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17 Crazy Crayon names that are official core colors

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:00:46 GMT

Fuzzy Wuzzy, Outer Space, and Bittersweet are just a few of the standard Crayola crayon colors released over the years. These 133 names are considered to be a "core color" by Crayola. Hard to believe that Razzmatazz is considered a core color. But it is! What a wonderful world Crayola has colored for us.

From the official list of 133 standard Crayola colors, here the 17 that stand out as being more wacky.

Color	Hex Code	Issued	Notes
Atomic Tangerine	#FFA474	1972	What makes this Atomic?
Banana Mania	#FAE7B5	1998	This color has a slight red-tinge to it. Maybe it's an embarrassed banana
Beaver	#9F8170	1998	The only Crayola color named for an animal
Bittersweet	#FD7C6E	1949	This is the color of something that is Bittersweet
Cornflower	#9ACEEB	1949	Is cornflower this color?
Dandelion	#FDDB6D	1990	Are dandelions this color?
Fuzzy Wuzzy	#CC6666	1998	Fuzzy Wuzzy?
Jazzberry Jam	#CA3767	2003	Is this the color of Jazz?
Laser Lemon	#FEFE22	1972	Renamed from "Chartreuse" in 1990. Interesting that yellow would be a laser color. Have you ever seen a laser beam that's yellow?
Mauvelous	#EF98AA	1993	Because mauv is just a marvelous color
Outer Space	#414A4C	1998	Wow. Outer space has a color?
Purple Pizzazz	#FF00CC	1990	Crayola likes names with many Zzzzs in them.
Razzle Dazzle Rose	#FF48D0	1990	Four Zs!
Razzmatazz	#E3256B	1993	Four Zs again!
Unmellow Yellow	#FFFF66	1990	Describing a color by what it is not. Very philosophical
Wild Blue Yonder	#A2ADD0	2003	Heh
Wisteria	#CDA4DE	1993	Wisteria? What is wisteria?

After writing this post, I found that Crayola has special coloring pages explaining each of their 50 most popular colors. Wisteria has its own page. It explains:

Wisteria is a plant that grows as a vine. It grows light purple flowers in the spring or early summer. Some wisteria plants can be 25 feet tall. The color wisteria is a peaceful color. It makes people feel better and helps them to be calm, sometimes even sleepy. Calmly color this wisteria flower with a Wisteria crayon.

The Tribune Tower Walgreens cookie run adventure (tweeted live)

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:00:14 GMT

Here's a funny story that happened to me yesterday. I live tweeted a cookie run to Walgreens.

Making a cookie run to the walgreens.

Chips Ahoy cookies are 4 boxes for $5. #walgreens #deal

Okay, so I bought FOUR boxes of cookies. I'll walk up the 14 flights of stairs at Tribune Tower to make up for it.

Security guard at Tribune Tower denies cookie offer. Oh well. More for the peeps on 14. Now it's stair climbing time!

At floor 7. This is much harder than I thought. Half way there!

Floor 14, I'm so happy to see you! +huffing and puffing+

Can you beat 3 minutes 14 seconds for 14 flights of stairs? It's very possible. I wasn't going fast at all.

In my desperation for water, I sit down at my desk with a full bottle and spill it all over! Classic! Thankfully none on my laptop.

Water is cleaned up. 14 flights of stairs are climbed. I finally sit down to enjoy some tasty cookie goodness! Mmmmm mmmmm

Guess what? The cookies are STALE. Shudda known. Typically when Walgreens has food on mega-sale, there tends to be something wrong.

The world's best Facebook status messages

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:00:28 GMT

Here's a growing collection of the funniest Facebook status messages I have seen. Feel free to add to this list by leaving a comment with hilarious facebook status messages you have read.

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Erik M. Transformers 2 comes out Wednesday. Too bad Michael Jackson didn't live long enough to see tformers2. He would have loved it. So sad.

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Erik M. I just opened the memory card slot on the company digital camera and seriously thought, "oh no I just spoiled the film".

