Category Archives: Whatever

Age of Wonders

July 1, 2008 – 8:51 am

Bill Quick sends an e-mail to Glenn Reynolds: So I’m out on my bike today - it’s gorgeous in SF - and I stop by the Bay for a breather and just to sit and watch the sailboats gliding under the Bay Bridge. I open my backpack and drag out my [...]

By Joe Martin | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Don’t Use Useless Definitions

March 16, 2008 – 7:17 am

When writing, it pays to be as clear and concise as possible. This sentence (from Alliant Energy’s “Monthly Natural Gas Update”) is neither: A decatherm (equal to 10 therms) is enough natural gas to heat an average home for 4.5 days. It’s not clear because I still don’t know what a “decatherm” is. The parenthetical [...]

By Joe Martin | Tagged | Comments (0)

Brett Favre is Retiring

March 4, 2008 – 10:16 am

It’s not on the Packers home page yet, but it looks like it’s official: Brett Favre is retiring. ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported that according to Favre’s agent, Buss Cook, Favre informed Packers coach Mike McCarthy of his decision Monday night. A sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer, Favre, acquired in a [...]

By Joe Martin | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Warmth Approacheth

March 3, 2008 – 11:44 pm

Lately, I’ve felt like the cold weather will never end. It seems like every single week of the winter has brought more snow, more cold, more icy, and more dreariness. But — at last! — I have hope that we’re seeing the end of winter. Average temperature for the first five days of March: 28 degrees. [...]

By Joe Martin | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Too Much Snow

February 6, 2008 – 5:20 pm

How’s the weather in Madison, WI?: Including today’s snow, it is the 37th time in the last 67 days — since Dec. 1 — Madison has seen measurable snowfall, according to weather service data. Madison’s normal winter snow total is about 49 inches, Kuhlman said, but the city is already well [...]

By Joe Martin | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

No roasting these

November 20, 2007 – 9:15 am

If you haven’t heard yet, the horse-chestnut tree that gave famous Jewish refugee Anne Frank so much comfort in the early 1940’s has been condemned by the city. And I don’t mean “condemned” in the sense that the U.N. “condemns” things; I mean it’s going to be ripped out of the ground. The [...]

By Adam Volle | Also posted in Culture | Tagged | Comments (0)

Birthday Beauty

October 24, 2007 – 5:03 pm

For contact information, please see postscript This is not the time to be writing a love letter. Bluntly, I’ve got snot all over my face. It’s pouring both down my throat and out my nose, wherein it joins a non-stop stream of tears that have rendered this screen in front of me all but unreadable. [...]

By Adam Volle | Tagged | Comments (3)

Bush wants to chat. Do you accept?

October 6, 2007 – 10:06 am

Above: Madame Secretary tactfully avoids Kim’s gaze. One interesting fact known by few around the blogosphere about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is that the feared tyrant is himself a skilled surfer of the World Wide Web. That’s because he never told anybody until this week, when he informed R.O.K. President Moo-hyun during their “historic summit” [...]

By Adam Volle | Also posted in Humor, Politics | Tagged | Comments (0)

Robotic Telecommunication

September 5, 2007 – 5:29 pm

Telecommuting — the next generation. This is how I need to work from home. Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do. He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers’ offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen [...]

By Joe Martin | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Home Urinal

September 3, 2007 – 12:03 pm

The impossible dream - Los Angeles Times The vast majority of my dreams are completely impossible: owning Mars, traveling to the future, writing a book. So when — thanks to the magical economics of failed television pilot writing — I got to buy a house, and that house needed a new bathroom, I was [...]

By Joe Martin | Comments (0)