Category: Flotsam and Jetsam

Stolen from Annika!

Instructions: Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three events, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

December 28

Events

• 1836 – South Australia and Adelaide are founded.
• 1895 – The Lumière brothers have their first paying audience at the Grand Cafe in Boulevard des Capucines marking the debut of the cinema.
• 1897 – The play Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, premieres in Paris.

Births

• 1922 – Stan Lee, American comic book writer
• 1933 – Nichelle Nichols, American actress and singer

Death

• 1984 – Sam Peckinpah, American film director (b. 1925)

Got this via email today, and I found it quite amusing. I will be adding these terms to my lexicon.
The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form a real word. Some are terrifically innovative:

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To anyone in L.A., you lucky people have the chance to go see the brilliant Eddie Izzard:
Eddie will be performing on Weds, March 29 to Saturday april 1 at 9pm(March 2nd – 5th) at:
The Coronet Theatre
366 N. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Tickets available starting Saturday, March 25 2006 at 12:00 noon PST.
TO BOOK CALL (US): 310.657.7377. NOW!
Secondly, if you really want something to puzzle your brain, check out this site. I’m totally addicted. this is not some simple internet game to pass the time. This takes serious brain work, detective skills, and thinking outside the box. In fact it takes thinking outside, inside, on top of, around, and next to the box. In fact you might need to break the box. I’m seriously addicted. At the time of this post I’m on level 11.

and the only prescription is more cowbell. Awesome.
If you don’t know what this is all about, then just go to Youtube and search for “more cowbell.” If it has Christopher Walken, Will Ferrell and cowbell, then you’ve found the right clip. An absolute classic.
Sadly, even though Saturday Night Live has had more exposure and free publicity than they’ve had in years from people posting popular and funny bits from the show, they’ve also been extremely aggressive in having unauthorized content removed from the internet due to copyright infringement.

I don’t usually post all these personality test type of things, but I stumbled upon this one recently (thanks, Beth!) that I thought nailed me pretty good. In only two questions. Crazy, scary accurate (with a dew exceptions as usual). This seems to be the consensus of almost everyone I know who took the test. Yes, I know it could just all be coincidence, standard disclaimer, bogus, blah, blah, blah. So, get to know me! Also see the link in Beth’s comment to a much more in depth description of my results.

Apparently I’m a 9 which means:

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So my latest entry on the Austin Metroblog has apparently been dugg. If you don’t really know what that means, don’t feel bad. Mostly it means some people have thought the story was worth sharing and while others post their witty, insightful, literate criticism of the piece. The troll comments are so amusing, I’d like to take them and use them as quotes like books and movies do.
“d00dzorz,. that;z u3er 1aMe!” – Trolly McTrollkin, New York Times
“This guysis like suzh a nerdburger that he should like totally marry the comic book guy from teh Simsons” – Noah Socialskills, Mom’s basement
You have to expect that kind of thing any time anything is put on the Internet for mass consumption. All in all, I find it pretty cool that someone “dugg” me and many people seem to have appreciated the post.

Thanks to Annika for leading me to discover Metroblogging, I have now begun blogging for the Austin Metroblog. Here’s hoping I can keep the pace.

Due to the fact that the number of unauthenticated commenters on my blog is far outweighed by the number of spam comments that attempt to get posted (and luckily trapped for moderation so I can delete them), I have now turned off comments for unauthenticated users. What this means is that you can not comment on any entries unless you create an account and sign in to leave a comment. I promise it’s painless and all your privacy is totally respected, protected and all that. Most people who comment here are already signed up anyway, so most of you won’t be affected. So to those who have not signed up for authentication with Typekey (you can sign up directly form the comments page), be it out of laziness, or paranoia of some worldwide internet conspiracy to steal your private data for Big Brother, I apologize. I am tired of moderating spam comments, and they are far more numerous than the comments I receive.
EDIT
I may allow unregistered commenters to comment again. I can’t decide. I really love not dealing with spam, but looking back through my old comments I started thinking it might suck to exclude those people.

Thanks to someone’s blog (or perhaps I should be cursing them), I saw something that had me wide eyed and slack jawed in its horror. Proof that Disney is a soul devouring machine of pure condensed powdered evil. I found myself appalled, and yet I couldn’t stop listening. As each consecutive clip played, I wished I could burn my own ears with a red hot poker until they were solid masses of flesh which could not be further violated. Instead I bolstered myself, summoning my strength of inner will to shake off the effects of this travesty and instead face this dark material; look this beast in the face to gain what knowledge and understanding I could without being cowed. I faced it and came out stronger, more knowledgeable of this insipid horror like some Lovecraftian hero who must be able to face monsters and demons and look them in the face to know their world and learn how to defeat them. Mark Mothersbaugh, why have you forsaken us?

There’s a subject line I never thought I’d type. For a long time there wasn’t much on TV that we watched. Usually just a handful of programs. This last season has been one of our busiest. Many of the shows we started watching to see if they would be any good, ended up canceled (Nightstalker, Threshold) while we still have many more that we are watching. I would say that a very large chunk of shows that we now watch were discovered in hindsight. We let everyone else suffer through the crap and wait to see what seems to consistently rise to the top. Eventually there are always certain shows that we can’t seem to escape. Everywhere we turn, we hear or read constant praise. When this happens and we finally decide that we must check out this show that everyone’s raving about, we will usually download or Netflix all the previous episodes, get caught up and then start recording new episodes as they air. This is how 24, Lost, House, Veronica Mars, Battlestar Galactica and possibly a few other shows came to be in our regular watching schedule (if you want to get technical, I think we actually caught up with BSG when they re-ran all of season 1 before season 2 began).
Our latest addition is Arrested Development. As with most of the other shows, I had been subtly inundated like Chinese water torture with references to how great this show was. I was always reading about how, despite its greatness, it was on the verge of cancellation because television can’t possibly let something good and original survive. Only the most cookie-cutter, bland, lowest denominator pablum was fit for our airwaves! When I heard it was canceled, I decided to finally give in and check it out because now I knew there was a finite quantity, and therefore I wouldn’t be investing myself into another indefinite television relationship (the small irony of that being now that I’m watching it, there are rumors that some other networks may pick it up).
I gotta say, I think it’s worthy of every nugget of praise that has ever been lodged into my brain. Very original and hilarious.
A few other grains of sand which have settled in my oyster hoping to irritate their way to making pearls are Scrubs and Deadwood.
With Deadwood, we don’t get HBO, so we have no choice but to download or wait for DVDs. Catching up and watching live isn’t really an option. We’ll see if Scrubs is persistent enough to break my resolve. Usually, once I’m aware of a program’s presence in my psyche, it’s only a matter of time before I give it a go. We shall see.