Posts tagged as mock mock
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- Tuesday, April 21, 2009:
Newsday Tuesday Rainy Weather Forecasts Misunderstood by Many To bring an umbrella or not to bring an umbrella? That's the perennial question on those days where the chance of rain is less than 100 percent. But only half the population understands what a precipitation forecast means well enough to make a fully informed answer, a new study finds. If, for example, a forecast calls for a 20 percent chance of rain... - Wednesday, January 21, 2009:
LOST Recap Day this post contains spoilers from last season's LOST finale The fifth season of LOST begins tonight at 8, and it's hard to believe that almost eight months have passed since the last one ended. If you find yourself blurry on the details of the fourth season, you should start with my old LOLLOST feature, before catching up on the final two-hour episode below. As a tribute to Charlie Pace, Jin and Michael blow up ... - Thursday, November 20, 2008:
Silly Ratings Day In an effort to provide some transparency in the game-rating process, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) has started including brief overviews of each reviewed game on its website. You can now see why games were given a particular rating, and just what exactly the term "comic mischief" means. To assist parents in their search for kid-safe games, the website also allows you to search for games by game content. Although their hearts are in the... - Tuesday, September 09, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Spies get social network as CIA, FBI promote their version of Facebook At long last, US intelligence agencies have created a new system of sharing their information with one another to prevent another terrorist attack. And it's a lot like Facebook. Developers were quick to point out that their network would be based on the useful "classic" Facebook, and not the usability-inhibited patchwork of coloured squares and ad... - Wednesday, August 27, 2008:
Audience Participation Day I've posted in the past about how bad the Family Circus has become over the course of forty-eight years worth of cartoons. It's not its fault, necessarily -- if I ever make it to fifty years of daily updates on my website, I'm sure I'll be just as bad as Family Circus, relying on repetitive jokes about how cool the Internet is or how Daddy might be a pedophile. In fifty years, I'll be seventy-eight with hands crippled by Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the remnant... - Wednesday, August 20, 2008:
Game Day There seems to be a recent makeover frenzy surrounding classic board games deemed too slow-paced or spiffy for modern audiences. The latest casualty of this is everyone's favourite game, Clue . From the cosmetic side, the staid British guests are replaced with a movie star and a football player among others, while the lead pipe has been dropped for the equally logical "set of dumbbells" (which is apparently easier to find in a spa or a home theatre). Because... - Tuesday, July 29, 2008:
Ethics Day As part of an annual recertification at work, every employee must take an online course in Business Ethics. Because the denizens of the URI! Zone are a shady bunch, these highlights might be helpful in your own lives. Socially aware customers are generally white, blonde, female, and braless (which raises two other ethical points, but only when it's cold outside). Mimi is obviously more concerned with the fact that ... - Tuesday, July 22, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday A dash of lime -- a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere... Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. &n... - Tuesday, June 17, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday When a wimpy bird turns into a stud Rebecca Safran has fooled Mother Nature. The evolutionary biologist from the University of Colorado figured out a way to give male barn swallows a makeover that makes less popular males much more desirable to females. Ms. Safran has already sold the results of her research to ABC, who will market it in the Fall 2008 television line-up starring Ty Pennington. The FOX Network is rumoure... - Wednesday, June 04, 2008:
Poetry Day a line analysis of classic poetry Waiting for Christmas by BU (age 5) I cicles hang at Christmas. The author is metaphorically referring to the silver tinsel which adorns the tree. Real icicles are not cost-effective for indoor tree decoration, given their tendency to melt. They are L ovely to. Some scholars argue that this line is incomplete, and believe that ... - Thursday, May 29, 2008:
