Today, the bitch that delivers our mail picked up my hard won tax return and left – a revised 1099 that changes the return.

Damn!!

British Airways has lost the hand luggage of a passenger who died on a BA flight from Hong Kong to London Heathrow last week.

The luggage contained his mobile phone and address book, leaving the family unable to contact some colleagues and friends about his funeral.

Professor Joel Richman, 74, a retired professor of social anthropology, was flying back from a three-month lecture tour of Hong Kong when he was taken ill and died of congestive cardiomyopathy, said his son Saul, 41…

“His one handbag and suitcase is missing, it has been lost by BA. We can’t invite people to his funeral, it has his address book and his mobile phone. To lose somebody’s hand baggage is just unforgivable,” said Saul Richman, an airline systems engineer and former BA employee. The funeral would go ahead and they were trying to contact everyone by email, he said.

I should have been finishing my upcoming post – It sounds like trick and it stands for tool – but I just haven’t been happy with the look of my last theme – So……. I sat down and did some revisions to a prior theme and am rather pleased with the preliminary results.

Let me know if you like it.

i/m

This quote just popped up on my home page:

Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Actually, you should remove the word “young” – at least for magicians.

Sorry for the delay. I’m still working on my review of the convention. I can’t remember when I was without the Internet for 4 days!

Scott, of Scot’s Magical Mystery Tour, has done a very detailed report. Start here to read it.

My review is decidedly less scholarly – of course.

i/m

Here’s a shock – the Magic Cafe treats their Guests (as Brooks calls them) like C-R-A-P!

Their latest is to tell all of their AOL users to kiss their virtual ass. Yeah, I know AOL is lame, but a lot of people depend on it for their access. All of the problems could be very simply resolved if they allowed “free” email accounts.

Every day, and I mean every day, I advise clients to move to GMail and unhook themselves from their ISP as their Internet email provider. Once they go through the one time pain of changing they are always happier with the service. Using a free account is the most intelligent way to manage your online email.

I find the genesis of this “policy” hilarious. Back when few people could even spell BLOG, there was a brilliant site called The Magic Circle Jerk. If I recall correctly, he started it after Brooks kicked him off for some minor infraction. In a battle of wits, the Cafe proprietors are totally defenseless and he constantly destroyed them. Andy, the proprietor was an absolute scream. I understand that some of his posts can be found in the Internet archives. It would be worth your time to look them up.

Anyway, one of his last assaults was a contest to see who could write the most boring post.What made this so terribly funny was, no one could be as boring as the regular users. Try as they might, nothing stood out. Brooks and Company closed down new admissions – changed the email policy and ran and hid like a bunch of prepubescent school girls. It was one of the funniest pranks ever.

So, on behalf of all of the AOL users I present the Golden Cheeks to our friends at the Cafe.

Personally, I could care less, but it’s time they revisited this arcane and archaic policy – it’s the right thing to do. (Write your own material here – I’m done).