how now brownpau
Now that I have confirmation from Thomas that there is indeed a Target near Wheaton Metro, I have an excuse to go up there and ride the Western hemisphere’s longest escalator, ostensibly the second longest in the world.
Yes, I’ve ridden the world’s longest escalator in Ocean Park, Hong Kong, and eh, it’s boring.
Valerie asks about grandparent naming conventions, and when I tell her about the words “Lolo” and “Lola,” she cannot but break into song (Scroll down to Post 9 in that comments thread). Nor is this the first time that I have inspired Copacabana satire: Ganns did likewise a couple of years back, too.
Here’s my DC ID photo beside a certain singer so the reason for all this is made clear: 
My highest-received SpamAssassin score thus far has just arrived in my inbox: 31.55, with subject line: “hi there brother – feel the vitality!” The message tells me to “BE A MAN,” and promises three extra inches in length, 20% additional girth, and rock-hard “Eerect1ons.” Funniest choice bits from the SpamAssassin content analysis: "0.1 - HTML_FONTCOLOR_RED - HTML font color is red," and "1.0 - BANG_GUARANTEE - Something is emphatically guaranteed."
Still, 31.55 is a paltry score beside Project Spamchart’s highest rating of 156.10. Also see this Wired story for more on competitive SpamAssassin scoring.
(It is also my humble opinion that SA people have no idea at all about what makes a good logo. None whatsoever. ;)
A daisy in the Smithsonian Butterfly Garden. (Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.)
Things I learned from watching Spiderman 2: [SPOILERS!]
Overall, an excellent film, quite effective at portraying the overwhelming burden of humanness lying beneath the superhero’s costume. Spiderman 2 was, in some ways, quite reminiscent of that other comic book adaptation where the hero’s internal conflict leads to him giving up his powers for love and humanity: Superman II, still one of the best superhero movies ever made.
As earlier mentioned, I got my mobile blog, MoBrownpau, back up, with help from a Communicam and Flickr’s mail-to-blog features. One shortcoming of this go-between method, however, is that Flickr only publishes the photo and title to your blog, with no caption or description; you must click on the link back to the Flickr photo page to see any other text you sent along with the photo.
This isn’t Flickr’s fault: they block the text because of the unsolicited advertising that US mobile companies insert into every MMS message sent. Witness, for example, this Flickr help thread on T-Mobile’s latest attempt to capitalize on their customer base with large, obnoxious, bandwidth-consuming image ads in MMS footers, thus breaking Flickr photo submissions. (That’s right: we’re already paying them monthly and per-message fees for the service, and still they insert invasive advertising. If we’re paying telecom companies to send our messages they shouldn’t be using our messages for their marketing.) For considering such an annoying factor and compensating for it by keeping the telecom marketing gunk out of our blogs, I suppose Flickr should be thanked.
I’ve decided to keep MoBrownpau on Blogger for now, rather than integrate the blogs as I did with BPBP; just to avoid potential clutter and cruft to the main journal. No that I mistrust Flickr, no, but it’s still a good idea to have a care with any output remotely generated by a third party. Moreso when two third parties are involved, and one of them is a US telecom company.
For future pondering: integration of output from different weblogs and feeds into a single stream.
Pandora is what Persian breeders call an “odd-eyed white,” with one blue eye and one green eye. One result of this genetic quirk is that odd-eyed whites have super-sensitive hearing. (As opposed to blue-eyed white Persians, which tend to be deaf.) Some days she can hear me coming out of the elevator down the hall, and is meowing before I’ve even pulled out my keys.
So yes, I’m an uncle. Everyone expected it would be me or Francis who would help bring Mom’s first apo* into the world, but that honor goes to one of my younger brothers. I won’t go into the sordid details, but suffice it to say that we’re all quite happy, though said younger brother has quite a struggle ahead of him. Circle of life and all that. Pray for him; he’s in need of much blessing.
Mom sent me a photo of the child at five minutes old, but she doesn’t like that photo and won’t let me publish it to my blog. His name’s Alfonso, but I’ve nicknamed him THE FONZ and am searching for a nice baby-size leather jacket. ‘Eeey.
(* Build your Tagalog vocabulary! Apo n. grandchild. Pronounced with stress on second syllable; otherwise you’re referring to the mountain.)
Earlier today, just as I was reading this news story about an Old Town Trolley catching fire in Georgetown, a tow truck passed right by our office on P Street, towing aforementioned Old Town Trolley.
Long before Scott Adams came up with this joke, Razormouth had already done it better.
(What happened to Razormouth? It’s all pundit-ish now.)
