Home of the Soul Cookie

Kitty Cannon

…or can still remember the sweet soundtrack to Link’s epic quest to reunite the pieces of the Triforce, you’re gonna get as much a kick out of this video as I did.

Recently, if you were a Jew suffering through ED at Passover, you were pretty much screwed (no pun intended).

Luckily, all that’s about to change:

A leading Israeli rabbi has ruled that the anti-impotency pill Viagra can be taken by Jews on Passover, reversing a previous ban.

I first encounted the concept and practice of kosher when from my friend Aaron in seventh grade. No pork, no milk, can’t do this on that day… it was all rather mystifying.

I had no idea that it covered this sort of thing.

The drug was previously prohibited because its coating was considered inedible over Passover, when contact with everyday ingredients, known as hametz, is forbidden under Jewish law.

What’s especially interesting is this line in the story:

A prescription for Viagra is issued in Israel on average once every minute, the [Jerusalem Post] reports.

Oy, that’s a lot of Viagra.

BBC News: Viagra ruled kosher for Passover

[via]

Want to own a piece of JMS history?

From: jmsatb5@AOL.com
Subject: from jms: too damned much stuff
To: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Date: 4/9/2005 9:11:29 AM

Okay. That’s it. I give up.

Over the last few days, I’ve been trying to sort through the tons of boxes that have for the most part been sitting in storage for the last several years to try and find space for all this stuff, and there just isn’t any. The floors are wall-to-wall with boxes, crates, palletes, you name it, the detritus of decades of making shows and writing comics and being a pack-rack. It has literally grown to overflow two rental storage facilities.

[...]

So starting sometime probably next week, the week of the 11th, and from time to time over the next month or so, keep an eye on Ebay.

[...]

The Ebay user ID is babylon5auctions.

JMS says in a subsequent post thay he’s going to ship everything FedEx, for like five bucks an item, so worldwide delivery won’t be a problem.

See the full post for an idea of the scope of this Straczynski bonanza.

Update: The first batch of auctions has gone up.

Predictably and depressingly, the prices, a day in, are already well outside my reach. I’d still recommend looking at the auction items, though. Joe has added a “director’s commentary”-style background blurb to each item. Neat reading.

Belgium! [huh?]

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie. Listen.

The author has two versions of his review available, a short, spoiler-free version, and a long-form edition that does a really good job of analyzing the movie in great detail.

[Via]

Stirling
[SoulCookie]

I just moved a batch of photos from my 1998 Scotland trip over to Flickr.

Through a combination of photographic technology advancing a lot in the last seven years…

(and the APS camera I took these with was so cool at the time)

…and poor compression…

(I paid extra to get copies of my pics on floppies - all bounded to a maximum height/width of 600px, as it turns out. :-()

…these aren’t anywhere the quality I remember them (and want them) to be.

I thought briefly about trying to get higher-resolution images pulled off the APS film carts again, but that’ll be a whole lot of expense that I don’t need for a very minimally incremental result.

Better to beg/borrow others’ digital cameras until I get my own and to take new pics.

Interesting piece over at Wired News on Blogger’s on-again, off-again flirtations with stability.

What’s up with Blogger, the institution that is eponymous with the media phenomenon it helped spawn?

Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content. Since Blogger, which is owned and operated by that sleek geek machine, Google, is a lot like a public utility, when it goes down, so do the lights on a large swatch of the blogosphere.

The result: a lot of irate netizens.

Blogger’s flakiness was the main reason I finally made the move on the backend to install WordPress, and I know Noelle still experiences problems with it (as have I, on those occasions I’ve posted something over there).

For all the really cool stuff Google comes out with, I’m surprised Blogger has languished as long as it has.

Mission Viejo, California
[SoulCookie]

Thanks to a post in the Flickr blog, I discovered a cool new meme making its way across the ‘net:

Memory maps.

Basically, you take a screenshot of different places you’ve lived using Google Maps‘ new satellite photos, import those pics into Flickr, and use the Notes feature to annotate them.

There’s even a Flickr group where you can see others’ work.

Know anyone that might like some good deals on some statues? Point them in the direction of my eBay auctions.

I just listed a bunch of ‘em, including:

• Scarlet Witch mini-bust
• Iron Man mini-bust
• Black Cat mini-bust
• Arwyn and Kreeg (from Sojurn) statue
• Anna and Nina Williams (from Tekken 3) statues
• “Poor Jack” Skellington (from NBX - Nightmare Before Christmas) statue
• Locutus of Borg bust
• Qui-Gon Jinn “Mega Collectible”
• a never-before-used R2-D2 mug
• Arthur, King of the Britons 12″ toy

I’ve got some stuff in there as cheap as a buck, and none of the auctions starts higher than $10.

Whee!