Ad for Cigarettes and a Will

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Heh, I think my copy of Opera has been watching my office browsing habits a bit haphazardly. Practically every page I go to has words like “tobacco” or “cigarettes” in it, so most of the banner ads displayed in the broswer bar are either for smoking products and promos, or for other anti-tobacco movements — but not always. The tobacco-related advertising is still interspersed with general-interest banners from other categories.

The funny part is, right after showing a Philip Morris promo banner, it switched to that of a law firm asking if I wanted help writing a will.

Legends Cafe Mediterranean

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Near Dupont Circle, on 22nd and P Street, there’s a little white and blue restaurant called Legends, and it’s the best Mediterranean cafe I’ve ever eaten from. The owners and cooks are a family of kind old Greeks, and the Beef Gyros and Souvlaki-and-Feta Cheese Pita Sandwiches are so wonderful it brings tears to my eyes to remember eating them. If you’re in DC and you like Mediterranean, go try them. GO!!! Yum yum yum!

Who’s Da Man.

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I have just finished a full day doing some seriously heavy tweaking to Lucid Calendar. My modification, needed for the front page of the new SmokeFree.org portal (no, that’s not it yet), will display events on their own per-day page rather than in the calendar directly, and can be included as a tiny little table in a small righthand menu bar.

The hardest part was getting it to print a link to the new per-day page, using a query string that would read the correct date from the calendar by taking a standard table-cell counter-variable minus the number of days from the start of the first week to the first day of the month. I forgot to add a “+1” to compensate for the fact that Sunday is a zero in the date function. Yes, I’m aware that I’m babbling. But it’s all fine now.

At this point, I feel like throwing things to the ground and yelling “WHO’S DA MAN?!?!” at the computer in testosterone-loaded jubilation, just like Will Smith in Independence Day after his F-16 crashed. But lacking the daring to do so, I will just sit here in quiet triumph and mumble “Who’s da man…” to myself in a way that will not cause the other people in the room to stare at me.

Lion bites off zookeeper’s arm

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Ow.

Her right arm was severed near the elbow.

The attack occurred outside the view of tourists as Bourassa was giving a private tour available only to zookeepers’ family members. The theme park suspended such tours Monday, said Glenn Young, the park’s vice president of zoological operations.

Busch Gardens officials said the 12-year-old lion named Max would not be destroyed, but said the amusement park’s safety policies would be reviewed.

The Woman Web

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Is it true that most women exist within a subtle and unrelenting web of conflicts, alliances, intrigue, and competition; and that this political web defines many of their interactions and relationships between each other?

Is it also true that men share a similar web of petty intrigue and competition, but dispel its tension by talking about cars, sports, beer, computers, current events, and other women?

Green Khaki Black Brown

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Last Thursday, I wore a green polo shirt, khaki slacks, black socks, and brown shoes. To anyone who saw me in that combination, I apologize for my unsightly fashion decisions that day.

New EU Bar-Code Flag

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The so-called bar-code colored flag, which rumors say the EU was going to adopt for itself, was just a hoax. Or rather, it was a real designer’s work, but the EU was never really going to change its flag anyway.

Otherwise, Left Behind rapture pretribs would have gone wild drawing parallels between the “Sign of the Beast” tattoo bar code and the bar-code flag.

The Nadine Spam Story

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The Story of Nadine, a sinister tale of spam. Lesson learned: be careful with your email addresses! Always try to use a “spare” address for your web subscriptions.

New Skates!

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One of the downsides to living in downtown Washington is that I must travel a great distance just to get a new pair of in-line skates. After getting a haircut at the barber on Florida Ave., I walked down to the U Street Metro and rode the Yellow Line to the Pentagon. (The Pentagon Metro station and bus terminal is right outside the building itself, on the opposite end from where the plane crashed. That’s the closest I’ve been to it. Coolness.) From there, it was a medium-short bus ride to Ski Chalet, where they had some pretty good recreational Rollerblades on sale.

Along the way, I had merienda at McDonald’s, which, pleasantly enough, was playing classical music. Nothing goes better with a double cheeseburger and fries than a Vivaldi concerto grosso.