Thursday, 21 July 2011

This afternoon, the group I work for had an outing at a local park. There was catered food, bocci ball, and badminton. The two games were in tournament style, complete with large brackets taped up to the side of the pavilion where participants wrote in their names as they moved up the rankings.

I was in the bocci ball tournament. My team lost their first game, so I had a lot of down time. In between eating ice cream (oh my god! Reece’s Pieces ice cream is like, the best dessert ever) and playing Uno, I checked out the two tables worth of prizes. The plan was, right at the end of the picnic, someone would draw names out of a bowl and the person named would then get to come up and select a prize.

While looking over the prizes, I decided that my first pick would be the camping chairs. Jennifer and I don’t have any nice chairs like that and when we’ve gone camping, or even just a few weeks ago when we were sitting on the shores of the St. Croix watching the fireworks, it would’ve been nice to have some camping chairs. So that was my first choice. But I knew that they would be a popular option so, unless my name was called first or second, I probably wouldn’t get the chairs.

My second choice, I decided, would be one of the bocci ball sets. My third choice would be the board game Fact or Crap, which I’ve never played before but it looked like a fun trivia game in the same spirit (though perhaps not quite as good) as Wits and Wagers.

A couple of hours later, after playing Uno with some co-workers, arguing with them over the rules of the game, and ultimately being proved correct, everyone gathered around for the prizes. First the bocci ball and badminton champions received their gift cards for their superior sportsmanship. Then came the drawings.

The first person to have his name pulled out of the bowl was someone I don’t know, but he went up to the tables and began poking around at everything, as if he couldn’t decide. He started asking questions like, “how do you play this game?” and he began carefully inspecting things like the mini-grill and the Igloo coolers. Some co-workers started heckling him for taking so long.

Finally, the VIP in charge decided to move on while that guy continued to weigh the pros and cons of selecting a badminton set over Guesstures.

My name was called second and, in contrast to my uncertain co-workers, I walked straight up to the camping chairs, grabbed the handles, and sat back down. The woman sitting next to me said, “You don’t mess around, do you?”

No. I don’t.

Here are the two chairs (one of them is in the bag, at left). The baby was sold separately.

Here’s another shot of the chairs, with the model donning a more contemplative expression for this picture.

Friday, 22 July 2011

So, for most of my life (from 1978-2005), the planet Pluto had only one natural satellite: Charon. It was discovered by James Christy and the finding went a long way towards demoting Pluto from the coveted Planet status.

Then, in the middle of 2005, The Hubble Space Telescope team discovered Nix and Hydra (go team!). This meant Pluto had at least three satellites, making Earth once again the only planet with only one natural satellite.

And guess what just happened this week? Pluto, no longer a planet anymore, has been found to have four natural satellites (at least)! READ MORE ABOUT IT HERE. Good for Pluto. I’m glad it has some company to console it now that it kicked out of the Planet Club. Notice IN THIS PRESS RELEASE, however, that New Horizons’ Principal Investigator Alan Stern refers to Pluto as a planet.

This makes me even more excited for New Horizons’ arrival to Pluto. It still has a ways to go on its journey, but it’s past the halfway point and, by December, it will be closer to Pluto than any other human-made object ever. New Horizons is scheduled to make its closest approach to Pluto in 2015.

Also, the dipshits on Kentucky’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources commission think we need to start killing Sandhill Cranes. Sign THIS PETITION to US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar asking him to deny this law.

Tuesday, 19 July 2011

Have you seen the new flick The Undefeated yet? It’s a documentary about Sarah Palin. According to the Los Angeles Times, and it’s still awaiting it’s first positive review (from a professional critic). This really makes me want to see the movie. I wonder if it really is that bad, or if critics’ preconceived notions were just confirmed. In reading the article, it appears to be the former – even conservative news outlets are giving it bad press. Best line in the article:

blogger Kirsten Boyd Johnson said the film opened “to exactly the amount of excitement visible on the faces of trapped subway car passengers standing next to someone who has just [passed gas].”

But if you want to read a funnier article – about a journalist who pushed through the crowds of Harry Potter fans in order to interview attendees at the Sarah Palin flick, READ THIS. Turns out, the journalist was the only person in the theater.

IMDb users, meanwhile, have afforded it a score of 1.6 out of 10.

Here’s a positive review of The Undefeated. It’s from Ben Howe, a friend of the director. Howe says he was “blown away.” He also says that, after watching the film, he felt shame. My guess is he masturbated through it.

I’m putting this on my Netflix queueueue.

