Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Was scanning my RSS feeds today and saw a post about how the lion population in Kenya is making a comeback:

Less than a year ago, [Laurence] Frank [wildlife biologist at UC Berkeley] reported that Maasai warriors appeared poised to obliterate southern Kenya’s lion population.

The big cats are speared as part of a manhood ritual and poisoned to prevent livestock predation, he explained.

In 2006 a total of 32 lions in the region were killed.

But a compensation program, combined with a newfound passion for conservation, has allowed the lion population on one communally owned ranch to increase from 15 to 25, or about 67 percent, in the midst of the surrounding slaughter.

It’s an interesting article, but I can’t help myself - every time I hear “lions” and “Kenya” in the same sentence, I think of this (and then can’t stop humming the damned tune all day long):

(Original version, in neverending loop, here)

When I converted my old and nearly-abandoned MT site to WP at the beginning of the year, I discovered several draft posts that were years old and had never made it to the “published” state. Here’s one from September of ‘02 describing a scene at my previous job. I have no real recollection of this event, but can pretty much guess at the players involved. Cracks me up.

I work with a bunch of engineers. Today I was in a meeting with a number of high-level managers and mucky-mucks in our company, which can sometimes be daunting (all that brain-power in one room!) if one doesn’t know them very well. I’ve been here long enough to have interacted with a number of them frequently, so I’m no longer as intimidated or “in awe” as I was when I first started working for this company. They’re really a great bunch of people, and today two of them gave prime examples of how Mucky-mucks Are People, Too:

Gotta love it when you look up near the end of the meeting and catch one of the upper-level managers making a paper airplane from the meeting handout.

We were having a discussion on our corporate email filters and how well they work (or don’t) at keeping out spam. One manager mentioned that he didn’t think there were many filters in place these days, as he’s been getting tons of porn spam in the last couple of weeks. One of the company Fellows, with a mock look of disappointment, interrupted: “Huh. I didn’t!!”

Happy Pi Day, y’all.

And if you were curious how to celebrate on this Day of Pi (3.14), there’s a site to tell you all about it. My personal favorite:

Convert things into pi. This step is absolutely necessary for two reasons: To utterly confuse people who have no idea what you are talking about (thus opening the door for enlightenment) and to have fun seeing how many things can be referenced with pi. Consider two approaches:

• Convert naturally circular things into radians like the hours on the clock. Instead of it being 3 o’clock, now it’s 2*pi o’clock. Or, instead of it being 3 o’clock, convert the inclination of the sun into radians and describe that as the time.
• Simply use 3.14 as a unit of measure. Instead of being 31 years old, you are 9pi years old (approaching your 10th birthday). With this same approach, you can find out your next pi birthday (don’t forget to celebrate it when it comes!).

“Dude, it’s so on!”