...summer, summer, summer-tiiime, oooh the summertime... doot doot pause doot doot...

Anyway, Kim and I had some watermelon yesterday.  If you’re ever not sure what season it is, that’s one good way to check.  If you’re eating fresh watermelon it’s probably summer.

It was delicious too, and that is the main point I’m trying to make.  Other fruits must be so jealous of watermelon.  I like most fruit, but there’s really no comparison.  I mean what other fruit is four times as big as your head, is hard and dry on the outside, and is hiding a cool, juicy, sweet, red paradise on the inside?

I also love raspberries and strawberries, but they are still no match for watermelon.

When asked this riddle 80% of kindergarten kids got the answer, compared to 17% of Stanford University seniors.

What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it and if you eat it you will die ???

From this ARS article:

Quoting roman:

Kids get forgotten in their car seat and die of hypothermia all the time. Happens a lot during the summer months and in the southern states.

Somehow I doubt it.

I’m reading this book called  Eats, Shoots & Leaves that Kim got as a (gag?) gift from her boss.  It’s a book about punctuation, and it’s also a "Runaway #1 British Bestseller" apparently.

If you are interested in good writing and punctuation, or more to the point: if you are bothered by bad writing and punctuation, then you will love this book.  It’s laugh-out-loud funny, to me at least.  Here are some excerpts:

Quoting Lynne Truss:

I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up.  Or, failing that, if a book announcing itself as The Only Way to Spell Connecticut is This is to be found in heaps on a table in front of them, they will think, "Hang on, I might get this!"  But it turns out there are people whom you simply cannot help, because it suits them to say, with a shrug, "Do you know, I’ve always wanted to know how to use an apostrophe -- and oh dear, I don’t know how to wash my hair either."  [xxiii]

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t.  A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near where I live.  "Come inside," it says, "for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s."  If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.  [1]

No one understands us seventh-sense people.  They regard us as freaks.  When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.  [4]

In the spring of 2001 the ITVI show Popstars manufactured a pop phenomenon for our times: a singing group called Hear’Say. [...] newspapers, who insist on precision in matters of address, at once learned to place Hear’Say’s apostrophe correctly and attend to the proper spacing.  To refer in print to this group as Hearsay (one word) would be wrong, you see.  To call it Hear-Say (hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture.  And so it came to pass that Hear’Say’s poor, oddly placed little apostrophe was replicated everywhere and no one gave a moment’s though to its sufferings.  No one saw the pity of its position, hanging there in eternal meaninglessness, silently signalling to those with eyes to see, "I’m a legitimate punctuation mark, get me out of here."  [36]

Guess who’s the #1 result for the Google search lorenzo’s nazi philadelphia?  That’s right.

The new Armor For Sleep album is really good.  Check out this track from it.

Over the past few days I’ve taken a lot of photos:

Ducks and Fog on K-Milk Pond Clouds and Skies and Shiloh Treeline at Dusk

Finally, check out this awesome error I got from one of the ancient Mac OS9 systems at work:

"An unexpected error occurred, because an error of type -110 occurred."

From BBC News:

It was found that habitual cannabis users were 9.5 times more likely to be involved in crashes, with 5.6% of people who crashed having taken the drug compared to 0.5% of the control group.

Their risk of an accident was increased whether or not they had used cannabis immediately before the accident.

In other news, the oceans were found to be full of water.

Apparently I’m currently #2 on google for the query quotes against wack people.  The fact that someone actually searched for that is hilarious.  If I had a motto or a middle name, that would be it.  Anthony "quotes against wack people" DiSante.

Those of you who know my dad and/or my neighbor Dan Watkins will appreciate this little exchange that happened in a dream I just had:

Quoting a strange dream:

Dad: Where’s Nick?
Dan: They’re caving, in Holland.
Dad: Where?
Dan: It’s the bomb.

I was up in my room and they were in the kitchen, and Dan had just come up from the basement, where he had been playing my drums -- he was playing a song from Rage Against The Machine’s "Evil Empire" album, and he totally nailed it.  I was in my room banging my head and waving my arm as he played  ( :

OK, back to sleep.

This photo is very fun.  You almost don’t even notice that it’s a night shot.  The photographer used a 583 second exposure -- yes, that’s nearly ten minutes.  One of the very few things I dislike about my DSC-S85 is that its longest possible exposure is merely 8 seconds.  I have a few somewhat similar night shots, but they aren’t nearly so cool.

Also very fun is the fact that I’m the fifth hit on Google for this:

Quoting some poor soul:

what does it mean when you have the same dream about the same person for over a week?

Yes, what does it mean?  Pray tell, oh Magic Google Ball!  : )

There should be The Stupid Police, and their job would be to throw people like this in jail.

Quoting Associated Press:

Arkansas coach Houston Nutt said that players caught loafing will no longer wear pink jerseys during practices in an effort to avoid offending breast cancer survivors.

