I should distinguish between the signifiers "woooOOOOooo" and "doodley-oodley-oodley". "wooOOOooo" tells the audience, "this is a scary story; feel scared." For my purposes, "woooOOOOooo" is appropriate for supernatural tales even when the story is not …

"I think many civil libertarians have gotten this idea from mathematics about epsilon-delta proofs of limits and thought that you could have a moral bounding box around an act..." "Hello my name is Jeremy I …

Last night I thought, "I wish I could transform tasks I have to do into food I could eat." And now I'm going to transform some outrage into some action. We should try to avert …

When I discovered that Colin Powell's son Michael heads up the Federal Communications Commission, and that (according to Leonard) he's actually quite qualified and everything, the following skit presented itself: Michael: (comes home, hangs his …

(or: Guess Dr. Lucky) This one's like Hangman. The Searcher picks some word and googles it and any number of Guessers guess the top result. I think category guesses, e.g., "a band" or "a furniture …

Hey, Alan! "In a supposedly live online chat with an SBC technician, Mizokami concluded that he was in fact 'speaking' with a machine."

Sarah invited me to hang out this weekend. One suggestion: "I could come by and watch the Simpsons. Or vice versa!" Of course, I immediately thought, "In Soviet Russia, The Simpsons watches you!"

I'm heading to the East Coast next month. Leonard will speak at PyCon in Washington, DC, and I'm traveling with him to sightsee and cheer. If you live around DC and would like to meet …

Two recent exchanges that have left Joe saying, "You're such a freak, but in a good way": Joe: So you know about the Tibetan monks' tradition of ritualized debate? Sumana: I was just reading about …

A long time ago, Saturday the 8th, I was puttering around my house when the phone rang. I whimsicoracally accepted, sauntered over to Memorial Glade, and started tossing the old disc around. Just as my …