Ramos: Governor Dean! How are you? I didn't think I was gonna get to you!
Dean: I'm gonna have to blow this one... what is your name?
Ramos: You're gonna have to what?
Dean: I'm gonna have to blow this child
(audience laughter erupts)

The most annoying thing was that almost every book I picked up was full of tips and tricks. Tips and tricks? I felt like I was getting advice on betting the ponies. I didn't want tricks; I wanted the ideas. What is photo touchup and enhancement? Where's the beef? How could I work on my photos if I didn't understand the basic concepts?

Working with digital images requires some understanding of what needs to be done. It's not a ``choose the right tool, one click, and you're done'' subject. Most books on digital image manipulation would have you believe the contrary...and perhaps they're right. However, that is not what this book is about. It is not about tips and tricks, and it's not a collection of recipes for solving someone's favorite image manipulation problems. It is first about understanding image manipulation concepts, second about knowing which GIMP tools are most effective, and third about the savvy use of these tools.

Welcome to Bannertown - where old Chickenhead banners go to die. Some of these ads are clickable. Some aren't. All are recommended by 3 out of 4 dentists who chew gum.

Table people = new Table("people");

SelectQuery select = new SelectQuery(people);

select.addColumn(people, "firstname");
select.addColumn(people, "lastname");

select.addOrder(people, "age", Order.DESCENDING);

The nonprofit group hoping to build an eight-mile streetcar line on Peachtree Street should move closer today to committing money to the popular $200 million project.

I knew that I had seen the face of God;
and it was so beautiful that I cried. me

A study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has found that participants who regularly drank coffee significantly reduced the risk of onset of type 2 diabetes, compared to non-coffee drinking participants.

Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a computer font that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.

Any public company or officer who commentson a pending government investigation concerning the company now does so at the peril of later being indicted for inaccurately or falsely denying the allegations of improper conduct. For the same reason, every officer of a public company is effectively deprived of the right to protect his or her reputation by denying public reports about purely personal matters which damage their good name.

To paraphrase Bob Dole in another context: Where is the outrage? Make no mistake. This is the most blatant attack by government on pure free speech in recent memory, made more chilling by the prominence—and wealth—of the target. If they can do it to Martha, they sure as hell can and will do it to the average American.

Phil Spector is credited with the Wall Of Sound, but on this CD Billy Syndrome brings you the Ceiling Of Sound. This is a multi-tracked production recorded on a $5 budget!! Billy took two shitty cheap mono tape recorders and recorded live with the previous tracks playing on the other tape recorder in the background. This process achieves tones and rings of distortion to insanity levels and is just so fucked up it needs to be heard to be believed. Billy Syndrome in 2002 dares anyone to produce such a ill sounding recording. With the death of condensor microphones in boom boxes, in 2002 YOU CAN"T DO THIS ANYMORE.

The movie is set in a small town in provincial France, mid-1950s. About halfway through the film, the town's mayor puts up notices forbidding anyone to eat anything but bread and weak tea during Lent (which of course coincides with the opening of the new chocolaterie). I almost laughed when they showed a close-up of the notice. The headline was set in ITC Benguiat, a typeface which debuted in 1978 and was mainly popular in the '80s.

Many of the characters in Helvetica and Arial are very similar to each other, although none are quite identical. Other characters are quite a bit different, and they are the key to telling which is which. Here are some of the most obvious ones

• The Knarrian alphabet is almost a superset of the Elosian. It has often been said that the Knarrian alphabet was created by adding letters to the Elosian to make it easier to use. With the Elosian alphabet, distinctions between voiced and voiceless consonants and also between several important vowels must be inferred from context (this may indicate that some historic phase of the Elosian language actually lacked semantic distinctions between voiced and unvoiced sounds, but there is no concrete lingustic evidence for that). This makes it almost useless for any language other than Elosian. It would be natural for someone adopting it to want to add new letters or diacritical marks or something to make these differences explicit (even the Elosians sometimes forced the "context" by adding in tiny letters that were not to be pronounced but only affect the pronunciation of the surrounding letters). However, if this was the case with Knarrian then the additions were done in a completely haphazard and illogical manner, showing an almost complete ignorance of the very phonetic concepts on which any use of the Elosian system would've been based. The creation of the new letters is usually attributed to the great sage Knarrknoxx, but no educated man would've done it the way he allegedly did.
  
  A possible explanation is that both the Knarrian and classical/modern Elosian alphabets descend from a common ancestor, which contained letters for all spoken sounds in some early Elosian dialect. By imperial times, many of these letters fell into disuse because readers had learned to infer their sounds from context. As a great scholar, Knarrknoxx may have known about these early letters and simply re-introduced them.
  
  
• The Stofonian alphabet is not particularly related to the other two. Certain Stofonians letters appear very similar to certain Elosian latters, but there does not seem to be any logical relationship other than that someone might have borrowed shapes from an alphabet which they couldn't read. The Stofonians either invented the alphabet themselves, or learned it from some culture other than the Elosians. Possibly the the Mayols, whom they succeeded as the rulers of the country now known as Stofonia?
  
  But neither the Stofonians nor the Mayols were advanced enough to have invented an alphabet themselves... especially since the order of the letters shows some knowledge of phonetic concepts such as voiced/unvoiced, stops, fricatives, etc. Maybe it came from someplace further afield, such as Foelia or even Gullen? I know it wasn't the Ipsilstanst, since Kulstof says that the Stofonians couldn't decipher Ipsilstanst writing.
  
  (Although perhaps Ipsilstant is the source of the anomalous shared letters with Elosian. Maybe both the Elosians and the Stofonians arbitrarily assigned letters from the Ipsilstanst alphabet to the sounds of their own language? )

Someone told me that all of the spider stuff actually happens in the second book in the series, and that they had to tweak some of the stuff that happens in the books to make the movies work. You know what? Good. Books suck. They used to be good back when people didn’t have movies and TV and dressed like Davey Crockett. People also used to ride horses and drink tea, but now we have cars and Sprite. Move the fuck on. Peter Jackson did an amazing job adapting these books, and now the movies are so kick-ass that some people are going to go back and READ the books, which wouldn’t have happened if he’d just filmed the books exactly as they are. Happy now, smarty?