Things I Did Not Know Last Month
- The reason I didn’t know what a rowan tree looks like is, apparently, that I’ve always seen them labelled as either “European Mountain Ash” or “Dogberry” trees. So, rather than being some esoteric European tree, they’re all over the place. This will make my offensive against the malevolent beings much simpler.
- The oldest joke in the world is a fart joke. Followed closely by a “boat full of girls in lingerie” joke. Based on a couple of movies I’ve seen lately the science of comedy hasn’t advanced at anything like the rate of the physical sciences, that’s for sure.
- Australians know a lot more about good coffee than North Americans.
- Canada is getting a supercomputer 30 times more powerful than our current best one–that’ll be enough power to place the machine in the top twenty in the world. In case you were just thinking “who still builds supercomputers in the era of Beowulf clusters?”, note that this machine is equivalent in power to 30,000 desktop machines.
- There is seriously a Miss Downhome pageant. And those are seriously the events in the competition. Sigh.
- Much of anything about beyond the obvious (at least “obvious” to the seriously progressive people) generalities about the National Endowment for Democracy. Amazing the difference that two minutes can make.
- I am remarkably unfamiliar with which words constitute the 100 most common in the English language.
- Squirrels are metal.
- There is no definitive answer to the question “where did the term ‘eighty-sixed’ come from?” Most of the theories sound plausible, but as you read through the list you start to feel like someone is playing games with you. For the record, I have never been eighty-sixed from a bar (although I should have been at least one time), but I have been from a house party.
- Google Street View will happily show you a picture of the building I work in when I visit Melbourne. You can only see interstates near the Boston office, though.
- 2042 is the year that the US Census Bureau predicts that “whites” will no longer be the majority in the USA. This should be even more fascinating than watching the world change as the Boomers age.
- You can play a kind of D&D on Facebook. That’s still not enough to get me to change my position as a militant Facebook Luddite, but it did make me pause for a moment.
- Robert Fripp does fumetti comics in his diary.
- Video games can be used to provide a kind of metaphoric understanding of some aspects of mental illness.
- It’s pretty simple to get something posted to Boing Boing.
- Bruichladdich has the wackiest web cam going: the Watch Whisky Mature cam.
- Some things that might, on a naive analysis, seem a bit ridiculous are actually completely self justifying. Like an exploding banana mask. (I am now using the term “exploding banana mask” whenever I am asked to justify a ridiculous decision that I utterly disagree with.)
- US border guards are now checking for “external penile rigidity devices”, and will seize them. They actually have a (newly revised) guideline on them. This is possibly the funniest thing yet in the post-9/11 security theatre category. (It’s also a very spooky reminder of creeping authoritarianism, but we’ll ignore that in the face of the funny.)
- Canada Post delivers to a larger area than the postal service of any other nation
- Cattle align themselves on a north-south axis. Now I should never get lost on a cattle ranch.
- There is a serious downside to my atheism.
- They are planning not one, not two, but three sequels to Hard Core Logo.
