President Bush has a new advisor: (link)


Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

Bad Housekeeping

If you're lazy like me, there's not a right time to put away the clean dishes. Who cares if you use them one-by-one out of the dishwasher? But there *is* a right time to discover that they're still dirty, and that's long before you're putting away the last couple of items after eating out of the dishwasher for days. Go »

The Revised Revised Revised Story

Last spring, This Modern World ran a great parody charting the decline of civil liberties in recent years, after the then-shocking revelation that the government was building a database of every call made in the country: (link) I was reminded of that over the weekend as the latest shocking revelation came out, that the FBI has vastly abused its new ability to request confidential information in the interest of national security (link), almost as if it was the next panel in the strip. Except I'm not laughing. Oh, what I'd have given to be the reporter at Alberto Gonzales's press conference this morning. Go »

Scott's Pet Peeve #2519

Why do some microwaves have a convenient quick-start option if you press 1 or 2 or 3, so that they instantly start cooking with 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 on the clock... but DON'T have this same functionality programmed into 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9, which do nothing when pressed alone? How does an engineer possess both the vision to provide the former and the lack of imagination that results in the latter? Go »

R.I.P. Pat

Kelly's mother passed away last week. The event had been anticipated for decades: Pat was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a child, suffered kidney failure in 1995 and survived on her brother's donated kidney, and had five strokes and five heart attacks and countless operations, including emergency brain surgery in 2007 that changed her personality. She obviously possessed quite an inner resiliency even if she seemed petite and frail on the outside, but it was inevitable that she would someday lose the fight with her own body. Go »

The Little Ship

Our cat Sweetie Pie passed away in her sleep on Thursday night after a very long illness. We don't know how old she was -- she was my mother's cat before mine, and my grandmother's cat before that, and belonged to some other lady in my grandmother's nursing home before then. We have that stranger to thank for giving her the old-fashioned name, but it was appropriate: Sweetie Pie was a friendly cat, who was happy when company came over (especially if they fed her treats!) Go »

Twit

Have you heard of Twitter? It's this great new web site where you report to your friends exactly what you're doing at that moment in time. Neat stuff! Go »