Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• There's lots more Neanderthal in us than we previously thought. My knobby Neanderthal head is poking me in my conical ribcage...
• Google just sold Motorola to Lenovo, but will be keeping the Motorola skunkworks.
• Saturation radio advertising in the early 70s has left their jingle stuck in the far corners of my head, but I never actually tasted Zapple cinnamon-apple wine. Weird wines fascinate me (I stop well short of baby mice wine, thanks) and that sounds better than some of the gimmick wines I've tried in my life.
• However, I did try Mateus and Lancers back in the day, both of which were handed out to all passengers on those noisy old Fokkers I used to ride between Chicago and Rochester MN when Carol was in grad school. Both still exist. I wonder if I have the will to buy one of each and see if those old golden memories were about the wine or the woman? (Three guesses. None of them count.)
• So is it "assortive" mating, or "assortative" mating? I see both spellings online, but having internalized "preventive" I'm loath to endorse"assortative."
• A heads-up on something I'm investigating when time allows: Running the Atlantis word processor on Windows 7 fails the first time, but launches the Windows 7 Game Explorer module gameux.dll, which for some reason causes rundll32.exe to use about 50% of my CPU cycles thereafter. This problem arises with games, but Atlantis is not a game. The machine does not have a network connection, which seems key. Still poking at it, but if you've seen this problem and fixed it, do let me know how. I'm starting to think that there's a game called "Atlantis" somewhere and that Game Explorer is looking for a network connection to "do something." If there's a way to carve Game Explorer out of Win7 without breaking anything else, that would be not only useful, but damned useful.
• People in Colorado are already skinnier than people in other states. They may be about to become skinnier yet.
• Another revelation from the Ministry of the Painfully Obvious: Political discussions damage Facebook relationships. Since a huge fraction of Facebook posts seem to be hatehurling anyway, this should surprise no one.
• Perhaps a new way to look at the dichotomy: Weather is anecdotes. Climate is data.