Archive for: April, 2009

It’s Full of Food Analogies!

Apr 30 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

There have been some neat news articles about space lately. From The Gaurdian, we get news that astrobiologists have found molecules in deep space that suggest that The Milky Way smells like rum and tastes like raspberries. I know we didn’t need another reason to like us, but that is totally cool. The Milky Way gets a huge high five:

In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

“It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries,” Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian.

We are well on our way to space raspberries. After we achieve those, I am going to hope for space grapefruits!

Less with biology and more with physics, different astronomers have recently published a paper on what it would be like to fall into a black hole. Dig this:

“The gravity at your feet is stronger than the gravity at your head, as long as you fall in feet first. … You feel this difference in gravity between your feet and your head as a tidal force, which pulls you apart vertically in a process called ‘spaghettification,’ ” Hamilton writes”….

SPAGHETTIFICATION! I mean, it sounds just awful as a process; as a word, I can’t stop saying it.

They also answer the question we are too scared to even ask: What if like, our sun turned into a black hole:

“All the planets would keep going around just the same. … Nothing would change except there wouldn’t be any light and heat,” McClintock said.

Oh, okay. Just no light or heat, but otherwise business as usual. Maybe we could all go space raspberry picking.

5 responses so far

You Were Holding It Upside Down, Weren’t You?

Apr 29 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery

You know, with all that makeup and stuff, I actually thought you were smart for a second.

2 responses so far

Are You Ready to Wrock?!

Apr 28 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Today is Wizard Rock Awareness Day! Or Wrock Awareness. Or just #wrockaware if you need to save characters on Twitter.

So let’s be aware of wrock! Let’s give each other the sekrit hard rock hand signal over songs about the Harry Potter universe! Wrock is the first new music I’ve been interested in a really long time. And the more I learn, the more I realize I’ve only heard a very small bit. I wish I had tons of pocket money, so I could buy all the albums I wanted.

Here are two of my favorite bands. First, Gred and Forge, singing “My Ear’s Not Here.” He just released his second album, “PitchesWitchesRiches.” This song is from their first album, “Half the Band I Used to Be.” I think my favorite line is “That evil git, my ear’s not here.”

And then, the first wrock song I ever played over and over and over because I love it, Voldemort is Awesome by Draco and the Malfoys:

“And I! Know you! Will totally unmercifully! Destroy! All non! Believers!” Yeah!

Wrock on, y’all!

7 responses so far

Game Characters Can Be Directed to Eat Hot Pockets

Apr 27 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Gaming

I can’t wait to roll a character in World of World of Warcraft.

Imagine the set bonuses for completing the Stay Up All Night and Drink a Whole Case of Diet Coke quests!

2 responses so far

Free for All Friday 19

Apr 24 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Free for all Friday

Friday! Friday! Friday! You’ll pay for the whole blog…. Actually, you won’t. Feel free to use any or all of your seat, the seats around you, get whatever you like out of the fridge. It’s cool.

  • Let’s start it off with a bit of retro pastiche. Put yourself in the spirit of a social hygiene film from 1959:

    JOHNNY

    Get hip to the glissando, kitten! Feast you baby blues on the Constitutionalist Manifesto. Dig this… I got the right to say what I want, pray how I want, assemble with anybody I want, nice and peaceable-like. It’s all right there in Amendment numero uno!

    BOBBY

    Whoa, hold on there. Ms. Anderson says that kinda stuff is only for the Guantanamo prisoners!

    JOHNNY

    Just read it, Daddy-o. It’ll flip your lid and make you blast off to crazyville!

    Iowahawk really is the funniest man on the internet. Jim Treacher is a close second, but still second. Sexy, sexy second.

  • Also really freaking funny, Mike at Unremitting Failure, talking about cheese:

    Let’s talk for a moment about cheese. Everybody has a favorite cheese with the exception of people who don’t like cheese, who are assholes. Our favorite kind of cheese is cheddar. It’s the Led Zeppelin of cheeses, with a big barbaric flavor that’ll trample your taste buds underfoot.

    What is your favorite cheese and which band does it represent? My favorite cheese is rich, bitter Maytag Bleu. I have no idea what that band would be. Muse? Help me out.

  • Then, funny, but sad, but funny, but sad: Vincent Connare is not a bad person. He just inflicted a terrible font on the world.

