Thought I'd give a heads up and offer a little something for your troubles...
This next little while on the blog is going to be a time of 8Tracks playlists. I already have four ready for this week (followed by a YouTube playlist for Friday) and a few more for next week.
It's not my intent to make this a music-only blog or anything. I just had a few ideas that I wanted to get out and didn't feel like making this a semi-regular feature (coming every Wednesday or something like that).
So I'm posting 8tracks playlists for a little while.
If you're interested, stick with me and enjoy the tunes.
Like there's this article on "crash blossoms" in which missing punctuation in newspaper headlines cause a bit of misunderstanding - "McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers"..."Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim"...“Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge”..."Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts"...
The next list is one of which I am admittedly a little skeptical, it's a list of grammatical curiosities - pluralities of various animal types. There's the standard and a little odd murder of crows, but there's a number of other oddities in the canonical list: bed of clams, bloat of hippos, dazzle of zebras. It'd certainly be awfully easy for a web savvy so and so to put together such a list without any sort of citation. I love the fascinating trivia of language.
For example, there's the Latin derivations for various animal types. Pretty much everybody's down on feline and canine - that's simple as simple can be. Most of us know bovine for cows. A few folks might make out ursine for bears. But acrine for something dealing with frogs? Larine for seagull-related discussions?
Then there's a list of humorous grammar rules - such as remembering that the passive voice is to be ignored; even IF a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed; and you'll look poorly if you misuse adverbs.
And, finally, there's the outstanding quality of the Oxford comma.
Careful about the video, though, there's a chili pepper word about four words in - it's repeated a couple more times.
If you're in the Cincinnati area tonight, come on out to bd's Mongolian Grill to help out PHS's Pasta for Pennies campaign and watch me grill your food.
Heck, if you're not in the Cincinnati area - like if you're up at the University of Dayton - or down at the University of Cincinnati - or over at Miami University - or over easterly at Ohio University - northeasterly at An Ohio State University - drive into town and help with the campaign.
10% of all bills - including whatever beverages you happen to have - are donated to the campaign. Plus, 100% of all bar tips - those tips for the awesome people cooking your food LIKE ME - go to the campaign, too.
Plus we'll have our raffle set up there for you to buy tickets for.
So, let's figure you'd all spend at least $13 ($15 if you're going to go to the bar a few times) plus a couple of bucks for drinks. That's $1.70 for our campaign.
Then you buy $5 worth of raffle tickets - maybe $10 if you're suckered in by our awesome raffle prizes.
Of course, you're going to tip us at the bar for a few more bucks - like $5 or $10, let's say.
So the way I figure things, you each owe like $21.70 to the campaign...feel free to round things up to the nearest big bill.
another Lego book that apparently slipped past me but that I now have on hold at the library
Collectible minifigs coming in June - apparently $1.99 each but sold in random packaging. I always waited and bought the full set of baseball cards. This might be the same kind of thing.
I tend to be a little obsessive about my video gaming time.
I'll get a new game and play it to death, taking an hour every day or two (or four or five hours if we happen to have a few snow days) until I'm good and done with the game, rarely to pick it up again except for a nostalgic play or two months or even years later.
In the past year to so, I've gone through Mario Kart and Tiger Woods '10. Now I'm almost through with Super Mario Bros. Wii, and I can safely say that it's a hell of a game, another in the outstanding line of the Mario franchise.
The basics of game play stay largely the same as they have been since Super Mario Bros. for the NES - you start on the left and run to the right (with occasional levels of climbing to the top) in standard side scrolling fashion, but to call it an old-school side-scroller would be to sell it woefully short as the Nintendo crew have added dozens of outstanding new wrinkles to this one.
The wrinkle that I actually enjoy the least is the most typically Wii aspect to the new game, the multiplayer format. The Girl and I played together for the first third of the game or so (through three of the nine worlds), and I found the teamwork aspect more frustrating than helpful throughout. There were a number of times when one player would be trying a particularly challenging stage and would be impeded by the other player. They have provided a method through which a stronger player can assist a weaker through by allowing the weaker player to hop into a bubble in which they are impervious to damage and unable to affect the game in any way until the other player bumps into them. It's a neat creation, but I enjoyed the two-thirds of the game play that I went through solo much more than I did working as a team.
