Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Can you believe that Wikipedia didn’t have an entry for “Flags of convenience“?

Well, now it does.

Check out this user agreement from Google Alert:

“…This Agreement, your rights and obligations, and all actions contemplated by this agreement shall be governed by the laws of the Gibraltar, as if the Agreement was a contract wholly entered into and wholly performed within Gibraltar. This Agreement will not be governed by the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.”

Excuse me, Google Alert, do I have to learn the Web laws of tiny Gibraltar before sending you my $10 for email updates?

Google Alert always seemed like good guys to me, but kissing off the United Nations standards for Gibraltar’s sounds unnervingly like one of those maritime “flags of convenience” …

A sick child.

A plain broth soup.

The magic ingredient to make plain soup look good is sprinkles of dried marjoram from her grandmother’s garden.

Imagine the scene in Victorian London, and the broth soup would be beef tea or barley water. For my poor sick twenty-something child, I found a Trader Joe’s box of organic vegetable broth–not enough salt for my taste, but that’s easily fixed.

The best part of that soup was finding a tiny glass jar that my mother had given me almost five years ago labeled “Marjoram 2000.” The green leaf bits inside still held the oregano smell of her summer garden. Putting some in the soup was more than mere decoration.

I remember myself, long ago, lying sick in bed while my mother brought me the prize home remedy of the 1950s–Campbell’s chicken soup, with noodles or rice. Her own real soups were too rich or too garlicky for any unhappy stomach.

Some day, maybe, I’ll get to be the grandmother, with time enough to plant herbs and tend them and dry them and pack them in shiny glass jars saved from mustard or pickles or jam.

Right now, in between, I’d like to thank both my daughter and my mother for a truly magical moment today in my kitchen.

The Inukitut have a word for it: “puijilittatuq.” Translation: “He does not know which way to turn because of the many seals he has seen come to the ice surface.”

That’s a good description (from this month’s issue of Ansible, the scifi newsletter from David Langford) of the blog-blockage typically caused by a fresh copy of Ansible.

Thank goodness, at least, that I’m not in Paris! Bloggers there will face the nightly temptation of being able to play mobile-phone-Tetris, using the lights on the Bibliotheque Nationale. (Thanks, Engadget!)

And check out Anil Dash’s piece on “Information Bankruptcy.” My favorite bit:

I learned that half of all bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills, courtesy of Rebecca’s link. I wish I had learned this from John Kerry about six months ago. This is the core of the health care debate in this country, not edge-case stem cell research. Modern political organizations have fantastic research resources available to them, but they squander these resources on finding weaknesses in their opponents…

…
And I linked to Jay McCarthy’s beautiful “Letter to Beatrice” from my del.icio.us linkblog, but never got around to pointing to it from here. Tiny sample:

In these paragraphs I will take Aristotle’s classification, if for no other reason then to impress those who are so impressed, on friends: those of interest, of love, and of contemplation. This division is not always perfect, and thus many components could easily be rearranged, but how many books are in the Bible is much less important than their complete message–so I press onward…

…
Now, you’ve got plenty to read, and I’m headed back to Thog’s Masterclass…

The eBay auction is over! I outbid “oceanman” to win a unique souvenir of our alien encounter in Kiruna.

One surprise side benefit has been oodles of emails from our friends in Sweden!

Dear Betsy and Frank, Today you were mentioned in the newscast on national Swedish radio and there was also a story in the newspaper. You probably guess why. The story about the DNA bidding…

Still making waves…I saw a short article in todays paper about the glass that the students tried to sell at an auction on the internet- and that you bought it! It was great fun to see your names in the paper again.

Hello Betsy! I followed the bidding at eBay with “Frank’s DNA”. Swedish biggest newspapers, local papers and media write about it today i. e.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/telegram/0,1082,64554414_852__,00.html…

Heh! Here’s my rough mini-translation: “One drinking glass as used by a Nobel Prizewinner in physics was offered on eBay by pupils of Rymdgymnasiet in Kiruna. Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek drank from glass while visiting the school, and thereby deposited some genius DNA. Said DNA will never be used for a future clone, however, as it was his wife who bought it for 275 kronor.”

Even when you add an extra $25 for the novel experience of having said DNA delivered by FedEx–that’s a genuine bargain on my favorite DNA!

He restored a Bugatti, then drove it from Belgium to Rome and back again. He’s the grandson of a Civil War Veteran, getting ready to celebrate his 80th birthday. He just piloted his own airplane from Florida to Boston.

I had a wonderful time at a banquet last night, thanks to my dinner partner, described above.

Yes, giant dinner parties can be fun when you’re getting to know somebody new and surprising–like the prize in a box of Crackerjack when I was a kid.

It’s certainly not those empty calories that give us so much pleasure.

I’m thrilled to be your number one “Betsy” (at least, the number one Betsy who isn’t an ad) … especially after your shocking treatment of Boing Boing…

…but don’t you think searchers will find it a little bit tacky that your top result for Linux is one of your own anti-Linux ads?