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Juan D. WHY RANDY JACKSON!!! WHY!!! A FRICKEN HEART ATTACK!!! HE WAS GETTING SO HEALTHY!!! ITS NOT FAIR!!! WE LOVE YOU RANDY JACKSON FROM T.V'S AMERIAN IDOL!!!!!

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Marco B. My dog must've been on an Old Style and White Castle bender earlier in the week, judging by the little gifts she keeps leaving in the yard and the basement.

(and classic comment) Matt Maldre at 9:12pm June 27
I ate a bunch of Post� grape-nuts yessterday and I know what you mean.

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Erik M. my brother started to collect Roy Smalley, Jr baseball cards (he found a great deal on an autographed card...50 cents or sumthin'). He couldn't figure out why he felt intrinsic value for this player. Then I figured out that his son, Roy Smalley III is on the lengendary R.B.I. Baseball game. So he started to subconsciously collect baseball cards because a player's son was on a video game from the 1980s.

---

WARNING: After copying a ton of files on a Mac, your computer will run slow

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:00:43 GMT

I copied 161gb of files from one external USB drive to another. The process took three hours. I figured that once it was done copying, my computer should behave normally, right?

No.

The computer actually went slower AFTER the copying was done. I opened the "Activity Monitor" (found in Hard Drive > Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) and it told me that an application called "mdworker" was using around 40% of my CPU power. WHOA!

Someone on insanelymac.com explained, "It is the new and improved Meta Data importer. Don't worry, after some time you'll see its CPU usage drop. It kicks in when there's any kind of file activity, especially documents."

June 25: National Handshake Day

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:24:03 GMT

I want to go around and shake people's hand at work and say, "Congratulations, today is National Handshake Day." Actually what would be more fun is to go around with a hand buzzer and do that.

A selected sampling of factoids on handshaking from wikipedia:

In some Oriental countries (like Turkey or the Arabic-speaking Middle East), handshakes aren't as 'strong' as in America and Europe. Consequently a grip which is too firm will be considered as rude.
Especially firm handshakes are sometimes called "Manshakes"
President Theodore Roosevelt, who set the world record with 8,513 handshakes at a White House reception on January 1, 1907. (i'm not bothering to mention the Atlantic City Mayor who broke the record in 1977).

Other handshake stuff:

Wikihow wrote an article about how to be a jerk and manipulate people with your handshake, "How to Have a Persuasive Handshake."
Batman and Superman shaking hands

What does popcorn, tully monsters, and fluorite have in common?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:00:33 GMT

What do the following 15 items have in common?
* Eastern Tiger Salamander
* Northern Cardinal
* Monarch Butterfly
* Square dance
* Bluegill
* Violet flower
* Popcorn
* Gold Rush Apple
* Tully Monster
* Big Bluestem
* White-tailed deer
* Fluorite
* Painted Turtle
* Drummer silty clay loam
* White oak

These are all OFFICIAL symbols of Illinois. What fun and odd conglomeration of things. I'm sure there's meaning behind each of these choices, but it's funny that together they should really say Illlinois, but I'm not sure I'd look at this list and say, "Wow! That's Illinois"

It would be fun to have a game where there are 50 lists like this, and you have to try to match them up with each state. I'd play that game on Facebook.

Lessons learned from sending invites to my entire address book

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:17:29 GMT

You just accidentally sent invites to EVERYONE in your address book to a book cataloging service. What do you do?
1) Laugh it off. "People get these every day."
2) Freak out and immediately send an email to everyone in your address book apologizing?
3) Freak out and ignore it.
4) Send an email to only the business contacts in your address book explaining your error.

What I did:
Yesterday I did a little bit of 2 and 3. I freaked out and posted an apology on twitter, facebook, and my blog on spudart.org. There's a level of freaking out, because my address book is a collection of EVERYONE I've ever met and have their email address. This includes anyone I meet in business and anyone I meet online. If you added me as a contact on flickr, I add you in my address book. If I meet someone through a personal, I add that person in my address book. I want to make sure that if someone tries to email me, the spam blockers don't block your email. Plus, I just like to have one central location where I have everyone I know. Networking is very important, and I've learned it's essential to have a complete address book of people that I get in touch with for helping each other.

