Manual Gaming Gone Wild

Rock, paper, scissors? You ain't seen nuthin' yet. I'm not at all familiar with Lovecraft, but seriously, how does this not sound fun?

From the RPS-101 Outcome Guide: Chainsaw DICES Turnip, Turnip STAINS Cup, Cup HOLDS Beer, Beer AFFECTS Chainsaw USE. Wow.

Delightfully nerdy. (Would 'Mesh prove to be the champion of this game, too?)

Not a Popularity Contest

This is a refreshingly realistic observation:

I am somewhat pleased by the fact that very few of the frontrunners in either party are particularly likeable. We have had 7 elections in a row in which we were supposed to
care about how much we "liked" the candidates [...]
[...]

We're not electing a dad or a mom or a best friend. We're electing someone who is supposed to: show up on time and sober every day, even when he's on vacation; work his (or her) tail off; juggle an enormous amount of responsibility; use good judgment with little information or time to respond; appoint reasonably competent people
to wield enormous (and sometimes lifetime) power; engage in hardball political negotiations with a sometimes-hostile and sometimes-stupid Congress.

I want a competent President who uses his head and who, at least occasionally, sees things "my way". I don't care if he or she is a jerk.

Quite so. We're electing a President, not a Prom King.

Quizzie Time: L.M. Montgomery

Which L.M. Montgomery Heroine are You?

Way to make my morning!

TT Ben

Reflections

What's in a compliment?

I don't mean a throwaway "Cute shoes!" or an "I love that dress!" but rather a real, substanative compliment, one you will never forget and will always strive to fulfill because it concerns a trait or goal you value most highly. Though the speaker probably didn't know it would strike you so deeply, it did... And you gathered it into your head and heart so that you might try to incorporate it in order to one day be more deserving. In nearly twenty six years, I can think of exactly two--which is probably as it ought to be, else one's head should be sorely swelled.

Funny things, words.

Where I wanna be...

Springtime in Princeton. Funny how just a picture can bring back all the emotions associated with this time of year there...for Yours Truly, it was always intensely bittersweet. It still is...and being unable to go to Reunions this year doesn't help any. Next year, though, next year.

Thanks to TH.

Q: Who could possibly have predicted this?

A: Pretty much anyone with a pulse. See "Well I'll Be Darned -- Norks Ignore Deadline to Shut Down Nuke Plant." (Don't you just love Andy McCarthy?) As a friend once remarked, Kim Jong Il may be nuts, but he knows what he wants and is acting very rationally. Et voila... Some days ago--maybe it was last week?--C-SPAN2 had on a panel discussion regarding NK, and one of the panelists drily remarked that it would be very interesting if someone were to do the research to find an agreement of any kind, nuclear or otherwise, that NK had actually ever followed. Indeed it would.

Nor is it difficult to predict that Ahmadinejad & co. have been taking copious notes for quite some time. Whatever else they may be, naive and stupid they are not, particularly given their most recent success.

SmorgasBorge

Happy April Fools', y'all!

Some year I'll remember to plan some sort of practical joke, but this year, it will have to be someone else's wit instead. A few days ago, I was noodling around YouTube, looking for Victor Borge clips to show El Novio, and I was pleasantly surprised to find several.

For your April Fools' amusement, some vintage Borge--comedy with a musical touch:

Hungarian Rhapsody

Two versions of "Phonetic Punctuation"

Czardas duet-duel

Intro (in Minneapolis) Parts 1 and 2

Warning: since this is comedy from a slightly different day and age, you may find it lacking in shock and offense. You may, however, laugh anyway.

Yip, yip, yip

For the Nomad Little Bro: little Flat-coat furballs.

The Hammie and The Broccoli

I used to use the expression "toe-wigglingly happy," though I think people found it puzzling. But no more! With this expert demonstration by a wee hamster experiencing the transcendent joys of His First Broccoli, the days of befuddlement are ended!

Courtesy of Cute Overload, purveyor extraordinaire of warm fuzzies and the greatest site on the interwebs.

Fusion Flauting

Despite my firm--nay, passionate and immutable--string loyalties, I do think this "beatbox flute" concept is creative and well-done...as well as very entertaining listening:



That and I have a soft spot for Axel Foley and the Beverly Hills Cop theme.

Quizzie Time: Tarot Card

You are The Star

Hope, expectation, Bright promises.

The Star is one of the great cards of faith, dreams realised

The Star is a card that looks to the future. It does not predict any immediate or powerful change, but it does predict hope and healing. This card suggests clarity of vision, spiritual insight. And, most importantly, that unexpected help will be coming, with water to quench your thirst, with a guiding light to the future. They might say you're a dreamer, but you're not the only one.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

h/t Jeff the Baptist

Hmm.

Is there anyone who actually adores writing research proposals? I'm going to guess no...

Teensy Study Break

I saw printouts of these lying in the building printer this morning and thought they were entirely too funny (and entirely too true!) not to pass on:

Application for a Boys' Night Out
Application for a Girls' Night Out

Hehe...Yes, I'm sure those have likely been floating around in cyberspace for years, but (1) they're still hilarious and (2) see blog subtitle above.

Movies that Move Men?

From the Amazon.com Screening Room Blog:

The Today show conducted a survey that stated guys actually enjoy "chick flicks." That's all well and good, because far be it for us gals to stereotype what gets men choked up. Yet, looking at their Top 7 Movies That Make Guys Cry list, something seems amiss. Do guys really know guys who cried in The Notebook? In Titanic? In even Gladiator?The rest of their top four are Dead Poets Society, Rudy, Saving Private Ryan, and Legends of the Fall.

