Friday in the wild - Jan. 21, 2005

From Theophilus over at Notes at the Front Lines comes this gem:

Today's "News of the Surreal" comes to us from Hollywood (surprise!), where Fox TV, of all people, acknowledged that it covered up the rear end of a cartoon character recently because of worries about the FCC.

[Read The Amish Take Over Fox TV]

Yeah, we all know how the FCC has cracked down on Fox for all those views of Homer's butt over the years. . . .

I don't believe for a minute that Fox is trying to cover its rear (so to speak); what we are seeing here is a sarcastic backlash against the general public, which is getting fed up with increasing levels of T&A being shoveled at us by the media.

Here's a gem that's been floating around the blogosphere since about Monday (I first picked it up on Slashdot. Someone managed to dig up some old publicity photos of Bill Gates, circa 1985, following the release of the original Windows. I know it was the 1980s and all, but they still look needlessly homoerotic. At the time of writing, the original source was suffering from the Slashdot Effect, so you might want to try here instead.

According to Tuesday's Daily Bulletin, after a vehicle accident damaged one of Waterloo's really bad sculptures, the powers-that-be have decided that it is beyond repair and will be removed. Good riddance, I say, though it won't make me many friends in the artsy community, and admittedly, "Joy" is one of the less ugly sculptures on campus (when compared, say, to the fountain outside the Math building that looks like a giant egg taking a whiz). My only complaint is: Couldn't the driver have run into one of those hideous, orange-painted piece of bent sheet metal instead?

The Jollyblogger quoted a famous passage of Pilgrim's Progress that he regards as the greatest words in all uninspired literature. Well, it's darn good stuff at the very least, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a big fan of John Bunyan.

This week, the Crusty Curmudgeon drops to #5 for searches on the word "crusty." (On the other hand, on MSN Search, I'm now #3!) Also, for no apparent reason, earlier this week I was #8 in a search on ttlb ecosystem. Not bad for a small furry rodent . . . Most interesting search engine referral this week goes to "i have a dream-martin luther speech in midi format." Yeah, I'd like to see that too. It'd be quite a marvel of computer science.