Rands In Repose: MOVEABLE TYPE This archive post from Rands was helpful, well-reasoned, and led me to his current post, “Editor Religion.” The reasons for blogging will duly be printed out via DYMO and stuck somewhere I can see it from the keyboard. Today’s blog tasks: more fixing of happy crappy background color horrorshows, possibly toning down some of the color choices. Today’s tasks requiring me to be dragged bodily away from the keyboard: my GOD, what the hell happened to the house? It looks like the Before segment on “Clean Sweep.” Today’s shopping goals (for those who hate to…

:NPR : Traditional Travel Agents Seek to Compete with Net Compete? He makes it sound like we’re destined for a museum, with little labels in Latin marking us out by subspecies, translated as in “Corporate Agent, var. SABRE2th Tigress.” So far, I’m one of those niche people, but who knows for how long? And sometime next year, the travel interface will be all point and click, and my mad SABRE booking skillz will be about as useful as a velociraptor’s toenail in a display case. Audio only – with perhaps a text transcript in 7 days.

It’s a glamorous world in the travel biz. So far today a gentleman yelled at one of the agents here because his flight was cancelled due to weather. He apparently expected her to re-open the flight, de-ice all the equipment, and clear the runways for him, personally… a rather Godlike task, and unlikely to be accomplished anytime this milennium. What’s going on in my corner of the globe today? Let’s go see:

Liberal talk network lands Chicago outlet Heh. This brought an Evil Chuckle to my lips: “Franken, who has established himself as one of the country’s leading conservative-bashers, said: “My first priority is to get sued by a right-wing jerk in order to generate interest in my new show, ‘The O’Franken Factor.’ Our hope is to do drug-free talk radio, although I understand it’s never been done. :(I don’t know WHAT he means. Or who. Nope.) “Quite simply, my plan is to alter the political landscape, drive this radical right-wing president from office and stand as a beacon for ordinary Americans…

ABCNEWS.com : Moon, Mars Proposals Stir Excitement “We had to do the moon first, but we’ve done it,” he said. “So the value of any permanent presence on the moon is not clear to me.” Well, it’s clear to me. We have to learn how to live, long-term, in a vacuum. Right now, there’s a slow leak on the International Space Station that we can’t find to fix. A permanent moon base could include underground rooms that could be pressurized easily and safely that could serve as bolt holes in case of a catastrophic decompression. On the station, or on…

kasia in a nutshell How weird is this? I was following up links to stories about spam, checked the author bio on this blog, and DH says “Oh, that’s a friend of Steve’s. She has the same kind of digital camera.” The common link? They’re both moderators (at least, I think Steve is also a moderator) at DSLreports DH participates there a bit as well. Anyway, weird coincidence, and spam sucks. Read on…

Frozen Pipes: How to Take the Chill Out! Oh, yeah. Frozen pipes. At least the toilet thawed out without cracking in two (and yes, there are a couple of family horror stories associated with frozen pipes).

The Salt Lake Tribune — Refuge of a scoundrel I’ve been reading the Salt Lake Trib letters to the editor for lo these many years. It’s always been a lively forum for people who like to argue back and forth about the same old hot-button topics. Occasionally, new topics get hot, such as medical malpractice. Apparently, now to be a letters to the editor playa, a good memory and copious enemies files are no longer required… all you really need is an internet connection and a little skill with Google. Well, two can play at that game, Dr. Trease.

‘Tis the season between Xmess and New Blears when the tough go shopping and the rest of us sit on the couch and groan about all the holiday binge eating they shouldn’t have done. It’s also that special time of the year when grousing endlessly about missing packages and tracking numbers that don’t track reaches its peak.

Metromix.com: Movie review: ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ Last night the dream of a lifetime’s reading came true; the full Lord of the Rings trilogy was gloriously realized on film, and I saw it at last. When the project was first announced years ago, I thought “Right, we’ll see, there’ve been disappointing blunders before.” I had suffered through Ralph Bakshi’s uneven (and partly rotoscoped) version, and I think there was a Rankin-Bass attempt to tell the third installment when Bakshi only got through the first two books. So again, when the project was announced, I…