popplers

Fountain fun

I knew that Mentos + diet soda = whoosh, but these guys take it to a whole new level. They're solidly in the midst of their fifteen minutes: they were featured on NPR's All Things Considered a few weeks ago ("Orchestrating Mixed-Media Art with Mentos"), in the Boston Globe yesterday ("Mainers earn Internet fame for tricks with Mentos, Diet Coke") and last night on Letterman. And our friend Ben actually knows them!

Mentos: the fwwooooshmaker.

You don't have to be a weatherman

Current weather forecast for the holiday weekend: bring SCUBA gear.

Still, it could be worse.

A 117-mile stretch of the Thruway between Syracuse and Schenectady has reopened this morning after flooding from torrential rain swept away homes and businesses and forced mass evacuations in New York and Pennsylvania on Wednesday. […]

[…] Thruway Authority engineers and maintenance employees inspected and used equipment such as snow plows and sweeper trucks to clear the Thruway of mud and debris, including lumber, tires, barrels and railroad ties. […]

Wednesday quickies!

• Don't miss the Museum of Bad Art's newest exhibit: Hackneyed Portraits.
• I've read about Twinkie "sushi" before, but this new cookbook offers down-home goodies such as Patriotic Twinkie Pie (sounds good) and Pumpkin Twinkie Bread Pudding (hmm, not sure about this one). According to an Amazon.com reviewer, one of the chapters is entitled Twinkies and Meat, and includes a recipe for "Pigs in a Twinkie" (aieee!).
• Knitted nautiloids. Knitted nautiloids. Knitted nautiloids! (They would go nicely with the squid hat.)
• Behavior modification techniques: if it's good enough for dolphins, it's good enough for me: L. R. S. (least reinforcing syndrome).

It only hurts when I laugh

Just got back from seeing the brilliantly blasphemous Eric Schwartz at Fox Run. My sides still hurt from laughing. The show was recorded and will be released as a CD in a few weeks. Eric sang lots of new material, plus some old favorites, including:

• Hattie and Mattie
• Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis
• Who Da Bitch Now
• I Don't Know You
• Houston, We Have A Problem
• Telltale Kitchen (How many folk singers can pull off rhyming drosophila with falafel?!)
• Martini

You can listen to and/or view these songs at ericschwartz.com. If you are not easily offended, please consider buying some of his fine CDs. We own Pleading the First: Songs my Mother Hates and That's How It's Gonna Be. I think that the newest CD should be titled simply, I Have No Son.

Slashfic and science

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article earlier this week entitled Reading the hand for sex distinctions. There is apparently a theory (ahem) that the length of your ring fingers correlates to the amount of testosterone that you're exposed to in utero. Catherine Salmon of the University of Redlands researched the connection between womens' finger lengths and their taste in erotica, and discussed the results of The Impact of Prenatal Testosterone on Female Interest in Male-Male Romance at the recent Human Biology and Evolution Society meeting. From the Inquirer article:

[…] Slash started in the 1970s with that sexy Star Trek duo Kirk/Spock. A quick Web search reveals dozens of stories with passages like this shower scene: "Jim ran his free hand through Spock's wet, matted chest hair, rubbing the bronze-green nipples with his fingertips…. Spock moaned…." The action gets much more pornographic at that point, and the pair eventually end up in a mind meld.

Many women find this unappealing to the point of disgust, Salmon says, but others report that it fulfills a long-held desire. She wondered whether the difference could be related to testosterone, and perhaps connected to these finger-length ratios. […]"

Reading this (especially with the accompanying illustration) brings to mind Ellen Fremedon's comments on slash shock: Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.

Lovetown

Got back last night from Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. The weather was hot and fhumid, but I spent most of the time in air-conditioned interiors anyway.

Three fun things that I did in Philly:

1. Visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art (albeit briefly). Sundays are "pay what you wish", so it didn't matter that the museum was only open until 5 pm. I took a quick stroll through the galleries, and particularly enjoyed the Brancusi and Duchamp exhibits. Also good: Someone's in the Kitchen: Culinary Design Objects from the Collection.
   
2. Segway tour of Fairmount Park with IGlide Tours. Fun, but my feet kept falling asleep.
   
3. Went to the Mütter Museum on Thursday afternoon. (They never mentioned that the College of Physicians of Philadelphia is in a pretty crappy neighborhood— there's a porno shop, a Goodwill, and housing project all close by. What a fascinating sidewalk stain! I wonder if that's blood. But I digress…) The museum is housed in a beautiful building, and touts itself as being "disturbingly informative". That's an accurate assessment. The virtual tour offers a glimpse into the collection, including conjoined twins, wax models of skin diseases, and (my favorite) sliced sections of a human head.

