It's not Wisconsin either...

"Was Canada involved? Did we buy drugs? guns? rice? I just started guessing at what we buy from Mexico."

Gimme a Large Medium

A Very Harold & Kumar (3D) Christmas - There is nothing at all intellectual here, nothing remotely intelligent or fancy here.

This is stupid, immature, drug-based humor. It's juvenile and puerile and stupid.

And it's hilarious...good times, folks.


Bob Roberts - I remember this fondly from my high school days. I went back to the well one more time to see if it was still entertaining.

The movie sees Tim Robbins as a Bob-Dylan-esque folk singer pushing a very un-Dylan agenda, that of the far right wing, trading stocks , making millions, verbally smacking around immigrants and running for Congress against a overly one-dimensional 'good man' incumbent.

When I was sixteen or so, I saw this as a brilliant satire on both the folk scene of the 1960s and the money-hungry early 90's.

I don't see it that way anymore. Instead, I see it as over-the-top, a little mean-spirited, and not terrifically witty. If you're a Dylan fan who knows every one of his scenes up to the motorcycle accident, you'll find a lot of references to Dylan's Don't Look Back. If, however, you're not a Bobcat, then I'd take a pass.

The Illusionist - Two magician flicks came out at roughly the same time back in 2006: The Illusionist and The Prestige.

The Prestige was excellent with a twist ending that didn't feel cheap in the least, that was intelligent and well-written.

The Illusionist has a cheap, impossible twist at the end and a montage that alleges to explain everything that's come along the way but doesn't.  It wastes two good actors in Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, both of whom are stuck sneering and overplaying this parts.

This isn't a good movie, and the ending is atrocious.


There have also been a lot of comic books in my past few weeks. Most of them aren't worth more than a few lines. Some were downright awful...

• Incredible Hulks: Planet Savage - I'm grooving to the whole Red She Hulk-green Hulk interplay. It's a fun little time. Heck, I'm grooving to the concept of a Hulk kind of family with the Warbound, the Abomination, Hulk's son Skaar, and even the red woman who I never figured out. Fun stuff here,but I would have liked to see the volume that came before this one with Hulk fighting Zeus.
• Avengers vs X-Men: It's Coming - Nothing new here, just sort of final issues from lots of other Marvel miniseries leading up to the current Avengers vs X-Men event. I actually felt okay reading these because most of them were ones I hadn't read before. If you've read all the volumes that make this up, there's probably no reason for you to show up.
• Marvel Knights 4: Impossible Things Happen Every Day - Moderately interesting stand-alone stuff here, especially the last one with the Impossible Man. That's some entertaining metacomics there with the comic book author just hired to write Fantastic Four comics and finding himself involved in the story. The rest is worth a glance but isn't going to rock your world.
• Arkham Asylum: Madness - One of the better turns of comic this go 'round. The volume avoids focusing on the inmates at Arkham. Instead it turns to the staff at Arkham who are, in this volume, at least, as trapped there as the inmates are. Good look at the small, terrifying everyday moments in this asylum.
• Ultimate Fantastic Four: Salem's Seven - Bad...poor...bad art (ineffectively titilating), bad characters, bad...
• FF: Vol 1 - It's a little odd to see the same introduce-Spider-Man-to-the-Fantastic-Four scene played by two authors and with two sets of totally different interactions, but that doesn't make this any less fun a volume. It's fun, light-hearted stuff. I particularly enjoy the interactions among the further-extended Fantastic Four family - the Richards children, their grandfather, and especially Dr Doom.
• Batman: Gotham Shall be Judged - Dumb...dumb...dumb...
• Captain America: Prisoner of War - The Black Widow breaks into a Russian gulag to save Bucky from having to pay for his brain-washed crimes. It's interesting how cold-war oriented this series still is and yet how enjoyable a read it can be.
• Fantastic Four: World's Greatest - Again, fun stuff. I appreciate the time-travelling plot line with the Fantastic Four fighting their only surviving future member and her allies. It's also a nice - but happily not obvious - twist connection between the two story arcs in this volume.

And then we come to Powers: Vol 11-13

• Secret Identity - In which our detectives take on The Devil...I think.
• The 25 Coolest Dead Superheroes of All Time - Here's the drama I've been looking for. It's been a while since Deena get her powers via virus and she disappeared from the scene, leaving Walker in need of a new partner between his world-defending disappearances. Excellent wrap up to the arc.
• Z - There's way more of Walker's history here, back to the World War II and just-after ring-a-ding-ding days, back to haunt him.

