Quartz City

Irritating and execrable pop psychologist John Gray (the “Men Are From Mars…” guy) threatens legal action against a blogger who exposes Gray’s fraudulent degrees. The blogger posts all the legal documentation and the news story spreads. More details here and here

Not sure? Find out with FundRace which tracks all campaign contributions by name and geographic area. Lots of Dean, Edwards, and Clark contributors in my neighborhood.

Victoria mentions a cool party idea that she and Johnzo are doing so in the interesting of meme propagation, I’m reposting here:

This Sunday evening, Johnzo and I are throwing a letter-writing party. Come on over and do your part to shame County Executive Sims into doing the right thing by the people who got him elected! Letter-writing for other causes is, of course, most welcome. Whether you want to get married, finally, after all these years; to urge stronger penalties for people involved in dog-fighting; to save the Hubble; or just to tell your local sewer commissioner that she’s doing a bang-up job, come on over and work that democracy-mojo. We commence at 7:00. Postage, envelopes, the internet, and stationery will all be available. If you don’t know where we live and want to come, respond to this and I’ll clue you in. I expect that most of you will be getting a redundant e-mail invite tomorrow. Bring friends, s.o.’s, parents, you name it. We want to pack the house.

The Secret Service affidavit that the Smoking Gun posted is interesting, not so much for the content (security begins at home, gee big surprise!) but for the glaring grammar error on the third page.

Guys, it’s “LEECH”, not “LEACH”. May I suggest some remedial English grammar classes at the junior college of your choice…

A good week for geek science news so far, yesterday was the announcement of Sedna. Today it’s zombie lobsters!

Call it cryonics for crustaceans. A Connecticut company says its frozen lobsters sometimes come back to life when thawed.

Trufresh began freezing lobsters with a technique it used for years on salmon after an offhand suggestion by some workers. It found that some lobsters revived after their subzero sojourns.

Now, Trufresh is looking for partners to begin selling the lobsters commercially. The company was scheduled to attend the International Boston Seafood Show, which began Sunday, armed with video showing two undead lobsters squirming around after being frozen stiff in a minus-40 degree chemical brine for several minutes.

The only way this story could get better was if radioactivity was involved

I’ve ranted about the sorry state of movie and DVD packaging before, and this collection of movie posters painted by Bob Peak in the 1970s and 1980s only highlights how crappy things are right now. Why can’t all movie posters look like this instead of some airbrushed gibbering celebrity head? I absolutely love this gonzo poster for Harry And Tonto:

As a fan of both urban infrastructure and secret knowledge, I cannot recommend the current “Loop Feedback Loop” exhibit at the Center for Land Use Interpretation highly enough. The Los Angeles street and freeway network is such a complex system that it’s unmanageable without automated assistance and intervention which in turn feedback into the system by controlling traffic signals, etc. All the data from the surveillance cameras, embedded induction loops, and monitoring devices are transmitted to the LA Department of Transportation’s Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control (ATSAC) System - an underground “traffic war room” (all data centers need to have a Dr. Strangelove-sized “war room” where the central brain for the system is located.

The CLUI exhibit details all this plus you get to view real-time data and laugh at the one photo of the ATSAC center which shows one of the screens tuned to The People’s Court. And you’re also right next to the best specialized bookstore in Los Angeles.

A lone SST sign on 4th St. in downtown Long Beach. I think this was the site of one of the SST retail stores, now it’s a ghost awaiting the inevitable Starbucks.

Twenty years ago I bought basically everything this label released.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Orange County education system at work:

City officials were so concerned about the potentially dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.

Then they learned, to their chagrin, that dihydrogen monoxide - H2O for short - is the scientific term for water.

“It’s embarrassing,” said City Manager David J. Norman. “We had a paralegal who did bad research.”

The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as “an odorless, tasteless chemical” that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.