LOST Recap Day this post contains spoilers from previously-aired episodes of LOST (season four) With so many complex timelines and unsolved mysteries, it's often difficult to keep track of everything that has happened so far on LOST. As a public service, here is a summary of the most important plot developments from this season so you are prepared for the upcoming season finale. A special LOLCAT format has been used for ease of understanding. Episode 1: The Beginni... - Tuesday, May 20, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Robot digger set to land Sunday at Martian pole Like a miner prospecting for gold, NASA hopes its latest robot to Mars hits pay dirt when it lands Sunday near the red planet's north pole to conduct a 90-day digging mission. The three-legged Phoenix Mars lander . . . is zeroing in on the unexplored arctic region where a reservoir of ice is believed to lie beneath the Martian surface. To be clear, the article is not saying Phoenix is... - Tuesday, May 06, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday The Silver Line, which provides Northern Virginia with its own brand of Ross-and-Rachel drama, is back on the table again after yet another reversal of federal funding . The goal of this project is to connect the region's only major International airport 1 with its inadequate Metro system so travelers don't have to use the inappropriately-named Washington Flyer taxi monopoly, which never travels at more than 45 miles per hour when the meter is running. &nb... - Tuesday, March 11, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday When Mom or Dad Asks To Be a Facebook 'Friend' More and more moms and dads are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their sons and daughters, they're friending their sons' and daughters' friends. Apparently "friending" is a legitimate dictionary gerund now, and for Facebook neophytes who are unaware of its meaning, this paragraph might be seen in a ... - Tuesday, February 26, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday Plan for Telescopes on Moon's Far Side Is Revived With NASA planning to send astronauts back to the moon sometime after 2019, those dreams of a radio telescope looking out through the galaxies from the protected side of the moon have been revived. The agency recently awarded two planning grants for research on the necessary technologies and on how to put them in place. Long time readers of the URI! Zone will recal... - Tuesday, January 29, 2008:
Newsday Tuesday The Dulles Rail Death Knell Travelers, shoppers and office workers -- interviewed at the airport, in parking lots and in Tysons area strip malls -- said they were stunned by the Federal Transit Administration's announcement Thursday that the $5 billion rail line would not qualify for federal dollars without drastic changes in price and management. Dulles rail was counting on $900 million from the FTA, and state offici... - Thursday, October 04, 2007:
Out of Ideas Day Don't worry, I'm not out of ideas, because as a last resort I can always string some vaguely rhyming words together and suffix them with DAY (see also, Museday Tuesday, Newsday Tuesday, Manic Monday, and Dave Day). It's actually Hollywood that's out of ideas, something that's been painfully obvious every since they released The Second To Last Karate Kid and Bewitched . The most recent example of OOI Syndrome (pronounced OO-wee) is the Alvin and... - Tuesday, August 14, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday Facebook pages concern parents of college freshmen As housing officials at colleges around the country send out roommate assignments to freshmen this summer, a growing number of schools say they're getting more requests for changes -- from parents who don't like the roommates' Facebook profiles. It looks like the "helicopter parents" have gained one more weapon in their quest to completely envelope their offspring in a protect... - Tuesday, July 10, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday An Underwater Fence to Stop Invasive Species Engineers are attempting to block the spread of invasive exotic fish by establishing an electrical barrier on the canal linking Lake Michigan to the Illinois River. Four species of Asian carp are spreading north up the river; a non-indigenous goby is attempting a move south down the canal. It seems like every contemporary environmental fix-it program is just a weak band-aid for some... - Tuesday, June 26, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday Dust Settled, Drivers Still Get Dizzy in Mixing Bowl An article in yesterday's Post reported that major construction work on the $676 million Mixing Bowl project in northern Virginia has been completed. The treacherous throbbing ulcer where Interstates 95, 395, and 495, and numerous local roads converge now flows much more freely than before. However, there are early indications that all is not well in the land of poorly chosen cooking analogi... - Monday, May 21, 2007:
Sequel Injection This summer, the theatres have been, or will be, graced with such works of art as Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Shrek 3, The Bourne Ultimatum, and (I'm not kidding about this one) "Live Free or Die Hard" starring a 52-year-old Bruce Willis. Just last week, Blizzard Entertainment announced that their new blockbuster game would be Starcraft II -- not Diablo 3 as some people expected (or Warcraft IV or World of Warcraft II for that matter). There's... - Tuesday, May 08, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday Delaware Energy Debate Could Turn on the Wind " Two hundred towering windmills, each so tall that its blades would loom over the U.S. Capitol Dome, could be built in the Atlantic Ocean near one of Washingtonians' favorite beach retreats, under a plan being considered in Delaware. " This article in yesterday's Post discusses the possibility of erecting turbines six miles offshore of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. With New Jersey... - Tuesday, March 27, 2007:
Newsday Tuesday School prohibits use of Myspace site ...students were informed recently that under a new school policy, Think First, Stay Safe, the use of MySpace.com will be prohibited at school and at home. The policy states that students enrolled in the school can't have a MySpace.com account or any similar type of personal site... I support this ruling wholeheartedly, but not for the reasons you might expect. It's not because of the... - Monday, February 26, 2007:
Don't forget -- the deadline for the "Write My Lyrics" contest is Sunday the 4th! Sign Day After many years of loyal service, the ubiquitous Radiation Warning Sign (seen on everything from Doc Brown's stolen Plutonium to the small print on Hot Pockets sleeves) has been updated. Five years of focus groups in eleven different countries led the International Atomic Energy Agency to the underwhelming design shown below. O... - Thursday, February 01, 2007:
Musical Patriotism Day There was an article in the Post yesterday about Virginia's revived interest in picking a new state song that doesn't offensively talk about darkies . The last time they tried to pick one, the committee could not reach a consensus on any of the finalists' songs -- and now our poor state has been tuneless for almost seven years. We at the URI! Zone consider this to be a travesty of the second highest order, and hypothesize that it could not possibly take almost ... - Thursday, December 07, 2006:
div.civil { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Times New Roman; } The Civil War Gets Me Hot The Virginia Tech Alumni Association is hosting a weekend for Hokie Sweethearts. Make plans for a Valentine's getaway weekend with your special someone. Friday, February 16 Arrive at the Inn at Virginia Tech to a romantic welcome gift in your room! Registratio... - Monday, September 11, 2006:
March of the December Decorations Christmas is coming to this end of suburbia, announced with the annual overstocking of garish decorations now available at Costco. As I stepped through the Gates of Consumerism on Saturday morning, I waved my membership card at the disinterested greeter, fended off the coupon book they routinely dump into your cart, and wended through the yuppies and slow-movers to do my weekly shopping. Even from the entrance I could see it: a massive display nestled between the $500 air ... - Tuesday, September 05, 2006:
Newsday Tuesday U.S. Intercepter Missile Hits Target After eight other tests and over one hundred billion dollars in funding (which would buy 22,935,779,816 two-piece meals from Popeyes), one of the United States' Intercepter missiles completed another successful test this past week, raising its success rate from 50% to 55% and effectively removing the program from the No Missile Left Behind blacklist. Although the naysayers may disagree, the Intercepter pro... - Tuesday, August 08, 2006:
How-To Day: Composing a Baby Announcement To: Everyone@Work.com Baby announcements shouldn't just go to the people who work directly with the new mother and father -- the entire company deserves to hear about the inner workings of the womb. This is why e-mail is the new mode of choice for publishing what came out of your body today. From: NotTheMomma If you are the parents, you probably won't have enough time or energy to announce the birth to everyone, so you'll have to hire one of your work... - Monday, March 20, 2006:
While listening to a CD of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir at my parents' house last night, I was struck by the plethora of nonsecular music that has accumulated over the last thousand years. We have millions of songs and hymns about Jesus and dreidles, angels flying high, and chariots swinging low. It seems like there's a piece composed or invented for virtually every important religious scene or feeling and every religion has a few ditties that you can sing on the street which everyone... - Thursday, March 16, 2006:
