the dangers of gerin oil

It is a highly addictive drug, but governments everywhere encourage its use:

Gerin oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of characteristic symptoms, often of an antisocial or self- damaging nature. If administered chronically in childhood, Gerin oil can permanently modify the brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which have proved very hard to treat. The four doomed flights of 11th September were, in a very real sense, Gerin oil trips: all 19 of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniol intoxication was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem witch hunts and the massacres of native South Americans by conquistadores. Gerin oil fuelled most of the wars of the European middle ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and, on a smaller scale, Ireland.

if your mother says she loves you

“If your mother says she loves you, get a second source.”
“If your mother says she loves you, get a second opinion.”

One place attributes the latter to Dan Rather; another to the movie Primal Fear. Clearly the saying predates both of them.

Other variants:
“If your Mother says she loves you, get two independent sources of confirmation.”
“If your Mother says she loves you-get it verified.”
“Even if your mother says she loves you, get two references.”

So: who said this first? where? when? and what did they say?

guerilla usability: ice oasis hockey

For the past two years, I’ve been playing hockey at Ice Oasis. It’s a nice enough rink, but their web site is terrible. While they’ve since ditched the neon colours, the schedule page is pretty awful:

  • you have to see all of the teams at once
  • white text on a red background is hard to read
  • it’s hard to tell when your next game is

My ice oasis schedule fixes all of those problems, and gives you even more. Features include:

  • A bookmarkable URL for your team
  • A choice of formats: HTML, plain text, iCal and RSS
  • Your next game is highlighted in green, and if that game is today, it is highlighted in red.
  • The colour of the team you’re playing is shown
  • A dynamically repopulating team menus whenever you change the day of the week

The site caches data from their site and converts it, much like Google makes PDFs and Word files available in HTML. It’s pretty gentle, not hitting the real site more than once a day.