I’m feeling marketed to again. Target is using Lena Lovich’s “New Toy” (number 18 on KROQ’s top 106.7 songs of 1981) in their latest commercial. Then there’s the Swiffer WetJet ad with the protagonist dancing with her sweeper to Devo’s “Whip It” (1980′s number 1) and a few others.

Cuddly, yet acrobatic:

You’d better act fast if you want to adopt this cutie at the Greater Huntsville Humane Shelter in Huntsville, Ala. (and featured on Petfinder.com).


From SFGate.com’s Day in Pictures.

From the crime log: “The preposterous case of the pink Chihuahua”

Susan Leong stopped at nothing to find the man who stole her dog. She called police, she offered a $1,000 reward, she even hired a private investigator.

This week, thanks largely to her own persistence and sleuthing, Leong has her dog back. It’s now pink, the result of an odd attempt by the thief to disguise it, but it’s still her pet.

I don’t get dyeing the dog pink.

The Department of Occupational Safety & Health (DOSH) report on the Big Thunder Mountain accident was released today. Strangely, the PDF was pulled off the DOSH Web site almost as soon as it was published, but MousePlanet managed to grab a copy. I just finished reading it and the first few pages are pretty grim — a complete description and timeline of the accident itself.

My first written contribution to MousePlanet was published today: Radio Disney CD Reviews. Another will be up next week.

The Chronicle’s Henry Shulman reports that Giants shortstop Rich Aurelia will be appearing on an upcoming episode of ‘General Hospital’ as a juror. He doesn’t have any spoken lines.

MousePlanet’s Disneyland Resort update includes this lovely photo, taken by Adrienne Vincent-Phoenix, of the progress being made on painting Space Mountain white.

With Caltrain down on the weekends and no other public transit accomodations made, the Chronicle reports a big jam is possible for the Big Game tomorrow.

Traffic jams are as much a tradition as tailgating and heckling opposing fans when Cal and Stanford meet for their annual football rivalry. But traffic at the 106th Big Game could cause it to be remembered as the Big Backup.

Virtually no public transit service will be available to Stanford Stadium, the site of Saturday’s game — and that could make for major traffic tie-ups before and after the game.

The 70,000-plus fans expected to attend will have to make their way to the stadium without Caltrain, which won’t be operating, or any special-event transit designed to haul huge crowds. Peninsula transit officials said they just couldn’t afford special service to the game.

I’ll be staying home tomorrow, that’s for sure.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened had I not accepted the job offer that resulted in our moving from SoCal to NoCal. The odds are that I’d still be working for Davidson/CendantSoft/Havas Interactive/Vivendi Universal Games or whatever they’re called today; would still be making an even more ridiculously low wage (unless the new, new, new owners forced a layoff or a wage review); and would still be living in an apartment. We’d still be going to Disneyland every Sunday and I expect I’d be much more involved with MousePlanet content-wise. Jennifer would be closer to her family. We would not have adopted Linus, but might have found another kitten.

We would not be scalp-deep in debt.

On the other hand, we would not be homeowners, and I really do like it here in the Bay Area.

Do I regret it? If I had to answer yes or no, I’d say no. If I could give a percentage, I’d say I’m about 65% satisfied. This would be improved with a change in employment, I think.

United States Patent 5,443,036 describes a

method for inducing cats to exercise consists of directing a beam of invisible light produced by a hand-held laser apparatus onto the floor or wall or other opaque surface in the vicinity of the cat, then moving the laser so as to cause the bright pattern of light to move in an irregular way fascinating to cats, and to any other animal with a chase instinct.

Does that mean I have to pay license fees when I play with Linus with the laser level?

The Mercury News are carrying an AP story reporting that Barry Bonds has won the National League Most Valuable Player award for the third consecutive year, and his sixth overall.

The San Francisco outfielder, the only player to win an MVP award more than three times, received 28 of 32 first-place votes and 426 points in balloting by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

Bonds had a difficult season in which his father, Bobby, died in August. Still, Bonds hit .341 with 45 homers and 90 RBIs, leading the major leagues in slugging percentage (.749), on-base percentage (.529) and walks.

One of the first Larry Niven stories/essays I can recall reading is now online (with permission from the author): Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. Here’s a sample:

What arouses Kal-El’s mating urge? Did kryptonian women carry some subtle mating cue at appropriate times of the year? Whatever it is, Lois Lane probably didn’t have it. We may speculate that she smells wrong, less like a kryptonian woman than like a terrestrial monkey. A mating between Superman and Lois Lane would feel like sodomy-and would be, of course, by church and common law.

It’s wickedly funny and all too true! Poor guy.

Sesame Street premiered 34 years ago today.

