[escaped from zug zug] Absolutely brilliant. Times TWO!!

Owen-san and I unravel the Mystery of a Very Hidden World of Warcraft Easter Egg:

<Spatch> and I found this last night in everlook: http://spatch.worldstop.com/wow-mol-spiritspeak.jpg
(That's how your speech looks in Ultima Online when you die and resurrect as a ghost.)
<Owen-san> !
<Owen-san> That's *hilarious*.
<Owen-san> have you tried parsing it as 7-bit ascii?
<Owen-san> Holy shit, that was a random guess and I might be right (so far: 'Ulti')
<Owen-san> Hur hur hur: "Ultima Online" so far.
<Owen-san> Ultima Online Napa Valley Knights of Chaos
<Owen-san> Someone has left a very well-hidden word to his guildies
<Owen-san> Incidentally, I can't believe I translated that.
<Owen-san> i r teh geek

The niftiness of this little well-hidden easter egg is only offset by the fact that today's WoW patch has completely broken my client. Blizzard, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that the game patcher requires over a gigabyte of free disk space to patch less than a megabyte worth of game files. When the patcher told me this, I hit the "OKAY I WILL EXIT AND FREE UP SOME SPACE BY DELETING PORN VALUABLE WORK DOCUMENTS" button and freed up some disk space, only to find that since the patcher had run (even though it hadn't completed patching) the client thinks it's already the up-to-date patched version... without the patched files in place.

Absolutely brilliant. Tuesday is NO PLAYING DAY for me, and it's also my Weekday Off! HOORAY!

durak takoi! (batz, boom)

OKAY SO WHEN YOU GO TO A NICE RUSSIAN RESTAURANT and the place has a subdued Romanov look to it and the prices reflect the glory days of the Tsar and you're one of only two people in the place who are primarily speaking English, what would you least expect them to do while you're eating?

1. Smoke cigarettes like they're going out of style, for that authentic Muscovite atmosphere.
2. Have some guy dressed up as Rasputin come over and tell you how ees everytheeng so far.
3. Give you a menu that suggests nylons and soap with your appetizer instead of wine.
4. Turn off the traditional Russian folk tunes, put American Idol on the TV over the fashionable vodka bar, and have it play very loudly as you're trying to enjoy your borscht and pirozhki.

The Russians in the place, it turns out, are all rooting for some skinny blonde kid using a patronymic surname. He didn't do so well this week, though. The borscht, however, was mighty tasty.