breakfast

(Just... wow.)

I like eating breakfast. I often forget about the other various meals commonly eaten by my friends, but breakfast is always on my schedule. I could even be considered a breakfast connoisseur.

In my learned opinion, a cruddy protein bar does not make a good breakfast. Perhaps I should have eaten this instead.

stolen in full

Credit to Marlene

A guy from Buffalo dies and is sent to Hell. He had been a wicked, horrible man his entire life. The devil puts him to work breaking up rocks with a sledge hammer. To make it worse, he cranks up the temperature and the humidity.

After a couple of days, the devil checks in on his victim to see if he is suffering adequately. The devil is aghast as the Buffalonian is happily swinging his hammer and whistling a happy tune. The devil walks up to him and says, "I don't understand this. I've turned the heat way up, it's humid, you're crushing rocks; why are you so happy?"

The Buffalonian, with a big smile, looks at the devil and replies, "This is great! It reminds me of August in Buffalo. Hot, humid, a good place to work. It reminds me of home. This is fantastic!"

The devil, extremely perplexed, walks away to ponder the Buffalonian's remarks. Then he decides to drop the temperature, send down a driving rain and torrential wind. Soon, Hell is a wet, muddy mess. Walking in mud up to his knees with rain blowing into his eyes, the Buffalonian is happily slogging through the mud pushing a wheelbarrow full of crushed rocks. Again, the devil asks how he can be happy in such conditions.

The Buffalonian replies, "This is great! Just like April in Buffalo. It reminds me of working out in the yard with spring planting!"

The devil is now completely baffled but more determined to make the Buffalonian suffer. He makes the temperature plummet. Suddenly Hell is blanketed in snow and ice. Confident that this will surely make the Buffalonian unhappy, the devil checks in on him. He is again aghast at what he sees. The Buffalonian is dancing, singing, and twirling his sledgehammer as he cavorts in glee.

"How can you be so happy? Don't you know its 40 below zero!?" screams the devil. Jumping up and down, the Buffalonian throws a snowball at the devil and yells, "Hell's frozen over!! - - This means the Bills won the Super Bowl!!"

p.s.

These controversies over Pluto make me wish I were still teaching science. Hoo-boy, what a discussion about paradigms we'd be having.

And, check out how popular your last name is. Mine ranks at 2236.

some quiz

Clutter my comments with your results, or I'll be forced to write real posts.

The Oracle
0% Extroversion, 100% Intuition, 16% Emotiveness, 57% Perceptiveness
Heuristic, detached, and analytical to a fualt, you are most like The Oracle. You are able to tackle any subject with a fine toothed comb, and you possess an ability to pinpoint nuances and shades of meaning that other people do not have and cannot understand. Accomplishment and realization of ideas are, for you, secondary to the rigorous exploration of ideas and questions -- you are, first and foremost, a theorist. You hate authority, convention, tradition, and under no circumstances do you accept a leadership role (although, you will gladly advise leadership when they're going astray, whether they want you to or not). Abstraction and generalities are your interests, details and particulars are usually inconsequential and uninteresting. You excel at language, mathematics and philosophy.

You are typically easy-going and non-confrontational until someone violates one of the very few principles that you deem sacred, at which point you can fly into a rage. Although you possess a much greater understanding of process and systems than the people around you, you are always conscious of the possibility that you've missed something or made a mistake. You don't tend to become attached to particular theories, and will immediately discard mistaken notions once they're revealed to be incorrect (but you don't tolerate iconoclasts who try to discredit validated theories through the use of fallacies and bad data). Despite being outwardly humble, you probably think of yourself as being smarter than most other people. That's because you are. In fact, in your dealings with people your understanding of their motives is so expansive that you know what they're going to say before they say it, and in world affairs, you usually know what is going to take place before it actually does. This ability would make you unbeatable in debates if only you were a little less pensive about your own conclusions, and a little more outgoing.

Famous people like you: Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John McWhorter, Ramanujan, Marie Curie, Kurt Godel
Stay clear of: Apollo, Icarus, Hermes, Aphrodite
Seek out: Atlas, Prometheus, Daedalus

google earth

"...it's powerfully addictive—sort of like freebasing your sixth-grade Earth science class."

Most of what I remember from sixth-grade science involves awkward class discussions around the idea that the earth is millions of years old. I don't want to even imagine freebasing that.

worst openers of the year

The winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are up. These aren't the biggest winners, just ones that I liked:

Lisa moved like a cat, not the kind of cat that moves with a slinky grace but more like the kind that always falls off the book shelf when he's washing himself and then gets all mad at you like it's your fault (which it wasn't although it probably was kind of mean to laugh at him like that), although on the bright side, she hardly ever attacked Ricky's toes in his sleep.
-----
Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
-----
Christmas Eve fell upon the piazza, and the pealing, the tintinnabulous pealing, (perhaps not a pealing but an incessant tinkling, albeit an appealing incessant tinkling) of the street performers reached my ears, masking the shot, which would have rung out had not the tintinnabulations raised such an incessant tinkling that the sound died as dead as the musician who fell like Christmas Eve at my feet - his bell having been rung.

This has nothing to do with the contest, but here's a more coherent set of reasons to dislike John and Stasi Eldredge's writing on gender.

Also, it looks as though the totalitarian Chinese are squashing the freedom of having striptease funerals. Silly communists.

marquee!

This might be a fun post,
unless you're using Internet Explorer.

