❮❮prevnext❯❯

We Got That Bike Bus - fun little video short from today's Peabody School

---

---

How to Tell If You Are Running a Money Laundry
(Updated Election Edition)...

---

this made me laugh out loud, on the subway

Boston is Philly that thinks it's Paris

---

Thanks to Paul Gregory, drummer and founding member of Good Trouble (née Second Line) - he uses his skills with fabric materials and construction to make custom accessories for fellow musicians - attached stick bags for drummers, a seatbelt-ish arrangement for lightweight sousaphones that lets a disassembled horn act like a backpack while biking, or in my case, a small releasable strap attaching a cheap passport pouch I bought (for holding band business cards, valve oil, and washable markers for my tuba banner) to the back of the horn.

(Some other tuba players have bags for mouthpieces and neck "bits" in a pouch in front, but I was preferring it behind me - with my tuba beads I have enough stuff dangling there - and now I don't have to rely on stretch-y cloth to keep it held down) behold the wisdom toad

---

so much of being an ok person is just 1) not panicking, 2) not taking things personally, and 3) not letting the vindictive gargoyle that lives in your head tell you what to do. this sucks because brains love doing those things

Dear Theo
Will life never treat me decently? I am wracked by despair! My head is pounding. Mrs Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth. That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman. I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing and wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid, I want to smash her.

We watched "Loving Vincent". Intriguing film, consisting of hand painted frames in Van Gogh's style, and a kind of detective story about his death, with characters who were also subjects in some of his works.



(The tension in the rotoscoping vs painting styles and the detective story gave it a bit of a 1990s puzzle-adventure vibe.) Reading Sam Harris' "Making Sense", a set of edited transcripts from his podcast. He leads off David Chalmers, about the "hard problem of consciousness", as Neutral Milk Hotel puts it "Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all".

Thought experiments are one of the few tools we have to thinking about the issues. One favorite for sci-fans like me is, how do you know the Star Trek teleporter is transportation and not just murder+deep cloning, that the Captain Kirk who steps off the transporter pad has the same soul or consciousness as the swaggering dude who beamed up from the planet's surface?

Or you see the same issue if you could "upload" yourself into the Matrix. ("The rapture of the nerds", as its been called.) If your old meatself was still there, looking through the screen at the new uploaded self, it would certainly feel like a matter of cloning and not transportation. But the "you" inside would feel more like a transported individual than a "new being".

But really, is that any different than what happens when we wake from a deep, lights-out sleep? Yeah, we know we're the same person, same consciousness (or same soul if you swing that way). But that's mostly a matter of the continuity we enjoy, the memories we have, the patterns we recognize as continuing. I think that's what a lot of people mean when they say "consciousness is an illusion" - it's not a singular thing like that.

So if the "virtual you" woke up inside the computer, would it be "really you"? Our bias in favor of our traditional meatselves would say no - much more of a clone. But I think we should extend that same logic to out current selves... we're continuous with the person we were when we went to sleep, but not the same person. You can't step in the same river twice.

So, we're left wondering what consciousness is. I'm willing to accept very low standards of consciousness. Like I a thermostat has the faintest glimmer of it - it has a kind of model of the world and its place in it - or more importantly, a model of its ability to interact with world. That's why I feel it has a claim to consciousness that, say, a chair doesn't.

(Similarly I am comfortable with the idea that our unconscious selves are kind of independently conscious on their own terms, but our narrative/rational selves has only limited knowledge and communication access with those parts.)

Another set of thought experiments is modeled on the "Ship Of Theseus", as Wikipedia puts it:

It is supposed that the famous ship sailed by the hero Theseus in a great battle was kept in a harbor as a museum piece, and as the years went by some of the wooden parts began to rot and were replaced by new ones; then, after a century or so, every part had been replaced. The question then is if the "restored" ship is still the same object as the original.

If it is, then suppose the removed pieces were stored in a warehouse, and after the century, technology was developed that cured their rot and enabled them to be reassembled into a ship? Is this "reconstructed" ship the original ship? If it is, then what about the restored ship in the harbor still being the original ship as well?

A humbler version of that is "behold, by great-grandfather's axe! Its blade has been replaced 5 times and its handle twice!"

But people like to think about, what if we replaced bits of our brain like that, at what point if ever would we stop being us? You can play with all kind of variants of that, along with transfer to virtual systems, to interrogate your intuition about what it means to be us...