Pix and a restaurant review to follow.

Saturday quickies!

• Gas pumps sound like peahens in heat?! (Or are peacocks extraordinarily dumb? "His two brothers are also showing signs of confusion when it comes to finding a mate. One appears to have a crush on the family cat, and the other has been seen attempting to mate with a garden light.")
• Brilliant Colbert Report clip: Stephen interviews Congressman Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia's 8th District.
• Interesting Guardian article on MMORPGs and griefers. Article includes this (made-up?) estimate from Stephen Davis of IT GlobalSecure (a firm that specialises in developing security technologies for online games): 25% of customer support calls to companies operating online games are a result of griefing.
• Two favorites from The Quotable Sam & Max:

  Max: "I'm not a malefactor, I'm a lagomorph"

  Sam: Aww… It's a cute hydrocephalic kitten.
  Max: I'll call him Mittens, 'cause I think he'd make a fine pair of them.
  

• Wonderfully snarky review of Frank Miller's All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder from i-mockery.com. "The fourth (and most recent) issue was so late there were rumors going around that Frank Miller had heard all the criticism of the book and was taking great pains to rewrite and improve his script. Well, after reading the fourth issue, I'm here to tell you that those ugly rumors are simply not true."

Je ne sais whaaa?

We just watched the movie trailer for Sofia Coppola's new film, Marie Antoinette. What were they thinking? Because nothing says, "France, circa 1770" like New Order's 1983 hit, Age of Consent.

in•con•gru•ous
Pronunciation: (")in-'kä[ng]-gr&-w&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Late Latin incongruus, from Latin in- + congruus congruous
: lacking congruity: as a : not harmonious : INCOMPATIBLE <incongruous colors> b : not conforming : DISAGREEING <conduct incongruous with principle> c : inconsistent within itself <an incongruous story> d : lacking propriety : UNSUITABLE <incongruous manners>
- in•con•gru•ous•ly adverb
- in•con•gru•ous•ness noun

Paragon City Pizza

I'm glad that, at least sometimes, a super-hero actually stops to help a woman whose purse has been stolen. Because if it went down like PvP portrays it, well, that would be harsh.

Movie night

Thank You for Smoking (IMDb:8.1|Rot:87%)

Went to see Thank You for Smoking last night. I haven't read the book, but the film is funny (and harsh)— a slick little piece of satire with quite a cast, including J.K. Simmons, William H. Macy, and Sam Elliot. Rob Lowe is brilliant as Japanophile entertainment agency exec Jeff Megall. (Although Adam Brody almost steals it as his smarmy California assistant: "As you can see, Jeff just loves… Asian shit.") The closing line made me very happy that Devo went into finance instead of becoming a lobbyist: "Michael Jordan plays ball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk."

Bork bork bork!

Perhaps if the Swedish Chef had owned a Spagettimått, this could have been avoided.

Spagettimått!

I picked up the mail today, and found a fairly heavy FedEx envelope. I opened it and realized that it was basically a Val-Pak from some of the vendors who will be exhibiting at the DIA trade show. Most of it was unremarkable: postcards and info cards and requests for contact info. The oddest freebie was a round piece of white plastic with several holes in it. I was wondering, 'What the heck is this for?' and I flipped it over. Of course— it's a Spagettimått!

Fun with YouTube

The picture quality is really poor, but I was happy to find these episodes of The State on YouTube:

• Hormones!
  
• Superfriends
  
• Muppet Hunter

Well, I guess he had to collect something.

Philly travel writer visits Iceland's own penis museum:

[…] I had planned to visit this infamous place while in Reykjavík last month, but discovered it moved two years ago from the cosmopolitan capital to Húsavik, a fishing village of 2,500 inhabitants located on a northern peninsula jutting within a few miles of the Arctic Circle.

When I asked curator Sigurdur Hjartarson how to find him once I got to town, he said, "Just ask anyone." […]

When we visited Reykjavík in 2000, we did pay a visit to the museum (photos). But the new digs look much nicer— check out the official web page for the Icelandic Phallological Museum.

