Posts in the category “News”

  • News & Notes
    • Couple married 72 years dies holding hands — from kottke.org
    • Jason Kottke also published an epic round-up of all the best stories, comments, obituaries, collections, videos, etc. about Steve Jobs.
    • Top Ten Misused English Words — from listverse.com
    • 4 Personal Finance Principles That Would Make Your Grandfather Proud — from The Art of Manliness
    • Stellar.io is just awesome. Seriously. Trust me on this one. (Let me know if you want an invitation.)
  • Apps
    • Amazing Breaker is a fun (free) breakout game.
    • Can anyone explain the difference between the Starbucks app and the Starbucks Card Mobile app?
  • Tech
    • If you have an iPhone running iOS5, open the iTunes app on your phone. Click “More” in the lower right-hand corner. Choose “Tones”. You’ll see that there is now a new section of Star Wars ringtones. (I can’t understand how this wasn’t front page news.)
    • See also: How to make custom tones for your iPhone — from macworld.com
    • If I’m going to get a MacBook Air, then it looks like I’m also going to get a new Thunderbolt display. — via Shawn Blanc
    • Incredible macro photographs taken with iPhone 4S camera — from campl.us
    • Shit Siri Says Is, indeed, quite funny. (On Sunday I was upset when Siri couldn’t connect to the Internet and was unable to tell me the distance from Key West to Cuba. When I said, “Blow me!” in frustration, she said, “David! The language!”)
  • Sports
    • Quote of the day: “…it’s clear that marketing people underestimated [Tim Tebow’s] intangibles and popularity.” — Tebow’s Eye Black

Okay, riddle me this, kids: The local NBC affiliate’s nightly news keeps running items about how Los Angeles residents are not returning their census forms. The anchorman reports hyper-specific percentages each evening of how many of us have not responded. On Thursday night he said that less than 72% of the city had completed the census.

HOW DO THEY KNOW?!?!

Okay, this is just awesome. Ron Howard directs Chevy Chase (as Gerald Ford), Dana Carvey (as George H. Bush), Darrell Hammond (as Bill Clinton), Will Ferrell (as George W. Bush), Dan Akroyd (as Jimmy Carter), and Jim Carrey (as Ronald Reagan) in a presidential reunion visit to Fred Armisen (as Barack Obama) and Maya Rudolph (as Michelle Obama) in the White House to try to convince the current President to push the Consumer Protection Act through Congress.

  • Check out Slaughterhouse 90210, where erudite literary quotes meet TV screencaps!
  • “There are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe.” — from a fascinating article by Garry Kasparov on the topic of playing chess with computers
  • If you’re addicted to Twitter, there are a bunch of tools you can use to monitor trends and (your own) statistics.
  • Terri Carlson is 45 and was born with a genetic immune disorder C-4 complement deficiency. She’s currently on COBRA health insurance but it runs out in a year, so she says she will marry you for your health insurance.
  • Probably Bad News is just like the Jay Leno “Headlines” bit. I saw a good one today: Homicide victims rarely talk to police.
  • Psssst! You can buy ten ampersands for $9.99 if you’re into that sort of thing.
2024-10-15: Broken links in this post have been removed and/or updated.

The Dogs of War

Happy Veterans’ Day! Celebrate by watching this compilation of videos of dogs welcoming their masters home from the field. And a hat tip to my grandfather Vincent Albanese (1918 – 1986), who fought in WWII as one of Merrill’s Marauders. Thanks for everything I have and am today.

Butterflies!

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A gift of more than 2 million butterfly and moth specimens to the University of Florida contains hundreds and possibly more than 1,000 new unnamed species, and will help researchers better understand biodiversity and environmental changes. The gift to the Florida Museum of Natural History from Dr. William and Nadine McGuire of

Angelina Jolie: Awesome

Angelina Jolie made a trip to the Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington, D.C. back on June 26th. No one reported on this until now because she didn’t tell anyone. She spent several hours with wounded soldiers and gave each one a gift bag which included, among other things, a $1000 gift certificate to Best

What about Sicko?

Does anyone have any idea why the Michael Moore film about health insurance in America, Sicko, got nowhere near the same amount of publicity as Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 9/11? I’m not asking how you feel about the message / content of any of these films. I’m just trying to understand why Sicko seemed

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.