I just wanted to mention one variant I thought of and don't remember hearing: So, if we managed to duplicate our brain digitally, I think most people would say "fine, you have a digital clone, but you're still the original you". But what if you split a human brain in half, and gave each half a perfectly functioning digital duplicate of its missing part. Would we have successfully cloned ourselves then? Would one lobe have a truer claim to being the "real us"?

---

A few weeks ago all but one member of my work team collaborated for a new baby gift for the remaining coworker. Along with passing the hat for diaper money we came up with some nifty designs for custom onesies--





I did the Pac-Man and Simon game (the coworker is a gamer, and the baby's name is Simon...) the last one is our team logo

---

The more I think on that, the more true it seems. Spring and Fall have it all over Summer, except so many of us have a deeply ingrained association with summer and being more free to do interesting things.

Actually come to think of it the one thing summer does have is nice long days. So "atrocious" is overstating it, but the heat can feel gratuitous. (but even with all this late spring/early autumn are safer bets)

---

Multiple boats sink at Trump boat parade on Texas' Lake Travis. Sometimes the metaphors just create themselves.

My favorite meme about this: "Help, our boat is sinking!" Response: "All boats matter."

Interesting piece on Mayor Pete's religiosity vs the apocalyptic view in some quarters on the right - the idea that the world can't or won't be better 'til we burn down the current one his horrifying.

I sort of hate how popular "When The Saints Go Marching In" is for NOLA-inspired bands, because it has that apocalyptic message baked in (I especially didn't want to play it for the counter-rally, where you have some idiots marching and thinking they're special messengers.) Like I say: "You know, in the movies, you can tell the bad guys - they're the ones that are plotting for and rejoicing in the end of the world. Turns out, same thing in real life."

I guess there's some privilege in that - when the world is treating you pretty well, there's probably "no place but down from here". But even taking that into account, it's easy to think that people who want to burn it all down are WAY overestimating the chances of it being replaced by something better. Reminds me of the quote:

Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.

That's one of the reasons why I put stock in "the system", as flawed and prone to abuse and exploitation as it can be. It needs reform, not demolition.

---

18 years ago my then 5 year old car hit 50,000. Last night, my 15 year old car hit 130K:

(Check engine light comes on a lot if a full-service gas attendant doesn't do the cap properly.)

---

All The Ways Brexit Could Go Now, Explained For People Who Are Confused "We're in the endgame now. Or maybe we're not."

---

Some other Car Talk words and phrases The Boston Globe identified: "dope slap," or a quick, corrective slap to the back of the head in punishment of stupidity; "urgent haircut," or the need to relieve oneself; "T.S., Eliot," or a public-radio friendly way of saying "tough shit"; "schnerdling," a word with Icelandic origins to mean toilet; and "boat payment," a unit of measurement arising from Ray's discovery that the least scrupulous mechanics he knew all owned boats.

Ha, did not know "Urgent Haircut" (as in Urgent Haircut Productions" was a euphemism!) RIP Burt Reynolds. I'm sorry I kept mixing you up with Tom Selleck, hope I'm getting it right this time.

---

I might sit in with the Tufts Pep Band this year, was at a rehearsal this evening, fun just reading charts and playing loud. Mostly with folks born after I graduated. (Yeesh)

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

---

What It Feels Like To Die - the details might not be as scary as you think. For a city that prides itself on being "smaht", our city planning is pretty damn dumb in terms of building where it's gonna flood as oceans rise. He says, during his lunchbreak in Seaport.
via Volcano Shockwave. I think more CGI specialists should do that "pushes away the cloud thing"; I don't remember seeing it much, it seems like it would be pretty easy to render, and it really conveys the power of the shockwave! Apple testing phones up to six inches. Half a foot of screen is too much for a phone for me, but one of those 4.8" models sounds just about right. I was a skeptic about the larger sizes til I interacted with a friend's S3... so not too excited about next week's event but have high hopes for 2014.

---

To master debugging, you must expect to find bugs. If somebody reports a bug, you should accept it. The natural state of code is to have bugs.

---

Some things quoted in Hank Lentfer's "Faith of Cranes: Finding Hope and Family in Alaska". (I had a small personal connection to the book, in that Riana and I were lucky enough to be borrowing one of the book's character's car in Gustavus)

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted, but getting what you have, which, once you have it, you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

Wilderness represents in space what the Sabbath represents in time-- a limit to our dominion, a refuge from the quest for power and wealth, an acknowledgment that the earth does not belong to us.

The opposite of faith is not doubt; it is certainty.

