MemeMachineGo!

Like geeks everywhere, I was on a roller coaster. Whedon doing another regular series starring Dushku! Yay! On Fox, whose capricious ministrations have doomed shows like Wonderfalls and Whedon’s last, Firefly. But it was really going to happen! Yay! But Fox hated the pilot and the show was postponed and finally put on Fridays. Boo.

And then, worst, the pilot was bad. Blatantly manipulative, it puts a little girl in the worst sort of peril. And while it succeeded in making me care about the girl’s situtation, not so much about everyone else. And I especially didn’t care about Echo, who goes back to blank at the end of the episode, and I really, really wondered how Whedon was going to pull off a character arc for someone with no character. Surely he’s got a plan — it’s not like he could miss the corner this structure paints you into.

But episode two rocked.

In 1976, George Washington was granted the title General of the Armies of the United States, which has "rank and precedence over all other grades of the Army, past or present".

Triskaidekaphobia only seemed like good sense last Friday, when I let the mememachinego.com domain name expire, and my registrar slapped up an ad page. I reactivated the name, and the correct value should have propagated everywhere by now.

For the past couple of months, most of my blogging energy has been going elsewhere. Since October, there have been a lot of articles on living cheaply. Jen and I couldn't help but notice that we were already doing pretty much everything being recommended. So we've jumped on that bandwagon. Frugal Culture: better living through economy is our frugality blog, with new articles every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Check it out.

I had always been under the impression that Canada was immensely larger than the U.S., but, according to the CIA World Factbook, Canada's total area is 9.98 million sq. km and the U.S.' is 9.83 million sq. km. If one goes strictly by land area, the U.S. is slightly ahead at 9.16 million sq. km to 9.09 million.

Of course, I have to wonder whether the CIA's measurements might differ from Canada's own, given the U.S.' predilection for sending submarines into water the U.S. calls international that Canada considers its territory.¹

And I'm amused by the fact that the CIA uses encrypted communications for all of their web traffic, even to look at their home page.

¹ This entry's title is just a Ramones reference for my own entertainment, not an assertion that the CIA is actually up to shenanigans with the Factbook.

Via Lisa Gold's blog, I learned that Moby Lives lives again, and found these wonderful links to pictures of interesting bookstores, libraries, and more libraries.