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Relationship Map
Posted 2:32 PM, May 29, 2007 |
This sweet relationship map was created for guests at a wedding as a conversation starter. The map shows how everyone relates to other people at the wedding, and also makes everyone sound way more interesting than most people I know:
- Steve once lied to the state of Virginia (and paid for it) on behalf of the Maid of Honor, Hillary;
- Hillary learned to waterski watching the one-legged acrobatics of Jim;
- Jim mourned the death of a sea bird alongside Rees;
- and Rees, once, in a Chinese restaurant in Suva, Fiji, watched three chairs get broken, one after the other, by Father of the Bride, Mick.
It’s a great idea, obviously only accomplishable by fascinating people. (via kottke, via gulfstream)
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Deep Sea Diving
Posted 9:56 PM, May 27, 2007 |
Regular readers know I have a penchant for bizarre creatures; this love is double if the animal is a sea-dweller, and quadruple if it’s an octopus or squid. With all this in mind, I’m happy to point you to a recent New york Times article about deep sea creatures, including Grimpoteuthis, the “Dumbo octopus,” presumably named because of its large, ear-like appendages rather than its ability to stand on its hind legs in a fetid circus tent.
The slideshow - under “Multimedia” on the side of the Times article - is great. It shows a really creepy fanfin seadevil, a truly bizarre Ping-Pong tree sponge (which sounds like something from Le Petit Prince), and a dragonfish, which is either also creepy, or kind of funny - look at those eyes!
Great, great stuff.
And, not for the faint of heart, this BBC article about a python that exploded while trying to consume a whole alligator. (Thanks to the EC and the Rittonians for the heads-up.)
Keep the wacky animal news coming to the inbox.
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Go Disney…
Posted 5:10 PM, May 26, 2007 |
Well, my partner and I went 0-3-1 in 4 games today - not well enough to make it to the final day on Monday (obviously). We managed to blow an 8-0 lead in one game and a 7-0 lead in another game. However, we lost to the team that has won the tournament 3 of the last 6 years, as well as a team that has, in the past, represented the country of South Africa.
I guess the thing is that southern California is the hotbed - if there is a hotbed - of lawn bowling, so the best of the best frequently enter tournaments around here. It’s not like your Wednesday night poker game, unless your Wednesday night poker game is at the Taj Mahal.
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Go Disney!
Posted 10:01 PM, May 25, 2007 |
Tomorrow (Saturday) is my first “real” lawn bowling tournament. A lady from the Santa Monica Lawn Bowling Club and I have entered as a team in the 37th Annual Disney Tournament, held in Beverly Hills. Should be interesting - I’ve bowled some league games and other stuff, but this is the first thing I actually had to pay to enter. Today, my partner and I bowled at the club and managed to blow an 8-point lead and lose by 2. This means nothing to you, because you’ve never lawn bowled, but it’s pretty dispiriting. The good news is that we were winning after 10 ends, and the games tomorrow only go to 10 ends, so in theory we would have won, or something like that.
Have a good holiday weekend.
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Crosswords
Posted 8:25 PM, May 24, 2007 |
The EC and I auditioned for the upcoming, brand new Merv Griffin game show, Let’s Do Crosswords. The show is set to debut in syndication September 10, 2007.
The audition was fine, a little crossword-style test, then a couple of personal interviews / auditions. No problem. I told funny stories, most of which I’ve already told you about on this website. They aren’t actually taping until July, and then taping through Thanksgiving, and I (unfortunately) don’t have a whole lot of other information about the show (except what you can find on the link above).
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Comparison
Posted 2:13 PM, May 22, 2007 |
In the battle between Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Dave Eggers’ story of Valentino Achak Deng in What is the What, there’s a clear winner: What is the What is the far superior book. What reads as if someone took Beah’s book and took out the boring parts and fleshed out the good parts and, seriously, made the main character seem like a real person.
Eggers does what Beah cannot, which is tell a story convincingly and completely through the eyes of a child. He uses flashbacks, as if Deng is telling other characters in the book about his struggles in the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya, and manages to tie all these events to things happening in the United States after Deng arrives and gets settled. I got a much clearer picture of where Deng had come from, and most importantly, how far he had come, by the juxtaposition of his life in Africa with his life in Atlanta. Beah’s book ends as he prepares to come to the United States to live; the only thing we know about his current life is that he has a wildly successful book being sold at Starbucks.
