Odd

If you have never had the experience of being on a massive conference call while an earthquake is occurring at one of the call venues, I heartily recommend the experience.

Listening to an east-coast person talk through a lot of background noise from the folks in a tower in Los Angeles as they rode out a 5.8 ’quake was oddly amusing.

If you need a chuckle, you may wish to examine this article at the LA Times (h/t cahwyguy) on conference room naming conventions:

Nowhere is that more prevalent than at Internet giant Google Inc. Its office here pays homage to television shows and movies set in San Francisco, including "Charmed," "Suddenly Susan" and "X-Men." In Washington, Google holds meetings in rooms named after presidential haunts, including "The Situation Room," "The Oval" and "Camp David." Employees also slip away to "The Secret, Undisclosed Location" and the even more mysterious "Smoke-Filled Room."

I still wish a group of us EPL fans at the local office had succeeded in our quest to have our conference rooms named after English football stadiums:  “Old Trafford”, “Craven Cottage”, “Fratton Park” and the “Conference Room of Light”.

I had to double-check, to make sure that it wasn’t The Onion.  It’s not; seen at ABC News:

Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants."

The Omaha senator[…] also says God has caused "fearsome floods … horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes."  He’s seeking a permanent injunction against the Almighty.

The article at ABC provides a bit of the background behind why Chambers has filed this suit.

Sadly, the judge before whom Chambers v. God is being brought appears to lack a sense of humor, and is threatening sanctions against Senator Chambers.  I can think of a few different approaches to dismiss the case – Sovereign Immunity, separation of church and state, lack of non-hearsay evidence….

Um….OK…

This might be the first time TreeHugger has written about competitive eating, and that’s no surprise really. The idea of stuffing down as much food as possible in as small amount of time as possible is about as un-TreeHugger as you can get in these days of food crisis and tortilla riots. But what if this most gluttonous of pastimes were used to promote a more planet-friendly diet? That seems to be the thinking behind Austin’s Veggie Dog Contest, where competitors will line up to help eat 1500 veggie dogs and 14 gallons of vegan ice cream.

So, how long will it be before there’s a veggie dog competition alongside the hot dog eating contests that are a centerpiece of so many Independence Day celebrations I wonder.

Threat Level has relayed a most interesting document:

AT a recent counter-terrorism and fusion center conference earlier this spring, intelligence and law enforcement officials were given a number of tools to help them fight terror attacks, including a dictionary of street gang slang that was compiled by Woodman State Jail in Texas. Somehow that document fell into the hands of THREAT LEVEL.[...]

The document (.pdf) warns to use “extreme care and caution in the display and use of this book. Do not leave it where it can be located, accessed or utilized by any unauthorized person.”

A couple of examples of this forbidden knowledge of terroristic language:

Y’ALL….(Street)….Short for “You All”.

YULE….(Occult)…..The Sabbath celebrated on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Congratulations.  Almost everybody who grew up in the south, or is a pagan, is apparently a terrorist threat.

Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

Yes, it’s the Onion.  That doesn’t stop it from being disturbingly entertaining because of the near-believability of its premise:

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

You may be acquainted with some of the problems in Zimbabwe — the nationalization of old colonial farms, the antics of Robert Mugabe to maintain power…and the country’s hyperinflation.

Consider, for example, the receipt at left, featured at the Freakonomics blog, for a dinner at Victoria Falls:  Z$1.25 billion.

Of course, that’s only US$1.06, or €0.67 at today’s exchange rates…if the Z$ can be said to be convertible in the first place.

It’s still an impressive-looking bill.

Seen in the Wall Street Journal (subscriber link):

Bowing to more than 1,300 phone inquiries, an online petition with more than 1,000 signatures and Internet chat sites lamenting the demise of the snack, Kellogg Co. has decided to temporarily relaunch Hydrox, the left-for-dead cookie.  [...]

Kellogg quietly killed off Hydrox in 2003, ceding victory to its longtime rival, Oreo, made by Kraft Foods Inc.’s Nabisco unit. Many Hydrox eaters initially thought their cookie had just become more difficult to find, learning only much later that the cookie had been discontinued. [...]

A Web site that recently listed the top 25 things people miss ranked Hydrox at No. 4, just behind in-store lunch counters and ahead of Howard Johnson restaurants and the popcorn snack “Screaming Yellow Zonkers.”

Woo hoo!  A brief respite from the tyranny of those dastardly Oreos!

In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, a little math-geek humor for the holiday weekend:

Since I encountered the report of Barak Obama having been formally adopted into the Crow Nation, on a campaign trip through Montana, I have been searching like mad trying to find the name he was given.

Major news sources all happily report that his new honorary name is “One Who Helps People Throughout the Land”, and his adopted family name is “Black Eagle”…but reports on the actual Apsáalooke name are few and far between.

I finally found it at ABC’s Political Radar Blog: Awe Kooda bilaxpak Kuuxshish

Sadly, my Google-fu is not strong enough to find the Apsáalooke term for “Black Eagle”.