This is a sad story from my old neighborhood (jobs lost, yuppification increasing, lying-ass executives — trust me, the workers are right about the real-estate value situation) but I will admit that after seeing the area in which this plant is situated, which boasts a truly unsettling amount of lead and other contaminants, I kind of kicked the refined-sugar habit.

If the Sopranos crew was actually a group of garden gnomes, this is how they’d whack a guy. (It’s a message. Says Tinkerbelle sleeps with the mermaids.)

So wrong. So, so wrong.

Winston Churchill’s macaw is 104 and still hanging out. That’s just… zounds.

“On behalf of everyone in Avionics, I’d like to thank you for flying with us today…” I do so love NASA geeks. Okay, they got Opportunity to Mars; now it’s time to park it. Can we beat the two-out-of-three odds? (Continuing: The flight-deck jokes come thick and fast now. Adrenaline — it makes you silly!) (And continuing: w00t!) (And one more: The announcer says it’s a very foreign world, and duh, but doesn’t this region look a whole lot like Nebraska? I like it already.)

Celestial jukebox meets the Mighty Wurlitzer: Good article (a couple of errors, but then I’m far too aware of this stuff), dumbfuck NYT factchecker/copyeditor. Don’t let that stop you, but be advised that the word is “copyleft,” no space. And a smarter writer would’ve gotten into the SCO situation. Unfortunately, that smarter writer is marooned in DC for now.

Looking on the bright side of the Packers game, next season is a clean slate and an opportunity for playoff glory, but Eagles fans will *still* be a pack of Philadelphia-identified assholes. It’s like the part of the world that not even qualified to be New England, and we all know what I think of that part of the country…

Were I still doing Unfortunate Site Of The Week, this would be a natural; were I in touch with my successor, I’d be sending this to her a we speak. BUt I ain’t and I ain’t, so… NO NO NO NO NO!!!

An engineer explains lit-crit to the masses, and the angels sing.

w00t! Uh, no, I didn’t write it, but friends have certainly heard me give the oral recitation often enough. Dude may be tactless, but he ain’t wrong. And I’m not sure he’s even wrong in his lack of tact.