There are certain skills that can only be accomplished with teamwork, but there is nothing in the game that can't be achieved playing solo. It might be a little more entertaining to make it through with four players, but I prefer the solo options.
The other additions to the game - new penguin and flying suit costumes for the players - are far more useful and well integrated into the flow of the game. The game includes a number of levels that are most easily played with particular power-ups (penguin suit, fire flower, shrinking mushroom, etc), but in almost every case, the level can be solved without that particular power-up - just not quite as easily. With the increased options in power-ups, players are able to attempt each level in dozens of new ways.
As the levels become more difficult and - correspondingly more frustrating - the game doesn't force players to attempt the same levels over and over and over until the game is simply put away, never to be solved, instead they have added in what they refer to as a super guide in which - after a player dies eight straight times on any one level - a green power-up block with appear allowing the player to have a computer-contrlled Luigi show the way through the level. The Luigi won't show any secret rooms or find any of the super coins - more on them in a moment - but it will allow the player to progress beyond the most frustrating levels without giving up on the game entirely. It's a great option and one I took advantage of on one of the most challenging levels.
The super coins also allow for further game play, with three on each game level - some in very obvious locations, some hidden in deviously challenging but hinted-at locations. None of the super coins have to be gotten in order to beat the game, but a secret ninth world appears which can only be played once all of the super coins from a particular world are found and retrieved. This let me get through many of the levels without paying any attention to these super coins but gave me something to go back through and play the levels once I could take the time to work through each level with increased skills.
Admittedly, the existence of a fully complete walkthru on IGN made finding a number of these coins far easier - or in some cases possible - than they would ever have been otherwise, but I'm okay with using a walkthru like that. To me, it's not cheating because I'm the only one playing here. If I want to use hints, I'm going to use them.
All in all, it's a great game and one that - as the Wikipedia entry quotes Nintendo Power in saying - "works as a sequel because it maintains what made the original Mario games great while adding new features".
Deal or No Deal parody from MadTV - I love the moment at 2:40 where the contestant replies. That may be my favorite comment ever...then again at 4:17...honestly, the whole thing's outstanding.
Tickets are ordered and hotel reservations are made.
We're going back to the nation's capital, this time with tickets to see Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny: a cautionary musical performed at the Kennedy Center. It's based on some book that I haven't read but of which The Girl is a big fan.
The snow has fallen - bringing us our fourth snow day of the year at PHS and our snowiest February ever in the Cincinnati area - and the world is fairly well blanketed by the two feet of snow that have fallen in the past week and a half. It's a mess out there, folks.
And still, Children's Hospital in Cincinnati is, I'm sure, open and treating patients who can't take a day off from their chemotherapy, from their radiation, from their fight to live another few days or weeks or - if they dare to dream - years.
I get to spend another day on the couch, working through Super Mario Brothers Wii, doing another load of laundry or two, watching the dogs romp through the backyard, and playing on the internet because mother nature has been kind enough to grace me with her snowy form of hooky.
Other families get to call the cab company and hope for a ride to the hospital. They get to wake up after spending another in an endless string of nights in the intensive care unit, holding their child's hand in hopes that they will get to eventually take that child home. They live out of suitcases, take short trips to their house, and come back day after day no matter the conditions of the roads. Driveways go unshoveled because they have to be back at the hospital if their child is to have any hope to fight the disease that mother nature has been unkind enough to grace them with.
If they're lucky - if their child fights the odds and gets to head home - then they get to spend another few years fighting for the educational assistance that their child is likely to need for the rest of their school career as the life-sustaining chemotherapy often causes damage to developing brains leaving their daughter, their son with learning disabilities and challenges that no one - much less a child who has fought for their life - should have to suffer.
Those children might grow up to be sterile, might have stunted growth patterns, might never have the same opportunities to thrive and survive that you and I will likely have because of the harshness of the treatments that they had to undergo as developing young people.
