The Brunch Table

Justina found this little guy* poking around one of her orchids tonight, and he was so cute that I had to snap a picture or two. Not long after we released him into the wilds of our fire escape, we found his little brother near the flowerpot. Justina’s not worried, though–she says that if they get to be too pestulant, she’ll just make a beer trap. What’s this? Yes, apparently snails love beer, and will happily drink themselves to death. Well, you learn something new every day…

*land snails are hermaphrodites, so it’s possible that it identified more as “gal”

VerifiedVoting.org’s TechWatch program is a great idea: they’re getting a bunch of geeks of all stripes together to act as election monitors this year, the theory being that we’ll be better qualified to notice and articulate what went wrong if some of the new voting machines flake out. I hope that many of you will go sign up for it yourselves, regardless of who you’re going to vote for this year; as it stands now, both major parties have already suffered apparent miscounts from electronic voting machines in various local elections. And if you’re in Florida, send email to voteprotect-fl@verifiedvoting.org right away, because they want to have people in place for the August 31st primary election.

I’m at LAS a few hours before my flight because I didn’t want to deal with the mobbed baggage check at the hotel, and on a whim I open my laptop and discover that they have free web-access Wi-Fi. It’s a good thing, because the in-terminal slots weren’t giving me any love. (I’m far more addicted to websurfing than to gambling, in any case.) This is the second airport in three days that’s had free wireless–PIT even had unrestricted TCP/IP access in terminal C, so I could run AIM and SSH and other nifty things. Score!

An Onion article just gave me a revelatory analogy, and I thought I’d share it: Classical physics is the list of ingredients; quantum physics is the warning that there may be peanuts. I don’t think I really understood the difference till today.

I’m going to enter the Everyman non-professional photo contest (you should too!), but I’m having trouble picking two to submit. If you wouldn’t mind looking through a few of my favorites and commenting on the ones you like best, I’d be much obliged.

Justina and I had a bit of time left on our Zipcar last night, so we decided to venture out to the suburban wasteland across the river for some Krispy Kreme (car-sharing-induced traffic, ha!). The big donut assembly line is pretty neat—but not entirely foolproof, as you can see. I watched this little guy flub his dismount from the oven conveyor, which got him out of sync for the flipper in the fry bath, so he never got cooked on top. I wonder how many of them end up like that?

So reading up on l’affaire Jibjab has brought me to this remarkable fact: Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” was itself grabbed and censored in the McCarthy era. I found the original version, and also the one that was in my elementary-school songbook (dig the two missing verses):