General

NYT: “Unless you get a critical mass of bishops and religious superiors who say, Now we can’t admit any gay men, I don’t think it’s going to have any discernible effect,” Father Bretzke said. “There are lots of excellent gay priests and seminarians, and we have a priest shortage. We’re not exactly in a buyer’s market here. If you’re not going to ordain gay men, and not going to ordain married men, and not going to ordain women, well then…

CHUD.com (courtesy Fred Badlisi) : Q: My impression – and a lot of people share this – is that the CIA is a dangerous and possibly evil organization. At least that’s the emotional reaction. Baer: That’s because you watch too many movies. Q: Yeah, I was going to say, is there anything you can say to dissuade me from that? Baer: It’s a bureaucracy. But the movie is looking at the evil side, which is that they’ve taken bad information…

Craigslist: 1997 Ford Expedition XLT, in excellent condition. Champagne color (beige), power steering, cruise control, antilock brakes, dual airbags, power windows, power mirrors, multi-disc CD player, tan color leather seats, illuminated running boards, alloy wheels, rear stereo and A/C control, roof rack, rubber lip container for the trunk, chrome bumpers. Single owner in Southern California, mostly freeway miles, regularly serviced and maintained, service records available 121,949 miles; $4,995 or best offer.

Anyone want to go with me? Homebrew Computer Club 30th Anniversary Retrospective: On March 5, 1975, a very special meeting took place at Gordon French’s garage in the then freshly named “Silicon Valley”. This was the first gathering of the “Homebrew Computer Club” (also called the Amateur Computer User’s Group). Now, this was no ordinary amateur group of folks but the very acorn of the great tree of the personal computing revolution to come. The hand-soldered microcomputer grew up to…

Hello from New York City and congratulations to everyone at Macworld. Tonight we won the silver Ozzie award (second place nationally) for best illustration in our class (consumer above 250,000 circ) for the illustration that went with our “Prevent Mac Disasters” feature. Congratulations to Rob for the excellent art direction! And we won the GOLD Eddie award (first place!) for the best consumer computer/technology magazine, defeating MAKE magazine and PC World. This is a gigantic win for Macworld, a national…

They Might Be Giants Friday Nov. 4 – 2 tix @ $30 each – or Thurs swap? – $60 Eight Paris Metro Tickets (unused) – $5

Turkey is awesome. Especially awesome to see it with a couple of Columbia buddies of mine who have set up shop as journos in Istanbul — one at the Turkish Daily News and one at the Associated Press. Quick recap before I hit the sack (I leave Paris in about 12 hours for DC and then onto Oakland). Turkey is a European country trapped in a Middle Eastern country’s body — or at least it wants to be. Most obvious…

I’m in neveshir in central turkey. We arrived in ankara by train and then a 3 hr bus further. We’re staying with the uncle of a co-worker of a friend of a co-worker of my aunt heidi’s. Go figure, huh? they don’t speak much english but we’re doing our best and there is a neighbor 20 year old guy who’s english is pretty good. We saw some amazing 2000 year old caves here, where early christians fled from roman attacks.…

LA Times is podcasting now. The good folks at Slice have gotten even cooler, with their Google Maps hack of their NYC pizza review database. Maybe this will push me into doing proper reviews of Bay Area pizzerias. NYT has a massive article on the whole “intelligent design” hoo-ha. Xeni pointed me to the latest in Pastafarianism, the parody of these ID guys. And for those of you who’ve followed my work closely since my Daily Cal days, might remember…

Yesterday, before going to a show at Café du Nord, Becky, Leila and I had pizza from Zante’s, which is basically Indian food but on a naan-style dough, in pizza form. Amazing. As Becky said: “I like pizza and I like Indian food. But together . . . oh, man!” While at Ton Kiang down on Geary in San Francisco today with Garett, Rachel, Eric and Ari, while we were having dim sum we saw Robin Williams for a second…