The Wyndee Martini

Happy Birthday Denise!!

We hope you like your present (particularly since you've been asking us to help you set one up since last year).

Behold: The Wyndee Martini!!!

Oh, and the Peanuts gang are making an appearance just because...

The Family Circus

If you were ever a fan of the comic strip "Family Circus" (and I dare say most of us were), you'll fondly remember that some of the most interesting cartoons were those that featured the dotted paths. Who knows why, but we found ourselves simply needing to go from start to finish every week. When you stop and think about it, the comic's creator, Bil Keane, basically innovated a new way of delivering a narrative, different than the tried and true, left-to-right cell-by-cell method.

The Joy of Tech paid some homage to that memorable style today, and in doing so they attempt to answer the question: Why does it take a pharmacist so long to fill a prescription?
 

Happy 32nd JazMarz

Enjoy the Monster seats tonight...and please, don't fall over the wall!

April Fool's Day 2008

Today is April Fool's Day (no really, it is), that wonderful day that comes once a year where people showcase their imagination and creativity through pranks and gags that test the gullibility of others. Ok, so some pranks aren't that imaginative, and most aren't as funny as the pranksters think they are, but there are definitely some out there that get you, and some even make you laugh.

This one is my winner for this year (yes, I know Google may have gotten you with Virgle or Google Weblogs). I don't know if it's real and I don't want to download anything that identifies itself as a virus to find out, old school or not.

The Amazing Mathemagician

I came across this in a feed from HowStuffWorks.com. It's a performance by Arthur Benjamin where he showcases his fairly ridiculous ability to quickly calculate 3, 4, and even 5-digit squares in his head.

Ok, so it might be a little geeky, but I still think it's impressive and entertaining. Click here or the image below to watch the vid.

OSX System Sound Song

I came across this on The Graphic Mac...and felt the need to post about it immediately. Apparently someone had entirely too much free time on their hands and created a song using only the system sounds from OSX. Ok, I'll give an "A" from creativity.

If you actually want to tweak this, you can download the actual Garageband file here.

Finally, Red Sox 2008

...bright and early at 6AM tomorrow morning. I can't think of a better way to start a day (other than a little later, maybe).

In case you missed it, Jayson Stark's column about the Red Sox was the lead on ESPN.com for a good part of the day today. An image similar to the one below was proudly displayed, followed by nothing less than the clear proclamation that "The incumbent Red Sox are favored to repeat in October. Any questions?"

Yowsa...there was actually a time I'd feel nervous about such bold predictions. Such is not the case anymore, and it feels good.

image from ESPN.com

Bloviate: A Great and (unfortunately) Useful Word

Boston.com ran a piece today called "The Meanies of Life: TV and film bullies we love to hate". It included some all-time names like Biff Tannen from Back to the Future ("McFlyyyy") and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket (um, too many good quotes to list). There were other, actually nefarious characters on the list to be sure, but I found one that actually made me cringe: Ann Coulter.

Yes, she has "blonde hair, intemperate venom" and her "Weapon of Choice" is well encapsulated in the phrase "[the] Politics of outrage", but it's the description of why she was put on the list that put it in perspective for me:

Who to choose among the conservative blovation spectrum? No contest: Limbaugh may be louder, O'Reilly more self-righteous, but no one delivers a verbal rope-burn with more thuggish glee than Coulter. The meanest Mean Girl of them all, she'd doubtless take that as a compliment.

And there it was. "Bloviation". I had to look it up to get a better idea of what it was. One definition was the following:

To bloviate means "to speak pompously and excessively." A colloquial verb coined in the United States, it is commonly used with contempt to describe the behavior of politicians, academics, pundits, or media "experts," sometimes called bloviators, who hold forth on subjects in an arrogant, tiresome way.

I realized I had finally found the word to encapsulate all that I loathe about politics today. People bloviate too much. How can one have a conversation with this type of person? You can't. You don't even get to agree or disagree. You're choices are to either listen or leave; talking means nothing to these people. It's their way or...well, their way.

The irony is that they feel they have to educate, to get out the truth (or what they think it is, anyway), when in reality the means through which they try to do so has the exact opposite effect - no one wants to listen to imperious babble from an overbearing, self-important blowhard.

...er, bloviator.
 

Need to Clean Your Screen?

In one of the rare cases where I find one of those emails making the rounds to be funny...


...and for those who think cats are better cleaners...


For full screen versions, click here for the pug or here for the cat.
 

Pi Day 2008

I can't believe I forgot about Pi Day.

As if the general lack of posts wasn't enough of an indicator of how busy I really am, I completely forgot what today was until TLM reminded 10 minutes ago. The sad thing is I spent a good portion of the day today backing up data from our servers, and must've typed in today's date at least 3 or 14 times. Doh.