When I send out a willy nilly accidental email like this, there's an element of losing control that is very unsettling, because I just did something I didn't mean to do. The flip side is that it's still a nice email. No harm done. And that's what I realize now. (I should note that it was not goodreads fault. I clicked on a button I should not have clicked on in their site. Goodreads does NOT do "contact scraping")

The result:
What then resulted from my online posts is people were disappointed that I was disingenuous with my invite. "Oh you didn't really want to be my friend." Which I'm sure is said in a joking manner. But there is some sort of truth behind that. In all reality, YES, I would love to be your friend. I just don't send invites out to my ENTIRE address book. But really, people don't care if your whole address book got sent an email, especially if it was for a service that is legit. Now if it was a spam site, then yes, I would probably email my entire address book telling them to ignore it. But goodreads.com is a nice site. I ended up with 16 new friends on goodreads.

What I should have done: (maybe)
Part of me wonders if I should have just emailed the business contacts to explain. But instead I went the passive way and posted a message online. Of course the business people don't see those messages online, but my friends do see them. It's my friends that should see it as completely normal for me to add them as a friend on goodreads.com. But I posted those messages online, because I want to at least try to be up front with people and let them know what I was thinking. I don't like to pretend or be fakey. Plus, I'm very willing to admit when I make an error. So, hence posting a messages to let people know a bit of the history behind the invite.

Once I saw all the people add me as a friend, I was really happy. Now I have 16 new friends on goodreads, and that's TOTALLY cool. I welcome Alice, Clorissa, Crissy, Cyndi, Erik, Frederic, Heidi, Jason, John, Julia, Pd, Steve, Tammy, Tracy, Wendy, Yoshinari as my new friends on goodreads.com!

The ultimate result:
Let's share some good books!

Oops: email sent out about goodreads.com to my entire address book

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:08:36 GMT

if you got a goodreads invite from me, you can ignore it. That was a total mistake on my part. I thought I was adding friends that were on goodreads already. I didn't mean to send it out to my entire address book. I accidentally clicked on a link to send it to my whole address book. This is not goodreads.com's fault, it's mine.

I'm actually not even a huge fan of goodreads.com, I much prefer librarything.com. Here's a comparison review of the two services.

But yeah... oops. I thought I was adding a couple people that were on the service. But then there was an alert that came up on goodreads saying, "message sent to 515 people." WHAT!? I'm very sorry for this. At least it's not leading to a spam site. Goodreads is legit.

If you do choose to join, I'd love to be your friend on goodreads.

Summer Solstice = Walk to home from work day

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:37:12 GMT

Take advantage of the day with the most sunlight, Summer Solstice on June 21.

Some suggestions:
Pull an all-nighter: I once did this when I locked myself out of my apartment on Summer Solstice a couple years ago. It was around midnight, so I felt bad calling my sister or my landlord who have the keys. I walked down to the 24-hour Golden Nugget and hung out until 7pm. It was interesting walking around and seeing all the activity going on late at night. Other people must have been celebrating the night as well.

Walk home from work: Now this I can see being a National Holiday. Can you imagine a day where nobody drives to work. Nobody takes the train. Nobody bikes. Just everyone walking. Wow! I live 6.8 miles from work. That's totally doable. Maybe I'll do a photo sequence of my walk. Yay! New traditions!

NEW WORD: amehzing

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:45:47 GMT

amehzing

Definition:
Combination of "meh" and "amazing." The situation where one person finds something amazing and the other person finds it meh. In order to come to a conclusion about the situation, both parties can agree to call it amehzing.

Usage:
Person 1: Dude, Star Wars is so amazing!
Person 2: meh
Person 3: I think you mean "meh" as in "amehzing"

Satisfied.