You don't say

Dear Sir,
As per your letter last, I thank you for your ane compliments. Yet my eptness is useless in the task you have sent. Alas, though I chalantly try to answer your query and discern what a silhou is, I am as yet dumbfounded. I have info regarding a possibly related animal, however.

The following item is, of course, the famous creature of the silhouette family that is pandemically spreading over the globe right now, facebookus shadowus:


Facts so far: This chameleon-like creature is able to look like everyone and no one. It has an incredible rate of growth (increasing by 5 million per week; 150-million silhouettes worldwide), and each spawn—er, offspring seems to be unique from all others. It is masculine, feminine and Alfalfian. Since the sex of silhouettes is undetermined, we must be careful in assuming that of silhous until we observe one in the wild or capture one.

I have recently infiltrated the facebookus shadowus community and will begin studying behaviors, traits, customs, etc. more closely. As always, I'll send more info as it becomes available.

What questions do you have?

Given the following image, what question(s) spring(s) to mind? Add 'em to the comments.

Found at Dark Roasted Blend

I'll get the ball rolling with: Where did the box come from?

Let's define our terms

Yesterday while I was having the last vestiges of spring quarter stress worked from my back muscles by a very talented massage therapist, she asks, "You've read books and I suppose you think. Would you consider yourself a liberal thinker?"

I heard myself say, "What could I possibly have done to make you think you had to ask the question?"

Whatever the behavior/activity was, it must be corrected.

Yawn

Two things for ya' right now. Both from Stranger than Fiction. Both make me giggle.

Thing 1: I love the scene when Will Ferrell and his buddy are talking about their superpowers. My superpower? Suspended animation. I am very good at it. Nothing can keep me from it. I only use it for good. I became good at it through practice. In fact, another practice session may happen this afternoon, for about an hour, on the couch, under a good book.

Thing 2: This has no connection to my daily life other than I walk around saying it, most times completely unrelated to whatever is happening at that moment: I brought you flours. Gah! It's hilarious. Hmm, maybe you need the visual. Go watch the movie then we'll talk.

Laugh(ing) out loud ... still

This comic panel wins the award! I don't know what award but it wins. Hands down.


I'm still giggling and snorting. My nose hurts—perhaps it has to do with the hot tea that came out through my nostrils.

I will no longer struggle to come up with the right word. This gives me permission to just insert the type of word that I need, not an actual word.

Comic panel from Dog Eat Doug (c) Brian Anderson

You want me to sign what?

The coffee stand on campus has a sign-up sheet for the Alliance for Animals that Eat You, or AAEY.

The manifesto is not provided. Is it pro-predator? Is it a movement to make more animals carnivores?

Sometimes I feel like an ESL student.

Needle in a haystack

While clicking along and pondering the ginormity of the interweb, this passed in front of my eyeballs:


And I am speechless. It is brilliant. I mean, who would mistake that drive for their own and accidentally walk off with it? Half the world's population would leave it on the desk. Awesome. It also has me thinking about floppy discs—with wings. Best not go too far with that one.

I'm more of a visual person so the picture was enough for me. When I followed the link to The Bloggess, I was pleasantly amused by the blog entry preceding the image. Better than hearing about the budget nightmare again. I scored a two-fer.

Off to scrounge up some dinner now.

Tech-Fashion 101

Maybe I'd jump if it were wireless.

Seems a contradiction

In my efforts to be a little greener, I adopted reusable canvas bags for grocery shopping. A couple of these are all I need since I am not stocking up the way my parents did with only one shopping trip per week and six mouths at the trough.

I noticed something odd after my last trip to the store. If I use my own bags, 3¢ is discounted from the final bill. That's swell. But this begs the first question: how are those three pennies charged when one is not supplying their own bags? I've never seen a charge for 3¢ on a receipt.

There is also another question. When I purchase just milk or just some other single item for which I do not need a bag, I am not credited 3¢. Why does the discount only kick in when I use my own bag?

I believe I am going to request the 3¢ discount the next time I buy items I carry out in my hands and I am a) checked-out by a manager at the register, and b) it is not crowded so we can talk about this without a line forming behind me. Stay tuned.