I don’t think, necessarily, that Deng’s story is any more or less compelling than Beah’s - it’s just better written.
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Ghost Town
Posted 11:23 AM, May 21, 2007 |
My brother noted that the school board in Duluth recently voted to close Duluth Central High School, the school from which he and I (and both our parents) graduated.
I have some fond memories of high school, but they are (apparently, due to a lack of any real sadness about the decision) totally untied to the building. The building was just, well, a building - I know people with whom I graduated that will be extremely upset by the news of DCHS’s closing, and some of that will be due to teachers that will, inevitably, lose their jobs, but some of the sadness will be tied to the abandonment of the building. Not this guy.
And that got me started thinking about Duluth in general, which I consider being well on its way to being a ghost town. Duluth is certainly a depressed economy and it seems like the infrastructure is in rough shape - Duluth has horrible roads, aging public facilities, and a declining tax base. Crime is on the increase (at least it seems like it - I didn’t check statistics). The only thing that seems to be holding steady (apart from shipping, which I suspect will always keep Duluth from truly being a “ghost town”) is tourism, and Duluth seems to mismanage its approach to tourism, from way back when Fedo put up that goofy miniature lighthouse at the entrance to the Canal Park district to the building of the money-sink aquarium. They’ve managed to sell all the land near the water to build hotels obstructing the lakefront, obviously ignoring (and alienating) the resident population in favor of tourism.
I’m no politician or sociologist or historian, but it seems like once a town’s population starts to decline and there are no potential business opportunities on the horizon that could possibly stem that declining trend, things start to look grim.
There are new businesses being introduced, and new housing being built, but that strikes me (and my dad and grandmother at the least) as incongruous - people buying these brand new homes aren’t working at the brand new Slumberland or the Olive Garden. There’s no new substantial businesses to be had, apart from retail, and retail alone can’t sustain a city - it can sustain, say, an outlet mall society.
Maybe it’s from living in Minneapolis and Los Angeles, two huge cities with varied industries, both well-supporting things like the arts, sports, and other leisure activities, that have skewed my view of Duluth’s socioeconomic future. Duluth seems to me, now, like a hard-scrabbled town with meager offerings, if any, on the horizon to improve things.
It’s a long way from being a ghost town, but it’s on the poorly-paved road there.
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Puzzle Time
Posted 3:12 PM, May 20, 2007 |
I wrote up a crossword-type puzzle for my brother. He’s using it as part of the process of finding the coordinates of a geocache he’s hidden, so for any non-geocaching puzzle solvers, that’s sort of irrelevant. But you might still enjoy the puzzle, which is provided with no instructions at all.
If you’ve come over here from my brother’s site, welcome. There are no hints.
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Hot Dogs and Ice Cream
Posted 11:00 PM, May 19, 2007 |
The EC and I watched A Hot Dog Program on public television tonight - basically an hour of poorly-edited footage about an abundance of hot dog restaurants across the country. The program was edited by Dickrun H. Manoogian.
Also, the show that immediately followed A Hot Dog Program? An Ice Cream Show.
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Turtles!
Posted 3:05 PM, May 15, 2007 |
More turtles: This is actually a turtle, a giant turtle found in Cambodia. I didn’t read the whole article, but I think these turtles were kept by the Khmer Rouge and used as pack animals, or maybe as Lazy Susans.
The posts are coming fast and furious here, so try and keep up. Cryptomundo has photos of a rotting, beached carcass of something that’s probably a whale, but maybe a turtle, or maybe a Martian - the jury is still out. Since I like to make sure your cryptozoologic needs are met, here’s the link.
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Africa
Posted 2:14 PM, May 15, 2007 |
So I finished reading Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone about civil war in Sierra Leone and, after plowing through a ton of old New Yorkers as well as the most recent Virginia Quarterly Review, I’m now tackling Dave Eggers somewhat-fictionalized account of Valentino Deng’s experience in Sudan’s civil war.
