The Occasional Blargh

The Y'all Look Alike Chronicles

David Mills, AKA the Undercover Black Man has a regular feature called "Misidentified Black Person". Whenever he finds that someone confuses two black people, no matter how dissimilar they may look, he writes about it. It's a regular enough feature that he can pull up three or four a month. Interestingly enough, there's studies showing that the saying "y'all look alike to me" has truth to it. People have more trouble telling others apart when they are outside their racial group.

Rebates are Scams

Rebates are scams! That's all that needs to be said.  It is a good thing that an old friend got me into the habit of photocopying all UPC codes and receipts before sending them in for those rebates. Otherwise, you're without evidence when the rebate processor denies receiving whatever items you sent in exchange for the rebate.

Not much to report from Baltimore Comic Con 2007...

Wonder Woman at DragonCon'07 by Grumpstone

It seemed to be an uncharacteristically costume-light weekend at the Baltimore Comic Convention this year. This year, because of difficulties of getting a car on the very morning of the convention, and the rush I was in to get to the convention before missing a panel I was interested in seeing, I forgot to take my camera on Saturday. With that said, this year there were far fewer folks in costume. There were a few folks dressed as storm troopers (Star Wars premiered 30 years ago in 1977.) and there were a surprising number of folks from the COBRA organization (I honestly don't know why G.I. Joe villains were prevalent this year.), but in raw numbers, more people dressed up for the dental conference also held at the Baltimore Convention Center this weekend. The only costume that stuck out in my mind from this year was a woman who dressed in Wonder Woman costume very similar to the one pictured here from DragonCon who I saw on Sunday. (In fact, it may be the same woman wearing the same costume.) I honestly wish I did take a picture of her on that day, but I had been exhausted by the time I noticed her, and did want to search my bag for the camera. (That and with Sunday being a lighter day, I had stopped expecting to see any interesting costumes.)

Note: The picture shown here comes from this location on Flickr, taken by a user named Grumpstone. I presume this is his website. I assume his choosing to license the photograph under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial is intentional. Hopefully this notice is sufficient attribution.

The Second iPhone Post. . .

I am glad that I did not spend $500 or $600 for an iPhone 69 or so days ago. I might be in a less than joyful mood. This concludes the second iPhone post, on this weblog. We well now return you to regularly scheduled non-updating of this web site.