Several people have written to say that green neon sign crosses are common in Europe (where I’ve been all of twice, sigh) and indicate conventional pharmacies having no necessary connection with marijuana. That would explain a lot; Europe has certainly led the world in marijuana tolerance. Here, however, green crosses have clearly become culural icons [...]
Posts Tagged ‘climate’
Odd Lots
The hat size/shape measuring gadget that I mentioned in my entry for August 11, 2010 is called a conformateur, and here’s a whole bunch of pictures. It’s evidently a lot commoner than I thought, still in use, and works spectacularly well. And another kind of Fedora anxiety: I accidentally installed OpenSuse 11.3 over my Fedora [...]
Daywander
Well, as a fair number of people have told me, the logo Carol and I saw the other day was the “hatchet man” icon of Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo from Detroit that I’ve never heard and probably won’t. Key to finding the figure online is knowing that what he’s holding isn’t a map [...]
Odd Lots
The rate of toxoplasmosis infection in a given nation appears correlated to the level of neuroticism in that nation. I’ve mentioned toxo before, but it appears that we have better numbers now, and that the UK is nowhere near 50% infected, as the source I quoted in 2003 implied. France, well, now… Here’s a nice [...]
Odd Lots
Well, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx is out there, but I had other committments yesterday and couldn’t download it on Day One. This may have been a good thing; there was a last-minute bootloader bug that interefered with dual-booting with Windows. Still, I’ll be installing it on one machine or another ASAP and will report here. [...]
Odd Lots
It happens all the time, but it’s rare that we actually watch it happen: a comet falling into the Sun. (It’s unclear to me what the brief tiny streaks are, since SOHO is a spacecraft and the image was not taken through Earth’s atmosphere, where meteors would look like that. Meteors in the solar atmosphere?) [...]
Daywander
Boy, I’ve never been gladder that I no longer live in Baltimore. Local snow totals there went well over 40 inches, which is pretty scary. Right before we moved to California, we had a freak late-season storm (it was mid-March!) that dumped 24″ or so, and the movers had to dig a path between the [...]
Some Good Juju and Some Bad Juju
Bad juju first: When I woke up this morning it was 0, and we had six inches of new snow on the ground. Carol had a physical scheduled for 10:00, so we were out the door extra early, slithering (even in 4WD) in a winter wonderland. We got there and back intact, but it was [...]
Odd Lots
We broke a new cold record for December 3 last night, when it went down to -3 here. (The previous record was +3, so that’s a significant margin.) Cheyenne Mountain is covered with snow, and it’s a wonderful wintry-Christmasy scene out my office windows, though I have to get out there and clear the walks [...]
Daywander
(Playing around with blogging styles here.) We got back from our Thanksgiving trip to Chicago yesterday afternoon, just before the deep freeze closed in again. Low tonight 10; high tomorrow 15; low tomorrow night 4. This is the coldest damned autumn we’ve had since we moved here, as well as the snowiest. Still, I’ll take [...]