Beah’s book seems to be the more popular, showing up next to the register at Starbucks, but Eggers book, even after 30 pages, seems better in almost every aspect. I already feel like I have a better understanding of Valentino Deng than of Ishmael Beah; however, the EC and I did see Eggers and Deng speak together a few months back, so I can imagine him much better as a flesh-and-blood person.
Beah’s book was written from the point of view of an pre-teen boy, aware of changes around him but not aware of the reasons; the book provided little backstory on the political events of Sierra Leone leading to numerous rebellions and attempted coups, other than in a brief chronology appended to the end of the text. Also, Beah’s writing isn’t very nuanced or skillful, even - it’s difficult to tell if this is intentional, given the narrator of the book, or just the way Beah writes. Deng and Eggers smartly teamed up; Eggers is an experienced writer, capable of handling varied voices, and does wonders with Deng’s voice already.
While Deng and Eggers openly admit that What Is the What is a slightly fictionalized account of Deng’s life, I have trust that the two of them changed things only to better explain Deng’s experience and the general situation in the Sudan. Beah’s book is entirely non-fiction, but told from the blinded view of a young narrator that I felt couldn’t entirely be trusted, simply because of his age and naivete.
Maybe, when I finish What Is the What, I’ll compare the two a little more in-depth. I doubt it, though.
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Pirates! Arrr!
Posted 7:16 PM, May 14, 2007 |
This article talks about a college student getting sued, but offered a settlement of $3000, for illegally downloading music. Sort of.
I’ve been under the impression that the problem isn’t with downloading music, but rather with sharing it - i.e., the person whose file you’re downloading is the one in trouble for illegal distribution. Maybe you’re in trouble, too, for possession of copyrighted materials that you didn’t pay for, but I’m not sure. That was never my impression - anyone can sort me out.
The article itself is sketchy on the details, clearly implying that the student in question is being sued for songs she downloaded, and an RIAA spokesperson saying, “Any student on any campus in the country who is illegally downloading music may receive one of these letters in the coming months” (emphasis mine). A couple paragraphs later, though, the article says students face minimum damages of $750 for each copyrighted recording shared. So what gives?
Kelly Bartling, a university spokeswoman for the school mentioned in the article, says, “If we can do anything to help educate students about what illegal file-sharing is, we’re willing and interested in doing that.” I think that’s a good place to start all around.
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Oven Parts
Posted 6:18 PM, May 14, 2007 |
Part of our oven fell into our food yesterday. The EC had thrown in some buffalo onion rings and they were cookin’, and we took them out and there was a nut and a round circle with a hole in the middle on the cookie sheet. We didn’t eat them only because they weren’t covered with delicious buffalo taste. There must be a bolt in the oven somewhere that is sad and lonely.
I cooked a pizza today and the oven still works fine, and there were no pieces of metal in my food, so no worries there. If you know of any good oven repairmen, please leave it in the comments. They must be fast and cheap, and preferably have a degree in oven-ology. Multiple degrees are even better.
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Graying
Posted 8:49 PM, May 13, 2007 |
Every once in a while, I notice a gray hair in the mirror. I don’t mind it - I just leave it there, and it’s fine. But today I was thinking: man, I can’t wait until I get gray hair. I’m going to look terrific.
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Frozen Foods
Posted 9:08 PM, May 10, 2007 |
It’s never good when you take something out of the freezer to make for dinner and you think, “Well, I’ve got to eat this sometime.”
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One Difference
Posted 1:44 PM, May 9, 2007 |
Since moving from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, people ask me if I notice any differences. I usually say no, other than the obvious, that Los Angeles has : more people, better weather, higher prices. “What about the people?” everyone asks. I explain that people are pretty much jerks everywhere, ha ha, you know what I mean?
But here’s the big difference: in Los Angeles, fast food drive-thrus close early. Both McDonald’s and Taco Bell have drive-thrus that close at 10pm on weekdays, even though the walk-in portion stays open late. In Minneapolis, it seems the opposite - fast food places (what my dad refers to as “gutbombs” or “gutbomb joints”) close the interior first, ostensibly to clean it while the drive-thru is still open for customers.
I don’t know why the difference exists - there aren’t drive-offs with fast food since you pay before you get the food, and it would seem easier to operate a drive-thru than a walk-in restaurant.
