I’m on to you!
Yes, this is pretty dispiriting: an iPhone app that does nothing but cost $999 dollars managed to rack up eight purchases before Apple yanked it. Amusingly, those who’ve jailbroken the new 2.0 firmware have had access to a copycat app since yesterday. It makes me sort of wish Apple hadn’t pulled the app — now the free app won’t proliferate and those eight dopes will be able to continue to enjoy showcasing their elite levels of wealth/idiocy.
It’s beautiful outside. I have the windows open, the better part of a pot of good coffee ahead of me, and I’m listening to music that’s both aggressive and aggressively poppy at a pretty significant volume. As a plan of action for a Friday in August, I heartily endorse this one.
Last night’s Samantha Brown episode about DC: actually pretty good. I suppose it ought to have been, since the Travel Channel is based in Chevy Chase. Still, it was kind of surprising to see someone do a not half-bad job representing the city. Brown herself is charming and funny, and I hear she killed Andrew Zimmern in personal combat in order to land her own show. Hell, I would’ve given her a show for any two of those three.
Jake‘s tweet captures something essential about geek seduction techniques, I think.
The Post writeup of this summer’s Goshen Scout Camp food poisoning incident brings back a lot of memories, as I’m sure it does for Mike and Ficke.
I’ve been to Goshen many times. My troop (and Mike’s) was 647 — the fightin’ 647th! — and every summer most of us would head to camp Bowman. Sitting on land originally donated by the Post family, Bowman is one of several camps surrounding Lake Merriweather on the Goshen reservation. And, if I may say so, it’s the baddest-ass of them.
The point of all of the camps is to aid in rapid merit-badge accumulation. Earning these badges is a worthwhile pursuit since it lets you gain rank, which affords you the opportunity to boss around little kids. Normally the process involves performing some tedious task in isolation (a week’s worth of pullups; wandering around a field with a compass) and then going to the home of a stranger you sort of know from church. He’s all pissed off because you couldn’t find his house and are late, and anyway he only signed up for this because he had to to help his own kid earn the badge. But eventually you have an awkward conversation about citizenship, he signs something, and a few weeks later your mom sews a new badge onto a sash that evokes dueling senses of embarrassment and pride.
The process for earning badges at Scout camp is very different. On the first day you go to each of the various stations: Orienteering! Pioneering! Aquatics! Archery! Riflery! Shotgun! Counterterrorism! Well, alright, not counterterrorism. But there are a number of awesome things that you can sign up for. And if at the end of the week you’ve managed not to shoot anybody or drown, you’re rewarded with a pile of badges — that, and a disturbing eagerness for society’s collapse, thanks to a newly-acquired suspicion that you’d excel in the state of nature (presumably on the strength of your ability to tie a proper bowline).
But this can be said of all the camps surrounding the lake. Bowman differentiates itself: its attendees are counted on to work together as patrols to prepare their own meals, maintain their campsites and generally do their best to forestall the descent into savagery that will inevitably have occurred by week’s end.
A typical dinner involves picking up ingredients from the central commissary, laboriously preparing them over an open wood fire, then changing into a filthy uniform prior to sitting down to a half hour of picking specs of ash out of inedible mush. Sorrow-drowning is accomplished via powdered fruit punch mixed beyond the point of supersaturation, such that muddy pockets of crystalline sugar whirl around your mouth, barely noticeable under the burning tang of the, um, Tang. There are adult leaders present at these meals, but they typically abstain from scout-prepared food. Instead they subsist on staples purloined from the campsite’s collective stores at the week’s start (“Almond butter? No, you’re right, campers, no one would want to eat that…”); and, in my experience, packets of Taco Bell hot sauce that they wisely smuggled in. The situation is about as dire as you’d expect.
The menu was usually the same from year to year, so I know exactly what caused this food poisoning: the foil packets. These hamburger concoctions were popularly referred to as “Davey Crocketts” in what I can only assume is a grisly reference to the Alamo. Consisting of ground beef and vegetables wrapped in aluminum foil and buried in the fire, they were a highlight of the week. Not because they were particularly good — a lump of unseasoned beef and half-cooked potatoes is not a taste sensation — but because there was no tedious cleanup required (washing dishes without running water turns out to be a huge pain in the ass). I have very little trouble believing that a ton of campers got sick from eating these half-assed culinary creations. It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often, in fact.
I myself got very sick one year at Goshen. Not from food, though — I think it was from inhaling some lake water. But man, I was really sick. Sick enough, in fact, that I was relocated to Camp Post, the administrative facility. I spent the week in bed, but I don’t remember much of it. I remember that my breath was sulfurous, which seemed like a bad sign. And I remember that there was a cooler from which patients could help themselves to as many Flintstones sherbet popsicles as they’d like — being afforded this kindness seemed like a very bad sign. I spent my waking hours reading yellowed Casper the Ghost and Richie Rich comics and being visited by my troop’s adult leaders, who, with their knee socks and Smokey-the-Bear-hats in hand, looked almost as somber as they did ridiculous.
But at the end of the week my parents picked me up, took me to the beach and after a night spent on the bathroom floor I was fine. I hope the scouts who got sick this summer fare as well, or at least that the quality of the comics on offer has improved.
