Start Your Reindeer!

Four hours until Norad Tracks Santa 2007 officially kicks off the Santa tracking for the year. I'll probably catch up with the trackers in the morning. All the interesting things are happening when I'm asleep lately, but since I all but hibernate through the winter, that doesn't take much.

Happy Solstice

I'm a little late on the Solstice well-wishing, but only because I was asleep at 1:08 a.m. EST today. Hooray for more daylight! It's all uphill until June.

Just how dumb do shoe saleswomen think I am?

Thanks in part to my new daily walking regimen (more on that some other time), I found myself in need of new daily-wear shoes. Being as I am taller than average, I have correspondingly larger-than-average feet. Being as I am of Swedish heritage, those larger-than-average feet can be called "boat-like." Both of those add up to it being easier for me to find sneakers in the men's department, but that is neither here nor there in this instance. In short order, I had found a pair to replace my worn out ones, and headed to the checkout counter. The saleswoman rang up my purchase, and I swear, actually said, "That will be $24.99. Are you sure that will be all? If you spend $35, you can get $7 off."

Let's gloss over for a moment, as my brain did, the fact that I had actually managed to find a comfortable and not entirely ugly pair of sneakers in under 5 minutes and had settled on purchasing them in almost record time. In fact, my brain was so busy glossing over that tidbit that it failed to catch the next thought, which actually made it out of my mouth, "Spend $10 more to get $7 off? The math just doesn't add up there."

Plea for Fruit Related Help

I have recently developed a taste for grapefruit. However, I failed to concurrently develop an innate knowledge of grapefruit-eating technique, and online instructions to "scoop out the sections with a spoon" are not as helpful as they may seem (for instance, do you scoop from the membrane side or the peel side of the section?). I started off trying to scoop the sections out of a halved grapefruit with a teaspoon. This was almost as effective as using a citrus reamer, so I switched to an iced tea spoon, which is narrower with a shallower bowl. I've managed to work into a technique of forcibly digging out one section, tearing the membrane between the missing section and the adjacent section, then working the spoon around the point of that section and wedging it off the peel. This, too, has given unsatisfactory results, unless one of the unsung benefits of grapefruit juice is as an eyeglass cleaner. Around the time I proved that it is, in fact, anatomically impossible to lick grapefruit juice off one's own elbow, I remembered that there exists a utensil helpfully called a "grapefruit spoon," and I procured a set of two. These do not come with instructions.

So, I am asking for help. I know at least two of my readers have extensive grapefruit eating experience. Does someone want to step up with some detailed instructions?

International Animal News

British trout make a run for the border.

Having realized that, to predators, they are the proverbial fish in a barrel (or just following their natural mating instincts), farm-raised trout in the UK have been photographed leaping out of their farm pond into a narrow culvert supplying the pond with fresh water. From the Big Leap, the trout have a 30-foot swim against the current before they get to the watercress fields on the other side, where apparently there are otters who see the opportunity to get both the fish and salad courses in one fell swoop. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Penguinal Synchronicity

We stopped in the craft store today to pick up one quick item. The second display that greeted us on the way in the store was a wall of these

The image is a tad on the small side, so to save everyone from squinting, it is a decorate-your-own cookie jar, and the one on the box is decorated to say "I (heart) Mom, Love, Janet."

In the words of Sheldon, from The Big Bang Theory, "This is one of those events that people unfamiliar with the law of large numbers would call a coincidence."

Universe to Solar System: Get Bent

Voyager 2 made its way past the solar system's termination shock--the beginning of the end of the solar system--some time back in August, and NASA has finally crunched enough of the numbers to discover that the solar system is bent.

How Geeky Am I?

This is the opening of my new favorite TV show, The Big Bang Theory (and if the WGA and the AMPTP can come to a mutually acceptable agreement, I can subsist on more than 8 episodes of it).



Now, the fact that this is my favorite TV show might make me slightly geeky. Really, watch the show--8:30 p.m. Mondays on CBS. Stepping up on the geek ladder, I TiVo the program. That leads inexorably to using the TiVo's frame-by-frame advancement feature to go through the flashing montage of images, and once I did that, it was just a hop, skip and a jump to indexing them. The full opening sequence is 20 seconds long, 13 seconds once the zoom through the solar system to Earth is done. In those remaining 13 seconds, 108 images flash. I was only completely baffled by 9 of them.

1. Cells undergoing mitosis
2. Two-cell stage zygote
3. micro-organism, type unknown
4. Volcanoes
5. Plant, large palm
6. The emergence onto land
7. Rocky coastline, possibly with seals
8. Dinosaur
9. Stegosaurus and apatosaurus
10. Mammoth
11. Chimpanzee
12. The Neanderthal part of The Evolution of Man
    
13. Stone wheel
14. Cave painting of hunters with deer-like game
15. Stonehenge
16. Moai, aka Easter Island statues
17. Stone carving of face, possibly South American
18. Machu Picchu
19. Olmec statue
20. Mayan pyramid
21. Giza plateau
22. The Sphinx
23. Hindu goddess in high relief
24. Mosaic of face
25. ????
    
26. Statue of Zeus
27. The Parthenon
28. Jesus with crown of thorns
    
29. ????
    
30. Great wall of China
31. Notre Dame de Paris
32. The Taj Mahal
33. The Leaning Tower of Pisa
34. Statue by Michelangelo (maybe the David?)
35. Da Vinci's “Vitruvian Man” (the genitals have been removed)
36. Old map, not sure of where
    
37. Viking Longboat
    
38. Crusader
39. The purchase of Manhattan
40. Joan of Arc
    
41. Napoleon charging
42. Pilgrims landing
43. Boston tea party
44. Great Seal of the United States
45. Declaration of Independence
46. Abraham Lincoln
47. George Washington
48. The Constitution of the United States
49. Presidential portrait of Grant
    
50. General U.S. Grant on horseback
51. ????
    
52. Covered Wagon
53. Photo of a Civil War amputation
54. Locomotive
55. Old West newspaper office
    
56. Man panning gold
57. ????
    
58. ????
59. A Russian cathedral
60. Parade float for Prohibition
61. ????
    
62. Lightbulb
63. London Bridge
64. Eiffel Tower
65. Statue of Liberty
66. Four women on farm equipment
67. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
68. ????
    
69. Horse, with a man on some sort of horse-drawn transportation
70. 6 people in an early automobile
71. ????
72. Teddy Roosevelt
73. Biplane
74. Mount Rushmore
75. WWI soldier
76. Einstein
    
77. Group of 6 P-51 Mustangs
78. “E=mc2” on a chalkboard
79. Dribbled paint painting, possibly Jackson Pollack
    
80. Aerial view of a subdivision
81. Wood-paneled soft top convertible, postwar vintage
82. Two people at a jukebox
83. Astronaut on a spacewalk
84. Space Shuttle liftoff
85. Pack of birth control pills
86. Surgeons in a modern operating room
87. Computer chip
88. Bank of magnetic tape computers
89. 3.5 inch floppy
90. ????
    
91. Subway train
92. Hollywood street sign
93. Martin Luther King, Jr. illustration
94. Disco ball
95. Rollerskates
96. Sony Discman
97. Computers with 5.25 drives
98. ????
    
99. Old cellular phone
100. Satellite Dish
101. Guy on a skateboard
102. Berlin Wall
103. Bullet train
     
104. Guy on Snowboard
105. Kids playing with the original Playstation
106. Oil pump
     
107. Digital camera display with a picture of a woman
108. Fireworks