I just finished setting up a page that has live news feeds from some of my favorite blogs. Check it out at Solonor’s News Page.
Much thanks to Jason at The Trommetter Times, who’s script I used, after seeing it at scriptygoddess.
AmphetaDesk is a free syndicated news aggregator for your desktop. I just put 20 of my favorite sites’ XML feeds into it, and now I can browse all the latest posts in one spot.
I wish it had a web-based version. I suppose I could figure out how to use it on the site, since it’s Perl-based, but I’m too lazy. I’ll wait for them to tell me how to do it. Very cool tool.
Here’s a cool new blog toy: 
You enter your blog and the blog or blogs that inspired it. You can’t enter child blogs (you must rely on others mentioning you as inspiration), but what you get is a blog pedigree that you can trace from blog to blog. Kinda neat!
There is no doubt that I am from Maine. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come from the story I am going to relate. I can’t recall where the Dickens I heard that…oh, yeah! Gonzo the Great.
Anyway, the thing to remember about Maine is that it’s not Florida. The average temperature for August in Maine is 64.3 degrees. The average temperature for August in Florida hovers somewhere between “hot enough to melt lead” and the vaporization point of concrete. And that’s before humidity…
We went to see Signs last night (at a late showing, no less…extra creepy). As with the last two movies by M. Night Shyamalan—The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable–there is more to the movie than the standard horror/thriller/sci-fi flick. There is a spiritual undercurrent and a sense that even the scariest things aren’t so bad after all. Mel Gibson plays a minister, Graham Hess, who quit the church after his wife died in a traffic accident. (Shyamalan plays the driver of the truck that hit her.) In fact, the main point of the story is not the alien invasion, but the re-awakening of Gibson’s faith.
The film does keep you on the edge of your seat in between some very funny moments. I especially liked the joke about Mel Gibson (whose characters are usually a donut short of a dozen) not knowing how to act “crazy.” And Joaquin Phoenix was excellent as Mel’s brother, Merrill. But be prepared to be scared–not the bloody Texas Chain Saw Massacre type of scared, but the War of the Worlds kind.
In fact, the only problem I had with the movie at all was the ending. Shyamalan builds the tension and paints the situation into such a corner, I was not sure how he was going to get out of it. So, I’m not sure what, if anything, he could have done differently to finish.
I realize that newspapers have to make money, but headlines like these just fan the flames of ignorance: Starved for Food, Zimbabwe Rejects U.S. Biotech Corn (washingtonpost.com).
On the surface, it looks like corrupt, stupid leaders of a Third World nation are allowing people to starve to death, rather than accept the generous gift of American bioengineered corn. You expect to read something from them like, “We no want evil corn. It cause cancer.”
As I have pointed out, Mrs. R works at Barnes and Noble. This offers us the opportunity to get a good crack at the books in the $1 bin. So, when she picked up the Fannie Farmer Original 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book, I thought nothing of it. But when I started hearing the wife and kids giggling hysterically over a cook book…I began to get nervous.
If you want to know what gastronomic delights they are looking at, check out Pepperkat’s Playground: Chicken Jelly.
Did I mention I have very strange children?
Got this from Mordant C@rnival: Blank emails containing worms!.
Never open another e-mail again. Ever.
Since ten monkeys on drugs could have picked a better list by throwing their feces on the wall and trying to figure out what character it looked like (oh, wait, that’s how TV Guide did it, sorry), we figured we could not do worse than to come up with our own list of the Greatest Cartoon Characters.
The main problem with their list was that they did not define “greatest” or “cartoon”. That’s how their list wound up with crap like “Josie and the Pussycats” and questionable entries like “Gumby” and “Superman.” (I don’t even want to know where “Bill” and “Gerald McBoing-Boing” came from…)
So, without further ado, we present our criteria and list of nominees (none of which look like monkey feces…except Scooby Doo…)
Sat down and re-educated my kids with some high-class mooovie. I love Westworld. Yul Brynner is the grand-daddy of the Terminator and the Predator.
