Friday, March 28, 2008

The Moon + Baseball = ?

Some maps are much, much better than others.

This, for instance, is a map of the Apollo 11 astronauts' moonwalks, superimposed on a baseball diamond.



Thursday, March 27, 2008

Happy Birthday to "Happy Birthday"

It's the birthday of the woman who co-wrote "Happy Birthday to You," Patty Smith Hill, born in Anchorage, Kentucky (1868).



Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Song Title of the Day

"Diamond Hoo Ha Man" by Supergrass

I'm actually sort of scared by the idea of a diamond hoo ha.


Tuesday, March 25, 2008

What's the Deal with Denton, Texas?

Why is it that I keep finding bands that I like from Denton, Texas? The place is only about 100,000 people, and it keeps producing good music.

First Midlake, and now The Marked Men.

I wonder if Bloomington-Normal will ever produce a band.

Probably not.

Monday, March 24, 2008

A Monument to Human Achievement...and Stupidity

Did you hear they're going to shut down one of the Mars rovers, Spirit? Do you want to know why?

Scientists plan to put one of the twin Mars rovers to sleep and limit the activities of the other robot to fulfill a NASA order to cut $4 million from the program's budget, mission team members said Monday.

The news comes amid belt-tightening at NASA headquarters, which is under pressure to cover cost overruns of a flagship Mars mission to land a Hummer-sized rover on the Red Planet next year.

It costs NASA about $20 million annually to keep the rovers running. The latest directive from NASA to cut $4 million means Spirit will be forced into hibernation in the coming weeks, said principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University.

Besides resting Spirit, scientists also likely will have to reduce exploration by Opportunity, which is probing a large crater near the equator. Instead of sending up commands to Opportunity every day to drive or explore a rock, its activities may be limited to every other day, said John Callas, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL.

"Any cut at any time when these rovers are healthy would be bad timing," Callas said. "These rovers are still viable capable vehicles in very good health."
So let's review. Over the weekend the Fed can find $30 billion to bail out the dumbasses at Bear Stearns, who are supposed to understand the difference between a good investment and a bad one, but apparently don't. Meanwhile the scientists who engineer a pair of robots, load them in a rocket, fire them into space, land them on the next planet over, and operate them for 4 years can't get a lousy $20 million to keep them running.

Unbelievable.


Friday, March 21, 2008

Fun With Phone Books

True or False: If you interweave the pages of two phone books, it is impossible to pull them apart.

Answer here



Song Title of the Day

"Bi-Polar Bear" by Wax Fang.


Thursday, March 20, 2008

Not News

Guys suck at picking up hints from women:

More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on, and a new study discovers why: Guys are clueless.

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more," said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

But the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys - they mistake females' sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

One common explanation for reports of men taking a friendly gesture as "she wants me," is based on men's inherent interest in sex. However, Farris and her colleagues didn't find this to be the case. Rather than seeing the world through sex-colored glasses, men seemed just to have blurry vision of sorts, overall. For instance, the college guys sometimes mistook sexual advances as pal-like gestures.
Yep, that was me. When I was single, I was absolutely the worst at this.

The. Worst.

I wonder if a guy could actually improve on this, or if they're just doomed?


Wednesday, March 19, 2008

I Might Want to See This Show

James McMurtry and Justin Earle (Steve's kid) are going to be playing in Bloomington May 16.



Take Me Out to the Ballgame - In Normal

Hey, this would be cool:

Multiple investor groups have expressed an interest in bringing an independent minor league baseball team to Normal, according to consultant Mike Thiessen. Thiessen is discussing with potential investors a stadium that would seat 3,500 to 4,500.

A Normal baseball team would likely play in either the Frontier League or the Northern League. Both Northern League commissioner Clark Griffith and Frontier League commissioner Bill Lee have expressed interest in having a Normal team join their league, possibly as early as 2009.
The Frontier League and Northern League are really low leagues - it's where you play if no major league team drafts you into its farm system. But baseball is baseball.

Apparently they're looking at building a stadium near Heartland Community College, which wants a decision by April 1. So we'll know something soon!

I Need to Read This Guy

I've never even heard of this guy, but I need to read him. From today's Writer's Almanac:

It is the birthday of Russian humorist, dramatist, and novelist Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809 in Sorochinsk, a town in what is now Ukraine.

Gogol wrote about his childhood in Ukraine, and some of his writings featured the devils, witches, and demons of Ukrainian folklore. These writings led to his book Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka -- a book that delighted the Russian literary world and made Gogol an overnight celebrity.

His novel Dead Souls (1842) was a satire and is considered to be Gogol's masterpiece. Gogol also wrote two famous stories, "The Nose (1836)," about a nose that disappears off the face of a collegiate assessor, is found by a barber, and then parades all around St. Petersburg, and "The Overcoat (1842)," about a man who acquires an overcoat and then dies of a broken heart when it is stolen. Gogol once wrote of his comic works, "The merriment observed in my early works corresponded to a certain spiritual need. I was subject to fits of melancholy which I could not even explain to myself and which may have originated in my poor health. To distract myself, I imagined every conceivable kind of funny story. I dreamed up droll characters and figures out of thin air and purposely placed them in the most comical circumstances."

