Ducklings, have you been pining away for your chance to meet Uncle Vinny? Well today’s your lucky day, as the mighty (but virtual!) CHS juggernaut is rolling into the physical realm at El Tajin on Broadway, 5pm, and I’ll be tagging along. I’m planning to bring a few books for swappage, even though that’s not on the Imperial Agenda.

Hope to see ya there!

Evidently Dana Carvey had a short-lived comedy show back in the day… who knew? Anyway, Metafilter pointed me to a few clips I wanted to share. This one is amazing:

And this one is pretty funny, especially if you’re immature like me and you love Stephen Colbert:

“Waiters who are nauseated by food…” That’s comedy genius!

Hello ducklings! Check out this screenshot of me wtfbbqpwning the competition in typeracing:

Typeracer screenshot

People race to type the paragraph (usually a long quote from a movie) faster than everyone else. Mistakes are not prevented — the area where you type turns red when you’ve screwed up, but your words per minute (WPM) is calculated up to where you started making the mistake.

It’s a neat little app, you should give it a try if you like typing. It’s fun to watch your little car zoom across the screen. My scores range between 70 and 90 WPM, good enough that I usually do pretty well against other racers, but not enough to get on the High Scores board. 140 WPM, yikes…!

…so I think I’m going to get a tattoo.

It’s going to be in Comic Sans.

It will be on my ass.

And it will say “BEST IF USED BY OCT 24 2008″.

Because that’s when I’ll turn 39.

39, people! Hot squirrel on a stick, that’s old!

I’m thinking multi-colored Comic Sans. That’ll be dreamy! Too bad my ass doesn’t allow blinking HTML.

First, go read this webcomic, which made me laugh a lot. I wrote to the author, figuring I was the 800th person to write in and suggest that he could have titled the strip LOL-Kets. Evidently I’m the first person to think of that, so go figure!

Which leads me to this wikipedia article on bra-ket notation. You see, Paul Dirac came up with bras and kets back in the 1920s as a shorthand way of writing down a wavefunction (for example) and its conjugate transposition. Like so:

< B |     this is a “bra”

| B >     this is a “ket”

Together they make < B | B >, a “bra-ket”, which Dirac invented by slicing the word “bracket” into two parts. I bring all this up for three reasons:

1. Plenty of grad students made jokes about the “bra” part of bra-ket notation, for obvious reasons, but this is the first time I found an excuse to make a “ket” joke. Naturally, I’m delighted.
2. It gives me a chance to complain that there is no “bra-kets in popular culture” section of the Wiki article, and…
3. I just want to point out that #2 is partially explained by the fact that Paul Dirac was a startlingly humorless character (see Paul Dirac — Personality for fun facts!), who assuredly had no interest in fomenting nomenclatural mirth.

So, boooo to humorless physicists, and yaaaaay to Abstruse Goose! You should go read them all, especially if you wish xkcd was even geekier.

Hey! Trivia was fun last week. I wrote my questions at the last minute, but I ended up really liking a lot of these questions; so even though only a few teams showed up to play, it was still a fun night. Most of the answers are Google-able, so I’ll just post the questions below. If you’re reallllly wondering about an answer, post in the comments and I’ll help ya out!

By the way, Round 4 was a “picture round”, where they had to name some movies and stuff.  For that, I mostly took screenshots from the awesome Name-That-Film Flickr group.

Remember: Trivia is always the 2nd Tuesday of the month at the Hopvine! It’s fun!

Click below to read the questions…

Round 1

• Which of these bands didn’t play at the first Lollapalooza? Jane’s Addiction, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Nine Inch Nails, Butthole Surfers, Motorhead, Violent Femmes
• Give an example of a “spoonerism”
• Name the two prime numbers that are below and above 67
• Which president was the “Democratic donkey” first used to represent, or which cartoonist popularized the association?
• Who was it that “did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels”?
• Name the 2002 dark comedy and box-office bomb starring Edward Norton, Robin Williams and Jon Stewart.
• What’s the title of the Harry Potter book with the highest page count?
• In 1965, William Shatner starred in Incubus, a horror film where all the dialog was spoken in what unusual language?
• John Coltrane’s Giant Steps  was released, the Olympics were held in Rome, and Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane was shot down over Russia… what year was it?
• Which movie has the final lines “Take care, you two. May the Force be with you.”

Round 2

• Name 2 of the 4 US states that are also commonwealths
• The peace symbol was based on semaphores for which two letters?
• Plunge, Cataract, Punchbowl and Cascade are different types of…?
• What’s the formula for deciding which day is Easter?
• In what year was the first Super Bowl, the Summer of Love, and the birth of the Seattle SuperSonics?
• Name the seven dwarves from Snow White
• What was the name of the Democratic VP nominee who was kicked off the ticket when it was discovered that he’d had shock therapy?
• If you take the seven highest peaks of the seven continents, which continent has shortest tallest mountain?
• In which movie did air from a subway grating blow Marilyn Monroe’s dress around?
• In what 1999 movie did Alanis Morissette play God?

Round 3

• The first Unabomber explosion, the acceptance of blacks into the Mormon Church, Pope John Paul II becomes the first Polish Pope, and The Police release their first album. What year?
• In the Pixar movie WALL-E, what 1969 musical does WALL-E watch over and over again?
• Which 1916 novel has the final line: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”
• Which spelling of ‘bated’ is correct: “He is waiting for the lottery results with bated breath”. Baited or bated?
• Which of the following did Mel Blanc NOT provide the voice for?
• The Kingdome got demolished, Charles Schultz stopped drawing Peanuts, and Elian Gonzalez returned to Cuba
• Which is the seventh planet from the sun?
• Since 1960, which two sitting Presidents did not debate their main opponents?
• What days are the summer and winter solstice this year?
• The tallest year-round waterfall in the US is Yosemite Falls. The next-tallest is in Oregon… what’s its name?