So that’s the big difference. Remember, people are jerks anywhere, ha ha.
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Mouse
Posted 2:31 PM, May 7, 2007 |
Just a little observation: at Ye Olde Math Shoppe, I work on a laptop that has a touchpad (which I almost never use, preferring the heft of your traditional mouse). However, today I spilled a little bit of water on the touchpad. While cleaning it with a paper towel, I noticed the cursor wasn’t moving. When I put my finger directly on the touchpad and moved it, it worked fine. Cover my finger with a paper towel (but still just pressing the tip of the covered finger against the pad): nothing. I also tried a pen-cap, the corner of a pad of post-it notes, and an eraser, but the only thing that makes the cursor move is a reliable human finger. What gives?
Well, I’ll tell you. Touchpads operate by sensing the capicatance - basically electric charge - of the human finger. So anything that doesn’t conduct electricity between the human finger and the touchpad (like a paper towel) makes it stop working, as does anything that doesn’t have a natural electric charge (like the eraser). I always assumed touchpads operated by pressure, not electricity, but what do I know? Very little, apparently.
Note: The above information did not come from Snopes.
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Just When I Trusted You
Posted 6:43 PM, May 3, 2007 |
Update #2: The folks at Snopes responded, directing me to this page, which basically says, “Don’t trust us, or anything you read, until you go somewhere else and check it.” This is dumb. It’s like dictionaries putting in false definitions, or a map making up extra streets. If I had time to go check three sources for everything, that would be fantastic. But I don’t - who does? So isn’t the point of reference materials (like Snopes) that they should be reliable and that they should be the be-all and end-all? If they can’t accomplish that, then why bother? Boo for Snopes. This is lame.
Update #1: Apparently the folks over at the Snopes message board have already gotten around to this one, but, oddly enough, within a week of when I ran across it. This brings to mind those coincidences where two scientists both serendipitously discover, like, the quark, at the same time. (Thanks, Pear.)
I’ve been a firm believer in the folks over at Snopes, referring people there to explain to them that you will not get free money from Bill Gates, a shark actually did not jump out of the water and attack a diver, and that Yahoo! servers will not be down between 15 March and 17 March 2003 (?). In other words, Snopes has been pretty useful and reliable. Until today.
I ran across this entry which makes the claim (supported by Snopes) that the Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from secondary school math curricula. This is not true. A search of the document linked to from this page labeled “2007 Mathematic Framework” (no comment) finds students required to work with complex fractions in Algebra II (page 150), partial fraction decomposition in Pre-Calculus (page 169), and decimal values in Discrete Mathematics (page 176). Sure, some pretty weird stuff - it’s not like students are adding and subtracting fractions - but Snopes is wrong. And, shouldn’t students have pretty much mastered fractions and decimals by the time they get to the 9th grade?
Yes, of course.
I’m most surprised that the folks at Snopes decided the statement was true (apparently) based on a “news article” that they posted. The article is sprinkled with cute little jokes that should be a clue that it isn’t a serious news piece:
The bill, which cleared the Mississippi Senate by a vote of “a lot” to “a little” (with “this many” senators abstaining) after some initial confusion over how many votes constitute a “majority,”
School librarians expressed concern about whether they will be able to continue categorizing books according to the Dewey decimal system once the law goes into effect, but Jason Compson, chief librarian for the Greater Biloxi School District, opined that “anyone who couldn’t beat that pinko Truman doesn’t deserve a place of honor in our schools’ libraries anyway.” Also, Judith Sutpen (mentioned as the chairperson of the Mississippi Senate Education System) is really a character from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Cora Tull isn’t the Senate minority leader, but a character from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Biloxi area chief librarian Jason Compson isn’t a librarian - he’s a character from As I Lay Dying. John Sartoris is the dead patriarch from Faulkner’s Sartoris instead of a freshmen senator. Even the “newspaper” from which the article was taken is from Faulker - the Yoknapatawpha County Register is named after Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional Mississippi county that serves as a common Faulkner setting. (Keep in mind, I’ve never read a lick of Faulkner.)
The unfortunate thing about all of this is that, like finding that one wrong answer in a Trivial Pursuit box, it makes it really tough to trust the rest of Snopes. Especially when what they overlooked is so obviously false.
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