2010 February minutiae

  • Ooh, this year's tax return envelope is the self-gumming kind. The glue on the old envelopes was the worst!

  • I find it really interesting that sometimes in Online Games Basketball I can be completely in the zone and just know exactly where to click, and other times I'll clank ten shots in a row. It doesn't feel like a fluke of statistics, but then again it also doesn't feel like that should be a skill that comes and goes.

  • Apparently three-eighths of the world's cats live in the USA.

  • abcnews.go.com: GOP Wins Shot at Obama's Old Sen. Seat. As opposed to what, falling below 5% and being disqualified from the ballot?

  • Facebook exchange:
    Marie M. has made potentially tasty bread. And without even stenciling "ARTISAN" across the top in flour. We shall taste tomorrow.
    Russ S.
    I got this error when I tried to "like" your post:
         Object cannot be liked
    Apparently, Facebook doesn't think much of your baking skills.

  • My bar of soap wore down to an unusable sliver so I stopped by Berkeley Bowl to get another. Then I thought, "I should get a couple — soap doesn't go bad and I ought to keep a few bars on hand." So I did.

    When I got home, I found a wrapped bar of soap sitting on my desk. I thought, "Well, no wonder I didn't know I had an extra — what's it doing here? I should start keeping the soap in the medicine cabinet." So I took the now three bars of soap into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet to put them away.

    Inside was yet another bar of soap.

  • I like the looks of the building that's going up on the northwest corner of campus.

  • Note to self: the reason $NAME looks so much older than in the '80s is that the '80s were three decades ago.

  • I happened across a Sesame Street clip in which Ernie, trying to show Bert the power of imagination, encourages him to pretend to talk to an elephant on a banana. Bert replies, "I'm just not emotionally secure enough to do this, Ernie."

    (At the end of the skit you can hear Bert saying, "I'm about six-foot-two, blond hair... I don't think we should meet, no.")

  • Another age landmark: learned through Facebook that someone in my class has children in high school. As in, they are older now than their mother was the last time I saw her.

  • Ric Bucher: Karl's uncertain future prompted he

  • I got that thing that transcribes your voicemail and emails it to you. It is the perfect service for someone like me who is online all the time but remembers to check voicemail maybe once every couple of weeks. However, the transcription isn't always perfect. One came out, "It's about being... I just wanna let you know that I cannot." Existential!

  • There's a huge sign along the 880 declaring to all and sundry the availability of GAS & FOOD. Underneath that sign is an animated box that cycles through the following sequence:
    UNLEADED $2.79 9⁄10
    [a waving American flag]
    BURRITO
    There's always a huge line of cars backed up at that exit, too. I guess people must see that sign and think, "Yeahhh, BURRITO"

  • msnbc.com: Big quake question: Is nature out of control? Yes, headline writer, the fact that we happen to have had a couple of big earthquakes recently means that THE EARTH IS GOING TO BLOW UP LIKE KRYPTON. This is as bad as Fox News crowing that "it's snowing near my house so global warming is a hoax!" At this rate during the next solar eclipse all the news networks will be asking, "Has the sun been eaten by a giant space goat??"

  • I also saw way too many reports saying that the Chilean quake was "nearly 1000 times stronger" than the one in Haiti. It's true that a 9.0 earthquake would be 1000 times stronger than a 7.0 earthquake (such as the one in Haiti). But while 8.8 may sound pretty close to 9.0, the magnitude of an earthquake is measured using a logarithmic scale. An 8.8 earthquake such as the one in Chile is only about half as powerful as a 9.0. If these supposed science journalists think 500 is "nearly 1000" then I'm guessing that back in their school days they got "nearly 100%" on a lot of their math tests.

  • I got a pressure cooker but so far I haven't been hugely impressed. I'm using it primarily to cook dry beans, but it goes through huge quantities of water and the beans still stay hard for quite a while before suddenly dissolving.

  • Youtube comment: fuck, i love fuckin to this song

    I wonder whether elsewhere this person has posted, "Shit, I love shitting to this song."

  • The ironic thing is that Dhow Shalt Not Steal actually did change the way I think about Somali pirates.


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