Kinetic Loop

“Mulder, come into my office, please.”

I wonder if he knows brown hat lady?

The 7400 riding power scrubber with FaST (Foam-activated Scrubbing Technology) in action.

Unless she’s operating the 7400 as a conventional scrubber, without the FaST system. (Didn’t ask.)

Regardless, it’s exciting, no?

Low 60s and everyone’s wearing parkas. And why all the bags? Did this person just burglarize the bag store you see in the background?

They covered considerable semantic ground, with firm politeness:

If you have a three-at-a-time plan with Netflix, and are considering “upgrading” to the four-at-a-time plan, don’t.

After two weeks on the four-at-a-time plan, discs have been arriving out of order, and slower than before, so we’ve returned to the three-at-a-time plan.
While it seems like you should be getting 1/3 or 33% more discs over a given period of time with four, the reduction in service quality means that you actually have fewer than before.

And if anyone lends me Heroes discs 1 and 4 to watch before Monday: BFF.

White Squirrel Wars
Five towns that trash-talk one another about their white squirrel population. “(Olney) conducts and promotes an annual white squirrel count, when locals scour the landscape inch by inch to determine population or migration trends. Laws on the Olney books give the squirrels right-of-way on every street; residents are fined if they try leave town with one.”

The cult of Leica
A long piece about the well-known photographers (Cartier-Bresson, Winogrand, Friedlander, et al) who used a Leica.

A defining dictionary moment for the Jaffa cake
New words in the OED (e.g., heaviosity); also, “a mass removal of hyphens” (which you can also read about in today’s WSJ).

Monkey bars are so old school
“Manhattan’s Imagination Playground, designed pro bono by the architect David Rockwell…will be one of the few playgrounds in North America to employ “play workers,” or staff trained to help children haul around loose objects to build structures that can also be torn down. There will be a system of pulleys and ropes for children to lift and transplant objects, as well as water and sand to build dams and canals.” Is the US that hard up for civil engineers?

Wrinkles in Time: Rereading Madeleine L’Engle
“L’Engle’s books share a preoccupation—you might call it an obsession—with what it means to have consciousness, to be alive.”

The Times / Vintage Classics Ghost Story Competition
With tips from Susan Hill. ” Ghostly fiction is really successful only if the ghost has a reason to appear. That reason is not usually benign.”

Jack Hanna, flamingo get stuck in airport turnstile
“Animal expert Jack Hanna and an 11-month-old flamingo became trapped while trying to squeeze through an airport security turnstile. It took firefighters to finally get the flamingo out. Hanna, the director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and a frequent guest on nationally televised talk shows, was returning from a zoo fundraiser with a mongoose, a small leopard and the flamingo.”

I love this poster (in the tradition of Tube posters, which I’m crazy about). Olney has their Annual Olney White Squirrel Count on the last three Saturdays of October. And, unrelated, make sure to mark on your calendar Olney’s Annual White Squirrel Cruisers Car Club Fall Cruise-In for this weekend (white squirrels in tiny cars?), Olney’s Free Paper Shredding Event in May, Olney’s Airport Fly In/Drive In Breakfast in June and fox hunting in July. Only one event centered on their white squirrels? They should do an American Girl store, but with squirrels, not dolls.