Powers doesn't hit the same massively high notes that it did in the last definitive hardcover collection, but it's still the best stuff I read this go-round.

The last thing worth noting this week was the first volume of Robert Kirkman & Rob Liefeld's Infinite.

This one deserves a big image because it needs to serve as a clear warning to everyone out there.

This is the worst comic I've read since The Widening Gyre or Cacophony. This is Rob Liefeld at his absolute worst - no feet, hundreds of pouches, thighs bigger than chests, nonsensical backgrounds, ridiculously sized and twisted guns, stupid haircuts, squinty eyes, outsized muscular chests - and that's just on the frickin' cover you see above. From there the whole thing gets worse with every page, making less and less sense and avoiding any understanding of human physiology or laws of physics.

I have no idea how Robert Kirkman got involved in this messy piece of crap, because his stuff is typically solid if not entirely excellent (Invincible, Marvel Zombies, Ultimate X-Men, The Walking Dead). This, however, is a shinola storm of epic proportions from the very first issue. It's a pretty 90's storyline with main character (giant guy up above) traveling back in time to recruit himself and his entire future team (but in the present) to fight the dystopian-future bad guy (who also travels back in time). It's a lot of 'we can't break the timestream' and 'how did they know we'd be here' and 'the plan isn't working, let's just blast our way out' at every turn.

This comic is horrible.

H
 O
  R
   R
    I
     B
      L
       E

Avoid it...burn any copies of it you see...destroy it with extreme prejudice lest the 90's return to us.

Thank the heavens that the series will never see a finish.

(And if you didn't click on that link of the worst art ever from Rob Liefeld, do yourself a favor and click on it now. He's an awful artist, and I haven't the foggiest idea how he keeps getting work.)

Forthcoming

It's been a busy week, but I promise to be back to posting bit by bit this coming week...with God as my witness, this blog won't turn into me just posting by awful stick drawings every day in history.

• Antibubbles in space - I can't not hear the Pigs in Space theme when I read that.
• Chemistry explained with memes - Sadly only one PowerPoint slide, but it's a start
• Never-Again-Land of the Day - Pics of MJ's Neverland...sad and creepy and pretty
• Ranking all 62 Stephen King books - All I get out of this is that I have some reading to do.
• Absurd tweets illustrated - Those are, indeed, absurd tweets illustrated.
• Sauced: Measuring Wine Glass - A birthday gift for Calen?
• Conan O'Brien imagines rejected Avengers - Wait for Ghost Rider on an old timey bicycle 

 

• 'I'm Not a Plastic Bag': the touching journey of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - A birthday gift for Calen?
• 'The Comic Book History of Comics' - Always need to learn more about comics...always need to read more comics
• Link Roundup - The first anecdote is touching.
• Looking MARVELous - Fashion and comics...a match made in weird brains
• Those 70's Avengers - Where's the DC versions (Wonder Woman Lynda Carter, Batman Adam West, Superman Christopher Reeves)?

• Top 10 Best Kung Fu Fight Scenes Ever - With video!
• The 2011 Portfolio - All of 2011's important flicks together at last
• The most versatile woman to ever live - So easy to go blue, but they didn't.
• 6 More Alan Moore Comics DC can Capitalize on after 'Before Watchmen' - The issues live on.
• Biz Markie is an 'avid' Barbie collector, possible hoarder - Yes, yes he is.

_ . . _ . _ . . .

Today's comment is just that lower pair of lines. They originally said RunnerBoy was stupid. RunnerBoy looked up how to change it to BrokenWing was stupid instead.

Gotta love the smart kids.

In which our ChemGuy goes soft

Two events today...the lower is the 16th birthday of one of my students who also played on my rec basketball team and PHS's varsity soccer team.

For the top one..."Everyone ran from the magic tablet of destruction"...

For the bottom one..."Was the 1st birthday cake that looked like a basketball or soccer ball made?"

Vonne Gut Reactions: God Bless You, Mr Rosewater: or Pearls Before Swine

What're we on now, three books? Four?

Five?!?

Yup, five of Vonnegut's novels done in just over three and a half months. I should be just fine to get through all fourteen novels this year at this pace, but I'm going to have to pick things up if I'm going to have them finished by the end of the summer, the adjusted goal.

So, we're reached the 'or' trilogy of Vonnegut's work. Each of his next three novels have a second, official title separated by 'or' from the more well-known title of the work. This one is God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine.

