Author: Joey deVilla

My Housemate Went to Poland and all I Got Was This "Osama and Friends" Nesting Doll Set

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date October 28, 2005
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Last weekend, my friend and former housemate Paul gave me a very eastern European gift — a set of matreshka (Russian nesting dolls) that he picked up during his summer visit to Poland and the Czech Republic. This was an unusual set — rather than the whey-faced women and girls typically depicted on such dolls, these had the Middle East’s most notorious characters:

Osama Bin Laden
Mullah Omar
Saddam Hussein
Yasser Arafat
Ayatollah Khomeini

Click the image to see a photo album of shots of this matreshka.

He wisely chose not to give them to me at my wedding, which took place in the United States. If American airport security found this in your carry-on luggage, I’d bet that your next stop would be the body cavity search room.

I took a few shots of the matreshka and put them in a photo album. You can view this album in album format or as a slideshow.

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Archie Goes Goth

Excerpt from the 'Archie' comic 'She's Goth to Have It'.

The last panel will shock you!

It’s a little-known fact that your subculture is over the minute it becomes a plot point in an Archie Comic. In She’s Goth to Have It, Betty gets tired of being ignored by her friends and tries a new look to get their attention:

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R.I.P., Porkins

Star Trek may have led to the term “red shirts”, but the expendable characters in Star Wars were more memorable. Most memorable of them all was Porkins (a.k.a. “Red Six”), played by William Hootkins, who passed away last weekend. Hootkins also played the crooked police lieutentant Echkardt in Tim Burton’s Batman and Frobisher in the Blackadder II episode “Beer”.

Photo: Porkins in the cockpit of his X-wing fighter.

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What Would Jesus Bet?

Next poker game with AKMA, I’m bringing Faith Chips!

A ten-pack is going for ten bucks right now! Click the image to learn more about Faith Chips.

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The Case of the 500-Mile Email

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date October 26, 2005
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[Cross-posted to The Farm.]

The story’s a couple of years old, but it’s been making the rounds

lately, so I thought I’d point to it: The Case of the 500-Mile Email.

Here’s the introduction:

I was working in a job running the

campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman

of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We

can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A

little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

“Um…

Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to keep

panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a

department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like

statistics. “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500

miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily. “You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–“

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. “And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email. Just not more than–“

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?”

“Well,

we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until

just now.” Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. “Anyway, I

asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it–“

“Geostatisticians…”

“–yes,

and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send

email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations

within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically,

but we can never email farther than this radius.”