Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Sweet!

What seems like forever ago, I wrote about finding a proper 10-pin bowling alley not too far from our MA house. Of course, that was a mere few months before starting my MLS degree, which left me spending time writing papers with the free wireless in my favorite coffee shop on Saturday mornings rather than at the bowling lanes, so I never got back into the game.

This past weekend, Hubby and I checked out the local alley, Sparetime Recreation (formerly known as Strike One), and I was thrilled to discover that it indeed is a 10-pin shop and not candlepin (I was actually informed that candlepin lanes in these parts are starting to disappear. Huh.). Even better, they’ve got a couple free slots for instruction coming up on Monday evenings, so I can get a much needed refresher, having not picked up a ball in ’bout 7 years. Sorry, knitting class, I’m gonna have to skip a few weeks while I tend to my bowling fix enough to feel confident in joining a league for the summer!

When I imported my (very) old MT posts into my new installation of WP a few months ago, I discovered several draft posts I’d completely forgotten. In this case, I can’t even remember how I found the passage below, or what I was thinking about when I saved it as potential post-fodder. Rereading it now, though, I think it begs for a corresponding flickr stream. Sigh. Must find time to pick up the photography hobby, too, and finally put that dSLR to proper use…

First saved February 3, 2003:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you —-beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey 1928–1989

Get Your Monster Name

(via)

It hasn’t been my intention to load these postings up with YouTube vids, and I swear to lay off a little in the future, but I just couldn’t pass up this one highlighting a prank at Dartmouth that had me giggling.

As an undergrad, I spent three summers on campus as a tour guide and every now and then had to explain away or divert attention from various scenes that one might not wish to highlight to prospective students - or, more accurately, said prospective students’ parents. Things like the rude saying that had been “painted” onto the roof of an old frat house using <i forget what, now - something like a varnish that wasn’t visible during good weather, but appeared clear as day when the roof got wet - like after a rainstorm>, or items one might wish wiseass coed friends wouldn’t hang in the shared lounge prior to a tour coming through just to see my reaction, or the results of an ongoing practical joke war, which left the “display bedroom” covered in toilet paper.

So, assuming that the tour guide in this vid wasn’t privy to the prank ahead of time, it’s pretty amusing to me to hear his attempt at addressing the spectacle: “I can say, for the most part…<snip of stuff i couldn’t make out>… uh, we party no harder, and no more than any other school…” Fantastic.

When I was young, I had a recurring dream theme that really used to freak me out: loose, missing, or in-the-process-of-falling-out teeth. Later versions of the dream usually entailed some measure of relief after the initial stomach-turning horror, as my dream-self discovered that upon losing a tooth another one was there growing in its place (despite it being an adult tooth, go figure). I’ll leave the dream analysis as an exercise for the reader, but I’m thinking now that maybe I was just having visions of the future…

According to a Reuter’s article, Japanese scientists have been successful at bioengineering a tooth and transplanting it into a mouse:

They used primitive cells, not quite as early as stem cells, and injected them into a framework of collagen, the material that holds the body together.

After growing them, they found their structures had matured into the components that make teeth, including dentin, enamel, dental pulp, blood vessels, and periodontal ligaments.

<snip>
The teeth grew and developed normally when transplanted into a mouse, said Takashi Tsuji of the Tokyo University of Science in Chiba, Japan and colleagues.

Nifty.

I’m pretty sure I was shown how to knit when I was young, but it never really took. A few years ago I decided to give it another go (after a particularly bad day of too many stupid mistakes with my quilting project), and looked online for some tips and techniques. I found an old video of the continental method, gave it a shot and really took to it… however, I started a knitting class at a local shop in which the instructor was not particularly enamoured with that method, so I switched.

I’ve got a couple projects on the needles at the moment, one of which involves a fair bit of switching between knit and purl stitches - something I recall finding exceedingly easier using the continental method. As luck would have it, today on whipup.net I saw a link to a great YouTube tutorial (see below) on how to tackle this method. Yay! I’ll be switching back shortly, which will hopefully speed up these projects so I can move on to others.

A week or so ago I finally got around to purchasing some of Jonathan Coulton’s music, something I’d meant to do way back when I first read the lyrics to Re: Your Brain (something about the sentiment ‘We’re not unreasonable, I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes‘ really speaks to me, ya know?).

We (Hubby-n-I) love this guy. The lyrics are great, and the music has us toe-tappin’ or hummin’ along (often I’ve woken up with a tune of his running thru my head). We both also appreciate his attitudes toward downloads, remixing, and sharing of his music, which make us that much happier to buy his stuff (and purchase swag from his cafepress shop). Check it out!

