Try this out. Remember: you can also grab her with the mouse.

I’m kinda creeped out.

Enter ABBOTT, an American pharmaceutical company, talking on a cellular phone

ABBOTT

And so I said, “If God didn’t want me to take advantage of quadriplegics He would have given them legs to walk to my competitors.” Anyway, I’ve gotta go. I’m meeting with Bolivia or something.

Enter BRAZIL

BRAZIL

Hello, ABBOTT. Do you have those AIDS drugs we discussed?

ABBOTT

Sure, we got plenty of Keletra, right here.

BRAZIL

Good. Now, how about the price. Did you drop it like we agreed?

ABBOTT

Sure thing! We dropped it down from $1.60 to $1.17 per unit, just like you asked.

BRAZIL

No, we wanted you to drop it down to $0.48.

ABBOTT

But that’s just stupid. There’s no way we can get it that low. We’d go bankrupt.

BRAZIL arches an eyebrow

ABBOTT

Okay, well, we wouldn’t go bankrupt. But do you know how much it costs to develop this stuff? Hundreds of millions of dollars. American dollars, not pesos.

BRAZIL

Keletra made you 897 million dollars in sales last year.

ABBOTT

Yeah, but we’ve got overheads and stuff.

BRAZIL

We’ve projected over two hundred thousand people needing these drugs in 2008. We’re talking about giving you 175 million dollars per year. You can afford to drop your prices.

ABBOTT

You can’t cheap out on me like this. You’ve got two hundred thousand Bolivians who need our product. You are putting your desire to cut healthcare spending ahead of patients’ needs for new and better treatments.

BRAZIL

Well, I’m not going to beg. I’ll just hire some chemists and make my own.

ABBOTT

You can’t do that! Keletra’s patented. I’ll fucking sue you into the ground.

BRAZIL

Really? What’s the patent number?

ABBOTT

We’ve got US patent 5,846,987, and US patent 5,886,036, and…

BRAZIL

No, what’s your Brazilian patent number?

ABBOTT

Um…

BRAZIL

That’s right, bitch.

ABBOTT

But that’s not fair! I’m a Murkan, dammit!

BRAZIL

Yeah, I’ve dealt with your kind before. You have ten days to drop your price to 48 cents or we’re going to make our own generic Keletra. Now get off my property.

Boy on a Stick and Slither

Originally uploaded by LAI.

Okay, guys, our secret is oot, eh. The Americans have found oot just how influential we are, eh. One thing left to do now: go read Boy on a Stick and Slither, eh.

royal01_grand

Originally uploaded by LAI.

Nantes, home to Jules Verne, had a crazy blowout festival. The picture you see here is just the first of a lovely and entrancing series of photos and videos of this street festival. Check it out.

via Bruce Sterling’s blog

I just bought a couple of CDs from CD Baby and got this awesome shipping confirmation:

Qty    Description                                    Price    Total
===    ===========                                    =====    =====
  1    JONATHAN COULTON: where tradition meets tomo   $7.00    $7.00
  1    JONATHAN COULTON: smoking monkey              $10.00   $10.00

                                                  Sub Total   $17.00
                                                  Shipping     $3.50
                                                Grand Total   $20.50

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make
sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that
money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, June 14th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year".  We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369  email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com

http://www.cdbaby.com

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.
Yesterday the New York Times revealed that a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute and current chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality had made substantial edits to a series of reports on climate change in order to play down links between greenhouse gases and global warming. The usual leftist quarters are fired up again, calling for America to join a veritable science jihad, worshiping at the altar of fact when we’ve yet to hear what fiction has to say about the situation.

Go read Fafblog. Read Fafblog NOOOOOOOOW!

I’m still busily at work on Memethief.com. I’m making some good progress on the techwatch section, although it will take quite a bit of time to implement all the features I want to.

The music section is less complicated, but I need to finish off my auto-podcasting script. This will be pretty cool: a page to upload a podcast and create a blog entry at the same time. Basically I’m just going to modify the existing WP page (the very one I’m using to type this entry!) to add fields and stuff. I’ve already written a script to pull podcast information from the database and display it in an rss feed — the results can be seen here [source].

There was a post on BoingBoing today about a geek who designed himself a yarmulke bearing such images as the Bluetooth logo, a PSP, an iPod, a cellphone, and so on. Kinda interesting. But this quote from the original article caught my eye:

My wife Leah spent three months crocheting the gadget yarmulka based on a design I created for her. She is not pleased with the idea that I’m going to want a new one with different gadgets – maybe a WiMAX logo? Nokia 8801? Motorola PEBL? – in a few months.

Sounds like the rest of the statement is “… but she will anyway, because I want her to.” Hey, what kind of geek is Avi if he doesn’t even want to DIY? Better to have his wife spend three months crocheting the bloody thing?