Naturally enough, the only country that could be trusted with such a role was Great Britain." -- The Brigadier
"Naturally. I mean, the rest were all foreigners.
-- The Doctor, Doctor Who: Robot

IT96: The Search for IT95

So, I looked at it95 just now (here) and realized that it wasn’t especially funny. So let’s just skip it and move on with our lives, shall we?
it96
HAVING CONSULTED WITH MY COLLEAGUES AND BASED ON THE INFORMATION GATHERED FROM THE NIGERIAN CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY, I HAVE THE PRIVILEGE TO REQUEST FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO TRANSFER THE SUM OF 4 FOREIGN OIL WORKERS (FOUR FOREIGN OIL WORKERS ONLY) INTO YOUR ACCOUNTS. THE ABOVE SUM RESULTED FROM AN OVER-INVOICED CONTRACT, EXECUTED COMMISSIONED AND PAID FOR ABOUT FIVE YEARS (5) AGO BY A FOREIGN CONTRACTOR. THIS ACTION WAS HOWEVER INTENTIONAL AND SINCE THEN THE FUND HAS BEEN IN A SUSPENSE ACCOUNT AT THE CENTRAL BANK OF NIGERIA APEX BANK.

Freedom is the Right of All Sentient Beings

One of the best things about being an adult is that you can buy all the toys you want and no one can stop you.
With that observation, I will now reveal that I’ve been a Transformers fan since I was a little kid. And now that I actually have a disposable income of sorts, I’ve decided to take up collecting Optimus Primes. I think I’ve got the majority of them now, or at the least, a representative sampling. There’s a few holes in my collection (RiD Optimus is stupid-looking enough that I haven’t been willing to shell out the amount that they tend to cost), but I think I’ve got a pretty fair spread. In my usual geekish way, I’m going to post a series of in-depth commentaries about the relative merits of each one.
But to start us off, here’s the top of my TV cart:

Optimus Primes

106 Books

So, Sargent over at Live Granades was compelled by his wife to follow suit on this meme whereby you look at this list of the 106 books most often left unread on library shelves, and mark the ones you’ve read.
So what the hell, I’ll do the same. Read in bold, partly read in italics, seen the movie in underline
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (It’s not underlined because Man of La Mancha doesn’t count)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (But I didn’t really pay attention)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park (And so did Leah; it was our first date.)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (But I regretted every word of it)
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Things I learned from the movie “Hostel”

1. Having your fingers severed by a chainsaw, though painful, does not require immediate medical attention
2. Everyone over the age of 12 in Bratislava is part of an international serial murdering snuff-ring run by the Russian mob.
3. You can always tell when someone’s with the Russian mob by their @gang.rus email address.
4. There is a level of suck a movie can achieve beyond which no amount of Slasher-Film-Nudity can make it watchable.
Now, #2 seems like a pretty bold thing for the makers of this movie to assert. I mean, that’s sure to piss off all the people in Bratislava. And I wouldn’t want to piss those guys off: I recently learned that they’re all part of an international serial-murdering snuff-ring run by the Russian mob.
So, to recap: Bratislava’s major exports:

Two Wild And Crazy GuysSerial Murder