Primate Brow Flash

I’m fascinated by this question: If people are dumb enough to believe Glenn Beck, how do they still have money to lose on his financial scams?
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this is what you are missing if you are not on goodreads:

Three weeks ago I held a yard sale. To pass the time I picked up this book I’d never seen from a box of books none of which I’d ever read and none of which I remember buying.

Of the many surreal happenings of that day one of the most strange was when, immediately after reading the first page, a well-groomed homeless man or a poorly groomed homed man rode past on a bike. He looked over and upon seeing The Eight lurched off his bike stumbled to my gate and, grasping it with all the force and desperation of a kindergartener being left by mommy, bellowed, “That book! Man! That book, man, is the biggest fucking mind trip it’s the best book you’ll ever read. That woman [the author] used to be an executive at Bank of America until those Southern fuckers came in and they fired EVERY woman in the company. God damn mother fuckers! But man, she’s beautiful too man, like a triple threat. And let tell you something…” and here he became quiet and conspiratorial, “….it’ll never NEVER be made into a movie. I won’t tell you why. 2/3 into the book BAM! [he yelled] it’s a fucking bomb on your brain! She just fucking drops that bomb on your brain and it’ll NEVER be a fucking movie!”

Can you name the book?

LINK

Latest Firefox Extension I cannon live without is Auto Pager.
Sites like Salon.com, Slate.com and nytimes.com feel the need to divide up the pages like they think I can’t concentrate for 5 pages of text all on one page. Reading 4 paragraphs and then having to click the “Next Page” button is a pain. So, here is this extension that automatically appends the next page to the bottom of the page you are on, so your reading does not get interrupted. With Auto Pager, if I load a site and then disconnect from the internet for some reason, I still have my entire article loaded in the browser for offline reading. Some, but not all, sites do have “show entire article” buttons, but this extension gives this feature to every web site.

There are many built-in sets of rules for common websites and common website software. phpBB, Google, nytimes, etc. For websites without existing rules, there is a nice wizard in Auto Pager to make new rules. The wizard allows you to click on the link that loads the next page so that it stores that and uses it every time you visit the site. It also allows you to specify which content (for example headers can be excluded) to load repeatedly. After a short learning process, most sites were very easy to create rules for. Settings allow you to control how many pages load by default.

I’m not sure yet about the privacy implications.

I’ve been meaning for years to write and draw in a journal about stuff I do with each tool.

So, today it starts:

The arm of a co-worker’s chair fell off and I had this in my bike bag. My brain showed me a slide show of how I could get this tool out, place the bolt on the tool and reach the bolt into the plastic casing and re-attach the arm. So that’s what I did. I love those slide shows.

Without planning it and without a map, I set out on Monday to “ride east until I could jump into the St. Croix River”. I rode out to Battle Creek park and then through Woodbury and Cottage Grove I picked up Trading Post road near Afton and followed that to Point Douglas recreation area where I jumped into the river.
Here is the route (without the mistakes and backtracks)
I love the rolling hills and secret farms near Afton. In the gaps in the trees I spotted a pack of baby lamas.
The morning didn’t feel all that humid, but after sitting in the air conditioning reading after lunch, my legs buckled when I walked back outside. The air felt heavy and hard to breathe. There were too many bugs to stand still outside for any amount of time.
My route took me through areas of the twin cities that are completely foreign. “Old Afton Trail”?? Ojibwa park? Cottage Grove Ravine? St. Paul Park deserves its own blog post. The city planners must have been on drugs. “Let’s put a megachurch here, next to the oil refinery. Next to that, lets put a boat marina, a school, and a pizza shop. Lets put a parking lot here in the middle of nowhere. And let’s put a bunch of random “bike route” signs here and there. Then, we’ll import a bunch of hillbillies and give them free houses. The empty space we’ll fill with giant rusting tank farms. Then, to really weird people out, here is the Ashland Avenue Grocery. It is a grocery store with a row of gulf coast apartments upstairs. I think Lee Harvey Oswald might have spent a few nights there in the early 60s.
I passed cookouts and baseball games and laughed to see a guy trying to light his grill in the humid air laden with refining by-products.

Some of the route follows the Mississippi River Trail (MRT). The MRT is really strange. It winks in and out. It is easy to lose. It takes the rider on insanely busy divided highways with chopped up shoulders.

about 80 miles. My legs feel like sacks of sand today.