Blockbuster’s late-fee gambit seems not to have paid off. It seemed unlikely that they’d be able to make up in volume the $250-300 million they were losing by discontinuing the fees.

I had occasion to see the abbreviation AI5 today, and I thought "Wasn’t that that cheesy science fiction show with Daryl Hannah?" Then my retrieval system came up with the tagline: "VR.5 is real." Then IMDb told me it was Lori Singer (whose character was called Sydney, I surely hadn’t remembered). And that it featured Tony Head, too.

Sarah: And Penn Jillette and Adam Baldwin. Man, remember VR? And jetpacks?

Plus: got a compliment on my outfit from a patron
Minus: patron trashed a co-worker’s outfit in the same breath
Mitigating Factor: patron believes world is controlled by lizardlike aliens.

Is it still a compliment? You make the call.

Did you know there is a Shinto shrine in Granite, WA? Neither did I! It was mentioned in the information about the Aki Matsuri festival sponsored by the Eastside Nihon Matsuri Association.

The Flikr pool that asks “What’s in the bag?”

As previously reported here, Pluto has no business being called a planet. 2003 UB313 gives us yet another chance to rectify the situation.

In at least some cases, texting profanity in response to a (legitimate) marketing SMS message has the same effect as sending an explicit opt-out request. I’ll be sure to publish any surprising excerpts if I can get my hands on a list of what constitutes "profanity."

Pretty much everything you need to know about calcium in your diet. I was interested to see that some of the possible benefits of calcium are more likely to occur with lowfat dairy products than with tablets. Dairy products also seem to be more efficient than broccoli, according to the eye-catching chart. And since kids need tons of calcium starting at about age 9, I’m going to be brewing yogurt in 10 gallon drums.

Apparently Joss won’t be at DragonCon after all (there are actual comments ostensibly from him on the Whedonesque page). This sucks, but the suck is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we would have missed his scheduled panel anyway.
Update: It’s looking more and more like Universal has committed Joss to be there. We’ll be missing that last panel either way, though.

Joss talks about just about everything. Even though I haven’t been especially impressed by Veronica Mars, I’m interested that he enjoys it. I admire Mars creator Rob Thomas, and I find it pleasantly reinforcing when a person whose work I admire admires the work of someone else I admire. He talks about Serenity, but he said nothing that I didn’t want to know before seeing the film.