Well Neya is settled into her new classroom and starting third grade today. The new teacher seems very good and receptive to the special accomodations that Neya requires...   more »

Amazing.  I should be working on Name That Movie but I'm having too much fun flying around the world with Google Earth.  If you have a broadband connection I definitely suggest you check this out.  It is a 3D rendering of satellite imagery of the surface of the earth.  From my house I looked at the surrounding hills and then flew to Escondido to view the beautiful hill behind Brian's backyard.  Looks like your neighbor has a nice swimming pool, Bri.  Then back across the country to Somerset to visit my friend James, and from there I went everywhere... Japan, Australia, Germany, India, Hawaii, Washington DC, Roswell New Mexico, my office in Burlington, my childhood home, and many other places. What a blast!

Here's an odd idea. I heard a guy discussing this on WBUR's On Point today: you go to Google and type in a phrase in quotes like "Last night I dreamt" or "When I grow old" or "Now I realize that", then with the resulting excerpts from websites that google returns, try to string the matching lines together into a poem...   more »

At the end of one of the Back to the Future movies, Michael J. Fox's character is horrified to see his scientist friend vanish unexpectedly in a flash of lightning. Almost immediately afterward he is approached by someone bearing a package for him that was sent nearly a hundred years ago, it turns out the letter is from his friend who has been transported back in time to the old west. I was reminded of this the other day when I read this story about a man in Vancouver who recently received a postcard from 1955...   more »

I posted a new photo to Photos/Nature/PorchlightPilgrims.

Until further notice, anonymous commenting is now disabled on Unbecoming Levity.

I apologize to those of you who preferred to not go through the hassle of setting up a reader account and having yet ANOTHER password to remember, but I just spent like 40 minutes deleting 30+ spam comments posted by a spambot to articles all over my blog.

I am not going through that again.

I implore my anonymous regulars to please set up a reader account and continue to be a regular contributor.

Check out this ZUG article.  It's a NSFW riot:

How To Draw The Nipples Back On Victoria's Secret Catalogue Models Using Adobe Photoshop

It's great for background noise when you're working on something else, and very entertaining to watch in it's own right. I'm referring of course to G4 Video Game TV, the channel specifically for gamers. I don't get to watch it often, but I almost always enjoy it...   more »

I have seen video games so engrossing they will suck you in for hours at a time, maybe even days... (Civ, anyone? How about Halo? Halo-2?) But there is one variety of video game that seems more addictive than any other, and this is the net-enabled games like MMORPGs or online shooters. I've seen people lose their jobs and lose their ability to function productively because of the pull of games like these. (EverQuest springs to mind, also World of Warcraft.) But now, from Seoul, Korea, comes the first ever (to my knowledge) case of someone playing online games continuously until dying...   more »

Apparently, I'm a fat, drunk, redneck!  This is news to me since I (a) don't drink, (b) don't farm or otherwise work in the sun so as to acquire the aforementioned neck redness, and (c) well okay, I am a bit portly, you got me there.  Check out this discussion forum and scroll down a bit.

See anyone familiar?

Bandwidth theft is always better when it comes with insults.

Over a year since landing on Mars with a 90-day lease on life, the rover Spirit is still alive and has made a major accomplishment this week. Shortly after its arrival the rover spotted a cluster of hills on the horizon that were quickly named after deceased astronauts. After completing observations in its immediate vicinity, Spirit started rolling toward those hills with the assumption that it probably wouldn't survive long enough to get there...   more »

As reported in the article New exhibit at London Zoo - humans (AFP via Yahoo News):

..."We have set up this exhibit to highlight the spread of man as a plague species and to communicate the importance of man's place in the planet's ecosystem," London Zoo said.

The scantily-clad volunteers will be treated as animals and kept amused at the central London zoo with games and music.

"I actually think the fig leaves will be enough to cover us up, it's no worse than a swimming pool," said volunteer Simon Spiro, 19, from New Malden, south of the British capital...

Those of you who've complained to me about inability to post comments or load articles at ULev will be pleased to know that BlogHarbor is restructuring its database this week to optimize performance...   more »

So lately I've been getting a rather insidious sort of comment spam. Perhaps you've noticed the peculiar comments I get every now and then that are only a few words long and add nothing useful to the discussion (as in "What do you mean?") or sometimes don't make any sense at all (as in "This theme is not actual.") Ladies and gents, this is the work of a spammer trying to improve his site's standings on Google. How? By placing his advertising on the page in a hidden fashion...   more »

Our wayward maple which dropped a 30-foot limb on the powerlines a few weeks back has been removed.  I added new photos to the Crash! Boom! photo album.  Here's the first one:

I posted a new photo to Photos/Nature.

Religious Wacko: (n.) see Pat Robertson.

The Globe and Mail: Why hesitate? Assassinate, evangelist suggests