From IMDb : uri! is the latest in a line of high production value biopics from the studio that brought you Ray and Walk the Line , documenting the life and times of musician-blogger, Brian Uri!. From his early days as a small Asian boy to his later years as an older Asian man, you will laugh and cry at the fecundity of human spirit. The talent slated to be in this movie include: The Family&n... - Wednesday, November 02, 2005:
In an effort to muddle up the more salient issues by introducing several new ones, President Bush has requested $7.1 billion in emergency funding to combat the possible bird flu pandemic which has been rumoured to be lurking in the shadows for several years now. After ten minutes of giving shout-outs to his dogs (but no nominations this time around), Bush gave a doomsday speech at the NIH which sounded vaguely familiar . Some conspiracy theorists note that the speec... - Wednesday, September 21, 2005:
Yesterday evening, someone from my hometown of Alexandria found my site by Googling "winkler botanical preserve" sex . The Mark Winkler Botanical Preserve is a small wildlife area nestled in the shadow of I-395 where I played one summer (as previously reported in an August update ). I did not have sex there, being an elementary school kid at the time (sixth graders did not begin having sex on school buses and in nature preserves until over a decade after ... - Thursday, September 08, 2005:
Appropriate Use of Katrina for PR Purposes: The Red Cross has been given a station on XM Radio to help coordinate their Katrina relief efforts . I think this is a great use of the technology, though I hope the signal won't disappear whenever the aid workers go behind buildings. There's a spot on the Fairfax County Parkway where my XM radio fades out momentarily every day I drive by. I think it has something to do with top secret military grade sonar weapons. We'll know when the beached whales show up in the Potomac ... - Thursday, September 01, 2005:
A Tribute to Jerry Fletcher The Endgame Hurricane Katrina was staged by a mad scientist / evil entrepreneur as a way to humiliate the Corp of Engineers and end the war in Iraq. The Facts The Warrior Group is a women-owned company in DeSoto, Texas, which creates modular office furniture. A few years ago, they had twelve million dollars worth of contracts to create modular barracks for the Corp of ... - Wednesday, August 17, 2005:
John Basedow is easily the scariest-looking self-proclaimed "fitness celebrity" of them all. John is the promoter of the Fitness Made Simple workout program that regularly advertises during syndicated television shows. He's the guy with the scrawny (yet still out of proportion) head on top of a leathery-chicken-breast body who looks eerily like a friend I had in eighth grade named Ian. If John is the living example of what the fitness program can do for average Joe Americ... - Tuesday, August 02, 2005:
An ominous plague has been incubating in America's moist spots over the past ten years. It's not contagious and it probably won't kill you, but it will add a certain obnoxious je ne sais quoi to your daily routine. What is this plague? Why it's the boogerspawn of all the laissez faire parents of the 1990s! These parents eschewed the standard guidelines of reinforcement and punishment, out of fear of being labelled an abusive parent, choosing instead to maximize thei... - Tuesday, July 19, 2005:
Life hasn't been good to NASA since I last reported on their craterization of a comet (see my entry from July 6, 2005). Apparently their P.R. department has decided that instead of performing a successful mission and having a grand news conference upon completion, it's better to Harry-Pottercize the next shuttle mission into hype oblivion (In other news, NASA obtained a temporary injunction against Scaled Composites LLC , who wanted to fly up a day early and spoil the en... - Friday, July 15, 2005:
It was funny enough when Blizzard's World of Warcraft gave you the option of owning pets, including Maine Coon cats, and players discovered that talking about their pets in Chat Channels filtered "Coon" as profanity. On Tuesday, they quietly changed the name of the cat without announcing it, regardless of the fact that Maine Coon is a real type of cat, and the state cat of Maine. (Maine Coons are giant cats once thought to have been mated with raccoons. ... - Thursday, July 14, 2005:
I read a story in the Washington Post a couple days ago that mentioned Herndon's continued efforts to regulate or do away with the sites where day laborers meet for jobs . Herndon and the proposed sites are literally right down the street from me. While I can see where the opponents are coming from, I think I see a few flaws in their logic: "At the 7-Eleven, it's an eyesore [...] Not too many people go to that 7-Eleven anymore . . . and now they want to ... - Wednesday, July 06, 2005:
