflexes. And having a great time. Whodathunk?

Oh, who's stupid idea was it to put the forward key on "w" and the sprint key on "shift"? I'm getting a cramp in my pinky from trying to hold down the shift key so that I can sprint through levels. I'm remapping that sucker to "e" tomorrow morning.

Excuse me. Gotta go wash all the demon blood off my body armor. The head shots really make it spray.

RIP Julia Child

Julia Child has died.

I loved Julia Child. I loved her sense of humor, her enthusiasm for food, and her strange hypnotic voice.

So long, Julia. Thank you for the Danish Pastry show. I made the danish braid!

A tiny blog showcase

Time for a new feature. (Okay, I'm bored.)

I figure that everyone needs a little boost now and again. Who am I to not do my part? So you'll now see random tiny blog showcases, in which I link to someone and boost their ranking in the Blog Ecosystem:

Tonight's Tiny Blog Showcase: Professor Chaos

The Professor (and yes, he really is a professor,) was recently discovered at his old site, and outed among his colleagues and students.

Just as I started to developed a bit of a readership at my other location, I discovered that two of my students had inadvertently “outed” me: one told another professor about my site (yes, I really am a professor) and another cut-and-pasted something I wrote and plastered my name and title all over it. So I’ve moved to this new location, and I’m going to try to rebuild a readership here.

Unacceptable, people. This will not stand. Let this voice be heard, without fear of recrimination from that blowhole down the hall who's still pissed that the Professor got the grant instead of him.

Go read some of the Good Doctor's work, and if possible, give him a link. Let's all do our part to get him out of the Insignificant Microbe category, maybe up to Wiggly Worm, or even Crunchy Crustacean.

Or not. I leave the choice to you. Not bending your arm, or anything.

Oh, come on. One little link. Is that so hard?

Mike kicks everyone's ass

Mike at Cold Fury dishes it out in exactly the way I would love to say, despite not being able to say it so well.

Press: “Mr. Ridge, how do you respond to charges that this security alert is really a scare tactic being used for political purposes by the Bush administration?”

Ridge: “Christ almighty, what is it with you people? You’ve spent a couple of years asking why we didn’t prevent 9/11, calling for an investigation, asking ‘how much did Bush know and when did he know it?’ You blamed us for something we failed to prevent after eight months in office, and yet to this day you give the Clinton admin a free pass, even though he had eight years—eight fucking years, people—to do something about al Qaeda and didn’t do one goddamned thing.

“You finally get your investigation, the results of which confirm most of what we’d been saying all along, but you don’t want to hear that any more than you wanted to hear about the fact that one of the Democrat commissioners, Jamie Gorelick, was responsible for the so-called “wall of separation” prohibiting information-sharing between the FBI and CIA, which nearly everyone now acknowledges was one of the biggest problems preventing any effective defense against terrorist networks. You do deign to acknowledge that problem, but the part you originally claimed to be most interested in—who was responsible—is suddenly not so interesting anymore the moment you realized you couldn’t reasonably blame us for it."

Go read the whole thing. There's a LOT more. It encapsulates the whole of my cranky right-wing tendencies of late.

Hat Tip: Brian at Peeve Farm

He's back

And he's just as irritable as ever.

It's the return of Mean Mr. Mustard, shedding a cold unflinching light on the madness in Berkeley. Because someone has to watch the looniest of the loony left.

The weekly weigh-in

is over at Project Fatboy. Go check it out.

Hey, I gotta drive traffic over there somehow.

Mole benign

Biopsy results are in. Benign Mole.

Dr. Lee still wants to completely excise it because it has some atypical features, but it's not cancerous. I knew it wouldn't be cancerous, but better safe than sorry.

So in October I'll go in and have them slice out (chop out? dig out? rip out?) the rest of it.

Okay? Everybody okay now? No, I'm not going to get cancer and expire on you. You're not rid of me that easily. Hah!

May I help you?

Fred after his first day on the job at Batteries Plus. Damn fine looking employee, I say.

So long, pal

I'm grieving.

My TiVo has gone mental. I'm forced to retire it.

It can't handle the process of decoding the MPEG streams from satellite any more. It gets about five seconds into the stream, and the picture locks up while the sound continues. This has been happening for the past two weeks. I thought it was rotting connectors in the lines running from the dish. So we spent two hours replacing all the cables yesterday, only to find that it was still happening. (Two hours not wasted, though. They really did need to be redone.)

A quick transfer of the upstairs sat receiver to the downstairs showed that it was indeed the TiVo unit at fault. Sigh.

So I headed off to Best Buy to find another. The new Philips Satellite DVR was in stock, and only eighty bucks. So the old Philips will stick around long enough for us to watch whatever programming is lurking on the disk, and then it will be dismantled so that I can swipe the hard drive.

Goodbye, old friend. I'll miss you.