Hyperbole and a Half: Wild Animal (The Simple Dog Goes for a Joy Ride)
No one expects their dog to instantaneously develop an extremely specific fear of horse statues, and I was unprepared for her reaction, which was to sprint powerfully in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, what the simple dog lacks in cognitive capacity, she makes up in ground speed, and her sudden fleeing yanked the leash from my hand.
The room is also decked out with a rope bridge that connects the pirate ship to the top of a jail cell, and a rope suspended from the ship’s hull provides drop-in access to the closet. There’s also a completely hidden spiral slide, that lets you travel downstairs in a more adventurous way.
OK, so it puts a bookcase door to shame, but it’s professionally designed and built and probably cost beaucoup bucks.
Got this from the hotel at which I recently stayed:
By completing this survey, you may be contacted by the hotel to help improve the quality of service provided. We sincerely thank you for sharing your opinions as we continue to do our best to make each stay enjoyable.
So, so you send me spam and if I help you out, my reward is that you’re going to bug me more? Could be worse, though. They could be telling me it’ll take 5 freaking business days to remove me from their email list.
Stanford’s once elegant, $500,000 sculpted clock/fountain sits glumly in storage
I guess I’m not the only one running into trouble with a fountain clock (and I have more on that, later).
The clock sculpture is made of a black granite turntable on an asymmetrical base that revolved once a year and was in constant motion 24 hours a day. To support it, and create a perfectly level surface for the heavy slab, Stanford sank five concrete columns deep into the earth.
Powered by electricity, it ran on a mechanical system with custom gears that were submerged in running water, according to Susan Roberts-Manganelli, manager of collections for Stanford’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts.
I tried going to the rally today, but didn’t make it.
Going into DC always carries with it the question of “where do I park?” and the one definite answer to this is “Work.” Owing to that reason, easy access to the metrorail system (“The Metro”) was never really a consideration for choosing a place to live, but it also means the occasions I need to use it, it’s a time-consuming chore. So I decided that driving in to work and catching the metro in DC was a better option than doing so from home. I hiked over to the Woodley Park station (and since most of you have never been there, let me tell you it’s like you’re descending into the bunker at SAC-NORAD or something. The station is 150 feet below the surface, and the second escalator is 200 frikkin’ feet long.) I bought my ticket and went down to the platform, and then was confronted with this:
All of the cars on all of the trains were packed. I was in the station for a half an hour and it was like this the whole time — one or two skinny people were able to insinuate their way into the cars, but that was it. I held out an irrational hope that the next train would be better, but of course it never was. I finally realized that there was no way of getting to the rally on time or even fashionably late. I had no plan B. (I could have initially chosen to hike to the DuPont Circle station to catch the metro, which wouldn’t have improved my chances of riding, but then I might have been tempted to just walk) Since at this point my net investment in going was only a few hours of my time, and I was not meeting anyone there, I just said fuckit and hiked back to my car and drove home. I went via Rock Creek Park on the way back, which was a nice way to go, and caught the last part of the rally on TV.
A map two-fer: The true size of Africa.
Flickr: Race and ethnicity maps
Red is White, Blue is Black, Green is Asian, Orange is Hispanic, Gray is Other, and each dot is 25 people. Data from Census 2000.
I would have gone with white is white and black is black, and put it all on a teal background, but the Avatar aliens would have been excluded…
And the US and European calendar protocols agree.
Finally signed up for “The Twitter.” When I first learned of it, I thought it would just be a compendium of noise, since the threshold to tweet is so low. And this is precisely why I don’t do Facebook very much — I am just not all that interested in the level of minutia of my friend’s lives, and I shudder to think they are that interested in mine (or feel that they’re missing out because I don’t post such trivialities very often). But today I found out that Steve Martin is tweeting, so I signed up to follow that.
I don’t want it to be a collection of “Boy, I could use more fiber in my diet” or “De-linting my belly button!” tweets. On the other hand, I do have these random thoughts, which I occasionally blog. That’s the kind of stupid stuff I’ll probably tweet. Probably.
I understand it’s protocol to follow those who follow you, but … no. I’m not going to return the favor in order to be a statistic, or even to be polite. I am a physicist, and have no social skills. Follow only if you have some slight possible interest in the content.
Two years ago I toyed with the idea of driving down to the ScienceOnline conference, and in thinking about it, doing a t-shirt depicting the Borg and a semi-recognizeable caricature of the scienceblogs logo, which would have read “Assimilated” or “Not Assimilated,” depending on your affiliation or lack thereof. Alas, I forgot about the opening of registration and by the time I remembered, I was only able to be on standby and never got a chance to go. So I never drew it up.
Now, I think, there could (also) be a t-shirt that reads “I drank the Pepsi” or “I never drank the Pepsi.”