Round 5

• Name the two NASA Mars landers that were launched in 2003 and are still operating on the surface.
• In what book were there Seven Commandments, including “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy” and “All animals are equal”?
• Batman’s secret identity is Bruce Wayne, and Robin’s secret identity was ….
• Which gunfighter met his maker in an early episode of the TV show Deadwood?
• Which city does Ferris Bueller’s Day Off take place in?
• Correctly name 5 of these 7 wedding anniversary gifts: 1st, 5th, 10th, 20th, 25th, 50th, 75th (two points for getting them all!)
• How many times has Elizabeth Taylor been married?
• In which movie does Robert Mitchum have the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles?
• Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, the first James Bond film premiered, and the Beatles released their first single… what year was it?
• There are four people who have won two Nobel Prizes. Name one of them. (Name two for two points!)

Round 6

• What particle do scientists hope to discover when the Large Hadron Collider starts operating later this summer?
• Depending on which biologist you ask, there are either 5 or 6 biological kingdoms: name 4 of them
• Which of the following chemicals is used by ants for defense: formic acid, acetic acid, ethylene glycol or glycine?
• Name as many of the 7 actors who were “The Magnificent Seven” as you can. The team with the highest score gets the point, and incorrect names count against correct names…
• Which Democratic presidential candidate did Arthur Bremer shoot?
• What’s the origin of the phrase “Beyond the pale”?
• Which animated movie has the line: “More people will come if they think we have punch and pie.”
• Name the Dr. Seuss book that has these lines: “You can make a quick trick chick stack. You can make a quick trick clock stack.”
• Which 1925 novel has the final line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
• Sun Yat-Sen became the first president of the Republic of China, Roald Amudsen reached the South Pole and a fire killed 145 in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in NYC. What year was it?

Hello ducklings!

I’m finally getting around to pointing you to my favorite photos from last year’s trip to Italy. I took a lot of photos on the trip, uploaded maybe 100 of them to Flickr, and the link above is to the 22 that are the most worth checking out. Hit the whole collection if you have more time.

In retrospect, it was a great trip, but I was a little cranky when I came home. I was there for 3 weeks, and it was hot all the time… I’m a PNW boy, I like me some shade and drizzle. But I saw a ton of wonderful art and ate a lot of terrific food, so I should be slapped for whining about the heat.

The “best of” link above doesn’t put them in chronological order, but here’s an outline of the trip: 2 days in Rome, 7 days on Elba Island taking a cooking class from the urbane and gallant Federico, 6 days in Florence and 2 days in San Gimignano. If I had it to do over again I think I’d spend more time in Florence and Rome, and more time paying attention to advice from the travel books about which restaurants to go to. Yes, you can get boring food in Italy, and I ran into my share of it.

Anyway, have fun with the photos!

Sadly, as an atheist/agnostic/long story/whatever, I probably won’t end up in heaven even if (against all odds) it turns out to exist. But if it does and I get to go, I would be sure that there would be lots of puppies and I would never have to smell Subway bread again, ever.

Now I can blather-on-the-go…

Tedious post incoming! Stop reading now!

It wasn’t a long weekend for most people, but my computer at work crapped out, so I ended up taking Friday off. I didn’t do much this weekend that’s worth blogging about except(*):

• Decided to start a month-long break from reading the news. So far I love this. The “Jesse Jackson caught on mike saying stuff” story was what made me say, “Ya know, I really don’t need to follow politics this carefully…nothing ever happens, anyway!”  So political blogs are out, the news is out. I still read the Slog, so if something huge happens, I guess I’ll hear about it there.
• My politics hiatus only applies to current events, so I’m happily plowing through that psychobiography of Richard Nixon by Fawn Brodie. She’s awfully blunt, but fair, and I’m guessing the book enraged Nixon.
• Mercilessly went through all my photos, culling the duplicate and junky photos. Holy hell, but I had this habit in the 90s of getting duplicate prints of EVERYTHING, and taking a lot of horrendously boring photos. I’m paring it down to the good stuff, and then I think I’m going to ship ‘em all off to ScanCafe to get them on DVD. (If you have any advice on this, feel free to chime in.)
• I bought a new pair of shorts, after discovering I’d worn a hole through my favorite pair. Does no one love me enough to tell me my ass is showing? Jeez. I also tried shopping for new shirts, but came away with only one. I can’t be trusted to make many clothing decisions, according to my superego.
• Listened to Amy Winehouse, Eriyakcya Baahhduhu, Beastie Boys and Tom Waits, thanks to a loan from a friend. Lots of great stuff that I am (as usual) listening to long after it came out.
• Oh, and of course I added a few levels to my little fake creatures in WoW. Lately I’ve been leveling a paladin, druid and hunter. This weekend they all hit 30, and I managed to reach 40 on my horde druid, too, so after farming some gold and shuttling back and forth to the auction house, he finally has a nice new kodo to ride on!

Veal and his kodo

• French Toast at Artemis this morning was super duper yummy. I’ve been back there for breakfast quite a few Sundays now, and I can happily recommend it.

Bye, ducklings! Hope you had a great weekend.

(*) I didn’t intend for this to be a long list, actually… but apparently my weekend was blogworthy. Ah, the pleasures of having free bandwidth and an extremely small readership!