Facets of Space: Insight Into Today's Headlines Space Invaders Being fat is now a matter of National Security. Military officials worry because too many recruits are now too fat to join the services (although they note that "'Large and in charge' makes soldiers look more formidable to the enemy" . Farther down in the article is a chart of weight-loss methods, with 21% of soldiers trying laxatives (apparently forgetting that they're grown adults and not high school rowers in the Lightweight 8 at S... - Friday, June 24, 2005:
Following America's obsession with obesity comes the "fat house in a skinny lot" syndrome. This occurs when homeowners can't quite afford to move out of their overinflated housing market so they renovate their existing houses to maximize indoor space at the expense of lawn and aesthetics. The homeowners with amenable houses add a new floor, preserving the balance between indoor and outdoor space, while those with houses that would collapse with added weight allow their homes to bulge... - Thursday, February 12, 2004:
I remember a time when the Family Circus used to be "aw shucks" cute, even if it was never hilarious. Nowadays, it's either hip Internet throwaway jokes or it has a personality crisis and wants to be a boxed strip rather than a single frame. Yesterday's comic is a prime example -- having a caption and also a balloon text just doesn't work if they're sequential. It just says that the cartoonist ran out of space and had no better place to jam the text in. A comic that tries this and su... - Wednesday, February 04, 2004:
As most people probably know by now, Bush is interested in establishing a moon colony to facilitate the exploration of deep space . Over the next five years, he'd like to redirect $12 billion dollars towards ensuring that the next round of moon landing photos are less fake than the previous ones . Insider sources suggest that half of that amount is earmarked for licensing stock planetary footage from recent space documentaries, such as Ind... - Tuesday, January 20, 2004:
If you were wondering why I left such a diminutive update on Monday, I'll tell you now. I posted that I was running a little late. While that wasn't exactly a lie, I feel somewhat duty-bound to explain the whole story... As you may well be aware, I typically awake at 4am to get ready for work. Since I went to bed extra early the night before (6pm) I woke up before my alarm went off. At 3:26am I got out of bed and made a simple breakfast. By 3:32am I had finished eating my Belgi... - Thursday, September 25, 2003:
This has got to be the stupidest thing I've heard this week: Junior Achievement is projecting that the lesson, which will be taught both in school and after school, will be used in 36,000 classrooms nationwide and has the potential of reaching 900,000 students in grades five through nine, or about 10 percent of all students in those grade levels. In the role-playing activity Starving Artist, for example, groups of students are encouraged to come up with a... - Wednesday, January 29, 2003:
From last night's State of the Union address, I learned that the representatives of our country are excellent clappers, although there was no occasion for them to demonstrate their "two and four" clap. There was one guy about three rows back who cheated -- he stood up with the crowd at every standing ovation, but kept his hands in his coat pockets. The clapping even came in a variety of styles, ranging from a broad low rumble to a more raucous pub-style, punctuated by jolly 'attaboy... - Saturday, January 11, 2003:
Tallahassee has the wackiest commercial selections I've ever seen, and not in a good way. First, we get the trial runs of those obnoxiously offensive "truth." commercials, like last year's floating eyeball cartoons which apparently never made it to a wider venue up north. Then come the horribly low-budget efforts from local merchants like Bill Well's Chevrolet and REX, and last month's welder school ad. There was also a notable, if tasteless, plug where Santa gets stuck in a chimney... - Monday, January 21, 2002:
There's no classes today, so I'll probably spend some time catching up on my composing, which slipped a little in productivity this week. This is actually the only federal holiday FSU allocates this semester, so I may as well enjoy it while I can. This three article series that we had to read for pedagogy is a ridiculous waste of pontification. The original article, which I read on Saturday, was a rational comparision of three solmization systems: one fixed syllable and two mov... - Friday, January 18, 2002:
It's Rush Week here on the campus of Florida State, so you see khaki clones with visors and ties everywhere you go. I've never understood the urgent need to belong to a fraternity -- paying annual fees to associate with a group of people and add a line to a resumé. When I was an undergrad, I never even bothered joining the various Honour Societies, and the only one I've even been associated with is Delta Mu, the non-service music fraternity coined on a whim by three anti-establ...