So it’s now Politically Incorrect to use the color pink in association with anything negative.  There are lots of other sensitive issues in our society, some of which have particular colors to identify their movements.  Should all these colors be off-limits for all uses with negative connotations?  Of course not, that would be stupid.

[Hat-tip to Mike.]

In case you haven’t seen one, this is what a computer might look like in the year 2004.

The best part is the steering wheel ( :

This is really funny.  Make sure to click the "Next" link at the bottom -- they only get better.

No banners.

No pop-up ads.

No pop-under ads.

No flash ads.

No email solicitation.

No free-plus-shipping.

No accounting scandals.

No fat cats.

No corporate jets.

No friends and family.

No Steve Ballmer monkey dance.

No annoying SBC partnership

No Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies

No shooting the target to win a prize

No "Earn $107.00 Daily, Part-Time... Even While You Sleep!"

No missing classmates from other countries.

No running around the pool.

No gratuitous use of exclamation marks!

No goofy guy singing the name of the site.

No e-ANYTHING.

No i-ANYTHING.

- Cox & Forkum

Yep, that’s about the size of it.

The recipe for toby stew is hilarious!

So it’s now the season of "Lent" in the Catholic church (not that that applies to me, because I’m not Catholic, I’m Christian), and everywhere you go, you can find restaurant signs that say "Lenten Special."  Because the Catholic church forbids eating meat on Fridays during Lent, and because some Catholics abstain from meat completely during Lent, the Lenten specials offered by restaurants are typically fish dishes.  You’ll even see fast food joints offering fish -- as if fast food weren’t gross enough, now you can have fast fish.

Well tonight I drove past a Taco Bell and saw this sign: "Lenten Special: 2 Bean Burritos."

So a buddy of  mine sends me this link.  I became very scared.  I don’t know what to think.  It seems the guy know’s of moshing but is unable to do it with people half his size.  Anthony, I need you to tell me if this is good or bad.  If I feel slight nausea should I turn it off or go with the flow?

hi
wat r u up 2? les meet up. by tyhe way are all volcanoes bad? i need to know ergent!

WHO SEARCHES FOR THAT??

I live by Dilbert.  I know you’ll like this one Anthony.  When I saw this I immediately thought of you.

Margie and I watched this movie, twice so far.  It’s freaking hilarious.  Best movie I’ve seen in a long time.  Watch it if you haven’t yet.  I know you’ll like it.  You can’t stop the moonboots!

It’s not that I want to keep posting these all the time, but they just keep pouring in... I’m #2 for:

Chief Elements of Krispy Kreme’s Strategy

Now THAT one I’m proud of  ( :

And interestingly, Belmont Club is #3, which is another blog that I frequent.

As you may have noticed, I am immensely entertained by the Google queries I find in my website’s referrer logs.  Barring the technical stuff, the things people are searching for are rarely found on my site, but sometimes they are.  I recently discovered that I am #5 for mcconnells mill photos and #13 #2 for just mcconnells mill, because of these photos.  Given that McConnells Mill is a really nice and big state park, that’s (apparently) pretty well-known around Pittsburgh, it’s kind of amazing that I’m #13 #2 overall for just the name itself.

I’m #2 for knee deep in nietzsche’s lies which is pretty cool.

Then I’m #8 for why does my screen blink whenever I click on something.  Come on people, it’s Google, not a magic 8-ball.  Generally speaking, treating Google like a librarian is not a good way to find what you’re looking for.  It’s not a person.  You need to put a few seconds of thought into your search efforts.

You have to remember that Google is just taking the words you enter and finding webpages that contain those words.  It’s not looking for "answers" to your input.  The state of search at this point in time just isn’t that intelligent, so your goal is to think of what terms would appear on a page that discusses your problem.  And the real secret to searching effectively is using phrases instead of individual words whenever possible.  The other day when someone found my site by searching for nonsense poems about moldy bread, they didn’t find what they were looking for.  Based on his query we can assume he wasn’t interested in nonsense poems about just any bread; it had to be moldy bread.  But that isn’t what he asked Google to find; he asked Google for all pages containing all of those words, even if "moldy" and "bread" appeared in completely different places on the page, as they do on mine.  What he should have done is put quotes around the phrase "moldy bread" in his search, because that tells Google that the pages must contain that exact phrase, not just the two separate terms independent of each other.

Of course, Google is programmed to try to figure out what you might have meant, in a crude sort of way, and will sometimes assume that if you have two words in a row, you might have wanted them to be a phrase, even though you failed to use quotes.  So you’ll probably see that the first results do indeed have either "nonsense poems" or "moldy bread" as phrases.  But again, search just isn’t that smart yet, so my site -- which contains neither of the phrases "nonsense poems" or "moldy bread" -- was still #10.  (Well, now I’m #2, but only because I now have a post containing that exact sequence of words.)

But back to the fun stuff: I’m #1 for when is googlebot coming.  (And he is, you know.)  (Coming.)  (For you.)  (Soon.)

I am #10 on Google for:

nonsense poems about moldy bread

My life is now complete.

- Cox and Forkum