Wednesday, 20 July 2011

So I guess this isn’t really about today, but since I finally figured out how to extract the image from my cellular telephone and get it onto my computer today, then technically it has something to do with today. Here goes…

I was driving southbound on Snelling Avenue in Roseville last week, and I suddenly found myself driving behind an SUV. Specifically, it was a dark green Mazda Tribute. After a minute or so, I noticed the vehicle’s license plate. It was a vanity plate, and (since I now have a phone that allows me to take photos) I just had to snap a picture of it. Here it is:

Okay, so I know that cell phone cameras (well, mine at least) are not known for taking the best quality pictures. But it was the best I could do. In case you can’t read the plate, it says: JEHOVAH.

Wow!

How exciting!

I never would have guessed that Jehovah drove a tribute. When I was growing up, I was taught that the Almighty God drove something more akin to this:

But, facts are facts. And the fact is: He Who Causes To Become drives a Mazda Tribute. In a way, this makes sense. Since he has unlimited resources, he probably doesn’t care that he’s only getting 11 miles to the gallon. And while Dodge’s Omni is probably a more appropriate vehicle name for a deity, I can see why a selfish megalomaniac like Jehovah would find “Tribute” to be fitting as well.

After taking this photo, I just had to see what God looked like. I know that Exodus 33:20 says that no one can look upon God’s face and live, but I figured that, like everything else in the bible, that verse is probably false, too. So I decided to chance it.

Anyway, you heard it hear first, people: Jehovah’s ‘image’ is that of a clean-shaven black male, approximately 30 years old. He drives a Mazda Tribute.

And he has vanity plates.

Sunday, 17 July 2011

I went into the public library last week and decided to check out some random books. After having read so much for college, book reviews, and my son, I decided it was time for me to read some stuff that didn’t require me taking notes for subsequent tests or reviews, and that didn’t require me to read out loud to a six-year old.

I left with three books: The Little Book of String Theory, by Steven S. Gubser; Ice, by Karal Marling, and Billy Joel, by Mark Bego.

I quickly dispensed with the first book; too much of it was stuff I had read before.

Ice appealed to me because, well, I like reading books that take one single thing and expand on the history of it. I read an entire book on pi, for example. Also, the author is from Minnesota, and a quick flip through the book revealed that she sprinkled her prose with local flavor (ice fishing, the winter carnival, Fargo).

It’s a really poorly written book, unfortunately. The author jumps from one topic to the next with seemingly little background information. She spends far too much time on things that are not ice-related (why six pages about Uncle Tom’s Cabin?) and never bothers getting into some of the more fascinating facts about ice. The narrative is often interrupted with indented paragraphs of no relevance to the topic at hand (I guess they’re supposed to be ‘fun facts,’ but they’re just annoying) and it reads in fits and starts on several topics. It ends with a glossary of words the author never used in the text. The glossary is not alphabetical, either, which just seems strange. And either the index is useless, or I just wanted to find obscure facts, because the five times I referenced to index, the topic I wanted to find was not in there.

Here’s a grievance I want to spell out in particular, though:

On page 156, Marling, a professor at the U of M, says: “in the autumn, President McKinley was assassinated at the Buffalo fair…”

Wrong.

McKinley was assassinate in the summer. I suppose Marling could mount the argument that early September is essentially autumn, but that would be a lousy argument. At any rate, why even say ‘autumn’? Why not just begin the sentence by saying, “In September…”?

In the very next paragraph, Professor Marling notes that St. Louis geared up for a World’s Fair in 1904, “honoring the Louisiana Purchase of 1804.” I’m sorry, but since when do professors not check their facts? I mean, aren’t they the ones who insist that students back  up their facts with credible sources? I’m glad I attend Hamline, because if Marling is the kind of person teaching at the U of M, I shudder to think what kind of misinformation the students leave with.

My source for both McKinley’s assassination and the date of the Louisiana Purchase is my brain. However, since I (unlike Marling) recognize that my brain might be incorrect, I will now type a few key words into Google and try to find a more reputable source (something U of M professors evidently can’t be bothered to do).

McKinley was assassinated in the summer.

The Louisiana Purchase occurred in 1803.

And while we’re on the subject of Americans-who-don’t-know-their-own-history, let’s take a look at Bego’s biography of Billy Joel.

This is another half-assed book. Bego repeats the same facts – the same lines, even – several times. His sentences are terrible. Maybe I’ll start noting the worst offenders for a future post (assuming I finish the book). In chapter two, for example, we are told at least three times that Billy Joel did not have a TV while growing up. That was certainly interesting the first time, but by the third mention, I felt like Bego was insulting me, as if I’ couldn’t be trusted to hold onto the fact that Joel didn’t watch TV all evening like his peers.

Anyway, Bego’s snafu is both more understandable (he’s not a professor, after all) and less understandable (his error is from a more recent event – an event that occurred during his lifetime). On page 28, Bego states “And then on November 21, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.”

Come on, you say. This is just one mistake. One little mistake in a big book.

