The true purpose of the internet

I'm sure most of my readers know of Googlewhacking, the sport of trying to find a combination of two words which return exactly one hit through Google. One can even keep score by multiplying the number of hits the individual words produce. I think the highest score I ever saw way "monophysite linux", which is alas no longer a whack; the sport in general is being degraded by the number of sleazy commercial sites which do dictionary dumps to get more Google hits. However, that was a genuine hit--it was someone describing people who believe that computers should only have one operating system installed.

My own favorite contribution was "brachiating numbat".

Anyway, in a friends-locked post, someone I know just accidentally invented a variant, which he tastefully did not name "Googlewhacking-off". Basically, it's a challenge to find a word which does not eventually yield porn. Inspired by the above-mentioned early Christian heresy, I tried "monophysite porn" and was amazed at the number of hits it got. Even "monophysite bukkake" returns over 200 hits, which really makes me shudder. "Nestorism porn", however, returns no hits at all, so I suspect that's a winner.

Yes, this is why Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML. Thanks for asking.

A travel surprise

It turns out that it's really, really, really cheap to fly on the day after Thanksgiving.

So I'm flying to Michigan on Black Friday to pick up the car that nigelpuggle's human mommy is graciously gifting to our household. I'll be driving back on Saturday (and possibly Sunday).

The advantage is this: Even if I end up having to stop for the night mid-way, we'll save about $500 on the cheapest possible auto shipping I could find, the scheduling is completely under our control, and I can guarantee door-to-door delivery, which none of the shippers could do. Books on disc make long distance solo drives quite bearable, so I've already grabbed a couple from the local library--Pride and Prejudice, which I've never read, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I read once in junior high and have been wanting to re-read at least since late 2001. (I "read" most of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix driving home from a Santanalia visit to my parents a couple of years back.)

I'm not going to have long to visit in Michigan, unfortunately; my flight is late afternoon so that, if necessary, I can help supervise the end-of-trading-day cleanup at my office. Fortunately, the market closes at 1 PM on Thanksgiving Friday, and cleanup only takes about ten minutes. (There are other people who know how to do most of it, but if any of the systems run into problems, I'm the best person for solving most of them.) But it will be nice seeing nellorat's siblings, in-law, and nephew even if only for the one evening, and we'll be coming back over Santanalia only three weeks later.

Geek books

I usually don't do this type of quiz unless I've scored high. Amazingly, I did--most of the books are old enough that I actually read them, before all my reading time was eaten up by comics, blogs, and Usenet.

( The list )

List taken from supergee; like him, I had no idea what The Trouble with Lichen was when I saw this list. I believe it's the only book on this list that we don't own.

Murtha

This is the entire right-wing/left-wing divide in a single incident.

Rep. Murtha, a war hero, the first Viet Nam vet elected to Congress, and in general a hawkish Democrat, makes a speech declaring his hard-reached decision that it's time for the US to pull out of Iraq.

He is immediately denounced as a coward by Dick Cheney, who pulled five deferments to escape service in the 'Nam, and by Jean Schmidt, a representative who ran against an Iraq veteran by calling him a pacifist coward. The Rethugs then immediately introduce a bill taking Murtha's position and exaggerating it to the point where only three reps (none of them Murtha) could vote for it, thereby, apparently, proving that Murtha wasn't serious about the point they tried to shove into his mouth.

I love my country. Where has it gone?

Another neat thing on the web that I didn't know was there

Thanks to redbird, I now know about TheThingsIWant.com, which is a web-based shopping list/wish list page. It basically just lets you easily set up a web list of things you want to buy and/or have other people buy for you and have other people take things off it when they've bought them. (Honor system only, for public lists anyway--one can't stop a vandal from marking your entire list as bought.) This approach has the tremendous advantage that I can point, for instance, my non-game-loving family towards the exact games I want and a shop which I know stocks them.

At the request of my extended family, I've put up a holiday shopping list. It includes a lot of things I've deliberately avoided buying for myself because I knew the holidays were approaching.