Worry is like praying for what you don't want.

I've been trying to wrap my head around those last two in particular. from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

7 years to master something? Does that mean working fulltime at it? Anyway, 7 years are nicer chunks than the 4 I started thinking in with high school and college...
--via 22words

---

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php?page=all I like high level thought and analysis like this, in part because I'm so bad at it.

---

Facts About Time. You live 80 milliseconds in the past. Earth hearts (all species) have about a billion and a half heartbeats in them..

---

Though, sigh,

"You and I won't live forever. But as for our grandkids, I'm not placing any bets."

Stupid grandkids.

---

http://mortals.be/ - coping with mortality has been a bugaboo, but I think I got it licked, hence that site. Still, more years would be nice

---

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/jobs-will-follow-a-strengthening-of-the-middle-class.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all Why trickle-down economics is exactly wrong: having productivity gains go only to the rich, not salaries, strangles economies, especially our own.

---

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.

I'm knocked over by how much great music I can run into still. I really thank MP3 players for revolutionizing my relationship with it, and how I can buy songs piecemeal and then give 'em a few months to burn into my brain before they get thrown into the general mix. (I'm also knocked over by how I can find nearly all of them on Youtube...)

Anyway, here are the 3,4, and 5 star songs I added to my collection over the past three months.

Random Modernish Urbanish Pop - I just dig the sound and swagger.

• TiK ToK (Ke$ha)
• Pretty Girls [Explicit] (Wale)
• Don't Stop The Music (Rihanna)
• He Said She Said (Ashley Tisdale)
• Get The Party Started (P!nk)
• Piece Of Me (Friscia and Lamboy Radio Edit) (Britney Spears)

NPR had a piece on the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and they covered "Hit 'Em Up Style", which turns out to be a good song in its own right.

• Hit 'Em Up Style (Carolina Chocolate Drops)
• Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!) (Blu Cantrell) -- I heard the singer isn't too crazy about the central theme of the song, but hey.

I read a book "100 Best Beatles Song", and that introduced me to or reminded me of a few songs

• Hey Bulldog (Bill Deal) -- I could't find the original of this obscure "Yellow Submarine" track, but the Bill Deal cover is pretty rockin'.
• I Saw Her Standing There (Beatles)

Last season's mix was really where I imported a lot of song from Amber's collection, but her music still has new finds for me...

• The Denial Twist (Album Version) (The White Stripes) -- Incidentally, this is the only song this season I gave 5 Stars this season
• Icky Thump (Album Version) (The White Stripes)
• Sea Of Love (Cat Power) -- So very sweet
• Think I'm In Love (Beck) -- but it makes me kind of nervous to say so.
• Innocence (Bjork) -- there's something subtley Atari-ish about this that I dig.
• Umbrella (Marie Digby)

Q-Unit's Greatest Hits is 50 Cent crossed with Queen... kind of amazing stuff. I love the back cover art with 50 Cent sporting a Freddy Mercury mustache.

• Crazy Little Pimp Called Love (Q-Unit) -- originally I heard this in this Penny Arcade inking Boba Fett video
• Candy Bottom Girls (Q-Unit) -- I had to learn "Fat Bottomed Girls" so I could sing it with Tufts' sQ!, but I think I like this version a bit better.
• Disco Language (Q-Unit)
• If I Cant Be A Champion (Q-Unit)
• This Is How We Bite The Dust (Q-Unit)
• Under Pressure All The Time (Q-Unit)
• We Will Rock You In Da Club (Q-Unit)

In high school I was "Big Jule" in our production of Guys and Dolls, so I still have a soft spot for the music from it-- this is from the 1990s revival I saw in NYC with my mom, I think it had Nathan Lane in it.

• Guys and Dolls
• Fugue for Tinhorns
• The Oldest Established
• Luck Be a Lady
• Sue Me
• Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat

Random 90s "Alternative"

• Breakfast At Tiffany's (Deep Blue Something) -- this song still makes me want to watch the movie.
• Sex And Candy (Marcy Playground) -- I came for the "I smell sex and..." and stayed for the "like double cherry pie" -- is that even a thing?
• Push (Matchbox Twenty)

Tuba-memory music...

• Just a Closer Walk With Thee (Canadian Brass) -- their signature piece, I remember seeing them a few times with my mom.
• Mozart: Rondo alla Turka from Piano Sonata No.11, K.331 (Empire Brass) - I played this in a few bands. I love how much harder the trumpets had to work than I did.
• Rondo Alla Turca (Hooked On Classics) -- not sure why I decided to go for this one but it's kind of fun.