No one ever asks what would doggie do

1) Are you pondering what I'm pondering? Probably not.

2) The fascinating thing about typewriters is that they have built in printers.

and this one is for you, Frenchie,

3)

Found here.

Condensed Time, Just Add Tech

Let's not discuss the lack of heat in ye olde abode right now. I want the remodel that has been a bright shining figment of my imagination for months now to magically occur over night, complete with new wood burning fireplace. If the elves can't make the whole thing happen, I'd just like the fireplace, please. How about just replacing the single-pane windows? I only feel my toes after a hot shower or first thing in the morning after a night of thawing, er, sleeping on Big Swampy.

Anyway, while my fingers are still warm and nimble enough to type, let me get this post going. Warmth may only be one factor leading to the downfall of this post, now that I think about it. The condensing of time might be what does it in. I read an article the other day on an old fashioned piece of paper, possibly bound together in what was known as a "news magazine" and the speaker pulled the Old Timer Walking 5 Miles Through Snow to School routine. My own 40-year-old brain has forgotten the subject of the article but the gentleman mentioned how hard it was for him back in 19-hundred-and-97 "when all we had was [the search engine] HotBot."

While that reference to way back when was kicking around in my head, I ran across this techno-gem this morning:

The third and last entry of the epic Toy Bot series offers a crescendo of challenges, superb levels and an exciting conclusion to this iPhone classic. link

The iPhone has only existed since June 2007 and the game is an iPhone classic? Was the word classic misused or am I becoming a fuddy-dud? Where is the line when something that was introduced becomes a classic? With cars, I thought it was around 30 years. Apparently with video games, the window is mere months. The App Store is not even a year old and a game has gone classic. I'm dizzy. How long before the game is so cool and old it is retro? When I start to refer to "back in my day" will I actually be referring to a four-hour window or might I be allotted an entire day?

A detail that is adding to this cognitive dissonance is that I'm listening to Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler on my old-school pre-3G iPhone and hearing all about London during WWII. In this time of the U.S. trying to get over itself in terms of international affairs, I considered how New York or Philadelphia or Seattle might have reacted if bombers had reached our shores during that war. Police phone boxes and hurricane lamps and typewriters and magnifying glasses were the tech of the day. (Also described are rationing and going to shelters and emerging to see your neighborhood has disappeared under a pile of rubble. I believe our American psyche with respect to hardship is sorely lacking as compared to the rest of the planet. I'm not saying we should have a war just to toughen us up but I do believe our collective perspective has some major holes in it.)

I'm going to ponder the speeding up of the passage of time more while I find some sticks to ... er, particles to rub together to generate some heat and warm up my coffee.

link for image

I knew it!

Here's the last image sent from the Mars rover Phoenix. Looks suspicious, if you ask me.


Actually, the photo was slightly, uh, retouched as part of a contest over at Gizmodo.

Just let me finish this page

This is how I feel in the bookstore and at the library and while browsing Powell's Books.com and well, all the time really. I wish I had a touch of insomnia, just a touch. Maybe then I'd have a chance to read all the books I am accumulating.


Link

iYiyi

What is the fascination with bacon? Bacon wallets. Bacon band-aids. And now iBacon for your iPhone. I am verklempt.


from Gizmodo

What Would Rorschach See?

As a follow-up to Gollum's particular perspective of a store display combined with my self-inundation in the national election, I bring you an interesting view of voting results. Way more info can be found at the author's site, not too far from the longitudinal midline of the contiguous 48.

The national election in 2004 spawned the Jesusland map, a (humorous?) response to the wave of red psychosis that swept the land:

Here's what it looks like in the more traditional colors of red and blue:

And now let's look at just the lower-48:


Now this is where things get really neat. If the map is tweaked based on population density and we look at the cartogram, the red and blue swatches look like:

For a fuller explanation of what's going on, check out where the maps came from.

Here are the results for the 2008 election:















I would love to see this map superimposed on on similar renditions of maps showing locations of cities. I wonder just how distorted location is. That claw on the west coast: is that San Francisco Bay? Where exactly is that pocket of red in the lower left corner, Arizona? The author offers up his software for free. I'm off to play.

