Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• I'm a day late and a shamrock short, but I want to endorse an obscure but wonderful animated film with connections to St. Patrick's Day: The Secret of Kells . It's a fantasy about the creation of the Book of Kells, drawn in the style of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.
• Granted that I'd prefer to achieve immortality by not dying, the notion of writing your memoirs for the sake of documentation rather than publication is catching on. I have 67,000 words so far. It's good practice in writing, and may prove useful against the future possibility that I myself can't remember what I did in high school.
• Earth is passing through a significant CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) and the aurora have been excursing as far south as Colorado. I had bad weather last night but I'll check again tonight.
• Chicago's quirky habit of dying the Chicago River green on St. Patrick's Day has its roots in detecting illegal sewage dumps into the river. Having grown up at a time when falling into the Chicago River was sometimes fatal, I boggled during a recent visit, when I looked down into the river and saw bottom.
• Our new pope has only one lung. This is less important than it would seem to the uninformed.
• Irrespective of the number of his lungs, is Pope Francis I more liberal than his predecessors? The question is tricky because "liberal" often means completely opposite things to North Americans as it does to Latin Americans.
• A 12-year-old girl is selling kits of Lego bricks that can be assembled into a case for Raspberry Pi computer boards. If ever the phrase "You go, girl!" applies, it would be here. I'd actually like to see a custom case with properly sized gaps and mounting holes for the Pi inside and Lego bumps on the outside, and I suspect at some point the product will appear.
• It's possible to have too much gold...if you're a Cray.
• While Carol was raking up the season's dead leaves, pine needles, and other plant debris from our front "yard" (we have no grass, only gardens) the other day, she found one of these lodged in one of our bushes. It had evidently been there for some time, but within its air-tight case was pratically mint. Still not entirely sure what it can do...nor what to do with it.