soapbox

Maybe. I mean, a couple of people said they saw one. That’s enough for news right?

It makes absolutely no sense that a European vessel would have actually been hijacked by pirates north of the English Channel. That just doesn’t happen.

This article has some pretty interesting theories about what actually did happen. I’m sure we’ll find out. In 50 years.

Was Russia’s ‘Arctic Sea’ Carrying Missiles to Iran? – Yahoo! News.

As a visiprof, I’m probably only going to be here in Walla Walla for one year. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to get nice furniture for a crap apartment that I’m only in 3.5 days a week. On the other hand, my experiment of sleeping on a thermarest mattress proved that I needed something more.

Mattresses for normal beds are hundreds of dollars and, since I don’t want to carry this stuff all back at the end of the year, aren’t that easy to sell off. A futon, on the other hand, is a bed. It’s a sofa. It’s anything you want to imagine it to be. Of course, at furniture stores, they’re also multiple hundreds of dollars (plus money for delivery).

What’s the solution? Well, what store specializes in cheap furniture packed into very small boxes? Ikea!

That brings me to one of the coolest furniture assembly stories that I’ve ever had. The vacuum-packed futon. Idea first packs the mattress in a vacuum bag, sucks the air out, and then rolls it up. To unpack, you take off the outer plastic and you end up with a flat hard thing. Remove the second layer and there’s a sucking sound and the futon poofs up.

Much comfier than the thermarest too.

So, this has been kicking around in the ‘drafts’ section for almost a month now, but it’s been a busy month and the item at hand is still worth a post.  Namely, Boseman, MT coming up with the genius policy of asking prospective employees to “please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages, or memberships on any Internet based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MySpace, etc”… and also requiring the listing of the corresponding username and password information! wow.

According to city attorney Greg Sullivan, the city has “positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City.”

Note that after just a couple days after the story was leaked to local TV, the city backed off the policy, but it’s quite clear that they really had no clue what they were actually asking for… only three lines were provided for data entry, nevermind the privacy issues, etc. But, “moral character” is important stuff, so why not.

Muppet diplomacy.

‘Nuff said!