    He cringes at the most improbable manifestations of his Frankenstein’s monster font and rarely uses it himself, but he says he tries to be polite when he meets people excited to be in the presence of the creator. Googling himself, he once found a Black Sabbath band fan site that used Comic Sans. The site’s creators even credited him. “You can’t regulate bad taste,” he says.

  • After that, funny scary: You might be Canadian and not even know it. Or you may think you’re Canadian and actually you’re Mexican. Or something, here:

    Then there are the Canadian Mennonites who moved to Mexico in the 1920s to the 1960s. When their children and grandchildren returned to Canada, many found their nationality unclear.

    Some such cases languished in litigation for years. Others surfaced in 2007, when new U.S. rules requiring passports for travel between Canada and the U.S. uncovered significant numbers of people who thought they were Canadian, but weren’t.

    If it does turn out that you are Canadian (by nature, inclination, or force!) I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe start by making a recording of yourself actually pronouncing the letter [o]. It’s probably not going to keep you warm at night, but it should only take you five or ten years to acclimate to the frigid temperatures.

  • Funny to curmudgeonly bitches like me, Maggie’s Farm quotes Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Total Effect and the Eighth Grade” on how kids may have opinions, but said opinions shouldn’t really count:

    In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail. …. The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

    And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

  • Also of specific interest to me, Alan Tudyk stars in . Look at that steely gaze. And that square jaw. And that neckerchief. And that, ahem, pelvis.
  • Fat is not a four letter word:

    Humans have been eating animal fat a lot longer than they have been abstaining from it. Fat is an important part of our diet, essential to our health. Our brain, hormones, immune system and bones all need fat to function. Good animal fat helps maintain our health and prevent disease. Fat aids the digestion of protein, making it good sense to eat a well-marbled steak, or a roast chicken with crispy skin. The external and internal fat in meat adds flavor and bastes the meat as it cooks keeping it succulent. Many aromas and flavors are only soluble in fat, so without fat, they are not released.

    Then there’s a recipe for “Salted Butter Tart” which is a giant butter cookie full of caramel and it gives me impure thoughts.

You know what’s full of fat? BACON. Which we don’t have much of this week, because I shot my swine belly wad last week. But just so we don’t get the blind staggers, check it out:

  1. The French Bacon Sandwich. Ooh la la!
  2. Rumaki, or Bacon Makes Fancy Things Fancier! Also, kinda piratey!

And don’t forget to tell your friends, family, and frenemies to Show Me Your Chucks!

8 responses so far

Show Me Your Shoes

Apr 23 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Decontextualized

You all are swell. You are very, very cool. Your kicks are boss. So I am going to make a web page about how awesome you are: The Cavalcade of Chucks!

Email a picture of your Chucks, your Converse All-Stars. It can be a photo of you wearing them, or not, or really whatever artistic thing you might come up with. Saucy and/or raunchy photos will be accepted and enjoyed, but probably not published. You should also let me know what you’d like to be called and where, if any place, you’d like me to link things.

Please do your best to get me a photo by Friday, May 1, 2009. Photos will be accepted after that time, but points will be docked. Also, should the spirit move you, please tell your friends. And have them tell their friends. Tell everybody. New friends are nice!

3 responses so far

Hey! Look Over There!

Apr 23 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Reflexive

I’m having one of those days or possibly one of those weeks where my whole life feels like a run on sentence that has to get said right now or else everything will be ruined forever but I might not have enough air to get it all out so I just get louder and hoarser and start flapping my hands around as if that will make you hang on my every word but the thoughts aren’t in any way complete and so they switch again and like any reasonable person you tune out in favor of boobs and silly jokes.

For that, I salute you.

One response so far

Heel Strikers, Over-Pronators, and Supinators, Oh My!

Apr 22 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

Yesterday Doc sent me an interesting article on running shoes: The painful truth about trainers: Are running shoes a waste of money? I get a lot of questions about shoes. People say, “I want to start running. What sort of shoes should I get?” I am curious about this, even though I figure I probably asked Chez the same question a year ago. The shoe you should get is the one that fits best. Or so you’d think. Maybe not.

The article starts with this inconvenient statistic:

Every year, anywhere from 65 to 80 per cent of all runners suffer an injury. No matter who you are, no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, fast or slow, pudgy or taut as a racehorse, your feet are still in the danger zone.

