Thursday, August 28, 2008

You know it's bad when...

... people sail across the pacific to dump their trash in the Ala Wai.

Raft Made Of Junk Crosses Pacific

A sailing raft made of recycled junk carrying two men on an estimated 2,300-mile trip across the Pacific Ocean has made it to Hawaii's Ala Wai Harbor.

I think we can fill the canal with shit on our own, thankyouverymuch.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Fan Service

Many of you (for some definition or "many", "of", and "you"), my dear loyal readers, have asked me repeatedly just how sharp an X-acto knife is. Since you have all made this blog so enormously popular (for some definition of "so", "enormously" and "popular"), I feel I am forced to do your bidding (for some definition of "do", "your", and "bidding"). It is for this reason that I decided to test (for some definition of "decided", "to", and "test") an X-acto knife upon my thumb. Unfortunately, I mean the common and universally understood definitions of "upon", "my" and "thumb".

On a scale of 1 (does not cut my thumb at all) to 10 (cuts the tip off my thumb), I would rate the X-acto knife's sharpness as 5 (cuts the tip of my thumb half way off). At the given depth, I'd estimate that if the cut had gone twice as far laterally, I'd be posting something philisophical asking whether it can still be called the tip if it's laying on the floor (see Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought).

Incidenatlly, when I say that coed astronomy pours it's blood, sweat, and tears into the Iron Puzzler BANG (and all the games we run), I don't mean that metaphorically. If your start clue has red stains on it, you'll know where they're from.

Well, ok, I threw out the piece of card stock I was currently working on, and the rest were protected in envelopes (unlike my carpet), so there was blood, sweat, and tears involved, but it's just the pouring that was metaphorical.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Historical Trivia

A coworker recently wrote an iGoogle gadget that uses News Archive data to display random historical events. Sort of a "This Day in History" thing with much more data and much less editing. So if like me, you happen to be in the intersection of the subset of people who use iGoogle and the subset of people who like random trivia, you might check it out:

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Go to Hell, Cokie Roberts

Apparently, I'm an exotic foreigner. And by that, I don't mean tha I'm seeing Double Vision or that I'm Cold as Ice. I mean this:



"I know Hawai'i is a state, but..."? Seriously? Go to hell, Cokie Roberts.