My new favorite phrase: “Slon Doon”
by V.E. on February 12th, 2008
filed under entertainment, words
Um… wow. That’s all I can say in this case.
by V.E. on February 12th, 2008
filed under entertainment, wtf
This goes into the “What the f@#k were they thinking?” file…
LONDON (Reuters) – Police in central England are hunting for a badly scorched would-be copper power cable thief after finding a hacksaw embedded in an 11,000 volt power cable Saturday night.The thief, who also left a lit blow torch at the scene, is expected to be badly charred, spiky haired and not exactly the brightest bulb in the socket.
“The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone,” said Phil Wilson, customer operations manager with local power company Central Networks.
“At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper… We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and were dragged away by an accomplice.” But searches of local hospitals have so far not found the culprit, a spokeswoman for Derbyshire Police said Tuesday.
“Maybe they had a lucky escape,” she said. “We don’t have any leads yet.”
Nearly 800 customers in the village of Creswell were cut off when the wannabe copper thief sawed into their power supply on Saturday night, but Central Networks got the lights back on within a few hours.
Copper prices have more than doubled in the last four years as China has gobbled up huge quantities of it, sparking a wave of copper thefts across the globe from South Africa and the United States to Italy and Britain.
Thieves targeting power lines and electricity substations have already led to two fatalities in Britain and many serious injuries, while leaving thousands without power.
V1ann Courtney
by V.E. on February 12th, 2008
filed under entertainment, personal, thoughts, wtf
… Um, so obviously no one checks the outgoing mail over at Harper’s Magazine. A funny story, actually…
So, my dad is a little odd (runs in the family, I guess) and will send me the most random stuff (via snail mail) when he sends all the mail I receive at my home address in Los Angeles. For example, I got him the 2007 Stuff on My Cat page-a-day calendar for Christmas 2006. He sent me the entire thing one or two or five pages at a time; after the day (or those days) had passed, he would stick it (them) into my next box of forwarded mail. Riiiiiight. ^_^
He also sent me the Post-It notes he’d used to follow the changing of the new year by timezone on our globe at home. One says “2007 —>” and the other says “<— 2008″ and he would move them every hour according to the New Year. And, when it got close to California (Pacific Time) switching over, we all toasted and sang Auld Lang Syne* every hour for roughly four hours in a row before our midnight and a couple of hours after. Like I said, my dad is a little odd. In a good way, of course.
* Well, the parts we know, anyway… which consist wholly of the first two lines of the first verse, although Dad can play most of the melody on the piano.
He also has a tendency to send me unopened mail that is addressed to him or my mom but that is obviously junk mail. Don’t ask me why; maybe he doesn’t want to throw it out, or he knows I’ll open it, or something… I don’t know. Whatever the case, I received this letter from Harper’s Magazine in a recent box-o-stuff.
I opened the letter before I realised it’s not even addressed to me. [Sigh] But then, I looked closer. Technically, it isn’t addressed to anyone in my family, although the address (which has been blacked out, as you can tell) is correct. Our initials are as follows, in order of birthdate: VOD, CBD, VED, KLD, JCD. The initials of the person to whom this letter is addressed are VCD. Obviously, that doesn’t match any of our initials.
Then, I looked even closer. V1ann? V1ann? V1ANN? What the f@#k? With a “1″? Um, what? (And, on a side-note, I’m only adding to the problem by writing this entry because now there’s search engine fodder on the Internets.)
My mom’s name is “Viann” and sometimes “i” gets mixed with “1″—especially in l33tspeak. But, first of all, my mom has never written anything in l33t, to my knowledge, including her name. Secondly, even if she had, this is (theoretically) a formal letter we’re dealing with, here, not some random SPAM email.
Isn’t there a cursory once-over given to the outgoing mail to make sure that the addressee’s name doesn’t have—oh, I don’t know—a number in it? I mean, this is ridiculous, even for junk mail. Plus, now my home address is forever connected to “V1ann Courtney” in the Harper’s database. And that’s just what we need.
My Sawyer nickname
by V.E. on February 12th, 2008
filed under entertainment, quizzes/surveys
I find this appropriate, even though I’ve never watched one minute of Lost in my entire life. Get your own nickname a’la Sawyer here.
One thing that does annoy me, though, is that (if you’ll notice) the assumption is that the quiz-taker is white (and female).
My reasoning—”Your Body Type Is: (choose up to 3)” choices are “Tall, Tan, Blonde, Short, Pale, Brunette”…. what about “Dark” or something not so white?… Or, at least, something not so obviously white? Also, when was the last time you referred to a guy as “brunette”?
