K-Squared Ramblings

Arctic Lairs and Towers of Midnight

• Pair of spam subjects this morning: “Watch your neighbor!” and “Creepy.” No kidding. (via @lol_spam #) I’ve got Weird Al’s song, “Do I Creep You Out?” running through my head now!
• Ah, the Onion! Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds of Secret Arctic Lairs. # I’m trying to remember whether Dr. Impossible had an arctic base.
• The next Wheel of Time book after The Gathering Storm will be called Towers of Midnight — a much better title! # The final book will use Robert Jordan’s original title for what he hoped to fit into a single book, A Memory of Light.

On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Doll

Alternate caption: On the Internet, no one know you’re not a dog.

Even Santas Have it Tough

Presumably this institution is designed to serve the needs of Santa Clauses who subsist on Ho-Hos.

Sending the Wrong Message?

I figured I’d wait until after the election to post this one.

Insert your own joke about renting politicians.

(Sorry about the image quality; it was across an intersection, so it was pretty small on the original image. I didn’t even resize it. It’s just cropped. Yeah, my camera isn’t that fantastic once you get down to a 1:1 pixel view)

How do you get them to talk?

How does that work?

Wait a minute… how does one lease a tax refund?

California Craziness

Here are some interesting/amusing signs we spotted on our trip to Northern California last month.

This seemed appropriate for a trip to a comic convention. And like the Sylar Industries sign I posted earlier, all it needed was a little adjustment. Can you get a room with the power cosmic? Found in San Simeon, across the highway from our motel. (Keep in mind as you read on that the one on the right is the only doctored photo in the post.)

My personal favorite was this one in Sunnyvale. It’s always nice when city planners (or anyone making a sign, really) have a sense of humor.

Perhaps Mr. Speeder was frustrated by driving this street, somewhere near San Luis Obispo:

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Sylar Industries

Up in Napa, we found this sign at the entrance to Syar Industries.

Being Heroes fans, we couldn’t resist. Not only was the name just one letter off of the show’s popular villain, but the elongated S in the logo was just begging for a trio of crosspieces to turn it into the helix symbol that appears everywhere in the show. A bit of photo-manipulation later:

Culprit Identified

The problem with the PowerBook has been confirmed to be the RAM upgrade I put in back in 2004. It hummed along fine for 3½ years, but I guess it finally went bad with the laptop getting so much more use the last few weeks.

Better something modular and easy to get at (well, except for the one stripped screw) than something intrinsic to the machine. Under the circumstances, I’m just having the shop replace it.

Though I guess I should’ve known better than to trust this guy:

moar humorous pics

(Check out the original lolcat post if you don’t recognize the phrasing.)

Assuming the box continues to pass diagnostics with the new memory, I should be able to pick it up at lunch on Monday.

Update: Success! The computer is back, and working again!

Ick! Sins!

According to Katie, this actually said “quick sins” the previous time we drove past it!

This shot almost cost us our new car. The sign faces the freeway, and rather than stick Katie with shooting from a moving vehicle at night, I tried to find a good angle from the parking lot. We saw that the lot extended far enough to see around the corner, and headed for the end of the lot. As I prepared to turn into the last space on the end, a truck came zooming around the corner of the next building over, a Carl’s Jr. with a drive-through and absolutely no visibility. Clearly they weren’t expecting to see anyone in the lot at 10:00 at night. Fortunately we both stopped in time.

Also, I now know that the horn works.

Santa’s other job

Spotted last summer. In case you were wondering…

…now you know what he does for the rest of the year!

Londo/G’Kar in 2008!

This just showed up in my email from babylon5scripts.com:

From JMS’s Cafe Press store (the same site through which he’s selling his script books with commentary):

With the coming 2008 elections, there aren’t a lot of candidates we can agree upon. So as a public service, we are now providing a slate of candidates that will bring the country together in common cause and preserve many of this nations’ finest electoral traditions.

Slates available include Londo/G’Kar, G’Kar/Londo, and Zathras/Zathras (trained in crisis management!)

I remember having an unofficial Sheridan/Ivanova ’96 (or possibly Sheridan/Delenn) bumper sticker, but I’m fairly certain it was a homemade “Elect The Brain” (as in Pinky and the…) sticker that I actually put on my car that year.

Now if only they’d used the correct punctuation on the ’08 instead of trusting smart quotes. (That should be an apostrophe, not a left single quote.)

New Age Drinks?

Okay, maybe I’ve missed a memo or something, but can someone tell me: what exactly is a new age drink? Nothing in the aisle stood out as being particularly new-agey.

Icy?

I found this photo while looking for the UCI Student Center pic. This was taken on the way back from a camping trip with UCI’s Campuswide Honors Program in the Angeles National Forest in April 2000. IIRC it was along Angeles Crest Highway.

A permanent sign isn’t necessarily the best way to indicate a transitory condition.

Not a problem

Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be anything odd about this sign. But look at the placement.

Why do they need a No Parking sign in the middle of the lawn? It’s a new sign, too—they just redid the entire lawn last year.

Seriously, I don’t think they’re going to have much of a problem with people parking on the lawn in front of an office building in Irvine.

Come to think of it, though, this is only 50 feet or so from the crosswalk warning device.