So yeah - this is what happened to my right front tire on Friday. Luckily I was at a traffic light on Blossom Hill - if it had happened five minutes earlier I would have been on 85, going about 70 MPH. I had to change a flat in 85+ plus weather, but all things considered I'm not complaining. Turned out that my left front had a nail in it - I don't quite understand why a nail would lead to a sidewall blowout but the guy at Sears seemed to think it was possible. I still think it was dastardly Panda Attackers - trying to incapacitate me before the Friday raid. And they failed miserably in that goal! We shall defeat them on foot if that's what it takes!

Fear the Claw Shrimp!Yep that's my WoW toon - I'm playing in the new Penny Arcade guild - Knights of Arcadia over on Dark Iron. After a crazy amount of scrimping and saving I bought the guild tabard last night so now I'm styling.I had joined the PvP Guild (Panda Attack) but when I saw that Penny Arcade was forming a guild to oppose PvP I had to jump ship and go with my true loyalties. I had been debating what to do about WoW since everyone I played with had either quit outright or moved to another server. And this time around I'm playing Alliance, so I don't have to go through the Barrens again.Anyway - the guild makes it a surprisingly different experience. I even took a Mage - knowing that I wouldn't be able to solo very effectively but I'm having a lot of fun.

Making Light points out the Lyttle Lytton contest which is similar to Bulwer-Lytton but restricted to 25 words or less. The prose is less purple but some of these are hysterical. I chuckled at the official Bulwer-Lytton entries, but I was guffawing at some of these. Go check 'em out! I'd advise starting with the 2001 entries and working forward - there are some "special awards" that make more sense if you read chonologically.

The 2005 Bulwer-Lytton contetst awards are out. If you don't know about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest go here. Funny stuff!

For one day the Shuttle was back in business. (sigh). Guess they think the current mission is safe but the fleet is grounded again. In other media news - look at the pathetic nature of the TV news. I'm watching an old Seinfeld repeat while eating dinner and the teaser strip says "Ten O'Clock News - shuttle grounded again." Well #1) I know the shuttle if fucking up there - don't tease a possible catastrophe and tell me to wait hours to find out more, and #2) how inconveient is this? So I pause the TiVo, walk into my office and punch up Google news. I'm going to back to my dinner. And I'll take my news on my schedule thank you very much, Fox Channel 2.