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I unpacked Anna's grandmother's truck and in it I found: The aristocracy A bordello A crotchety driver Dreamscapes El LePhone A Finnish peacekeeping contingent A gangrenous toe Homicidal tendencies Irina A jury pool Krapp's Last Tape A lamp Manchego cheese Ne'er-do-wells Oogenesis Porcupines Questioable medical ethics Responsible medical ethics Scott's mom Tealuxe An unruly mob Violent Soviets Wahoo's fish taco stand Xenophobic Argentinians The Yakima Dinos Zero-tolerance immigration laws

A frying tip: don't fry anything wet, don't pour oil in a frying pan until the pan is completely dry, and don't drip anything into a pan full of hot oil. You'll be happier for it.

What exactly was that horse (and his rider) doing walking across Broadway towards Riverside Park? It didn't even wait for the light .

Times article of the day: An Officer and a Gentleman? 50 Women Would Disagree The funny bits: She said he told her he was fighting in Afghanistan. A week later, he called her by satellite phone, saying that he was in a safe house in Afghanistan. "He sounded like Don Johnson," she said. He wrote her daily e-mail messages and made phone calls to her that sounded dangerously exciting: "Baby, I love you . . . vehicle coming!" "What proceeded were the most intoxicating love letters," she said. "He wrote better than Yeats. He wrote better than Shakespeare. He totally intoxicated you with his feelings: `Oh, baby, I want to tell you how much I miss you.' `I can't wait to get home to you.' " It is unclear how tall Colonel Saleh is. Women who have met him told some of the others that he was 5-foot-9 or 5-10, and possibly didn't even qualify for tallpersonals. In his mushy e-mail messages, he told the women he was 6-3 or 6-5. Ms. Calder was...

I remember reading an article in Apple's old Develop journal about providing ambient feedback in software. I think the example they used involved respresenting the state of a complex system via a cartoon face--the slant of the eyebrows might represent one piece of information, the mouth would vary from a smile to a frown based on another, and so on. The theory being that it's hard to glance at a number of gauges and quickly identify if anything is amiss, but most of us have no trouble looking at a representation of a face and identifying whether it's pissed off or happy. Anyway, I always thought that sort of feedback was cool, and this article reminded me of it.

I've gotten my hands on most of the remaining cereal boxes: Honey, Not Venerios! , Le Froste Flakes , the much-requested Snapple Andrew Jackson , and my favourite, The Odyssey of Homer (Lattimore Edition) .

Peter G. Peterson, who sounds made-up but probably isn't, has a good piece in Sunday's Times Magazine about just how screwed over we're all going to be 5, 10, and 20 years down the line thanks to today's tax cuts and resultant deficit spending. Central bankers usually are reasonable folks, even the ones who previously served in Republican administrations. If the administration had stepped back and given monetary policy a chance to kick-start the economy instead of throwing our future away with irresponsible fiscal policy, that would've been something. With inflation looming in the late '90s, no one called for raising taxes to cut it off. Rescinding any monetary initiatives enacted today is a relatively easy thing to do; it's hard to get people worked up about interest rate changes. This is opposed to the political nastiness that will ensue a few years from now when whichever Democrats are left in office actually want to uphold the sunset provisions in the...

Instead of (or, really, in addition to) sitting around and waiting for Radiohead's new album to come out, everyone should go and buy Pablo Honey and have a good time.

I'd forgotten that the weather could be used for good as well as evil.

Things that warm your heart: seeing two national guardsmen (guardswomen, in this case) stationed at the Times Square station, each with a rifle in one hand and a cell phone in the other. How they were getting reception underground is beyond me.

(originally posted to the aforementioned Specwords list, but I like the title enough to repost it here) When I saw the dude riding a unicycle heading into the Court St. station just ahead of me, I thought he was pretty cool. A unicycle! He got off just before the stairs down to the platform, apparently not deft (or daft) enough to take them whilst mounted. Then I saw that he was wearing a fanny-pack, and I realized that he was not quite as cool as I had originally thought. Once on the train he took one of those PocketPC handheld things out of his fanny, which I thought was pretty cool but in reality wasn't. The "X"-ed out "whining" button he was wearing on his shirt definitively pushed him over the edge to complete dork. Some women sitting across from him flashed smiles at the sight of the unicycle, but I think he creeped them out with looks intended to inveigle them to hop on his lap and go for a spin. He left dejected at De Kalb to transfer to the express and...

The first rule of Specwords? Don't talk about Specwords . Note: when that link ceases to make sense, it won't be my fault... I can't link to individual Imperial Pint posts.

It should be fun at work tomorrow.

While I'm at it, here's the word search generator that I wrote.

I've begun the process of scanning in cereal boxes that I've defaced. Actually, I've finished the process for now, since I've scanned in the Rice Krispies box and the Kix box , and those are the only two left in my possession. I gave away all the good ones. If you happen to have one of the good ones, I'd appreciated if I could appropriate the box for a bit for purposes of electronic exhibition.

If Mark Cuban can get the Mailman to shack up with with the Mavs , I'd use all my powers of cognitive dissonance to put aside the fact that buying championships is fundamentally not cool .

I recently subscribed to the Urban Organic produce delivery service, which is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. It's not a bad deal if you have the interest and the means to spend $21 a week to have a large box of seasonal organic produce brought to your door. Instead of washing pesticides off your fruit, you get used to brushing bugs off, and you learn than fruit is fundamentally ugly. This week's box wasn't too interesting, but there were blood oranges and a mango in the box last week. I made a sauce out of them and pan-fried some salmon fillets with it, and it came out well, but the recipe exotic enough that it's only practical when you're looking to impress people with the impracticality of the meal you just made. 3 or 4 salmon filets 2 small blood oranges, the bloodier the better 1 mango salt ‘n’ peppa Squeeze the blood oranges, and put the juice in a bowl of your choosing. Cut the mango in half over the bowl to collect the ensuing mango juices, and then s...

Maybe I can use my blog to popularise "wham" as an analogue to "whom," but for referring to things and not people. I've tried to do this before, but never via a blog. Maybe I can use my blog to popularise British spellings. That would be worthwhile.

I was hoping to see one of the Shandel & Blitz adverts on my subway ride home tonight, as they're outrageous and would have been something good to write about. But I didn't, and I'm not going to stoop to the level of making stuff up in my first post (that will come in time, mind you), so I won't pretend that I did. I'd write about the person sitting halfway down the subway car who has the volume on their cell phone turned up loud enough so the entire car could hear it announced that she had 900 phone messages, but that's not interesting. Coming up with interesting things to write about is difficult, it turns out. I think my problem is that I only take public transportation throughout Brooklyn, and everything interesting happens on cross-town buses in Manhattan, at least if the actual Metro Diary is to be believed.

A few words of explanation about this site: It's a blog, of sorts. I'm hoping it will motivate me to write a bit more, or at least share what I write with random people. They never let me write anything at the Spec . There are sections on the left, (not too) loosely based on different daily sections of the New York Times . I might have made the Arts & Ideas section up. I may or mayn't post to those sections on the appropriate days. When the posts have datelines, you can rest assured they're from places to which I've never been. You can comment on posts via the link on the bottom right of each box. Kick ass, no? Some real content is coming. I promise.

So now I have a blog. Now all I need is some content. More on that to follow...