Mad as a Hatter

1. Feeling pretty jetlagged. Circumstances this past weekend really messed with my sleep schedule.

2. Should also mention that I'll have spotty internet access for the next week or so.

3. From Twitter: Spacewalker Bobby Satcher just said, "...give a shout out to the Twitterverse."

From the universe to the Twitterverse. Silly Dr. Satcher. Doesn't he know that in space, no one can hear you tweet? I guess he just doesn't appreciate the microgravity of the situation.

Still... it's kinda cool. But also oddly scary.

4. Found a couple of interesting items in SkyMall.

The "Body Figure Enhancing Pads" caught my eye first. Diet until you look more like a sick figure than a healthy human being, but don't worry, we can fix that! Just slip these pads into your jeans and it'll look like you actually still have curves and a butt! All the fun of padding your bra, but upside-down! (Just don't try to sit down...)

Also, for you Yankee fans:

For only $799, you can buy a seat from the original Yankee Stadium!

Better yet, you can get two for $1499!

If that's out of your price range... never fear!

$99 will buy you an authentic chunk of freeze dried Yankee Stadium grass! But wait! Only $21 more, and you can get a square foot of Yankee Stadium sod! Better yet, $280 gets you four square feet! It even comes with a free bag of Yankees grass seed, which would otherwise cost $25. (And stoners thought their grass was expensive...)

Other items of interest:

Truck Antlers! They go in the windows to make your truck look like a deer! How precious. And hiliarious. BTW, you can't close your windows all the way because the antlers are there, so you'll probably get that annoying whistling sound at highway speed. And if you open the window, the antlers will fall out. Possibly causing an accident in the next lane over.

Windmill for your cell phone! Yes, now you can make use of all that hot air. This backup battery for your favorite portable electronics not only has a solar panel (like several others on the market), but also a small wind turbine. Just stand around holding this giant battery up in what is hopefully a decent breeze and, eventually, (probably after a few hours on a good day), it will recharge. Yay for green power!

Telekinetic Obstacle Course. The headband reads your brainwaves, and, based on theta wave activity, adjusts the power to a fan which holds a ball aloft. Focus, and you can get the ball to go up and down. Use a knob (so much for TK) to rotate the board, allowing you to maneuver the ball past one of nine interchangeable obstacles. Wow.

But I saved the best for last:

Underwater Cell Phone System

Now, not even the depths of the ocean can keep you from those vital "Hey, I thought I was on vacation, dammit!" conference calls. For a mere $1790 (plus tax and shipping), you can get this floating antenna and make cell phone calls while scuba diving! Never be out of touch with your favorite telemarketer again! "But wait," you say. "It's a floating antenna? How am i supposed to use that while diving?" Quite simple! A 40 meter cable connects the antenna to the Bluetooth headset built in to the mask. Because of course the excellent voice quality of Bluetooth will work just fine through water. Of course, if anyone else happens to be diving in the area with a tether to the surface, you just know you're going to get all tangled up together. But no matter. You can always call for help - or call each other! Just make sure not to dive more than, say, 38 meters down (have to leave some wiggle room and all - waves, horizontal distance, etc).

SkyMall can be entertaining and amusing. Every once in a while, it pops up something cool and interesting like the giant cupcake of doom or the recycled plastic composter or something (which can generally be found elsewhere for 2/3 the price). But sometimes I worry that there's actually a market for some of this stuff. And sometimes, it just seems to highlight everything that's wrong with this world.

Had a good day yesterday (finally!). Feeling back to my old crappy self after getting off those pills. Still not great, but at least not crappy and drugged. Was worth a try, anyway.

So I went into the city and spent the day with my sister. Walked around central park. Finally got rid of the Reverse Tooth Fairy coins that I've been carrying around in my pocket this whole time. Tossed them into a fountain in the park. (If found by the park service - there's a guy whose job it is to clean and maintain the fountains - the money goes to maintaining the park. More often, though, the coins are picked up - illegally - by homeless people. Hopefully, Tooth Fairy money will bring luck and good things, either way.)

Also tried frozen custard for the first time, since they were selling it at the Boathouse in the park where we had lunch. It's a lot like ice cream, but thicker and smoother. (According to Marc Summers, it's also made with more egg, served colder, contains less air, and must be served fresh - within minutes of coming out of the machine.) So that was pretty cool. (And listening in to snatches of conversations from neighboring tables was interesting, too...)

From there, we went to the Met. Sis was hoping to find something of interest for her class in the newly (re)opened American Wing. That didn't work out so well, but there were still some cool things to see. A view into the life of generations past. But they also had these cool interactive touchscreen displays at various points. Including one that dealt with colonial-era intercontinental trade (triangle trade and beyond). I was looking at that (sis had gone on to the next room) when a woman (late middle age) walked up to look at it, too. We started talking about the displayed trade route for Chinese porcelain, which was reportedly shipped around Africa to Europe. I was struck by how difficult that trip would have been, especially taking cargo as delicate as porcelain around the Cape of Good Hope. She was saying that there should have been other stops (not shown) along the way. We had a rambling discussion, ultimately deciding that we would have shipped it around Asia (avoiding the difficult mountain crossings), offloaded around Egypt (where the Suez Canal is now), relayed overland, filled the first ship with spices, rugs, and other Arabian products, sent that back to China, and sent the porcelain on another ship, to be relayed across the Mediterranean. We had fun, as she said, "rewriting history." Then we went our separate ways. Been a while since I've done something like that.

Left the museum to go back to sis's place, hung out there with her and the kids, and had a great time. Best day I've had in a long time.

In other news...

