Friday Shards

You're reading my 300th post here, counting a few draft posts I may or may not ever get around to publishing. Today also marks visitor #4500, more or less, for whatever that's worth.

It's also a Friday post, and my Friday posts tend to be jumbles of assorted links and misc. items. Today is no exception.

First, about the photo. It's just some broken glass I saw on the sidewalk this morning on my way to work, but I thought it might make a decent picture. So there you have it.

Some recent search engine hits:

• "What to do with ground meat?" Oddly, I am the only link for this phrase on the entire internet. It's a heavy burden to bear, truly it is. So here's my ground-meat-related advice: Make burgers. Add cheese, bacon, and/or guacamole as needed. Serve with fries or tater tots, and plenty of cold beer. Devour. Smile.
• sca way to tie hair male. Honestly, I don't know what to make of this one.
• corvallis oregon downtown statue phallic. I haven't been to Corvallis in years, and I don't recall anything about a phallic statue. I could've missed it, though; anything that's longer than it is wide is bound to look phallic to someone, I guess.
• "Pork Chop on a Stick" recipe. If you're interested, you really want to visit Porky's Delight, the company that created this dish. You also might enjoy Bacon Unwrapped, a blog all about bacon. Mmmm.... bacon....
• @executivegreetingcards.com CEO. A bit of background here: ExecutiveGreetingCards.com was the source of repeated holiday-card-related blogspam I was getting here, back when I'd inadvertently turned off captchas. The search originated from an outsourcing firm in Bangalore, perhaps looking for the CEO to drum up business. Which makes sense, really; why pay a US citizen to spam blogs and infuriate people when you can have someone in India do it for a few cents an hour?
• "Jesus fish" August 29 Oregonian. This confused me until I saw a brief item in this week's Willamette Week:
  

  
  There's no real clever way to put this, but here goes: Why is there a tiny "Jesus fish" in the bottom right-hand corner of some copies of the Aug. 29 Oregonian Metro section ? The well-known Christian emblem appears in ghostly gray at the edge of a story headlined "Clark County affidavit describes suspect truck." As they say, the Lord works in mysterious ways.
  

  
  So it's still mysterious, but now I know what the mystery is, at least.

Now, a variety of other links I've accumulated lately:

• Lately I've been grumbling about fall and leaves turning and so forth. So it's nice to be reminded that it's almost spring in Australia
• I can't mention Australia without a few cute wildlife links. An interesting biology-geekish post about monotremes -- mostly platypuses, though, and not so much about echidnas, which is unfortunate. There is a small photo, though, so that's something.
• Link #2, a visit to the Melbourne Zoo, with photos of non-Aussie beasties.
• And link #3, some koalas at Cute Overload. Awwwwww....
• Also at Cute Overload, yet another video of cute kittens. This stuff just never gets old.
• As much as I like animals, I'm still a happy, unapologetic carnivore. Which is why I'm opposed to the "Horse Slaughter Prevention Act" now working its way through Congress. Apparently the R's want to prove they can play "jackbooted food cop" too. So I may have to have one of Carafe's horse burgers while I still can, before the government drives the practice underground.
• Even multibillion-dollar robots the size of school buses need a breather now and then. Cassini took a break from its usual rings-of-Saturn daily grind to take a nice photo of the Pleiades.
• And a great piece by the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission, explaining why they're still going to refer to Pluto as the ninth planet
• A post at Beervana points out a classic Hamms commercial on YouTube. Now, Hamms is one of the worst beers on the planet; it's what you buy if you can't afford Budweiser. But they do have that catchy jingle. If I had any musical talent whatsoever, I'd be happy to write a song for the nice folks at Tugboat, but sadly, I am not merely unmusical, I am antimusical. Guitar strings break at a mere glance from me, and my mere presence depresses the natural musical ability of those around me. I can't explain it.
• A piece about Seattle trying to be greener. As one commenter notes, what downtown Seattle really needs is more greenspace. I like the place, but it's a bit too much of a concrete jungle. You sort of forget how lucky we are in Portland sometimes. I usually balk at the whole Portland smugness thing, so when I say we're lucky, it means more.
• I was poking around in MSDN, and it turns out there's a whole new API just for handling Terminal Services stuff. I hope I never need to learn or use this.
• Lately I've taken an interest in the obscure flights of public stairs the city maintains around town. I'm not alone: Here are some photos and more photos. Enjoy. Or roll your eyes at me and call me a geek. I don't care.

The latest pile of accumulated Blogspot referrer pages, from people Blogspot sends my way, usually after I post something here. I haven't been very diligent about capturing all of these, so I've missed a number of them lately. FWIW.

• My Paintings [ericksen-art]
• love [140blogs.com]
• !!!Fest:ON!!!
• Vistas de Metro e Meio
• one day it'll all make sense
• O meu mundo
• Little Tiny Hangers
• P & B's 3 days in Hong Kong
• Solomiranda