With regard to the famous James Nicoll quote, and the correction of "rifle" to "rif[f]le", I always thought that "riffle" was what you found on the surface of a babbling brook, or what you did to a deck of cards, and that "to rifle" meant either to cut spiral grooves in a gun barrel OR to loot, plunder, ransack or rob. Teh Intertubes, though hardly authoritative, seem to back me up.
Am I wrong? Does one indeed "riffle" through one's victim's pocketses? Have I been doing it wrong all along?
Here's an illustration of what happens if you dump water into a fryer. This movie is a chip-pan fire, not a turkey-fryer, but the idea is the same: big pot of hot oil over a fire. Whoosh!
http://tinyurl.com/pyy6a
According to Wikipedia, in Escape to Witch Mountain, the twins Tony and Tia were fostered by the Malones, so I guess they would probably have been Tony and Tia Malone.
And now Steve's "tuning" is done, and both his monitors are working at the right resolutions, thanks to the wonders of AIM, EMail and dogged persistence in tweaking the X Windows config.
Georgina, that references the original at Treacher's blog here.
The True Stella Awards, named after the infamous McDonalds Coffee victim, tries to keep track of real and fictional outrageous lawsuits.
There are some silly suits out there, like the one against Piper Aircraft for faulty design of the Cub (one of the most popular aircraft ever, for over 60 years) when someone in an illegally modified Cub took off against advice, struck a van and his passenger was injured.
Hm, you may be right. It was a while ago, all I'm certain of is it was a uranium glaze on the bowl used for the keys and badge.
I remember hearing, in my initial briefing at Lawrence Livermore, the story of a researcher whose dosimeter kept reading anomalously high. (The dosimeter is a little gizmo hooked together with the required ID badge that measures each person's radiation exposure.) After painstakingly detailed audits of his work environment it was eventually tracked down to -- you've probably guessed by now -- a red Fiestaware bowl on the front hall table he habitually kept his keys and badge. The moral was, be careful what you do with your badge. (Mary Kay, Jordin may remember this story too...)
Heh, when I first saw the title of this thread "Marlowe in action" in my RSS reader, I thought to myself "Kit or Phil?" Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be both.
Kip, you got it. But it's "Berry", not "Barry" please.
When he knocked at my office door, I could tell that he had travelled far. By the cut of his coat he was from the old country. He was on his last legs.
"Desert" he gasped. "Out in the desert."
"What's out in the desert, old man?" I asked him.
"Near the legs. You know, the stone legs?"
He meant the the ruined statue halfway to Vegas. Some crooked contractor shorting the mix again. "What about it?"
"My trunk, it's missing. You gotta find it for me. I last saw it out there. All my work is in it. You have to find it." I could tell he was sinking into despair.
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