But still, every day the chances that those children will survive long enough to deal with those added challenges goes up. The rise in survival rates is incremental when looked at over small scales, but are staggering when viewed over the sixty year history since the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has been working:
From 1960 to 1963, the five-year relative survival rate among Americans of European descent with leukemia was 14 percent. From 1975 to 1977, the five-year relative survival rate for all persons with leukemia jumped to 35 percent, and from 1999 to 2005 the overall relative survival rate was 54 percent. The relative survival rates differ by the person's age at diagnosis, gender, race and the type of leukemia. (source)
The five-year relative survival rate for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma has increased dramatically from 40 percent in whites from 1960 to 1963 to more than 86 percent for all races from 1999 to 2005. Five-year relative survival rates are 91.8 percent for all patients who were less than 45 years old at diagnosis. (source)
The five-year relative survival has increased from 12 percent in 1960 to 1963 for whites to 37.1 percent from 1999 to 2005 for all races and ethnicities. The three-year survival rate as of January 2006 was nearly 56 percent. (source)
The simple truth is that people are fighting to live, and because of the work that the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is doing, people are winning that fight more and more often than they ever have before.
And some small part of the fight is being won because of Princeton High School's Pasta for Pennies Campaign.
Over the decade in which PHS has been involved in the campaign, we have raised of $325,000 to fund research into, subsidize patient services for, and educate young people about blood cancers.
I have spent enough time on this blog explaining why this campaign matter to me, why I own a copy of A Lion in the House, why I hate the Girl Scouts, that I would hope every one of you understands what this charity means to me, so I won't belabor the point further.
I have said it before, and I will close with exactly the same words that I closed with a year ago...
If you can, please take a moment and make a donation to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. You can donate via our campaign by going to this website and choosing the [Click Here to Contribute button].
You can also send us a check at the following address...
Lonnie Dusch
Princeton High School
11080 Chester Rd
Cincinnati, OH 45246
If you're a little cash poor right now, then give the Society your time. Collect on your dorm floor...ask your neighbors for donations...contact your local LLS chapter and see what you can do to help out...sign yourself and your friends - or sports team - up for our 5K...find a school in your area that participates in the Pasta for Pennies or Pennies for Patients program and make a donation through them...
With recipes and photos like those that accompany this carbonara recipe, it's a winner each and every time out.
If, on the other hand, you'd rather go a little more scientific, check out The Food Lab, whose chili recipe I'll be making in the next couple of weeks when time allows.
Last year, I saw the Princeton Vikings lost a nail biter to the Northland Vikings in the boys basketball state finals. In 1996, I saw the New Albany Bulldogs fall in two overtimes in the state championship game to Ben Davis. I wasn't in Indianapolis for the 1980 championship defeat of New Albany by Broad Ripple, and there was no way I was able to see New Albany's lone boys basketball championship in 1973 over South Bend Adams.
But I have proof, record that it happened, because I have the stein to prove it.
Originally, I'm sure my dad had the stein to prove it, and I'm guessing he was there at the game to see the high school where he worked - where he works - where he attended - win their only boys basketball championship. I know him well enough to know that he wouldn't have missed that game.
I saw originally because the stein is mine now. (No clue whether I'm effectively outing myself to my family here, but I do have some things in my house that weren't exactly asked for when I left home.) It's been my stein since I left for Wabash in 1992, and I think it was in my room, on my shelves before that even.
The flip side has the team roster and all of the tournament scores.
We're going to forgo wondering whether a championship won in the 2000's would ever be commemorated with a drinking stein (we can't even give out glasses as prom favors) and just revel in the coolness of that mug.
The gold accents, the bulldog shield, the jackboot stomping of Clarksville, the lack of classification in the title Indiana State Champions all are just little glimpses at the awesome.
I took the stein with me to Wabash - and my high school yearbooks, too - because I was and am proud of my time at New Albany. I dug high school. Dug the high school radio station, dug the hometown, dug tennis road trips and home basketball games.
I know I left the hometown, but I still love visiting and love having the stein on my shelves.
Oh, and by the way, NAHS also won a girls basketball championship in 1999, but they didn't make steins.
I've pointed out a few galleries from Boston.com's The Big Picture blog before, but I haven't straight out said that the Big Picture blog is the easiest way to see great photographs from current newsworthy topics every day.
Thanks to a little snooping at how New School had his header images saved, I managed to get the rotating header images back up and working. Plus I added in a dozen new images.
Enjoy 'em one at a time or check 'em all over at the new Flickr account.
