Notre Dame‘s cancelled all classes and activities and declared it a “Day of Prayer”. That’s an understatement.

They’ve evacuated most of the City of London. (The City is the square mile financial district in the middle.) Canary Wharf, the London Stock Exchange, the Natwest Tower, the Lloyds of London building… All empty. This is frightening.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Can you believe this? Our whole office is clustered in the kitchen watching the news footage as it rolls in. The BBC site seems to be swamped. My cousin IMed me from the States to say she’d just seen the footage. I IMed my mom and told her to turn on the TV. My sister called from work to say she’d heard from her boss that something terrible had happened. It’s like a disaster movie.

Excerpt from an Instant Messenger conversation:

Snookums: What is disputed? The fact that there is always carrots or the source of these carrots? The presence of carrots is ubiquitous enough to make it into at least 3 entries in this excellent list of regurgitative euphemisms.
Kris: Dude, you’re just making this worse. You know it all goes straight to the blog.
Snookums: I found a reference to vomit always containing carrots somewhere on hairytongue.com.
Kris: Nasty. *pause* You ready to go to lunch?

Damn. My perverts page is catching people, but a bug in my code meant that their “appeals” weren’t getting recorded properly. It’s fixed, though, so hopefully we’ll get some suckers today.

Oh, and I changed the poll. 🙂

Is it wrong to wanna see Michael Jordan fall on his ass? This is gonna be ugly, folks.

Ever heard of the “carrot sac”? Snookums explained to me at lunch that everybody’s got one in their stomachs where all the carrots you ever eat are sent. That’s why when you vomit there’s always carrots in it. (I swear, this is what the boy said.) I told him that this must be a quaint Australianism, because it’s certainly never entered my slang dictionary before. Have you ever heard of it?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the perverts page! I can’t wait til they start rolling in.

Here’s what amazes me about the I.T. industry: we can build something completely awesome for a client, only to have them screw it up completely with their marketing or P.R. For instance, I’m working on a site that allows a user to search for available holiday cottages in France to rent. It works well and the design doesn’t suck. Yet here’s a sample of the copy they sent to be used on the home page:

Finding your ideal French holiday cottage isn’t easy, but every year we search France with a passion, for the most characterful cottages in the prettiest regions of the country.

“Characterful”?? That isn’t a word! People get paid to write this crap? I’m going to be embarrassed to put that site on my CV!

Hooray! The Harry Potter movie will have its gala premiere in London on November 4. Now I just have to take the day off and stake out the theater all day. I’ll get to meet everybody!