Fun for US Canada Day
I apologize that I neglected to wish all my Canadian friends a happy Canada Day, although we did talk about maple trees on the second. Honestly, Chris, I adore maple trees, just some more than others. To celebrate y'all might enjoy looking at Bill's "Canada Day, 1976" photo album. As one friend wrote, he understood that today was Canada Day down here in the US.
We did rejoice a bit around here on the news of Jesse Helms' death, but not for long because his memory doesn't deserve much of our time. He was more like that big, festering wound that you just want to forget about when it finally goes away. Say something positive about the dead? He was a positively horrible Senator.
One blog I like to keep in my feeds (listed at right) is ManBabies. (I know, I've mentioned it before, but this is a party!) The idea is easily explained: once a day we get to see a photo (maybe two) of a baby with its dad (or some other man, perhaps) in which their heads have been interchanged. Of course it's peculiar–like a good friend should be. Sometimes it's a bit unsettling, but it's always worth the few moments it takes to look. These are a few favorites of mine from the past months that I keep looking at:
- "I WANT THE CHICKEN STRIPS"
- "doorwayyyy" (those sweaters are too precious)
- "lil cub scout" (this one creeps me out a bit, but the facial expressions are fabulous)
- "AAAH A MONSTER!" (this one makes me laugh every time, like a joke told with perfect timing)
You know that I adore the comic xkcd ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language"), which is most definitely not to everyone's taste, so I will reveal more about myself by sharing the three that I've saved over the last few months that I find inexplicably hysterical.
- "How it Happened" — It's the way the little guy on the right doesn't move at the end that's the kicker. It's okay: I made Isaac look and he didn't understand why I was slapping my knees either.
- "Purity" — One of my favorite memories from the time of the great Pons & Fleischmann cold-fusion debacle was news reporting from a meeting of the American Physical Society (in Baltimore, that meeting) where there were the first, very well attended sessions of experiments not replicating their results. One news reporter got some physicist on tape actually saying (paraphrasing) "Well, what did you expect? They were chemists." This cartoon summarizes what the whole professional pecking order are thinking, but nobody's supposed to say it aloud for consumption by mere mortals.
- "Unscientific" — I just can't help but laugh at the idea of "zombie Feynman". As a bonus, he's defending "Myth Busters" in a way I approve.
I've also saved things from Boing Boing over the last couple of months and can't think of anything to do with them, so here they are.
- "Concrete washbasin shaped like a fossil ammonite" — this is just a gorgeous picture of something I wouldn't mind having in my own very-high-concept bathroom, if I had one. I bet Mike, who's a real fossil fan, would like one of these.
- "Google 'shell' for your browser" — It's called "goosh" (of course). Some of us really old-fashioned Unix types just prefer an interface where we type and results appear in bad computer-terminal typefaces, at least sometimes. Old fart that I am, I still use "vi" (or a derivative) for lots of stuff because it's faster for me.
- "We could have colonized Mars with the money we spent on the Iraq war — what else could we do?" — That's a pretty self-explanatory title: what could we have done with $6 Trillion that might have been better than wasting it in Iraq? Every time I saw this article in my saved list, it made me think of the joke that goes, in brief: The son goes into the kitchen to talk to his mom; she's chopping vegetables for dinner. "Mom, I have something to tell you: I'm gay." She stops chopping and points the knife at him. "Does that mean you men's penises in your mouth?" she asks. Rather embarrassed the son answers, "Yes." Mom resumes chopping: "I don't ever want to hear you complain about my cooking again!" After $6 Trillion I'm thinking I don't ever want to hear complaints about how $10 million for the National Endowment for the Arts is money the US can't afford. (May Jesse Helms spin in his grave, as soon as he gets there.)
- "Slate's John Levin on computer solitaire" — Mr. Levin apparently offers several high-brow reasons why solitaire games on computers are so popular but seems to overlook two obvious components of the answer: 1) solitaire has been a very popular, one-person pastime for a very long time; and 2) playing on the computer means not shuffling and playing out the cards, thus keeping the fingers from getting sore.
- "Rats are ticklish!" — with video! Apparently rats, who laugh in ultrasound, enjoy being tickled.
- "Band 'shoots' video by sending Data Protection Act requests to CCTVs that caught them performing" — Their song doesn't do all that much for me — not my favorite genre, so mark it up to personal taste — but I love the concept.
- "Patriot Act gag-order on the Internet Archive clobbered by EFF and ACLU" — This was just a bit of good news about one of the most un-American bits of the so-called "Patriot Act", wherein not only could a federal agency seize information so long as they wrote a letter about it, the person from whom the information was seized was enjoined from even talking about it.
[Later additions follow: there were a few more from Boing Boing I had pinned that Bloglines finally coughed up from the database. I'd wondered where they got to.]
- "Ill. Rep. Monique Davis: it's dangerous for children to know atheists exist, orders atheist to stop testifying" — I'm an atheist; naturally I think it's dangerous for people to hear anything that Monique Davis has to say.
- "Lush visualizations of ON THE ROAD's language" — this one caught my eye just for the ideas about interesting ways to visualize textual structures.
- "Dan Proops's digital culture-inspired oil paintings" — Mr. Proops is quoted as thinking that cubist art had an influence on computer interfaces. It's an interesting idea but also rather silly. I thought I might write an essay on the topic sometime.
- "Science News on food science" — The excerpt mentions Harold McGee's fabulous book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, which I read a number of years ago (there seems to be a new edition–book note anyone?), as well as the "Physicist in the Kitchen" lecture some years back by Nicholas Kurti. I saw him (Kurti) when I was in graduate school. His demonstrations were great fun, like the "Inside-Out Baked Alaska" that he made in a microwave oven.
- "Libraries for clothes" — mentions "the Belmont Clothes Library in Western Australia", where you can check out an outfit. What a delightful idea.
In: All, Laughing Matters, The Art of Conversation