All I do anymore is Random
If Rock Band ever gets the rights to "Cult of Personality" I will die happy playing it. My arms will probably fly off and I'll bleed to death, my face in a tortured rictus of exhausted glee.
We've had an Eskimo's thesaurus of snow types in the past couple weeks. I was out in it an hour ago with Charlie, and it looked like in a cartoon when the animated characters walk around the background and they don't affect it (you know, leave footprints or anything). Charlie was running at a full clip on what looked like snow but was a kind of foamy solid water that he didn't break through. My tubby footsteps clomped right through it.
When I go see Doctor Teenager next week I'm looking forward to blowing her mind with my newly discovered (well, my dad explained it all better) medical history. Heart disease in most of the men, including Dad's first one in his 40s and his second one which almost stopped it for good. My Grampa's mystery cancer (the taciturn old New Englander had cancer somewhere that you don't talk about--colon? rectum? testicles? penis? what?! I inherited your genes dammit!) and then I find out that at least two female ancestors had probable Alzheimer's--Dad's grandmother and her mother both died in the crazyhouse. Mom started showing signs of it right about the time of dad's first heart attack. I'll be lucky if the doctor lets me leave the hospital.
Got a call from the programs director at Drumlin today asking if I'll teach spring and summer mushroom classes! Sure, why not? I'll find some somewhere, right? Maybe we'll be lucky and it'll be a good morel May. Nice to be appreciated as a naturalist by someone still. Sometimes I feel like I'm just a floor cleaner and I'm not even a particularly GOOD one.
My Facebook friends page is rapidly filling up with everyone I ever met at College. I'm puzzling over some of them, I admit. I only kept in touch with about half a dozen classmates, and five of them are on livejournal anyway. I made more friends at the crappy jobs I worked at during my college years than I did at the school itself. I friended some of those people too.
Apparently (meaning, I heard all this on NPR) Slate.com has a questions feature, like The Straight Dope, and once a year they gather all the unanswered questions and readers vote to choose the one they want answered. The number one pick this year was one that was already answered on The Straight Dope. 25 years ago. It was "Why do cockroaches die on their back?" I've had the opportunity to examine my weight in dead cockroaches, and I have to say, they don't always. But they usually do. You see, dead cockroaches are prickly and pointy and uneven on one side, and smooth and even on the other. Also, most of the dead cockroaches people see have either died of blunt trauma or nerve toxins, both of which mean that the body was in some motion just before being dead, increasing the chance that they'll end up on the smooth and even side. If you whisk a living cockroach off a wall it lands on it's back a fair amount of the time, sometimes even turtling for a little while. Anyway, they didn't answer that question because it had been answered before.
So they answered a really stupid one: "Which dog breed is the most loyal?" Even the reporter interviewing the Slate guy came just short of calling it a stupid question. She did explain why it is stupid, and that was essentially the answer to the question, too: "Loyalty" is a subjective construct of many complex behaviors, most of which are not inborn. How would you measure such a thing scientifically? No, I'm sorry, there are no stupid questions, but that one definitely says more about the questioner than anything else.
Plus pit bulls are the most loyal.
We've had an Eskimo's thesaurus of snow types in the past couple weeks. I was out in it an hour ago with Charlie, and it looked like in a cartoon when the animated characters walk around the background and they don't affect it (you know, leave footprints or anything). Charlie was running at a full clip on what looked like snow but was a kind of foamy solid water that he didn't break through. My tubby footsteps clomped right through it.
When I go see Doctor Teenager next week I'm looking forward to blowing her mind with my newly discovered (well, my dad explained it all better) medical history. Heart disease in most of the men, including Dad's first one in his 40s and his second one which almost stopped it for good. My Grampa's mystery cancer (the taciturn old New Englander had cancer somewhere that you don't talk about--colon? rectum? testicles? penis? what?! I inherited your genes dammit!) and then I find out that at least two female ancestors had probable Alzheimer's--Dad's grandmother and her mother both died in the crazyhouse. Mom started showing signs of it right about the time of dad's first heart attack. I'll be lucky if the doctor lets me leave the hospital.
Got a call from the programs director at Drumlin today asking if I'll teach spring and summer mushroom classes! Sure, why not? I'll find some somewhere, right? Maybe we'll be lucky and it'll be a good morel May. Nice to be appreciated as a naturalist by someone still. Sometimes I feel like I'm just a floor cleaner and I'm not even a particularly GOOD one.
My Facebook friends page is rapidly filling up with everyone I ever met at College. I'm puzzling over some of them, I admit. I only kept in touch with about half a dozen classmates, and five of them are on livejournal anyway. I made more friends at the crappy jobs I worked at during my college years than I did at the school itself. I friended some of those people too.
Apparently (meaning, I heard all this on NPR) Slate.com has a questions feature, like The Straight Dope, and once a year they gather all the unanswered questions and readers vote to choose the one they want answered. The number one pick this year was one that was already answered on The Straight Dope. 25 years ago. It was "Why do cockroaches die on their back?" I've had the opportunity to examine my weight in dead cockroaches, and I have to say, they don't always. But they usually do. You see, dead cockroaches are prickly and pointy and uneven on one side, and smooth and even on the other. Also, most of the dead cockroaches people see have either died of blunt trauma or nerve toxins, both of which mean that the body was in some motion just before being dead, increasing the chance that they'll end up on the smooth and even side. If you whisk a living cockroach off a wall it lands on it's back a fair amount of the time, sometimes even turtling for a little while. Anyway, they didn't answer that question because it had been answered before.
So they answered a really stupid one: "Which dog breed is the most loyal?" Even the reporter interviewing the Slate guy came just short of calling it a stupid question. She did explain why it is stupid, and that was essentially the answer to the question, too: "Loyalty" is a subjective construct of many complex behaviors, most of which are not inborn. How would you measure such a thing scientifically? No, I'm sorry, there are no stupid questions, but that one definitely says more about the questioner than anything else.
Plus pit bulls are the most loyal.