It started up with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Bohemian Polka,” which was a fun, off-kilter start to the week. When it followed up with “Jurassic Park,” I didn’t think much of it. Twofers by artist, and even by album, aren’t that uncommon.

When “Living in the Fridge” started up, I got a little suspicious.

Sure enough, when I stopped the car and checked, shuffle was set to “off.” I figure the playlist must have been sorted by album the last time I synced, with Alapalooza the first on the list.

I’m still not sure whether it switched off shuffle when the battery ran down, or I just had it off before and didn’t notice because the last playlist I was listening to was pre-shuffled. Still, it was — appropriately — weird.

I thought a major point of PulseAudio was to let applications share the sound card cleanly. *grumble* Sound worked fine before Fedora switched. I can’t even blame it on a bleeding-edge distribution, since from what I hear, Ubuntu has similar problems.

At least now I know (sort of) why it stopped again after applying the Complete guide to fix PulseAudio and video/audio VLC Media Player issues.

IIRC Neil Gaiman said he stole the joke from Douglas Adams, who had someone refer to “Dentarthurdent” in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, but I always think of a Charlie’s Angels episode in which someone greeted “Bosleyjohnbosley.”

The thing is, I barely remember Charlie’s Angels, so the way I remember it is actually as “Bosleytombosley” … and in my memory, she’s saying it to Tom Bosley!

Cool: daily @thisistrue story suitable for mobile phones: i.thisistrue.com #

It’s a Tesla Coil that’s set up to modulate its discharges so that they produce specific notes. In other words, it’s a Tesla Coil that plays music using lightning!

Seriously… how can you turn down a description like that?

It’s also been called a “thoremin,” — another lightning-god-based pun, this one on the theramin,

The company that makes them has a couple of video clips on their website, but sadly they’re a little underwhelming on a 200-pixel window with computer speakers. I imagine they’d be seriously impressive in person.

Photo by Dracoswinsauer. Used per Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Well, I guess they don’t need to worry about finding the spare!

We both just sort of stared at it for a second or two. Was that really what we thought it was? Then I grabbed for the camera, snapped a shot that didn’t come out well, and handed it to Katie, who had a better view from the passenger seat.

Fortunately the traffic was terrible (now there’s something you don’t say very often) and we were able to get a shot instead of zooming past.

The “perfectly cromulent gifts” is my favorite of the bunch. The Simpsons display was found at a Borders bookstore, probably the one at The Block at Orange.

I love the fact that the “Bah Humbug” hat is actually labeled as a “Santa Hat.” I think someone’s got their wires crossed. Found in the clearance aisle at the grocery store.

These bars of tomato soap (not a typo!) were at the World Market at The Village (the one that used to be Orange Mall, not the apartments across from the Spectrum — though I think they use the same font for their logos, which is kind of strange. Better than the apartments that use nearly the same font as the logo for The Prisoner, though!)

I think the reason I get such a kick out of this toy is that laptop computers didn’t exist when I was in preschool (or if they did, they certainly weren’t affordable to anyone who didn’t absolutely need one for business). A laptop meant the top of someone’s lap. And now, in the grand tradition of transforming the everyday objects of the adult world into toys for infants (cars, telephones, bubble pipes), we now have something that vaguely looks like a folding keyboard and screen.

I was rather surprised to see that a search for “klasjdf” turned up 508 hits.

As I think about it, it makes sense. Those letters are 7 of the 8 home keys on the QWERTY keyboard layout, and the eighth is not only a semi-colon, but home to a pinky. A touch typist hitting random keys might be inclined to just hit the ones that are already under his or her fingers. One per finger, leaving out the single non-letter, gets you exactly the 7 that I typed.

As for the letter order, I spot-checked a few permutations, the lowest of which was just 251 for klasdfj. Those with patterns scored higher: 18,400 for alskdjf (alternating left & right, working in from the edges to the center); 99,600 for asdfjkl (left-to-right).

I guess there must just be a lot of people typing random text. Infinite monkeying around, so to speak.