My favorite song of the bunch so far has to be Code Monkey, all the more amusing to us because of the WoW video set to the song, available via YouTube:

My one question to JoCo: when ya coming (back) to Maine, dude? (preferably central Maine )

(ok, yes, i’m backposting this cuz i forgot to publish it when i first started the post)

I’m terribly glad to know that I’m not the only one who experienced a “wtf??” head-scratching moment after the recent episode of Lost - the one ABC had promo’d as containing answers to three earlier questions from the series. Uh, which questions were those, exactly? Explanation of Jacks’ tats, which I’d completely forgotten he had? Pity I ended up with more questions at the end of the show and a rather substantial lack of satisfaction with the “answers” that were provided. Sigh. We were completely hooked on the show after the first season, and while I’m not yet ready to give up on it, Hubby & I are both finding it less and less compelling. C’mon, ABC, make with more details!

For those who missed the episode, or don’t really follow the show at all, some amusing and often snarky recaps can be found at Television Without Pity.

Hah. I subscribe to ASIST’s Info Architecture SIG mailing list, which tangentially relates to my current work and interests. A recent post from the prolific Ziya cracked me up and had me eye-rolling at my favorite-company-to-hate, Microsoft. Apparently MS (via e-crusade Marketing, according to whois data) is trying to find out why folks in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea are not as keen on the XBox 360 (and presumably what they want to see in a gaming box) … via a site called WhatsWrongWithU.com. Uh. Nice. I’m torn between being amused at the snark, and mildly insulted on behalf of folks who don’t like/want the 360. Ziya poses a good question or two:

Has anyone seen another example of a site purely dedicated to blaming (potential) customers for not buying a company’s product? Or is this pure, edgy, counter-culture Redmond genius at work again?

{update}
hahaha. and in a follow-up post in the same thread:

Counter-culture at Microsoft consists drinking a quad tall mochachino and unleashing your inner howler monkey at the afternoon staff meeting.
<snip>
More seriously - Microsoft’s advertising these days, like IBM’s before it, is to real marketing as Muzak is to Tom Waits, and there’s a fundamental reason why the edgiest marketing efforts of both companies wind up feeling so flat.

Last week I was in Ohio for a training class. As is often the case, the hours of waiting in the airport, hanging out in a new hotel, & driving around the local area lent themselves well to general observations and musings. A few from the week:

• Beltways are funny things. I stayed just outside Cincinnati’s I275, and if I were much more directionally challenged than I already am, driving around would have been significantly more interesting. The hotel was about a 35 minute drive on 275 Eastbound from the Northern Kentucky airport (which was nice - relatively little traffic the times I was going to-from the airport, with none of the stress I’ve had trying to get to/from Logan in the past!). It was also situated roughly at the 2:00 point of the beltway, which meant odd things: the Dunkin Donuts in the area was one exit back toward the airport; logic would dictate heading west, but from the hotel this was actually east. Getting back to the hotel from Dunkin Donuts was stranger still - I had to head northbound on the same highway. Aiyeee. And to think that when I first moved to Northern Virginia I did a little bit of head-scratching at the “inner loop” and “outer loop” designations.
• So, when I stay in hotels I’m generally happy to follow the management’s suggestions for conserving water by reusing my towels instead of receiving fresh ones every day. “Just hang your towels on the rack to reuse; leave them on the floor to get fresh ones.” That’s simple enough, and heck, I certainly don’t get fresh towels every day when I’m at home - it’s a “luxury” I don’t mind doing without. However, this was the second hotel I’ve visited in recent months where there seems to be a disconnect between management’s policy about towel use and the actual actions of the housekeeping staff, as despite my diligent efforts of hanging every towel & washcloth that were used, fresh ones appeared in their place each of the 4 days I was there. Weird.
• Flight Etiquette. I found myself wondering how irritating or depressing it is for flight attendants to go through their spiel at the start of each flight — even though so much is automated now — when at least half of the passengers are still talking, have their noses buried in books, or are already dozing (i.e., not paying attention, or even pretending). I suppose many (most?) travelers these days know the routine practically by heart, but I can’t help but think it’s gotta dig just a little to see the lack of courtesy so regularly.
• Not much is a more welcome surprise than waking up to 15 degree temps and ice cold leather in the rental car and discovering the ride has heated seats. Yay, warm tushee!