Intriguing! I have to agree: a few of the titles Today lists don't really seem to belong on that list. For the male reader(s) out there, which is more correct, the Today list or the Amazon list? Do both miss the boat? What movies, if any, have tugged at your heartstrings or have otherwise strongly affected you emotionally? Why? By all means, please weigh in; I'd love to hear!

Yes, I looked for a video clip of the classic Tom Hanks/Victor Garber "Dirty Dozen" scene from Sleepless in Seattle (possibly one of the Nomad Dad's favorite movie moments ever), but couldn't seem to find one floating around there on teh interwebs. I would've figured it would be out there. Anyone else know where one is?

Bernard Lewis Lecture & New AEI Mag

While poking around online to see whether AEI had put up its own video of Bernard Lewis' 2007 Irving Kristol Award Lecture, which I watched on CSPAN 2 last night--which I hope they do eventually--I noticed that AEI is producing (has released) a new magazine in print and online, The American. Undoubtedly everyone else is already aware of this and I'm behind the times as usual! Thought I'd mention it anyway. Since I really should go feed fish and work on writing my due-uncomfortably-soon prelim that has repeatedly gotten second billing to this semester's plentiful and substantial academic obligations, I only perused the titles; nevertheless, it looks promising. Whoever does have time, go forth and read.

Stop the Presses

Slackenerney...writes a thesis?? Now there's a plot twist for you!

At any rate, perhaps that will reassure El Novio: if even Mike Slackenerney can write a thesis, I'm sure I can too, someday. (I don't think you're actually reading this, but you can be reassured all the same.) Today, however, is not that day.

What's Leubh Got to Do With It?

In honor of Valentine's Day and celebrations everywhere of love and/or flowers and sweetened fat in the form of chocolate--70% dark, please!--John McWhorter discusses a bit of the history of that certain feeling:

Recently I was on a panel about language "usage and abusage." The idea was for me and three other language specialists to answer the audience's questions about why there is such an epidemic of "sloppy grammar" afoot in America. "Why are people using interface as a verb?" "What's with ‘nucular'"? [...]

The reality that animals and plants have changed eternally has gained a pride of place in enlightened conversation, such that creationism is on the defensive. On the other hand, the general public has yet to join the 21st or even 20th century when it comes to language. The educated person is taught that a language is something enshrined in its "right" form in dictionaries and Strunk & White, such that any departures from this book and guide are "mistakes."

In fact, it is every bit as inherent and inevitable for languages to change as it is for animals and plants to. What we are taught to recognize as "mistakes" are simply tomorrow's version of the language.

Valentine's Day provides an object lesson, in that humble yet marvelous word — love. A simple, proper word, some might believe. But, in fact, like all words, it has a chaotic mess of a history.

It is one of several offshoots of a little piece of lexical kudzu that some bands of land-hungry Neolithic farmers infected in Europe. We only know so much about them. Apparently they were eager to make the world safe for horses, wheels, and patrilineal inheritance, and they emerged either on the steppes of southern Russia or in what is now Turkey. But the language they brought with them when they spread westward into Europe is the seed for most of today's European languages.

In that language there was a word, leubh, that meant "to care" or "to approve of." In each region of Europe these people's language spread throughout, leubh settled in with them and morphed into different shapes and meanings, rather like Web log became blog.

By two millennia ago, this was happening to leubh in the language that was soon to become "Englisc." The word love was one outcome — one may well have love for something that one cares for or approves of. Love was as a noun, but quickly started being used as a verb as well. That is, when you say, "I love you" to someone, you are using a word that began as a noun just as fax, interface, and green-light did.

Yet we would have little interest in an early Englisc-speaking shepherd scolding us for using love as a verb. And love was only part of the story anyway. Meanwhile leubh also morphed into what we know as leave — not as in departing, but as in the archaic expression "I give you leave to … ," or in other words, it meant "approval." This leave is more alive to us as it was bound into the word belief — belief means approval. Like other nouns, belief was turned into the verb believe.

Plus, notice the jump from leubh to leave: people started "mispronouncing" leubh just as you-know-who pronounces nuclear as nucular. But the planet keeps spinning and we have no sense that the "proper" pronunciation of belief is "beleubh." It was the same with the transformation of leubh into love. Every time we say love or belief, we are, technically, mispronouncing leubh!

[...] One could note that the word love is the descendant of an ancient word that contained within it desire, approval, belief, and permission. That's sweet, but a tad antimacassar.

The word love that we will hear in such proliferation today is one dollop of restless horsemen's heedless splattering, unconcerned with its multifarious fates, of leubh all over Europe.

Ultimate Nose Shot

Because the world's cutest black wet noses are Flat-coat noses!

The Danio Diaries

Since I probably shouldn't be blogging about my own benchtop misadventures research even though it's rather tempting, how about someone else's instead? Ergo, tomorrow morning Keith Cheng is giving Grand Rounds, speaking on "From Cancer Genetics to Surprise Insights into Human Pigmentation from Zebrafish." From the condensed descriptions of what they do:

In order to discover new vertebrate genes that control tissue differentiation, we have performed a screen for histological mutants using larval array technology developed in our laboratory. Both organ-specific and multi-organ mutations were found, including
one with cytological phenotypes highly reminiscent of cancer. We expect the mutations to affect key decision points in processes including cell polarity, cell proliferation, and cell-cell interaction.

Oooh, tissue differentiation! Most interesting, no? Dr. Cheng's most recent Big Splash is the identification of the gene causing the golden mutation in zebrafish, the putative cation exchanger slc24a5. Should be a good talk all around!

Tale of Two Driveways

Mr. Edwards' Builds His Dream House: the Saga Continues. Reminds me a bit of the days back in the 'Bunk & the 'Port. (Which, as an added bonus were practically the safest places to be during the Gulf War.)