To that, I say: Yes, but if I caught this one mistake, who knows how many others I didn’t catch. Bego says that Billy has an older sister, is he right? I don’t know. I can’t trust him.

And getting Kenndy’s assassination date wrong is so grievous – after all, it would require the research efforts akin to asking anyone you meet on the street if they know when Kennedy was killed – that it just smacks of lazy writing. It’s not a daily blog, Bego, it’s a fucking book. Get it right.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, later in Bego’s book, he mentions that 9/11 took place on 9/12.

I would, at least, appreciate the consistency.

Monday, 18 July 2011

Today I finished reading Ice (see above). This less-than-mediocre book gets one more mention on my blog for one reason only: It represents the 800th book I have read.

“Wait!” you scream, “Surely you have already read 800 book by now!”

“Yes,” I say, adding, “calm down.”

Allow me to explain.

I maintain a list of books that I’ve read. Since 1989, I have kept and updated this list with the express goal of reading 1,000 books.

The tricky thing is…what is a book?

It’s a tougher question than you might think. For one thing, what’s the minimum number of pages a text must have before it becomes a book? My daughter, for example, has several board books. Surely they’re books, yet most of them have less than 10 pages and not more than two dozen words.

And what about periodicals such as Life and National Geographic. They’re not called books, yet they have more pages than many things that are called books.

So, I had to set some ground rules.

1) I had to have read the book cover-to-cover.

Okay, so I allow myself some leeway by stipulating that I don’t need to read the acknowledgments, index, or bibliography. But I do have to read everything else. In college this past spring, for example, I probably read about 300 pages out of a book, yet I did not add it to my list because I didn’t read the whole thing.

2) The book has to have at least 40 pages.

I’ve upped this twice. When I first made the list back in 1989 (with about 100 books listed), I didn’t care how few pages a book had; if it was a book, I counted it. Then, sometime in the mid-1990s, I decided the book had to have 32 pages. This forced me to remove dozens of books that are just too easy. I don’t think a book that has fewer pages than a phone bill and fewer words than this sentence should rightly count towards my goal. Then, just a few months ago, I upped the minimum to 40 pages as, once again, I felt there were too many easy books on the list. Also, I had read several brochures that were 32 pages, and I didn’t think they shouldn’t count, either.

3) No books for little kids.

As I’ve stated, this includes not just super-easy board books, but other books for the very young, too, such as nearly all titles by Dr. Seuss, and books like Where the Wild Things Are and Harold and the Purple Crayon. They’re great books, don’t get me wrong, they’re just too simple. I wish this wasn’t such an arbitrary rule, but I don’t know how to improve it. I mean, Owen and I just finished reading Henry and Ribsy, and I counted that book. After all, it had over 200 pages and thousands of words…but where do I draw the line? It’s tough.

4) Don’t count any book more than once

Of course, there are several books I’ve read two, three, or more times. But no book can count more than once. If I read an updated version of a book, I do amend the title and number of pages on my list as appropriate, but it still only counts as one book.

So, yeah, anyways…I’m at 800 now. If I keep up my current pace of approximately 45 books a year, I should meet my ultimate goal sometime in 2016.

Unless I change the page number rule again.

And finally, I am in favor of using the Oxford comma. It seems natural, logical. When I was in elementary school, I just assumed everyone used it and I had to unlearn using it. I’m pleased to see it’s making a comeback.

Friday, 15 July 2011

As discussed earlier, I hosted an episode of Atheists Talk in June that featured local librarian Mindy Rhiger talking about her favorite books for young free thinkers. Very young free thinkers, that is. Most of the books she cited are probably best suited for those in the under 10 years old category. If you have a child or grandchild between 1 and 10 years of age, I suggest you get some of these books. A short description accompanies each one, and the webmaster (not me) provided a link to Amazon.com to purchase the books. Many of the books are available at the public library, too.

Here is the complete list of books we talked about during that show. Here is the iTunes podcast list for the show, though at this moment it has not been updated to include June’s episode yet.

And here is Mindy’s blog, including her “Secular Thursday” posts that feature new books for children every week.

And as long as I’m directing you to go to other places on the web, check out my buddy Tim’s latest blog post, in which he shows off his new baby girl and his photo-taking prowess.

Saturday, 16 July 2011

After Owen’s unprecedented acceptance of Star Wars, I felt the need to bring some Star Trek into his life. As everyone knows, Star Trek > Star Wars, and my wife came up with the idea that showing Owen the animated series may be the best way to introduce him to that universe.

This is a great idea, really. The original series, I felt, would be too boring and dated for him. Next Generation and Voyager are way more fun to watch, but there’s also a lot more violence and other things that are, perhaps, inappropriate for a six-year old. But the animated series seemed perfect: half hour episodes of Captain cartoon Kirk flying around saving the galaxy.