Yes, I am a math enthusiast and I am excited by the idea of irrational numbers and the fact that pi has been calculated to over a trillion places after the decimal. I like the official Pi Day site, too, and I think the graphic on the top is a nice touch (expand your window and it just keeps giving you decimals...).

Happy Pi Day!
 

Some People Born on "Leap Day"

Ok, enough is enough. Time to get back to some posting.

Today is of course February 29th, referred to by many these days (especially those at LeapZine.com) as "Leap Day". When this changed from "Leap Year's Day" I'm not sure, but the new version seems more fun to say for some reason.

Just a few days ago TLM and I were talking about the family with something like 4 children born on a leap day. Well, it turns out it was only 3 siblings from Norway, Heidi, Olav, and Lief-Martin Henriksen (only 3...come on!) born in 1960, 1964, and 1968 respectively. Is this a freak example of probabilities gone haywire (I mean, the day only comes by every four years or so, depending on the century), or is it instead a masterful example of premeditated and well-timed reproduction? You tell me.


Whatever the case, there are lots of other interesting and/or famous people whose birthday falls or fell on February 29th. For example, as if being a leap year baby wasn't enough, one set of parents in Germany decided to take baby naming to another level in 1904 by naming their son:

Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberdorft Sr.

See the pattern? He had a name that began with every letter of the alphabet, in order, up to his last name (which wasn't exactly that short either, btw.). He could have used a different name almost every day of each month, or maybe based on how he was feeling that day. He apparently did have a shorthand version: Mr. Wolfe Plus 585 Sr., though I haven't figured out where the 585 comes in.

Oh...and is that a Sr. I see at the end? Does that mean there was a Jr. running around at some point with the same name? Had he been born somewhere like 60-68 years later, he may have opted to go with the classic Big Bird word that wasn't (see below in case you have no idea what that means).



Some other Leap Day babies include rapper Ja Rule, Pedro Zamora from Real World San Francisco, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and Lyndon Byers, the infamous Bruins enforcer who can still be seen now and then in and around Boston bars and nightclubs. Below is an example of LB's handiwork, and one of the few times you'll see a hockey fight broken up before someone hits the ice.



Happy Leap Day!
 

Pats are 18-1, and done

I'm trying to remind myself it's only a game, but this one hurts. It would be different if the Patriots hadn't gone undefeated all year, I imagine. I'm still trying to put together thoughts about this, so here:

Joe Kittinger - Skydiving from Space

Taking a brief reprieve from all the Super Bowl hype (my last chance to do so), I came across this History Channel vid that describes an interesting, and I think little known, even that occurred on August 16, 1960. As part of the US's evolving space program, Joseph Kittinger strapped into a helium balloon craft named the Excelsior III with a very unusual mission. Following orders, Kittinger waited until he was 102,800 feet above the Earth (that's pretty much in space, folks), then jumped out.

Yup, he jumped. And he made it back ok.

Now though the act was really part of an experiment trying to determine the effects of high altitudes on human beings, Kittinger managed to also set a few world records. Firstly, it's safe to say that he has the distance record for skydiving (spacediving?). Secondly, because of the constant acceleration of gravity increasing his velocity all the way down, he ended up traveling over 700 mph at one point, setting the record for fastest human not in a vehicle of some sort, not that many vehicles can get to that speed. The man actually broke mach 1 about 3/4 of his way down.

I deem this worth watching at least once. At least.

Happy Birthday SirKenLord

A "third of my life" he says to me...well, better than half I say.

Have a good one Ken. See you next weekend for Super Bowl XLII...
 

Burns Night

"Auld Lang Syne"...in this country it's one of the most commonly known songs, of which most people know all of five words. It can be heard at New Year's parties and on the streets when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st each year, but where does it come from? Who wrote it?

The answer is Robert Burns, a Scottish poet who lived in the late 1700's and is generally regarded as the man in that country. Besides "Auld Lang Syne", he wrote many other highly regarded poems and even collected folk stories and songs from around Scotland for preservation, and in some cases like "Scots Wha Hae" (the unofficial Scottish national anthem for a long time), inspiration.

Burns is so highly regarded that Scottish emigrants (and fans of his poetry too, I suppose) all over the world come together on or around the anniversary of his birth, January 25th, to celebrate in what's become known as "Burns Night". The celebration is fairly elaborate, and sometimes very formal, a testament to how highly Burns is still regarded.

There is always a meal shared by all attendants called the "Burns Supper", unsurprisingly. A loose outline of the supper's order of events is outlined at Wikipedia (hopefully by people who actually go to these things). I found the Selkirk Grace, commonly said before the meal, particularly fun to read for whatever reason:

"Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit."

-the Selkirk Grace

So eat some haggis, have a shot or 3 of some good Scotch Whiskey, and end the night with a good rendition of "Auld Lang Syne".

But please, make sure to learn the words first...