Songs from the Weird Al...

• Lola (The Kinks) -- Al's was "Yoda". Also kind of a rediscovery from Amber's
• Sharp Dressed Man (Remastered) (ZZ Top) - I think he through this one into a "Polka Party"

Songs from "Shake Burger and Fries" -- McDonalds had some promotional tapes once in the 80s, mixtapes of songs from the 60s-- I've tried in vain to track down a playlist, but I remember some of the songs...

• The Wanderer (Dion & The Belmonts) -- I remember doing this as a lipsynch at church camp. (I had the sax solo) Not the most appropriate song, in retrospect.
• Runaround Sue (Dion)
• Under The Boardwalk (The Drifters) -- I remember Veronika say how an English teacher tried to say that this song was about bugs - I guess he was mixing up "boardwalk" and "floorboards".
• Rhythm Of The Rain (The Cascades)

Songs off of youtube videos...

• Transformer Breakdance (ft. Soundwave and Lazer) (Lazer) -- liked this one for years, the breakdancing is great.
• gimmebackmason (Swede Mason) -- oh, will Mel Gibson flying into a frothy rage ever grow old? Um, probably.
• Birds And The Bees (Sliptone) -- (actually the video I posted was Den Meyer's Annual Report which cuts out quite a bit.

I've been seeing some IMAX at Jordan's furniture lately, and they have a thing for that 90s-era swing revival stuff...

• The Ding Dong Daddy of the D Car Line (Cherry Poppin Daddies)
• Here Comes the Snake (Cherry Poppin' Daddies) -- I've always been a bit amused by the lack of subtlety in this song
• When I change your mind (Cherry Poppin' Daddies)
• Zoot Suit Riot (Cherry Poppin' Daddies)

Random finds:

• Good Enough (Remastered Album Version) (Bonnie Raitt) - a suggestion from a therapist I see every once in a while.
• Dance Across The Floor (Jimmy Bo Horne) - Lileks wrote "How we hated disco. We wore skinny ties and were Mods! But allow me to present the brief for the opposition."
• Fresno Drum Cadence (Fresno State Bulldog Marching Band) -- I still long to hear the funk-laden of Euclid High School Marching Band circa 1990 or so... (link not quite what I have on my iPhone)
• The Girl From Ipanema (Stan Getz) -- when I am elected king of the world, EVERY elevator will play this song, by kingly mandate.
• At Last (Etta James) -- not sure where I heard this, but probably a soundtrack.
• Son Of A Preacher Man (The Gaylettes) -- didn't realize "Preacher Man" had so many old covers. This one is good, though I dislike how they change the slant-rhyming "learning from each other's knowin'" to "learning from each other's knowledge"
• Fever (Little Willie John) - I was reading about this earlier version of a song I love from the Peggy Lee cover.
• Sand In My Shoes (Dido) -- I think this song used to be in my collection, not sure what happened to it-- anyway, it's great and happy and sad.

---

September Blender of Love is here!

---

--Life magazine put together this kind of noir parody of the Hays Code "Thou Shalt Nots", what you weren't allowed to show in movies of the time.

I. Law Defeated
II. Inside of Thigh
III. Lace Lingerie
IV. Dead Man
V. Narcotics
VI. Drinking
VII. Exposed Bosom
VIII. Gambling
IX. Pointing Gun
X. Tommy Gun

Seems like it would have been more efficient to have the woman pointing a Tommy Gun rather than having it awkwardly posed on the cop's head, but hey.

---

"It's the librarian fantasy, man -- glasses off, hair down... ...books flyin'"
"She doesn't wear glasses."
"Buy her some, it's worth it."

---

http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays - one of the funnier twitters I've seen in a while.

---

http://www.livescience.com/technology/060707_pacman_insects.html - news of the old, insects stepping in as the ghosts in Pac-Man

---

(In)famously, Apple's official recommendation for fixing the ill-fated Apple III was drop from a height of several inches. Oddly, for now this seems to have fixed my PC which was shutting itself off for no good reason.

(Note to future self: HP gear is attractive from a design standpoint, but ranks rather low on reliability and preloaded-with-crapware metrics. Heed this.)

---

new blender of love digest As a sidenote, I cranked up my "Twitter journal" viewer to show my 5 last tweets rather than just 3. On the one hand, I'm happy to have less of the "well I don't want to post because I'll push something clever off" thing (yeah, I know) but on the other hand, I'm posting more trivial stuff (yeah, I REALLY know.)

