NPR did a little story today about how some luxury items (massages, for example) are doing much better than expected in the economy. They figure that people are giving up the big ticket items (like travel) and instead settling for small, but luxurious, things. One woman is getting a spa treatment this year, instead of […]
Author Archive | weeklyrob
Long Dry Spell
A tuatara named Henry hadn’t had sex for at least 40 years, but finally got it on and has become a dad to eleven bouncing baby tuatara. He’d apparently been grumpy due to a tumor on his rump (or his underneath area. I can’t be sure, since the article says “his bottom.” What does that […]
Birdies
boingboing.net directs us to cloudboxer, where you can see pictures of birds in the guy’s backyard. Incidentally, that was a hard sentence to write because I originally wrote: “… pictures of birds shot in his backyard.” Then images of bloody starlings came to mind and I changed it. Incidentally again, the word “backyard” is a […]
Lovely Rita
Last night/this morning, as I couldn’t sleep from fever and other annoying symptoms of an ear infection, I watched The Lady from Shanghai. The movie? Interesting in bits. Whatever. But man, was Rita Hayworth beautiful. Good God.
Animal Handymen
Or handypeople. Wired Science presents a list of animals making and using tools in the wild.
Inauguration
Overall pretty nice. I liked that Obama was nervous enough to stop in the middle of his oath and wait for Roberts to help him out. It was kind of a sweet moment of humanity. And it’s the last time that the Chief Justice will lift a finger to help out Obama. Update: Ok, so […]
John Mortimer
If you’ve never read any of the Rumpole books, then you still have the chance to read one for the first time. I don’t know what I expected when I read my first one. I think I was waiting for some sort of Jeeves story, but with barristers and wigs. I love Wodehouse and Jeeves, […]
To Bee or Not to Bee
I’m reading Fruitless Fall, by Rowan Jacobsen. It’s mainly about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has apparently devastated the bee keeping industry around the world. I haven’t gotten to a lot of the CCD stuff yet (as of page 60), but what I have read has been fascinating. Bees’ lives, the different roles in their […]
My Birthday Present
If you’d like to get me something 100K-ish, you could do worse than this. For only four hundred bucks, there’s this.
It's Personal
I hung around Israel for six months or so, and the family in the picture above sort of took me in. We were all visiting the “Flour Caves” at the time of the picture. I’m the guy crouching on the far left. Today I just keep thinking about Yakir, the little boy on the far […]