We watched the first two episodes a few days ago, and this evening we watched episodes 3 and 4; “One of Our Planets is Missing” and “The Lorelei Signal,” respectively.

So far, Owen loves them! Both times he has requested watching a second episode (I would rather limit the TV viewing to one episode a night but, come on, this is Star Trek). He was very excited to learn that episode three indicated a missing planet, because he thought it meant that there must be a weapon strong enough to destroy entire planets. I told him that might be the case, but he was sure to be disappointed if he went looking for a Death Star in every sci fi world he entered.

Anyway, there are only 22 episodes total. (How come all the shows I like have so few episodes? Oh, wait – not all the shows I enjoy are like that.) Seeing Owen’s enjoyment of disk 1 has led me to put the other disks on the Netflix queueueue. I may have to bump them up to higher positions.

Also, I’ve been meaning to say: Happy Independence, South Sudan! Yes, that’s right, this month marks the beginning of a new nation in the world, bringing the total up to 196. I believe this is an all-time high. In other news, it now means THIS QUIZ has 54 answers now, instead of 53. Just to be sure, I played the quiz to ensure I could still get 100%. I can.

Tuesday, 12 July 2011

So, we were gonna go to the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Onamia this morning but, in keeping with the to-hell-in-a-handbasket nature of the rest of the state, it was closed. My father-in-law then immediately enacted his modus operande, which is stipulated thusly:

On the final day of any vacation, participants should, without fail, proceed with all due haste back home. They must neither stop for meals, entertainment, nor any other diversions.

So, they drove back home. We got in our car, too, and proceeded southward.

However, we first drove through a certain small town that was practically screaming our name. So I asked Jennifer to take some pictures (I wanted the whole family in the shot, but a quarter of us were sleeping).

After that egotistical layover, we ventured to the city of Big Lake. We used to live there and, though I’ve gotten close, it wasn’t until today that I actually re-entered the city for the first time since the day we moved out.

It was a little bittersweet, really. The house has been fixed up nicely – new siding around the windows, a new roof, some pretty landscaping in the front (where I could never seem to get the grass to grow) and a shed in the back yard. We pointed out where Owen’s bedroom windows were, but he said he had no memory of living there. As we rounded the corner and drove out of town, we pointed out so many memories: the library, our favorite pizza place, our grocery store, the place where we purchased our first cell phone, even the mailbox where we mailed the letter saying “fuck you” to the elders.

We then sped on to Elk River, where we visited the historic downtown area. I was pleased to see that the city has continued in rejuvenating this area, and it appears to have transformed into quite the hubbub of activity. We stopped at our favorite bakery ever (we hadn’t been there since the day before we moved out of Big Lake – over 3 years ago). We bought three loaves of bread, enough to give us our Diamond City fix for a couple of weeks, at least, and then walked over to a local restaurant.

In the evening, Jennifer and I watched Babel. Skip it.

Wednesday, 13 July 2011

First of all, Happy Birthday to my sister! She continues to lag behind me by several years but, from a percentage viewpoint, she is catching up.

Second, at Toastmasters today, I gave speech #5. I got off to a quick start in Toastmasters, giving speeches #1 – 4 in December, January, February, and March, respectively. But I wasn’t assigned any speeches in April or May, and I declined a speaking assignment in June due to my super-stressful college class.

My speech today was titled “A Short History of #1” and I based the content of my speech on THIS BLOG POST. I went overtime on my speech for the first time ever – but not by much; I probably wrapped it up within 15 seconds.

The Competent Communication book that comes with membership to Toastmasters has ten units, each one a different speech and a different aspect of public speaking to work on. So now I’m already half done with those then. Once I finish all ten, I get an award, which includes a certificate, a letter to my manager, and a couple of free books (on public speaking). I’m gonna shoot for that goal. Five more speeches. I hope to accomplish this before my next birthday (I have just under 11 months).

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Today I carpooled with a co-worker. I haven’t done much carpooling lately, but today he and I decided to try making a go of it.

I think I probably put more miles on my car in the past 12 months than any other comparable time frame, actually. For the first several years we owned the Cavalier, I didn’t have to drive that far to work.  From 2006-2008, I carpooled to work with a couple of people. That was great, because they met at my house, meaning that on days that they drove, I didn’t even have to start my car. There were some weeks when I only drove my car to work once.

When we first moved to St. Paul, I again began carpooling with a couple of people. One person was an intern, so she left for college pretty early on. The other guy eventually moved to Roseville, so he wasn’t as convenient anymore. He’s the same guy I carpooled with today. The downside is, I still have to drive as far as Roseville even on days that I don’t drive. But the upside is, less wear and tear on the car.