At the end of the rainbow

Way back in The When, at the beginning of the presidential primary season when it seemed like every politician who had a pulse decided the run for the office, the question arose, "Who is this Obama fellow?" My favorite answer to the question—and this is real, I swear—was that he was a nice Irish fellow cut from the same liberal cloth as a previous generation's nice Irish fellow.

Irish. As in O'Bama. For a brief moment, I wondered if I was spelling his name wrong and that the apostrophe was actually some sort of glottal stop like in the word Hawai'i. Thankfully, the moment passed. 

I can only think that these poor mistaken folks, deep in their conservative closet, were so shocked that a man of mix-raced lineage would dare enter the campaign that they clung to their error for comfort. Did they also misconstrue the rest of his name? Did they hear it as Patrick Seamus O'Bama? Oy.

Car 54 where are you?

The local newsrag reported that a local woman was shot through the leg after lighting the fire in her woodstove. A few weeks earlier, she spilled shot from a shotgun shell and apparently some made it into the newspaper that was used as starter fuel. The woman lit the paper, turned and began walking away when the shot exploded out of the stove and punctured her in the leg. She lived to tell the tell the tale.

But what if she hadn't? What if the shot had clipped an artery and she died and took the details of the ammo spill with her? Could Sherlock Holmes have figured out whodunit? I would have liked to hear his deductions that night:

From the trajectory of the shot, the assailant was standing on this side of the room. He is short, pot-bellied and has rather dark skin with a complexion like iron. He has four legs and an interesting gait. He cannot move too quickly. I believe we will also find he has a rather long, skinny neck.

Available over WiFi, you say?

Add "and tastes great" to the list of iPhone features.

Found at Macenstein via MacRumors

Is there a prize for this?

So I'm thinking of using a wiki in one of my classes this fall. Generally, I'm motivated by the "why one when many" model of information delivery. More specifically, since I never know where the next calculator question is going to come from, the students could work from their collective knowledge. Sounds good in theory. Post what you know, it is more than I could ever tell you.

Problem one with the theory is where does the wiki wiv, er, live. One option is at pbwiki. While surfing throught the employee information, I found the following:

Lynn Wu got her undergraduate degree in Golf and Sports Turf Management. She won silver in the biathlon in Torino. She also took on Wolverine on American Gladiators. Coming in at 6 feet 4 inches, Lynn keeps the PBwiki team in line with her amazon-like ferocity. In her spare time Lynn enjoys LOLcatting, practicing the art of bowyery, and writing fake biographies.

I'm leaning toward pbwiki as the external host for the class wiki if only because the upper-level mucky-mucks are cool with this and see amazon-like ferocity as a plus.

Updated 12:40 PM — The tagline for EditMe: "geek tested, newbie approved" is also a useful measure of quality.

Buffalo, NY: the new world power

I just had the most bizarre wiki experience that has shrunk my view of the planet. Follow along, kids.

I have acquired a copy of War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. I went to The Wik to learn more about this documentary before I committed myself to watching all thirteen hours. On the incredibly brief page, I clicked on the link for ...

PBS. I read way more about the tagline " ... and people like you" than I could have predicted. The page included a list of major PBS affiliates including ...

WNED. I had flashback overload to childhood hours spent wondering why there were no commercials on this station. I knew it had something to do with "people like me" but wasn't sure what because my parents would just bitch about the fund-raising campaign and change the channel. Then I clicked on ...

Buffalo, NY. I love that information about the climate is the first major wiki subsection. I miss snow and thought about the Blizzard of '77. I lived it. The rest of y'all can play the board game. As part of the discussion surrounding the cultural nuances of Buffalo, the 4 AM last call for bars is front and center.

I believe that this drinking convenience is a major reason for InBev locating their American headquarters in Buffalo. I mean, with those extra two hours, think of the research the company's interns can do investigating the beverage selection of the locals.

Look at that loop. It started with a documentary about the Cold War and ended with info on what the population of St. Louis sees as a foreign invasion by a Belgian company headquartered in this hemisphere in the city where I grew up.

I don't know what it means but it means something.