• “beowulf godzilla” — I still get a kick out of the fact that a Beowulf movie opened at #1. This landed, appropriately enough, on “Beowulf vs. Godsylla”, Tom Weller’s parody from the (sadly out of print) Cvltvre Made Stvpid. The fake-old-English parody is so good that it gets used in college courses on Old English. As my professor pointed out, the short poem uses the proper four-stress alliterative form, and even (mis)uses classic phrases like ice-cold.
• “scary pitchers” is still going strong, though these days it hits a previous strange-search post rather than the original pun.
• “wonder woman tied up,” “wonder woman hentai,” “wonder woman humiliated,” “wonder woman captured” etc. have been showing up with disturbing frequency since I posted Victimized Hero. Of course, that’s mostly about the Flash, but the cover with the Flash and Wonder Woman tied up (immortalized in San Diego as the “Wonder Woman/Flash bondage poster” above the DC booth) has somehow ended up in the first two pages of image searches on Google. Admittedly, WW has a long history of bondage subtext, but it’s still kind of disturbing. Especially when it leads to…
• “cheerleader tied up” — We’ve been getting a lot of hits from searches for Claire Bennet lately, mostly hitting the spot the cheerleader post. This seems to have started crossing over with the WW trends, along with people searching for “clare bennett naked”.
• “JMS Babylong 5 arc” — honest, it wasn’t that long! Okay, the first half of Season 5 may have seemed like it…
• “My child has more honor than your child” — somehow our crappy little cell-phone picture of this Klingon bumper sticker has become #1 on a Google search for the phrase.
• “ANITA COMIC” — I need one too. If you have one of these books and are willing to sell, please let me know! (I assume this person was looking for info on the Anita Blake comic books.)
• We’re seeing lots of phrases that are clearly copied out of advance fee fraud messages. The comment thread on my fake UK artists post has turned into an informal clearing-house of people posting their experiences with this type of scam.
• “cheese” — I’m a bit confused by this one, but it seems to have hit the cheese information center.
• “need coffee” — yeah, it’s getting kind of late. Though unless you’re planning to order coffee beans or grounds for future use, I’d recommend stepping away from the computer and turning on your coffee maker. Or walking across the street to the nearest Starbucks. (You know you need coffee when…)

We carpooled with my parents, and arrived while the group was still stuck in customs. So we wandered around the Santa Monica Promenade and pier for a bit. Not surprisingly, there were some strange things about, like this turtle-themed drinking fountain.

Then there was this sign, on the Johannes van Tilburg Building, which I couldn’t quite decide how to take. “Free Will?” “Free Willy?”

The most disturbing was probably this mash-up of two movies on one of the many theaters on the promenade:

Is the American public ready for that film?

There are topiaries sculpted into the forms of dinosaurs scattered along the promenade. This stegosaurus came out the best:

As I mentioned, we did wander out to the Santa Monica Pier after a bit. Nothing terribly odd, just a couple of photos to set the scene:

The shuttle route from our hotel to the con passed by this mural, which plays with the nature of the constructed reality. The wall is a newspaper page. The face is a sculpture, a painting. The hands holding the chisel and paintbrush, of course, are just as artificial as the face being created.

We noticed an interesting coincidence at Horton Plaza. Just a few doors down from the Post Office was an Aeropostale clothing store:

This bench was in front of a hotel, probably the Hilton San Diego Gaslamp. I suppose that makes the pun on dog training more appropriate, since it’s a block away from Petco Park stadium.

I’ve always figured standing out on a street in a mascot costume must be miserable, especially in summer. But how much worse to be dressed as a giant soft drink? I suppose this would go with last year’s walking sandwich.

Now, you have to wonder about AMN Healthcare. It’s clearly a set of initials…but how often do people complain about health, insurance, and the healthcare industry? It’s just one letter off from “Damn Healthcare.”

Back to the shuttle route, next to (or possibly connected to) the Martini Ranch spotted in a previous installment of this series, was this nightclub that made no pretensions about what people are going there for. Also note that it’s a “niteclub” — is that a nightclub with fewer calories?

Then there’s this place, which employed the ultimate euphemism:

That’s got to be the most convolutedly delicate way of saying “sex shop” that I’ve ever seen.

Stormtrooper Elvis has become such a fixture that I almost didn’t bother taking a picture of him when I saw him this year… but then I noticed his pose, and the Sauron statue in the background.

There were a number of people walking around with “Free Hugs” signs, most of them women, but a few men. I never actually saw someone take one of them up on the offer, though.

On the subject of “Free” signs, I found it amusing that the Bantam Dell booth was trying to attract people with a hand-lettered cardboard sign proclaiming, “FREE!”

At one point I looked upward at the ceiling of Ballroom 20. With The Dark is Rising being made into a movie, I saw this lighting fixture and cross-beams and immediately thought of the Sign of Fire.

This guy had the ultimate cheap costume: A roll of tape. He just took every freebie flyer that was handed to him, and taped it to himself.

There’s apparently a band called CKY. Some of their merchandise manages to work the name into a rather rude saying…

There was a group of women in identical red dresses, with identical hairdos, and identical shoes. I saw a few of them wandering the floor on Saturday, but didn’t realize just how many there were until we left the convention center for dinner, and saw them crossing the street.

Edit: Mystery solved? The Resident Evil panel featured 17 Milla Jovovich doubles wearing her iconic red dress. This looks like more than 17, and the dresses don’t seem to be ripped in the right place, but this could be them.

Continued in Strange Sights of San Diego.

So, how many spaces is it? Or is it a tab?