There’s a story in today’s Washington Post about aresidential zoning law in Manassas, Va. that is being used to govern who can and can’t live in people’s houses.
Activists are calling it “Anti-immigrant,” presumably because immigrants are more likely to live more densely than established citizens. One person quoted in the article called it racist.
I call it Anti-American.
Don’t get me wrong. I think zoning laws in many cases are a reasonable limit on individual rights as long as they’re declared and not changed all that much. I like that the city of Elmira can prevent my next-door neighbor’s house from being knocked down and replaced with a model airplane glue warehouse.
But to say “sorry, kick 2 people out of your house because we passed this new zoning law, and who do you think you are letting your nephew live in your house anyway” is pretty messed up.
What if people don’t kick folks out? Will Sheriffs come and make people homeless?
There’s an interesting story in today’s Washington Post about a woman who had her thesis stolen because it was on a “jump drive” in her purse.
Umm, backups, anyone? If it can fit on a jump drive, can it fit on your gmail account, too? My guess is yes.
Anyway, I didn’t get to read the whole article, so I don’t know if she gets reunited with her thesis… I’ll read that part later.
Regret the error is a site that tracks corrections and retractions in the mass media. As one who writes corrections now and then (more often than I would care to admit), I take great pleasure in reading this one.
The writer focuses on the great corrections of our time. Sometimes the author highlights the more boring screwups, but frequently there are really funny ones.
Go read it now.
Almost all of my storm windows are hung onto the house for the winter. Unfortunately, there are two windows that are not yet hung, because they are broken and wouldn’t do much good. Here’s one of them.
There are two ways I can get this fixed. I can pay someone to do it, or I can fix it myself, and save a bunch of money. The total project cost for this fix was under $25, including the tools that I get to keep for next time. I didn’t check to see the price of fixing one window pane in a removable storm window, but I bet I saved some money.
I figured that I might as well document the procedure for my blog, in case anyone else wanted to reglaze a window. “Reglaze” could mean to replace glass, but it could also mean to reapply glazier’s putty or caulk. I am not really sure. It doesn’t mean to drip molten glass (as the word suggested to me, anyway).
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I saw Rent with Erin the other night. I didn’t like it much at all.
Primarily, I thought the film was too predictable. And this is from a guy that saw neither La Boheme (the opera which it was based upon) or Rent when it was not yet a movie.
Of course, there are spoilers in this cursory review, which is why you have to click to read the entire thing. If you really think you’ll see it after it got such bad reviews (MSNBC gave it 1.5 stars), be careful what you read below.
Where do I begin? (The beginning, perhaps?) The film opens with “Seasons of love,” a great song that Erin has had on her iPod for years, in her Christmas music playlist. Then it breaks into a charging, intense number about how the main characters are going to pay rent. The film establishes that the core characters are artist types with no incomes to speak of, and suddenly they’re going to be evicted because the landlord decided to collect on last year’s rent, which had been free. So far, so good.
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Gotglued.com tells the story of a man whose buttocks became glued to a toilet seat at a hardware store.
Don’t let this happen to you! Visit gotglued.com and share your most embarrassing moments for the upcoming book celebrating life’s gotchas!
Jason Whong: Do you remember the “No soap radio” joke?
Eugene Whong: no
Jason Whong: You’re the one who told it to me
Eugene Whong: i vaguely rmember it
Eugene Whong: what is the punchline?
Jason Whong: That is the punchline
Jason Whong: I just found out what it is on wikipedia
Jason Whong: it’s anti-humor
Jason Whong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_soap_radio
Eugene Whong: ha
Eugene Whong: u figured it out
Jason Whong: I think it needed to be told by adults…
Eugene Whong: i was pulllin ur leg all along
Eugene Whong: lol
High winds closed schools nearby, tore the roof off of a restaurant’s refrigerator and hurled it into a power transformer, and blew down my fence, not even a full week after I had reinforced it with some a-frame lumber (see the post I made last week about sawing mitres).
Boo. I think the only way to keep the fence up is to actually put the posts into the ground. Which means Erin and I need to decide whether we really want to get rid of all that pavement.
Alternatively, we can build a wall with a gate…
I’m pretty sure last week I deleted the Totally Oustanding Teen Crimefighting Girls.
Let me explain. TOTCFG is this totally outstanding group of teens that masquerades by day as the Orlando Bloom fanclub. But when trouble rears its ugly head in Horseheads, New York, these girls spring to action with their… uh… high school crimefighting skills. There’s a mystery to solve. Or something. I think.
And they’re totally outstanding. And fictional. It’s a very short screenplay I wrote in the spring, intending to create a viral video using a still camera and lots of cut-and-paste in iMovie.
I took about 300 photos for use in the project, roughly. I paid the actors and actresses with pizza. But I moved into the house, and had so many other things to do, so I never actually put the piece together.
Last week I deleted it, accidentally.
Sorry, guys.
…or Cassidy and Whong house, depending on your persuasion…
I woke up this morning and nailed two of the mitres to the fenceposts to prevent the fence from blowing around in the wind. I think it may actually work.
Then I put the finishing touches on the downstairs cleaning, and soon Erin’s mom and her brother, Jim arrived. There was some conferring in the kitchen about our oven, then the turkey baking began.
Today the Dunnes are also coming over. Michelle Dunne is the bass in Erin’s quartet. She is bringing her parents, too. Michelle’s mom was great with helping us clean up yesterday, since all of our cleaning time has been spent in trips to the hospital this week.
It’s not the first Thanksgiving in Maryland that I will have missed (I think it’s my second, not counting 1979), but it’s unreasonable to expect that times will not change. And while I feel like I might be missing out on a Tradition (yes, that’s a capital T), there are others in the family who have also missed out. Eugene was in Japan for a whole bunch of Thanksgivings. And now Chris is in Kuwait or Iraq or someplace.
There will be many more Thanksgivings for Erin and I, inshallah. Some in Maryland, some in New York, and some in other places, probably.
Well. Three kids just passed our house on a riding mower. In the street. I should take a picture, so I can compete with Chris’s photos of the bedouins picking up spent brass casings from the rifle ranges. “See here, these strange kids from Elmira and their Thanksgiving traditions!”
Happy Thanksgiving.