TiVo geekery

Well, we've just watched the entire Season 1 Venture Bros. DVD, from the pilot episode (The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay) to the final cliffhanger, Return to Spider-Skull Island. (Bonus: you can download a free mp3 of the boys' theme, Nick DeMayo's Look Away, from venturebros.com.)

Because teh intarweb is truly the summary of humankind's vast knowledge, we submit forthwith the following trivia: the canonical list of internyms used by Kimson Albert.

• Dia de Los Dangerous! - Kimson "Don Alberto"
  
• Careers in Science - Kimson "Peligro" Albert
  
• Mid-Life Chrysalis - Kimson "all out of condom" Albert
  
• Eeney, Meeney, Miney… Magic! - Kimson "in twain" Albert
  
• The Incredible Mr. Brisby - Kimson "Companda" Albert
  
• Tag Sale—You're It! - Kimson "Little Water Baby" Albert
  
• Home Insecurity - Kimson "Shaved Bigfoot" Albert
  
• Ghosts of the Sargasso - Kimson "Re-bort" Albert
  
• Ice Station—Impossible! - Kimson "Ba-Hey!" Albert
  
• Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean. - Kimson "Dreaded Candiru" Albert
  
• Past Tense - Kimson "25 Charisma Points" Albert
  
• The Trial of the Monarch - Kimson "Mecha-Shiva" Albert
  
• Return to Spider-Skull Island - Kimson "King Gorilla" Albert

Book Club

Most recently read:

• Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog. I think that this is the first time that I've read anything by Connie Willis. She's won a huge number of awards (8 Hugos and 6 Nebulas, at last count), and she's very funny (both as a speaker, and in her writing). This is a time-travel story crossed with a Victorian comedy of manners. Unfortunately, I've never read Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome, so I felt like I was missing a lot of the subtext. (Note: Three Men in a Boat is available as a free e-text from gutenberg.org.)
  
• Nalo Hopkinson: Skin Folk. I was lucky enough to hear Nalo Hopkinson read at Torcon, and I like the way she writes. A co-worker gave me this collection of short stories; he told me not to bother returning it— it wasn't his thing. Snake is an incredibly creepy horror story, and Fisherman is wonderful— sexy and lush. Some of the stories didn't satisfy me, but the ones that are good are very good.
  
• Wendy McClure: The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. I don't know that this really qualifies as a "read." If you're a fan of Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food or if you enjoyed Wendy's original candyboots.com web site, check out her book. As she herself puts it: Once upon a time the world was young and the words "mackerel" and "pudding" existed far, far away from one another.

Currently in the midst of:

• Mark Twain: Roughing It. I started reading this after seeing an article in the Travel section of the New York Times entitled, Mark Twain's Hawai'i. (Note: Roughing It is available as a free e-text from gutenberg.org. The Hawai'i section starts with CHAPTER LXII. Bound for the Sandwich Islands.)
  
• Eoin Colfer: The Arctic Incident. I borrowed the first three Artemis Fowl books from Cheryl a few months ago. I enjoyed the first one, and I've been (slowly) making my way through the second one. They're kids' books, but still quite enjoyable, in large part because the author doesn't write down to his audience. And it's delightful to have a child protagonist who is ruthless and Machiavellian. Who says that kids' books have to be all sweetness and light?

In the queue:

• Wendy McClure: I'm Not the New Me. The first novel from the author of The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan.
  
• Christopher Priest: The Prestige. On loan from Poz.
  
• Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City. On loan to Poz.

Alooooha!

I uploaded/ captioned/ tagged a subset of our vacation pix from Hawai`i.

This recent New York Times article on Mark Twain's Hawai'i is an interesting read:

[…] Twain spent four months in the islands in 1866, when he was 31 and working on becoming famous. His 25 letters from the Sandwich Islands, written on assignment for The Sacramento Union, are still fresh and rudely funny after almost a century and a half — a foretaste of genius and the best travel writing about Hawaii, my home state, I have ever read. […]

  

Thursday quickies!

Four things that made me smile this morning:

• Cat and Girl: Culture Wars. "Give me convenience or give me death!"
• John's essay on user interfaces, writing without interference, and the "long descent into the hell of "helpful" software": Stop helping me.
• This cartoon from Natalie Dee: unless you just buy them to prove you think of stuff.
• Defective Yeti on finally getting high-speed internet access. "Frankly, I was quite happy with dial-up (except when I was actually using it, when I was typically ENRAGED)."