The writer Dostoyevsky once famously remarked, "We have all come out from under Gogol's overcoat."
Russians are funny.

BTW, today is also the anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's debut album.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

The Lunatic Express

Here's a nice new blog, The Lunatic Express, logging the round-the-world exploits of writer Carl Hoffman, who explains the reason for his journey thusly:

We’re lucky. The world is on the move; people aren’t just in their villages anymore, and most of them are subject to horrendous travel. Buses that turn over and plunge from cliffs. Commuters literally crushed to death on the trains in Mumbai. Planes that might not leave at all, or worse – you’re 25 times more likely to die on an African airline than on an American one.

So I’m off to circumnavigate the globe, traveling as the rest of the world must – on the world’s slowest, most crowded, or most dangerous, buses, boats, planes and trains. I want stories, yes, but perspective, too. I want to see the world in a new light, a new way. I want to meet these people.
Hoffman's eventually going to write a book about his travels. And apparently he's not kidding about the hazards of his travels. Today he's in Colombia and writes:
Regarding bus safety, the government of Columbia was progressive: since 2004 it required bus companies to post safety statistics in every ticket window. At first the stats for my bus didn’t seem too bad – only 18 accidents, eight injuries and six deaths. But that was only for the first two months of 2008. And no one seemed to have died on other lines. Oh well, I bought a ticket and settled in.
A hundred years ago writers traveled around the world and then wrote books about it when they returned home. Now we get to follow along during the first-draft. Pretty cool.


Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Maybe the Most Bizarre Story I Have Ever Read

I am simply speechless about this:

Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years — so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police.

Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to her mid-thigh. She was "somewhat disoriented," and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman's skin had grown around the seat. "We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

The boyfriend told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

"And her reply would be, `Maybe tomorrow,'" Whipple said. "According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom."
I guess not.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Thanks for All the Fish

Douglas Adams would have been 56 today. It's still hard to believe he was gone so young. This is a quote of his that I hadn't read before today:

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
I can relate to that!


Thursday, March 06, 2008

Move Here Today!

Here's a place where Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged would feel right at home:

The mayor of the French village of Sarpourenx has passed an edict forbidding the 260 residents of his small hamlet from passing on within city limits.

Mayor Gerard Lalanne complains his town has run out of room at the local cemetery, so he's passed an ordinance that states "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish."

What happens if you do? The law promises to severely punish the offenders, which would literally have to be a fate worse than death.
Apparently the undertaker's lobby is very weak in Sarpournenx.


Myspace Sucks

I've got a myspace page which I don't visit very often. Lately, though, I've been trying to keep up with it a bit.

But almost every time I log on to myspace, I get an error message because the pages time out before they finish loading. These are not fat pages - I'm just trying to read comments, friends' blog entries, etc. And this is on a broadband connection.

Myspace sucks.



Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Politics

This is the kind of political writing I can relate to:

One of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare [is]: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.

Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries. Sometimes he is glimpsed with his elbow on the fireplace mantel of his remarkably well-appointed lair, clad in a smoking jacket. Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor. When he is pushed too far and must respond, he borrows a quip from Groucho Marx: "Of course, you realize this means war." And then, whether his foe is hapless hunter Elmer Fudd, varmint-shooting Yosemite Sam, or a raging bull, Bugs always prevails.

Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury. His response to bad news is a sibilant sneer ("Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!"). Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them. In one classic duel with Bugs, the two try to persuade Elmer Fudd to shoot the other—until Daffy, tricked by Bugs' wordplay, screams, "Shoot me now!"

In every modern presidential election in which the candidates have personified a clear choice between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Bugs has prevailed. Go back to 1960, the first campaign in which television was the clear dominant medium. John "Bugs" Kennedy was cool, restrained, ironic. Richard "Daffy" Nixon was brooding, suspicious, scowling. Look at 1980, when Ronald Reagan's sunny approach to the campaign and to the world stood in sharp contrast to President Jimmy Carter's talk of a crisis of the spirit. Or think about 2000, when George W. Bush suggested a candidate who could easily live with defeat, as opposed to Al Gore, who seemed wound far tighter.
Pretty true, that.

"What's up, Doc?" vs. "You're despicable!"



Is Mushroom Soup Soup?

So I'm enjoying my lunch today - a yummy bowl of cream of mushroom soup. And I'm wondering:

Does anybody else besides me actually eat cream of mushroom soup, as soup? Every other time I've seen it served, it has been and ingredient in a casserole.

Mom always used to serve it as soup, so it seems perfectly natural to me.

But maybe I'm the only one.