Jay Leno often shows funny (usually naughty) wedding
announcements. Just to refresh your memory, weddings are
announced in the form of BridesLastName-GroomsLastName. So
anyway, last Monday he had a bunch of hysterical ones. Here they
are (it helps to say some of them out loud):
Dueitt-Kute
Long-Ouch
Dugger-Bush
Beaver-Hunt
Eaton-Boner
You know public discourse has reached the next level when the Hitler comparisons start flying. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show castigates Congress and others for their use of this metaphor.
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=15751
(There is a short commercial you have to watch, but it's worth it)
This one is making the rounds again. These will make your brain
spin, even if you are a native/experienced English speaker.
The bandage was wound around the wound.
The farm was used to produce produce.
The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
We must polish the Polish furniture.
He could lead if he would get the lead out.
The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum
When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
I did not object to the object.
The insurance was invalid for the! invalid.
There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
They were too close to the door to close it.
The buck does funny things when the does are present.
A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
The wind was too strong to wind the sail
After a number of injections my jaw got number.
Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
I had to subject the subject to a series of tests
How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Google Maps includes arial/satellite photography. Because GoogleMaps makes it so easy to scroll around, you can stumble across some interseting stuff.
I just stumbled across this plane in flight about to land at the airport in Boise, ID.
Turns out others have spotted airplanes in flight using Google Maps. The previous link is from http://www.googlesightseeing.com, a site dedicated to the cool things people find using Google Maps.
MrCranky.com has never reviewed a movie he likes. His rating scale from best to worst is
1 bomb = Almost tolerable
2 bombs = Consistently annoying
3 bombs = Will require therapy after viewing
4 bombs = As good as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick
Ka-BOOM! = So godawful that it ruptured the very fabric of space and time with the sheer overpowering force of its mediocrity.
Nuke = Proof that Jesus died in vain.
Here's some choice bits from his review of the lastest Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith (he gave it 3 bombs):
Ultimately, Anakin chooses the dark side because it has a better health care plan.
If George Lucas has a filmmaking philosophy, it goes something like this: drama + special effects = more drama. By this point in the series, however, audiences have pretty much seen it all, and the only way Lucas could get anyone's attention would be to crash the nitroglycerine planet directly into the enriched uranium planet.
To say that "Revenge of the Sith" is disappointing, given that some of us have invested almost 30 years of our lives in this franchise, is like saying that Catholics were a little sad when the Pope died.
A student at MIT is requesting help to publicize a time travelers' convention he will be holding on May 7 on the MIT campus. His idea is to make this convention so well known that all future people with time-travel capabilities will know about it and come for the event. So, in the interests of helping out, here are the details:
The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
(event starts at 8:00pm)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)
Back in 1984, Infocom and Douglas Adams released a text adventure game based on Adam's Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. I remember playing this on my Commodore 64 in the late '80s.
BBC Radio 4 has converted the game into Flash so that you can play it on-line. Even better, they have two different illustrated versions of the game. It's still a text game, but with illustrations of each location as you play the game.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml
To play the game, choose which illustrated version you want, then have fun.
From Scott Adams' Dilbert Newsletter #60:
Sometimes my brain ties together things that are better left alone. Here are three things I've thought about recently:
I wonder if any cryptographers have looked at that junk DNA to see if it's a message from the designer. I'm guessing that it's a code that says something like, "I am Kaloopah, from the star system Nebulon IV. I have sent this evolution program into space as my eighth grade science project."
For example, if you go to the "The Da Vinci Code" listing on Amazon.com and scroll down a bit, you will find this section:
Statistically Improbable Phrases: cilice belt, lame saint, seeded womb, lettered dials, corporal mortification, rosewood box, sacred feminine, royal bloodline, stone cylinder, sweater pocket
Amazon's says this about the feature:
Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.
A bit of Google'ing in the blogosphere seems to indicate this feature appeared in mid-March. I actually stumbled across this on my own when looking at Amazon.com.
I wonder if this feature will interfere with people who like to googlewhack?
Okay, We Give Up
There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.
In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of socalled evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.
Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.