Build Date: Thu Dec 26 19:00:06 2024 UTC
The latest craze sweeping my apartment is two-fisted coffee and beer drinking. I call it "Boffeer".
-- Mr. Bad
Blast from the Past at Last
1999-01-13 18:16:00
Java and XML and CORBA and all that fancy crap have got me down. I was pining for the days when Microsoft second-sourced a UNIX for the 286, and RDBMS's were the hottest new technology. Then I found "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre". Ah.
This crazy pages-long diatribe is a combination of Kafka and HST with a strong jolt of Revelations thrown in. Its message -- about the horrors of maintaining systems for morons who don't understand them and don't WANT to understand them -- is as true today as it was in 1989. That is, not much.
But check out the XCM anyways. It's good strong stuff for a bad weak era.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument
Mr. Bad and Crackmonkey collaborate on a fine Mr. Bad's List. We put together ALL the TECHNOLOGY you ever need to know in order to STUMP your OPPONENT in a technical argument. Use these only when your back is against the wall -- they're definitely desperation tactics. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
This is one for the Ages. Our new signature SMRL drink. We beta tested this several weeks ago at the Goat Brothers B-Day Party. Oh my! (More...)
Grow better illegal mushrooms than lousy "Psilocybe fanaticus"
Disclaimer: PaoTzu's a1 illegal mushroom cultivation cookbook is meant for educational purposes only. Be aware of the techniques used by hardcore criminals! Protect your children! Read, learn, educate. Do not try this at home. (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
Three Days and 25 Spocktails: A Cautionary Tale
Johnnie Royale picked me up from the dental surgery. I felt warm, safe, cradled in the anathesia's loving embrace. The pharmacy downstairs gave me a bottle of Vicodin and a few instructions: take it with food, don't mix with alcohol, don't operate heavy machinery. I put it in my pocket and we left. "Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to a bar?" asked Johnnie. (More...)