I picked up a box of “Mad About You” DVD cereal for Katt…that’ll teach her to sass my cereal buying tastes!

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Let’s see how things roll with the Big Kahuna back. I hear Nevada went really well!

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Computer’s chips turn into potatoes

Staff at a department store in the German city of Kaiserslautern called detectives after an angry customer tried to return a computer stuffed with potatoes to the shop twice on the same day.
The man berated sales assistants in the store, complaining that the computer he had bought only hours before did not work, according to police reports.

The store’s staff opened the machine and discovered it was not functioning because its working parts had been replaced with small potatoes. The bemused shop assistants gave the man a new computer free of charge.

But bemusement turned to suspicion when the shopper returned a short while later with another computer – again potato-filled.

Police were called and the man was arrested.

A spokesman said: “The second time he said he didn’t need a computer any more and asked for his money back in cash.” Roman Zukoan, a computer technician who works in the Nexos computer shop, also in Kaiserslautern, said: “It is hard to imagine how the potatoes could get into a computer’s casing.

“When computers leave the factory they are packed in plastic to prevent damage from condensation.

“If they are running for a long time they get hot and in theory it would be possible to cook a potato in a computer, but who would try that?”

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I read this, found on Warren Ellis’s blog, which took me to a long question and answer with Bruce Sterling. Mostly, Sterling doesn’t interest me much, but the quote caught my attention:

“I’ll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes “Gobi Desert Opera” because, well, it’s just kind of obvious that there’s no good reason to go there and live. It’s ugly, it’s inhospitable and there’s no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it’s so hard to reach.

On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense.

If there were a society with enough technical power to terraform Mars, they would certainly do it. On the other hand. by the time they got around to messing with Mars, they would have been using all that power to transform *themselves.* So by the time they got there and started rebuilding the Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn’t look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras.”