Add a bunch of links to the People section; basically everyone I could find with a LiveJournal and a few other sites. If you’re listed and don’t want to be, or would prefer an online handle instead of your real name, let me know.

C|Net’s MP3 Insider gives five reasons not to buy an iPod. Writer Eliot Van Buskirk makes some good points in this piece. I have an older MP3 CD player, which is adequate but by no means perfect. The Dell unit he mentions might be a good upgrade.

November 7, 1998: A good day for me. Here are some pictures, courtesy Sean ‘Yoda’ Rouse and more from Chaz Boston Baden.

Test your knowledge of 80s lyrics. I scored 91.5. No Googling for answers, keep it fair.

The Register’s Ashley Vance reports that an avid Mac fan has taken the infamous Monkey Dance Boy video of Ballmer and repurposed it as an iPod commercial. You can see the finished product here until it’s slashdotted. It’s loud, so wear headphones or keep a finger on the volume knob.

How much are those doggies in the window? Basset hound pups are all ears as they stop, look and listen from a barn in Willow Street, Pa.
Courtesy SFGate’s Day in Pictures.

Nothing outlasts Voyager 1. Except Pioneer 10, I suppose.

As of Wednesday, 26 years after its launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 was 8.4 billion miles (13.5 billion kilometers) from the sun. That’s 90 times the distance separating the Earth from the sun.

As the robotic spacecraft continues to push far beyond the reach of the nine planets, two teams of scientists disagree whether it passed into the uncharted region of space where the sun’s sphere of influence begins to wane.

They really built them to last in those days.

The Chronicle’s Susan Slusser reports that Eric Chavez has won his third consecutive Gold Glove at third base for the Athletics, and it may earn him a rare pre-free agent contract extension.

“It seems like it’s tougher every year to stay on top of your game,” [Chavez] said. “I do whatever I can to maintain it, but now, if I don’t live up to certain things, it’s like I’m slacking.”

Chavez’s combination of top-notch defense, power (95 homers in the past three years) and run production (100-plus RBIs each of those seasons) could translate into something unusual for the A’s: a contract extension that would keep him in Oakland beyond his scheduled free agency. General manager Billy Beane has said that signing Chavez to an extension is something he’d like to do.

All right, all right, I know I said no more baseball for a while. But this news was too good to pass up!

SFGate’s Mark Morford details how BushCo is Protecting us from Pornography (this week–last week it was those icky homosexuals, next week it’ll no doubt be cars which get more than 12 miles to the gallon and weigh less than an Abrams tank).

Look. Of course hardcore porn can be dangerous to young children. Or course it can be overly explicit and hollow and is absolutely not for kids or even certain priests. This is not an argument.

And of course the Net has helped put some truly nasty images in front of millions of children’s eyeballs, and there is very little parents can do about it except deflect and restrict access and educate their kids as best they can, and hope for the best.

But maybe there are other strains, other mutations of “porn” to be wary of? Maybe there are other, far less regulated, more explicit pornographies we might want to consider, raw and darkly titillating forces hell-bent on soiling young minds and exploiting weakness and numbing the human spirit? Like, say, the pornography of McDonald’s toxic foodstuffs. Or the Home Shopping Network. Or dead U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Or mutilated bodies and naked writhing guns and Rumsfeld’s kinky black-eyed sneer.

Bite me, Echelon.

Weekly Space Mountain paint update. I don’t see a lot of change from last week, actually.

The Bay City News/SF Chronicle are reporting that the Petaluma ‘cat lady’ has been collared.

A suspected cat hoarder wanted for allegedly jumping bail in a Sonoma County felony animal cruelty case was in a San Francisco jail cell today.

Officers arrested Marilyn Barletta, 64, at a Fisherman’s Wharf hotel Monday night, police spokesman Dewayne Tully said.

Barletta is charged with felony animal cruelty for allegedly keeping 202 cats — some of them dead — in filthy conditions at her Petaluma home two years ago.

This woman is obviously sick–I hope she gets the mental help she needs. I also hope she is enjoined from ever again owning a cat.

The Anchorage Daily News is featuring an AP story describing how Alyeska engineers anticipated the effects of a bruising quake when building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

No company would build on a huge, active earthquake fault if it didn’t have to.

‘We didn’t have a choice,’ said Steve Sorensen, engineering coordinator for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co.

Short of running the trans-Alaska oil pipeline through Canada, Alyeska had to cross the Denali Fault, which spans almost the entire width of Alaska, to get North Slope crude oil to tidewater.

I’ve been fascinated by the Alaska Pipeline since its construction, not to mention reading an Alistair MacLain novel (Athabasca) in my impressionable youth. The linked article describes the feats of engineering necessary to build an oil pipeline across an active fault line.