ALSO: The Nabob reminds me that he wrote a similar post almost exactly three years ago. Except as you might imagine his life-and-death BSA experiences had more to do with exploding shrapnel and flying axe heads than tiny, microscopic germs freemasons run the country!
Image by Flickr user jimstonjournal, used under a Creative Commons license
This (via Ezra) is a pretty fun little toy — it uses this clever hack to figure out what sites you’ve recently visited, then compares it to demographic data from Quantcast to determine whether you’re male or female. My results:
That’s right: my overpowering masculinity extends far; yea, even unto the document object model.
Actually, though, I think I probably got this result in a nontypical way, as my browser history currently contains no links to ESPN. The most incriminating domains on my list include jeroenwijering.com, digikey.com and, um, washingtontimes.com (I don’t read it for the articles! I swear!).
That, or maybe the script noticed that yesterday I read an article about Tucker Max. Based on that datum alone the script should not only be able to tell that I’m male but also that I’m an asshole.
It’s that time of year again: the FishbowlDC Hottest Media Types contest is upon us. And frankly, I’m a bit disappointed: due to last year’s… irregularities, Patrick Gavin promised new and improved technology. And I was ready! I checked Crowbar out of SVN and into a virtualized environment; I created a custom screen-scraper script for it, and got it working with XulRunner in such a way that it could be called by Ruby. I started looking into firing up a farm of Amazon EC2 instances to run the operation in parallel. I hit a snag when trying to find a decent RDF parsing gem for examining Crowbar’s output, but then the poll went up and I saw it didn’t matter.
It’s the same goddamn PollDaddy crap as last year! And it’s still just as vulnerable to a looped one-liner shell script. Fire up Firebug to grab the AJAX call’s URL, then set curl to keep loading it. You don’t even need to fake your user agent.
Ah well. We can still have some fun with this. Thanks to this handy GreaseMonkey script compiler I’ve put together a little Firefox extension that should help this year’s voting arrive at the appropriate result: namely, one that puts Mr. Brian Beutler at the top.
For those who question the propriety of this enterprise or (gasp) Brian’s hotness — well, there’s probably no hope for you. But look, maybe an analogy will help: Fifty Cent got shot a bunch and it made people start acting like he can rap. Now he’s a millionaire with access to unlimited supplies of Vitamin Water. A public acknowledgment of Brian’s post-shooting beauty is a pittance in comparison. It’s the very least we can do.
And it should be really easy, too. All you have to do is click the link below, say OK to whatever security warnings come up, and install the extension. I think it’ll work in Firefox 2 and 3; I’ve only tested it in the latter, though. After it’s installed and you’ve restarted Firefox, navigate over to the appropriate page. A message should pop up, then the robovoting will begin. You’ll get feedback, too, and the total number of votes you’ve cast (and your associated rank) will be displayed as it proceeds (it should remember the total even if you stop and restart the process).
And if you really want to demonstrate your love for Brian, you can leave proof of your vote total here in comments by pasting the tiny hexadecimal garbage displayed under it (along with the vote total you’re claiming) — each total has a unique code. No cheating!
Y’know, the program that lets you skip through lines at airports? Well, the database of registered travelers’ personal information has just been stolen. And no, of course it wasn’t encrypted. What, you think a company empowered to decide who bypasses airport screening should know something about security? Sheesh.
Via al3x
Lord knows we need all the tolerable bars in DC we can get, but last night’s experience is making me want to write off Townhouse Tavern. We ended up there with a larger-than-expected and somewhat unwieldy group, but arrived early and had secured chairs for everybody outside. After an hour or so one of our party went a few feet up the street to take a call. When the bartender came to clear empties he pushed the guy’s chair a bit out of the way, making it look like it belonged to a different, unoccupied table.
Some new arrivals approached another table out front that had folks around it, and one of them grabbed the now-slightly-displaced chair. We tried to explain that it was spoken for, but the guy who had snagged it just ignored us. Emily politely tapped him on the shoulder and explained the situation again, but he continued to blow us off, not even bothering to make eye contact. One of his group found the whole thing funny, and asked us incredulously if we realized that the chair-taker owned the bar.
Well, hell, did he? My gullibility is well-established, but it actually seems pretty possible to me: the bartenders were hanging out with their table all night, and the guy certainly carried an attitude of entitlement sufficient to mark him as a proprietor. If so, man, what a lousy way to treat your customers. I left that place pretty pissed off, and am sorry to have had a chip placed on my shoulder about what is, like I said, one of the few endurable bars in DC.
I suppose when you buy a place like Townhouse a large part of your motivation is a desire to host your friends exactly how and when you want. I can understand that. But it’s tough to want to put money in the pocket of someone who treats you like garbage, regardless of how nice his bartenders are. Hopefully somebody’ll pipe up and tell me that no, there’s no way that was the owner.
KRISTON TO THE RESCUE: Mr. Capps, a good friend to me and Townhouse both, writes with assurances that the TH owner is considerably taller, beardier and more Scottish than the thoroughly dude-like dude who behaved so poorly toward us. Sounds like it was just a bunch of regulars with delusions of grandeur. Good.