Let's look at the basic plot and then at my thoughts on the book. The book opens on a supposedly repugnant little creature of a accountant in the form of Norman Mushari. Mushari is a young accountant in charge of the Rosewater Foundation, the final legal heir of which is the titular Elliot Rosewater. Mushari sees an opportunity to transfer the holdings of the Rosewater Foundation from the 'Indiana' branch of the Rosewater clan to the less affluent, less successful Rhode Island branch of the family, most of whom know absolutely nothing about their more well-off 'Indiana' brethren. It's Mushari's plan, however, to perhaps take a little finder's fee from the fortune in the process of the transfer.

(None of that is really spoilerish as that's all revealed within the first chapter or so. I once saw a bit of writerly advice from Vonnegut telling any burgeoning writers to reveal their story to the reader in the first pages. He pointed out that none of us [readers] has the time to go looking for the plot. Put it right out there for everyone to see.)

If you click through, you'll get spoilers.

Apparently he went to Yale

"Batman went to school..."

Thank you, Mr Jefferson

"books at the library?...1st amendment...2nd amendment?"

Ricky Jay...amazing

Ricky Jay, everyone, Ricky Jay...stunning magician...interesting That Guy character actor...

Posted from lovely Cleveland, OH

I'm a model in Cleveland!

• Materials Park - I'm actually spending the weekend in that building up there. Really looking forward to seeing the dome.

• How to make ice cubes shaped like tiny baby heads - ...or other things, too.
• Egg chart - How to make eggs that you can roll out like playdoh...'cause I want that.
• Mesmerizing pendulum waves - I might have posted this before, but I feel like my memory of that has been wiped.

• Parody of the Year - "We Are Not Young"...nope...not at all... 

• PB2 - peanut butter powder?...It's in my pantry as of this week. I'm gonna give it a try.
• Iced coffee and tea: (not) taking the heat - Harold McGee looks at energy and tea
• Levon Helm - We've lost a good one, folks. Sadness...

• The last shuttle - sadness and pride in a photo
• Color Reel - I have a number of them, but I don't have the fourth one (propeller/maroon?), sixth one (paper airplane?), or ninth one (blue/Z/life preserver).
• Bill Nye the Science Guy PA of the Day - Bill seems a good sport.

• The last Al Pacino/Christopher Walken picture you'll ever need - That is, indeed, right.
• Rick Santorum Aborts Presidential Campaign - Presented without comment

Rick Santorum Aborts Presidential Campaign from Ashley Judd     

• The Batman Villain Project - Dorky drawing projects with a comic book connection? I'm in.
• Cinnamon bun waffles - I know what I'm having for birthday breakfast.
• Lego Super Mario Bros. Thing of the Day - I think Kickstarter may be getting out of hand.
• Should Dodgers game be replayed - The triple play was a tough break for the Pads, but the ump made it worse with his half-hearted arm wave and changed call.

• Microscale World Trade Center Memorial - Impressive, but his other constructions are even more impressive, especially Taipei 101.
• The 20 Greatest Original (Non-Theme) Songs from TV - I'm a sucker for lists, especially if it's YouTube embedded lists.
• Aftermath of the BP Oil Spill: Mutant Seafood - Yesterday was the two-year anniversary. This will, however, be with us for decades.
• The Great Buck Howard - Anybody seen this? It's on reserve for me at PLCH because the preview entertains me.

Lonnieburger Baskets: Sonny's Three Meat Burger

Three meat burgers...how can that sound anything but good?

A burger with two extra meats...and I'm gonna order it with bacon? There's nothing but positives there, but let's look at how the concept of multiple meats turns out.

Burger

• Let's get right to the heart of the matter by checking out the burger patty itself. It's ground beef, lamb, and chicken all stuck together which is a little freaky. Beef and pork, I'm kinda okay with because that's meatloaf, but the beef/lamb/chicken frankenburger had me a little freaked out before I took a bite.
  
  From that first bite, I was a convert. The Girl pointed out that trying to pull off a bite of the burger is a little tougher because the patty sticks together more than a thicker beef-only patty doe. This didn't, however, result in a tough chew in the mouth. The patty did have an odd, almost a little sausagey flavor to the patty, but I don't know that there was much spice more than salt and pepper. The sausagey taste seems to be purely from the meats. It's an odd taste, but it's one that totally works.
  