Anyway, went to a real life Drive-In last night, out in Mendon, with Ariana and Shawn. Pretty cool, $20 buys you a carload, you can bring along some lawnchairs and a radio... we saw "Tropic Thunder" and "Pineapple Express", both kind of goofy spoofs, not bad End-of-Summer Drive-In Fair.

---

Passage of the Moment

"Pooh," asked Piglet, "did you remember to help Owl remove that--"

"Of course," said Pooh. "I have a phonographic memory, you know."

"You mean," said Rabbit, "a photographic memory."

"No," insisted Pooh. "Phonographic. It goes around and around. Sometimes it gets stuck. That's why I remember things so well."

The book is kind of a disappointment. especially compared to its companion "The Tao of Pooh". This book is more preachy and pedantic and ultimately apocalyptic in its outlook... Hoff almost seems to be turning himself into a messianic, or at least redemptive, figure for Piglet and some of the other Pooh characters.

---

Infectous Music of the Moment
Do You Like The Hot Hot Tamale? Weebl continues the tradition of super-catchy music and hypnotic videos, like Kenya back in the day.

---

Wow, a real live Drive-In at Mendon... fun and retro and the mosquito coil is a-smolderin'

---

The Drive-In was impressive in many ways. Not least among them:how Ariana's jalapeno cheese poppers were evidently actually full of napalm.

---

sigh mon oncle's deaf to "should I go ahead and do that?" hints (ala "I want it done but will do the work");"no I'll get it"-later, or never

---

bad moments in Oreos; EB hands me 2, a second later: "whrz tha crmm flllng??" He had ("accidentally") taken 2 from the post-decreamed stack-

--Methuen MA, 2007.09.03 My last day of "vacation"... trying to rush around making ready for party and a future housemate.

Ksenia and I went up to Vermont. Brattleboro on the way in was pretty nifty. We stayed at a place called the Deerhill Inn, and I gotta say that of the 3 or so B+Bs I've stayed at, this one is definitely tops. We did the whole web search thing (and man those room photos start looking all alike after a short while) and this one stood out... at first because of the webdesign, but it turns out that's a reflection of the place itself. For starters the room (we stayed in the Dahlia room) looked great in the photos and had the full set of amenities: fireplace, tub with jacuzzi jets, TV/DVD, even wireless 'Net so I didn't feel like a total refugee. Then it turns out that the grounds were beautifully done as well, with better landscaping and a much better view than any other place I've been in...they even feature a small pool. Breakfast was great (though I'm getting the sneaking suspicion it's fairly easy for B+Bs to throw together breakfasts that seem impressive and taste wonderful...) but the place also has a (price-y) built-in restaurant... we had a great creme brulee via something like room service.

Plus you can order these various packages, in-room massage, dinner things, etc... I splurged for some champagne and local chocolates. Oh, and if you poke around the site, the "last minute deals" links is pretty damn bargain-riffic.

I guess in short it manages to get the best of both worlds, some of the features of a small hotel without sacrificing much of the personal feel of a smaller B+B.

Yesterday we also went to the Billings Farm outside of Woodstock. Ksenia had an urge to commune with cows a bit, and that was the place to do it, along with stocking up on Maple Syrup. And Maple Candy. And Maple-infused Seltzer. Etc. Plus, they had some ice cream made from milk from the herd. Kind of weird to think you're ingesting something that might well have come out of the creature you were just petting 15 minutes earlier.

We also did a little factory outletting in Manchester. I had more trouble than I expected explaining the Factory Outlet concept to Ksenia, especially after she saw some of the brands (I stocked up on amusing boxers at Banana Republic) and the prices (Giorgio Armani had shirts at 90% off...which makes a $500 shirt just barely outside of what I'll pay, rather than considering the price "bat-s*** insane") and the fact that there didn't actually seem to be any factories nearby.

Plus, I got my first ever speeding-ticket. Boo, Hiss, frickin' Vermont pseudo-highways going straight through the middle of their little podunk towns.

---

Quote of the Moment

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Cool and memorable way of putting the situation, though I'm not crazy about the hint of "Cartesian Dualism" (soul and body as distinct and separable) it carries.