Credit.

Unrelatedly, this comic made me think of a table I waited on last night.

Also, what is vegetarian leather?

notes

Good post from Martin on John Woolman.

I think I'm getting restless: both these programs look really interesting. The first is a bit more practical than the second.

Greens suck. That is all.

book meme

Kept meaning to get to this, but I didn't. Until now...

1. One book that changed your life: C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. It's not a great book. If I remember correctly, Lewis encouraged people to read the later A Grief Observed instead. It was the first non-fiction book I ever read, though, and so was very exciting. It hadn't occured to me that people would just write books about ideas, rather than making me wade through characters and plots and long descriptions of sunsets over grassy meadows just to get to the point. And no, books about dinosaurs and horses and Abraham Lincoln didn't count, in part because I had read them already, and in greater part because what I wanted was something more abstract. Ironically, the thing that makes A Grief Observed so much better than The Problem of Pain is that it is far less abstract; The Problem of Pain is an attempt at building a theodicy, while A Grief Observed is what Lewis wrote in the aftermath of his wife's death. I probably wouldn't have liked A Grief Observed at the time.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: Zorba The Greek. He dances what he can't say! Don Quixote wins 2nd place.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I haven't read this book, but I really want to. It strikes me as the sort of book that would require uninterrupted time, so a desert island would be a great place to read it. 2nd place: Till We Have Faces.

4. One book that made you laugh: Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" (Calvin and Hobbes). I used to read and reread these cartoons while practicing my trumpet- reason #73 that I'm not an accomplished trumpeter.

5. One book that made you cry: Where The Red Fern Grows. It was assigned in class when I was in middle school, and I read it within a few days on the bus. And cried on the bus- it was so embarassing.

6. One book that you wish had been written: How about "Hit and Miss Evangelicalism at a Quaker Seminary for Dummies?" That would be a useful book.

7. One book that you wish had never been written: I'm going to cheat and list an entire series of books: anything written by John and/or Stasi Eldredge. I read Wild at Heart the way that Kate read The Prayer of Jabez: sitting in the college bookstore, because I was too indignant to buy it. I can boil the entire philosophy of gender down into two clauses: men want to accomplish things and be admired, women want to be protected like princesses and adored. Men secretly desire risk taking behaviors, hunting and bloodshed, and women secretly desire to be desired. If this doesn't describe your experience of your gender, then you aren't properly in touch with your gendered nature. That's far more than two clauses, but it's an infuriating series.

8. One book you’re currently reading: Meaning, by Michael Polanyi.

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: I'm going to cheat again and list two. A Poetic for Sociology would be a great follow up to Meaning, and I've wanted to read Deeply Into The Bone since junior year or so of college.

today I saw...

...a man wearing a full helmet and chinstrap in a laundromat, playing a Star Trek pinball game.

...a cute guy who leaned out his car window, noted that I looked tired, and asked if I had been working. I said that I had, but was now heading home- he told me to sleep tight and drove off.

...a couple sharing a set of earphones and swing dancing on the sidewalk.

What a lovely day.

sad sandwich story

It all starts with me and some greenhouses. I'm not much good at with plants, but having a porch for the summer inspired me to try growing some tomatoes and peppers. As much as I try to tell my plants that this isn't so, it's become sort of a plant hospice. None of the plants were particularly healthy when I bought them- I picked ones that I could get discounts on.

Some of the plants are doing better than others. I've had a salad with fresh grape tomatoes (three of them!), and the lone ivory pepper seems to me maturing well. Others of the plants are still excitedly flowering, as though it were still June. "Flowers!" my daft plants think to themselves. "Maybe these tomatoes will be ripe by frost! Flowers! Julie needs more bees on her porch! Flowers!"

The bees are amused, I'm sure. They probably have a special dance by now for "those dimwit cherry tomatoes are blooming again, the same ones on the corner porch that have been blooming all summer."

I, on the other hand, was excited to see that my hot peppers have come in. The type I've got are cherry tomato sized and bright red... and hot. I diced half of one into yesterday's scrambled eggs, and they was fantastic! The fresh basil and chives out of the herb basket didn't hurt, of course, but the pepper had a lovely taste.

This morning, I though I'd eat a tuna fish sandwich for breakfast, due to my late lack of grocery shopping. I chopped up perhaps a quarter of the remaining pepper, along with more fresh basil and chives, made my sandwich and took a big bite...

...and realized that I hadn't cooked the peppers. Furthermore, I hadn't taken out the seeds.* This sandwich was as exciting as the eggs, one could even say 'breathtaking,' 'rousing,' or 'stimulating,' but not in such a positive sense. I reopened the sandwich and spread sour cream inside, and ate it with a glass of milk to keep my tongue from curling up in a ball of regret that I had ever had such a dumb idea.

The sandwich gave me the hiccups- it was that hot. I didn't even know I could get the hiccups from a hot pepper. Hiccups and a stomachache for an hour. A lesser gardener (or a more avid grocery shopper) might have given up, but I ate the whole thing.

I still feel a bit queasy. Ice cream might help, but if I go to the grocery store then I should buy eggs, and cereal, and more milk, and all the other things on my grocery list, so I'll probably just let it go.

*Mr. Miro tells me that I should have taken out the white veins as well, as this is where much of the sneaky capsaicin hides. I did no such thing, of course.

I am infinity You may worship me, but from afar _

what number are you?

this quiz by orsa