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Monday morning quickies – gifts patented

FFII have discovered that Amazon.com have received a patent from the EPO ‘which covers all computerised methods of automatically delivering a gift to a third party’. It seems to cover Amazon’s ‘One-Click’ ordering system, as well.

Wierd: Tiny town to reek of sex. Don’t get excited — it’s only moth pheromones. (via Peter Darben on the forteana list.)

Medical slang, including:

  • ATS: Acute Thespian Syndrome
  • Departure lounge — Geriatric ward
  • DBI: Dirtbag index (calculated by the number of tattoos on the body multiplied by number of recent missing teeth, to estimate days without a bath)
  • NFN: Normal for Norfolk
  • Pumpkin positive: When you shine a penlight into the patient’s mouth and his brain is so small his whole head lights up
  • PFO: Pissed, fell over
  • Scepticaemia: What doctors develop with experience

And — finally! — an explanation for that ER term:

  • Stat: Immediately, shortened from the Latin statim

Linux: GrokLaw on SCO and Sun’s Linux indemnification FUD. Well worth a read — especially the bit where Mr. GrokLaw finds an old SCO contract that does include indemnification terms. Indemnification, that is, with some pretty serious get-out clauses and stings in the tail.

Weather: Mont Blanc closed due to record heatwave. ‘This year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made western Europe’s highest peak too dangerous to climb. Mont Blanc is closed. The conditions have been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the Alps’ eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range — and its multi-billion-pound tourist industry — may never fully recover.’

Food: Cooking for the Mafia. ‘Conrad Gallagher was the highest flier in the gaudy firmament of New Ireland. A Michelin star at the age of 26, and a swank restaurant, called Peacock Alley’. Not too long afterwards, things had not gone so well — he was in the Brooklyn Detention Centre. Pretty terrifying article — a US jail is not one of the nicest places in the world…

Spam: The Howard Dean election campaign ran into a wrinkle last week — and pretty soon was apparently ‘joe-jobbed’. This one is going to get interesting, if the Dean campaign follow up, as joe-jobbing an election campaign is in violation of federal election law, and is apparently taken quite seriously.

Reminder: keep an eye on Spamvertized.Org for the latest news in political spam!

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