And the answer is, apparently, super high tech shoes. One of the experts quoted in the article is Dr Daniel Lieberman, a biological anthropologist, who says:

‘Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet and had a much lower incidence of knee injuries.’

Evidently there’s no actual data on how any shoe, made by Nike, New Balance, Adidas, any major brand you can think of, actually helps prevent injury, or increase your speed or distance.

At first, I had a hard time imagining running in anything but a space-age, super-engineered marvel of marketing. I run in the city and I can just imagine all the cuts and puncture wounds that would result. Then I remembered seeing a guy a few weeks ago running around Southside in what were basically neoprene socks with articulated toes. Dude seemed to be perfectly fine. There was no visible blood, at least.

The anecdotes at the end of the article really stun me. Like the Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise study that found that the more money you paid for a shoe, the more likely you were to get injured. Or the guy who runs wearing old, busted shoes on the wrong feet and still makes great time and distance. And finally one of the commenters who runs distance in Converse All-Stars, which were high tech 60 years ago.

I have three pairs of All-Stars, two pair of Asics, one pair of Sauconys, and an aching tendon in my knee. Really makes me wonder how well I could do over five miles in my pink chucks.

21 responses so far

“Done”

Apr 21 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Rhetorical and Literary Devices

I had one of those uncomfortable epiphanies this weekend. I was driving along, and I don’t even remember how the thought coalesced, but I realized that I might use phraseology that makes people want to stab. Would make me want to stab, kinda. And over the word “do.”

I use the phrase “do about” all the time. To me it means “take care of” or “complete” or is just an all-purpose phrase for any given set of tasks that need to achieved. It reminds me of the French verb faire, “to make and/or do.” You just use it and your listener gets it contextually. It seems very efficient.

But then I started thinking about how much I hate it when people say, “do what?” instead of “excuse me” or “I beg your pardon” or “come again” or just “I didn’t hear you; please repeat.” “Do what?” is not for repetition. “Do what” is for asking “What do you want me to do?”

Which makes me think of saying, “I need you to do about the _____.” And how the reply could be, “Do what?” And I wouldn’t know if the respondent was asking me to repeat myself or asking me specifically what needed to be done. Either way, my super-efficient verb shorthand goes right out to the window and I commence cringing.

What do you think? Do you do about? Do you ask do what? Are they the same thing? Or am I justified in thinking that while one is efficient, the other is just plain lazy.

14 responses so far

Wrackspurts Have Got Me

Apr 20 2009 Published by Sarah, etc. under Fandom

Do you all want to talk about all the cool parts of the new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince trailer? I do! Here it is:

Wow! Right? WOW!!! There are so many awesome things going on there. Doc and I were chatting about it last night. He digs the cave stuff. I really love the clips of Katie Bell being cursed, especially the way it looks like her hair has come to life and may help kill her. I also like the shot of Draco pulling the drapery off the Vanishing Cabinet. And I think of Honu Girl every time I watch it, because the Death Eaters strafe Trafalgar Square. I like the superfast montage of ickle Tom Riddle becoming Voldemort.

And then, we finally get some Severus Snape. How beautiful is he? How rich is that voice? I still don’t trust Steve Kloves, but he was right when he said that Rickman acts out even the commas, and “It’s over” really comes across like the bitter end, don’t you think? At least, I hope that’s from “The Lightning Struck Tower” and not some other thing Kloves (untrustworthy!) jammed in there after he expunged the story of Merope Gaunt. Where was I? SEVERUS! I like hearing Harry scream, “Fight back you coward!” and then watching Snape dash away the curse like it’s no big deal. I need to watch it yet more closely though, to get a sense of facial expression. If he’s just looking sad and haunted, I may have kill some folk. Kloves, maybe, to start with. Snape is supposed to be insane with rage, there. Right?

What is your favorite part? What are you thinking? You want to get in on my anti-Kloves plan? Okay! And here’s a picture of beautiful, beautiful Severus:

Poor, sad HBP!

I look at that and daydream and then, pruriently wonder if he’s uncomfortable. How much slap do they have to put on him to get him looking that sallow? A bunch, right? You can only see the shadow of his beard around his mouth. His gorgeous, gorgeous mouth, which makes love to all the commas. Back to daydreaming.

5 responses so far

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