Advice of the Moment

But keeping feelings bottled up is like holding an angry tiger by the tail: Unless you hold on tight, he'll kill you--metaphorically. Realistically, if you have a tiger by the tail, he'll kill you whether you hold on or not. In fact, if you hold his tail he'll probably find you quicker. All he has to do is follow his body down to the end of his tail, and there you are. But not for long. Sure, technically you might be able to continue holding on to the tail while he is gnawing on your skull, but this is merely a muscle reflex. Let's face it, once the head leaves the body, you aren't doing much of anything. I guess my point is, don't touch tigers' tails. They don't like it. They are very flexible and have powerful paws with razor sharp, retratable claws. I don't even want to talk about the teeth.

My 'net connection has been down as much as up this weekend...yesterday I got a lot of reading done, two books, two small graphic novels. That was a nice change of pace.

---

Link of the Moment
How I Failed The Turing Test. I've argued for a while that chatbots have passed a watered-down form of the test; if people aren't paying attention, and sometimes even if they are, they think these chatscripts are humans. (And vice versa, now...)

Quote of the Moment

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important.

Not sure if I really like the quote or not, but ah well. Had a hard time coming up with a good "feature", settled on a brief link to this relationship quiz.

---

Ramble of the Boat
Heh, not much of an update today...I had a serious attack of lazy.

Pretty busy weekend, but today feels oddly like a Sunday. I was worried it was going to feel like a Saturday...I feel totally ripped off when I'm at work on a day that feels like it's the day after a Saturday.

You know what I need? Some program that would take text, pipe it through a text-to-speech synthesizer, record the result as a wav file, and then let me burn it to a CD. I think they have something like that for the Apple iPod, except it makes files that can be loaded onto your MP3 player. And then, of course, I'd have to find e-texts that I really want to listen to. And not get sick of that robovoice...

---

Toy of the Moment
Conceptually neat (but with a fragile implementation) barcode clock. Actually, that site has lots of random barcode themed stuff.

---

Article of the Moment
Very cool and readable History of Nintendo's NES for the 20th anniversary of the Famicom, the original Japanese version. A nice two-person format, and mini-reviews of lots of games, broken up by year. Great reading for anyone who grew up during the 80s, not just for classic video game nerds like me.
Backlog Link of the Moment
Tiny Games for Windows. They're really really tiny. Unfortunately, some of the more interesting arcade ones on the right need the original ROMS to work...but one of my favorites, Tiny Invaders (shown actual size here: ) doesn't. It's a bit smaller than most of them, and shows up in the SysTraym by the clock. (Make sure to read the read me files they include to know the controls.)

---

Lite News of the Moment
My mom actually sent this one along, UK McDonalds to make hedgehog friendly icecream cups. I'm just getting this image of chubby English hedgehogs.

---

Quote of the Moment

Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory against the League leaders after a fish-and-chip lunch.

A lot of UKisms I'm not quite picking up in this book. Maybe I like this quote because it has some of the lingo, but not too much. My dear old cute Honda Civic rolled over to 50,000 miles yesterday. I'm proud of this car. It has a goofy color, a frog holder for its stuffed frog, and I paid for it with my own money. I bought it new right before I graduated from college, in 1996. It has taken me to Cleveland and Ocean Grove and back. And to Pittsburgh, which is where I learned it can go 100 miles on rainslick highway with 5 people bundled in (with my a cappella group, chasing the other car in order to make it to a concert on time.)

I love the color of this car. It's a bit flamboyant but is aggressively cheerful and reminds me of spring after any rain.

I wanted to put up this picture for another reason...after I want to college and my Mom moved to NYC, we realized we didn't have any pictures with our beloved metalflake-orange-bronze ford aerostar minivan. (The "pumpkin carriage") That was the vehicle I learned to drive in, and the one I have other fond memories of being inside its upholstered confines. But no pictures of it, and I didn't want the same think to happen to the kermitmobile.

---

Online Toy of the Moment
Similar to this one school filmstrip in the 1970s, a powers of 10 visualization toy. You start out at 10²³ meters out, where our galaxy is just the brightest splotch, go to 10¹³, about the size of our solar system, to 10⁶, the southeastern USA, and then end up zooming in on a single leaf in Florida, until at 10^-15 you're staring a proton in the face. You can let it run on automatic, or press the button at the bottom to engage manual control of the zooming.

---

Quote of the Moment

With the gay sexual revolution in San Francisco, he was finally free to express that side of himself openly. This was a wonderful thing, but the effects of it were confusing and bizarre for my brother and me. With him, the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name became the Love That Would Not Shut Up.