I so want to put this in my quotes file, but I can't.

So I stumble into an office conversation between [Irish male coworker], [American female coworker], [Italian male coworker] and [French male coworker], at the point at which [French male coworker] says, "so what does "cunt" mean?"

Much laughter ensued, followed by a whispered explanation from [American female coworker] and thereafter by a somewhat embarrassed-looking [French male coworker].

more quotes fodder that won't quite fit

Neil Gaiman's assistant writes about things you shouldn't send a writer.

5. Letters written on black paper with a silver pen.
Silver pen on black paper is not nearly as cool as you think it is.

possibly missing the point

The Boston Phoenix chimes in on the Jon Stewart Crossfire appearance:

Stewart's Daily Show does enormous numbers for cable; a recent appearance by Bill Clinton drew a reported 1.9 million viewers. The crew has a bestselling book, America (The Book). Stewart's on the cover of Rolling Stone. By contrast, Crossfire is a dying show based on a dying paradigm. (At least I'd like to think so, although Fox's detestable Hannity & Colmes would seem to suggest otherwise.)

Now, I don't have access to any US TV channels except Discovery and CNBC Europe, so I can't verify if it is a dying paradigm, but everything Stewart had to say and indeed a lot of what I've read of American media (and the never-ending stream of lightly rewritten Americanisms that show up on Sky News, Sky One, MTV, and even our domestic channels) seems to indicate the contrary.

your daily jwz

jwz asks for some help with video-on-linux, redux. The reason I am linking this is because this has to be some sort of record: it was posted at 11:35pm PDT which is, like, HOURS ago and there's not a single followup. Possibly because there's a threat therein to ban people who just post ME TOO crap or I USE THE FROBNITZ WURLBOTZ 2.X AND IT ALMOST WORKS ON TUESDAYS.

Since I don't have anything useful to contribute over there, I will mention that (a) you can watch WMVs with marginal success by using CodeWeavers' CrossOver Plugin and Windows Media Player, but I suspect that would invoke the "I'd rather eat glass" reaction, and (b) I'm pretty damned sure that MPlayer used work with .wmv files, since I've got a few of them scattered around. But no, I tried looking at one and it crapped out, so either I watched them with some other Damned Thing or the MPlayer guys broke their code.

death of teh intarweb predict0red

This sort of thing has come up before, but basically someone's written to boingboing ragging on about how google will destroy the known world with its ToS. I don't get this. You're free to simply not use the service. There's nobody forcing you to do so. If you don't like it, find something you do like and go for that. Maybe this is supposed to be alerting people who wouldn't otherwise check terms of service, but I can't see that it needs to be so bloody alarmist about it.