Didn't watch the Oscars

But I hear The King's Speech did well.  That's nice and all, but the real entertainment is over at The Argyle Sweater.

The Gin Laser

There's an article tracking down this former urban legend over at Popular Mechanics.  Bottom line is that it works, but (as noted in IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics) "There are better uses for ethyl alcohol."

Hmm, wonder how well vermouth would lase?  Olives though would tend to mess it all up.

ACME has a competitor!

United Nuclear

Very nice.

Heart Attack

You may need this
...after watching this.


Seriously, go watch both.  But swallow your coffee first.

Backup. Always have a backup.

Tuesday's MacMall deal of the day was a 1TB external hard drive for $50 w/free shipping. I'd been needing to upgrade my outboard hard drive, and wanted to start using the Time Machine utility.  Well here we go!
On sale at a ridiculously cheap price w/free shipping.  Ordered Tuesday morning, at my house mid-day Wednesday.  Buying computer hardware just doesn't – can't! – get better than that.

Not the Ordinary Recession

Something's going on:

Jobs aren't rebounding.  Notice too the trend over the last four recessions: job recovery in 1982 was pretty much in line with past performance, but each subsequent recovery is taking progressively longer.  I could offer all sorts of explanations, but that would just be ultracrepidarianism.  It's just enough to note the trend and say that it's... bad.
Linked from Pethoukoukis' blog at Reuters.