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Where there’s swill, there’s a way

That may be the worst pun I’ve ever used in a blog post title, but anyway, I just happened across a website called Swillparty.com, which turns out to be a Buffalo/WNY site devoted to social wine tasting. Apparently SWILL is an acronym, standing for “Several Wine Imbibers Liking Libations”.

They’ve got a wine blog (already bookmarked for the next update of the blogroll), and they’ve even come up with a nifty-looking kit for getting your own wine-tasting parties together, along with several other items of merchandise. So, if you’re local and you’re looking for wine-tasting stuff, keep your money local and buy from them. And if you’re not local, buy from them anyway, because your locality doesn’t need the money as much as Western New York does! I’m not quite the wine drinker I used to be — beer, rum (Spum! Vrum!), and Southern Comfort are my poisons of choice these days, although I do enjoy wine and I’ve got a half-bottle (or whatever the technical term is for a 375-ml bottle) of Sauternes that I’m keeping for consumption when I make my first professional fiction sale. (Although at the rate I’m going, that bottle will be too valuable to drink when that day comes….)

I found this site, incidentally, by exercising an old online pseudo-hobby of mine, namely, Googling names of people I’ve gone to school with. Turns out that the founding SWILLer, Anne Conroy-Baiter, is one of those old friends with whom I lost touch years ago. (It also turns out that she’s apparently quite the watercolorist, which is something I don’t recall knowing about her at all from high school. I could really learn to like this Interweb thingie!

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Okay now….

:: I’m torn. Part of me actually wants to see what my cats would be like on distilled essence of catnip, while the other part of me is terrified at that same prospect, since said cats are (a) big lummoxes, and (b) barely smarter than chickens.

:: Bicycle chandelier.

:: Huh-whuh?!

Police on Capitol Hill are baffled by an attempted robbery that began with a handgun put to the head of a teenager and ended in a group hug.

:: Oh, how I wish this was how For Better or For Worse was really going!

A pretty good week for weirdness on the Web, I’d say. Let’s keep it up, folks!

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Yippee-kiyay….

I just e-mailed this to a friend, but I figure it warrants posting here too: via Michael May’s Adventureblog, I see Ten reasons why John McClane is more bad-ass than Optimus Prime.

Well, duh. I think the real question is, who’s more bad-ass: John McClane or Jack Bauer? For instance, John McClane never has to torture anybody, and while he might be racing against time, he never seems all angsty about it the way Bauer does — I mean, Bauer’s always barking to somebody about how “he’s running out of time”, whereas McClane just keeps chuggin’ along, making one wisecrack after another.

How about you all, folks? Terrorists are gonna do some really bad stuff, so who do you want after them: McClane or Bauer?

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Dumb Question Time

OK, I keep forgetting that I have an account on that Facebook thingie, so I’ve just done some actual editing of my profile over there, here. So far so good, but is there a way to find people who marked me as a friend? I got an e-mail about someone doing this a while back, but at the time I didn’t have time to reciprocate and then I must have stupidly deleted the e-mail because I can’t find it anywhere.

Anyway, as social network sites go, I think Facebook’s a lot nicer than MySpace. Too much looking at MySpace sites makes me have seizures.

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Let’s here it for Pennsylvania!

Pennsylvania passes a law protecting the right to breastfeed in public. Wow — ditching Santorum, now this! Good on them!

(Via PSoTD, who coins the term “feed-o-phobes” to refer to people who are against public breastfeeding. Nice word.)

UPDATE: GAHHH!!!

Yes, in the title of this post, I used “here” when I meant “hear”. This is because I wrote the post in about nine seconds when I was tired, and these days, I’m seemingly morphing into something of an idiot.

But hey, making these kinds of errors has never stood in Matthew Yglesias‘s road to blogging fame and fortune, so maybe I’ll start making moor mistakes of the homonymic variety.

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Unidentified Earth 10

[Updated with a hint.]

[Updated again.]

Somehow I totally forgot to do this last night, since this is a Thursday feature. Sorry, faithful readers! Just a good old fashioned dropping-of-the-ball on that one.

First, I’ve decided that closing comments and having guesses e-mailed to me isn’t that great, so I’m reverting to comments. I would like to impose one rule, though: When leaving a guess, please use this widget to convert your guesses and answers into rot-13. That way, the comments won’t spoil it for anyone who’s looking to comment while still trying to figure it out for themselves. I think that will work. If anyone comments without using rot-13, I may delete that comment, but when doing so, I will convert it to rot-13 myself and repost it, identifying the original poster so that it won’t be like the entire comment is scrubbed forever from the blog. Let’s see how that works.

Second, last week‘s answer. I received two correct replies, so those of you who got it — you know who you are — can award yourself five thousand Quatloo’s. The image was of the Millau Viaduct in France, which is the world’s tallest vehicular bridge. What’s cool about the image I used is that the Viaduct wasn’t completed; only the very tall concrete support pylons are in place, which can be made out sharply standing upright and casting long, straight shadows on the valley floor. Congrats to the winners! Don’t spend all your Quatloos in one place.

And now for this week’s stumper:

Where are we?

(Remember to rot-13 your answers!)

UPDATE I, 7-17-07: Here’s the first hint. This location figured prominently in a movie.

UPDATE II, 7-19-07: Here’s the second hint: The movie came out in 1969.

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You [beep] donkey!!!

Anyone else out there love Hell’s Kitchen as much as I do? I think that show is unbelievably hilarious — the blend of The Apprentice with a cooking show is terrific, especially since Chef Gordon Ramsay seemingly alternates between exactly three moods: calm and playful when he’s being a “civilian”, mild haughty disdain when he’s being a chef, and — most amusingly — over-the-top, profanity-laced rage when he’s being the chef.

Interestingly, I don’t think the show would play so well if we were hearing Ramsay’s unexpurgated curse words, epithets, expletives, and use of “f***” as punctuation. The censoring beep actually seems to make things funnier, when he’ll utter a sentence that includes four or five beeps.

Anyway, here’s a long video of highlights from Season Two of HK, with some very funny stuff (like his immortal “You donkey!”, when the inept Giacomo can’t figure out that the oven isn’t working because he turned the gas off). My favorite Gordon Ramsay moment, however, comes at the beginning of this short video, when he gets so worked up that his voice actually breaks on the word “nonstick”.

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The Interview Meme! Answers trickling in!

The first answers are in from my questions on the Interview Meme: Lynn, Laura, Dave, Tosy and Cosh, and TeflonJedi. Everyone else, your questions await in the comments to that very first post linked above, so grab ’em!

(And if anyone else wants five questions, I’ll still entertain any late-comers. Such is my devotion to the great Interview Meme!)

UPDATE: Minutes after I published, I saw that Two Write Hands has answered as well.

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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