I've been enjoying my Kindle. Read a bunch of Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World, several books by Mark Twain, Alice and Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass, and now I'm on to an 800-page book on Norse mythology. Amazing. And I've still yet to actually purchase a book, thanks to Project Gutenberg.

Playing Scrabble with sis led me to remember a favorite word of a friend of mine. "Lagniappe." It's a Creole word meaning an extra or bonus. Basically, a little gift given "just because." Neat little word. Thought I'd share. (No, it wasn't actually used in the game.)

Take a look at this picture. Notice anything odd? It's something I've been wondering about. "Fat Free ReddiWip." ... "Made with real cream!" How does that work, then? They use real cream and then skim off the fat? That's even stranger than the Ben & Jerry's ice cream I came across a few years back which boldly proclaimed "Made With Real Skim Milk and Cream!" ... which two ingredients, mixed in the proper proportions, would result in... whole milk, the original product from which skim milk and cream are made.

To the good people at Community Energy:

I recently received your letter explaining that you would be raising your prices due to the "increasing price of solar power in New Jersey."

This at first confused me. The sun, though steadily burning its finite supply of fuel, surely cannot be appreciably different in the quality or quantity of its output. If it is, then I've got a lot more to worry about than an extra 2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Solar technology has been around for some time, and any improvements in that technology should, on the whole, serve to make it cheaper and more efficient (else they wouldn't really be improvements, per se).

Then it occurred to me. In the time since we signed up for your renewable energy plan, the sun over New Jersey actually has grown dimmer and the hours of daylight shorter. I am happy to explain to you, however, that this phenomenon is known and understood. It is called "winter." It is the phase in the Earth's orbit in which the northern end of the axis points away from the sun, reducing the quality and quantity of light which hits the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere. Fortunately, though I can only prove it through the logically imperfect process of induction, I can say with reasonable confidence that by March 1 (your proposed effective date for the price increase) winter will have passed and New Jersey will once again benefit from a brightly shining sun. In fact, with the winter solstice having already been passed, you may have noticed that the days are already getting longer.

So, unless there's some other factor which I have failed to consider, you may relax and be confident that an increase in the supply of solar power is soon to come.

Sincerely,

Paul-Gabriel Wiener

Caught a bit of a broadcast from Chicago today. It was the McDonald's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Being broadcast (live, I believe) December 1st.

Let me repeat that.

The McDonald's Thanksgiving Day Parade. On December 1st.

Right.

And the commentators... There was a mixed group of horses going by. Some full size, but also some kids on ponies.

W: There are those little horses. I don't know how they do it.
M: They probably stop feeding them after a couple of days, so they don't grow anymore.
W: You are so smart!

The last two lines were obviously joking, but she sounded like she meant the first one. And I don't think he knew where ponies come from, either.

The one thing I can say for it all is that they took the time to play Twist & Shout over the PA or something. (Covering over a marching band that was passing by the camera at the time, but what can you do?) A parade, in the streets of Chicago, with Twist & Shout (the Beatles version) blaring out and parts of the crowd singing along. Very cool. Though, since I only caught the end of the song, I do wonder what float I missed going by. But hey, it's nice to know that a classic movie of my childhood has not been forgotten.

As for the rest... all I can say is what's in the tag: What In Fragnation?

You know that Carrie Underwood song, "Before He Cheats"? It's been out for a little while now, and I've been wondering about it.

For those of you who don't know the song, it goes like this: "He went off with some bimbo, so I totally trashed his precious car. That'll teach him."

First of all... How did this escape the country stations into my airwaves?

Second... Let's consider the legal issues involved. If they were married, then cheating is grounds for divorce. By trashing their car, she's ruined what could have been a very good case. They're still getting the divorce, but that car (and probably more) is coming out of her share.

If they weren't married, then what it comes down to is that he left his girlfriend for another woman. It happens. And Carrie is now guilty of a little thing called "Willful Destruction of Property." In Michigan, the top hit on my quick search, it's a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to 3 times the value of the damaged property.

Either way, she's screwed herself for the sake of a bit of petty fun. And is now crowing about it. Brilliant.

Meantime... he left her (here's a Google Image search), and she responded by throwing a tantrum. Which is the shallow one here?

Did she ever stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, the reason he left is that she's... I don't know... a jealous pyscho?

What in fragnation?

Just stumbled across the Shakespeare Fishing Tackle Company, a brand of fishing equipment that, according to their history, was founded in 1897 by "William Shakespeare, Jr., an avid fisherman of 27 years" (27 years in 1896, when he started designing the equipment he would sell the following year). Their signature brand of freshwater rods? Ugly Stik (sic).

Pardon me, I think my head just exploded.

Well, the shoe fits, so I must acquit. Or maybe it means I'm Prince Charming? Or... no, wait... If the shoe fits... wear it.

Looks nice, fits comfortably, Mom likes them better than my old ones... things are good. Yay!

In other news, I a got a letter in the mail today to acknowledge/confirm that I chose email instead of paper delivery, so they don't have to send me any more letters. Gotta love it.

(In truth, I'm glad they did. Means someone can't hack my account and change the delivery settings without my finding out about it. Still, you gotta appreciate the irony.)

In yet other news... We've just taken a step closer to Back To The Future II's vision of 2015.

In that future, Marty orders a Pepsi, only to be served a vitamin-enriched Pepsi Perfect:



Meanwhile, just this month, the Coca-Cola company came out with a new product: Diet Coke Plus.

"Each 8-ounce serving of Diet Coke Plus provides 15% of the daily value for niacin and vitamins B6 and B12, and 10% for zinc and magnesium."

Yes, that's right. It's enriched with up to 15% of your RDA of five vitamins and minerals! Wow.

But hey, it's an interesting step.

Now, where's my flying car...?