  Outside of the tri-meat composition, the burger patty is substantially similar to a Steak 'n' Shake patty - fairly thin, crispy edged, cooked through and through. I'm liking this burger patty. Burger - 8    

  Toppings

• Only a couple of cheesy options here, so I didn't get to go the cheddar with bacon route. Instead, I went American and bacon because lamb/beef/chicken just screams AMERICAN cheese, right? I threw in lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion, and banana peppers with the house sauce on the side. The Girl went similarly but with cheese, bacon, and not too much else. She's a straight burger kinda gal.
  
  The cheese was rockingly melted - as American is wont to do. The lettuce was chopped, but it's the big chop that comes from actually chopping the lettuce in house rather than just dragging it out of a bag of shredded crap. The onions were nice, fresh, red ones. The tomatoes are heading toward being good summer stock. The bacon was good stuff - better than average but certainly not Applewood smoked or anything.
  
  The house sauce was wacky. The woman taking our order said that the house sauce was mostly vegetables and spices, nothing remotely like a standard 'secret sauce' Thousand Island dressing that McDonald's and everybody else claims is their secret burger sauce. This one's kind of like a roasted red pepper humus (appropriate for a burger place with lamb in the patties) but without anything like chick peas mixed in to thicken it up. Instead, it tastes primarily of roasted red peppers and a little spice - not much, though. I didn't care for it, but The Girl liked it on her fries - not on the burger oddly.
  
  They do offer a nice spread of toppings as you can see in that bottom photo up above a bit. Toppings - 7

 Fries

• We'll get to the fact that the cost of fries is included with the burger cost in another couple of sections, but that is awesome. The fries are wonderfully fried, served hot and tasty in a little butcher paper sack right there next to the foil-paper-wrapped burgers. There's not much taste other than crisp, potatoey goodness. They had a tiny bit of salt - enough but could have used a little bit more. These were fairly light and good and crispy. No heavy oily feeling or taste here. Good stuff across the board. Fries - 8 

 Ambiance

• Admittedly, ambiance isn't the selling point of Sonny's. They're sort of at the end of a crappy, two-business strip mall kinda thing with the other business being a car stereo place. They're right on the busy Becchmont Ave strip of craptacular commerce, so that's not exactly a selling point. The place isn't all that big - only twenty some-odd seats, two with comfy chairs, six or so at high stools on a window counter, and lots of two- and four-tops.
  
  This is an order at the counter kinda place, and they have a couple of behind the counter steam tables that they weren't using and that didn't appear to have been used in a while - so I don't know what those are for. They then brought the burgers out to us on a tray - a la Five Guys - wrapped up in foil paper. I was all happy with that aspect.
  
  The decorations are a little not too thrilling with a few wall hangings and a television that makes for an absolutely nothing theme to the decorations. It's clean and plain, the people are friendly. It's all good, but it's not thrilling. Ambiance - 5  

Cost

• Good burger...cheap prices...nothing wrong with that. The burgers come with a side - fries, chili, or soup of the day. A bacon cheeseburger with fries is $6.20 ($5.95 from the menu plus a quarter for the cheese). The single cup of Diet Coke is a bit shy of a couple of bucks. To that's cheap as can be short of going to Herb and Thelma's. Cost - 7 

Other Stuff

• The house sauce isn't thrilling enough to earn a bonus point. It's distinctive but kinda meh...
• The whole three meat thing (with bacon to make it four meets, of course) makes me feel impressively carnivorous. That's worth a point. +1 
• They offer Fanta and various other wacky drinks off on the side in a separate case. This lead The Girl to teach me the Scottish slang term Fanta pants, of which I was not aware. That's totally worth a point but more for The Girl than for Sonny's.
• The Girl commented that  the unique taste of the burger wore on her by the end of the burger. The first bite drew a big compliment from her, but she was tired of the burger by the end. I didn't run into that in the least, but she didn't want to go back by the end. -1

Math, of course, must be done...1+7+5+8+7+8-1 = 35 points for Sonny's Three Meat Burger. Considering how similar to Five Guys Burgers & Fries the burger kind of was - other than the unique meat combination - that seems about right. Little cheaper but marginally better than Five Guys...fewer toppings but fries almost equally as good.

Rankings at this point...

• Terry's Turf Club - 45
• Cafe de Wheels - 44
• Senate - 43 
• City View Tavern - 40 (scaled from 32/40)
• Stuffed on Vine - 38
• Five Guys Burgers and Fries - 36 
• Roxy's - 36 
• FlipDaddy's - 35.5
• Sonny's Three Meat Burgers - 35 
• VanZandt - 34
• Gabby's - 34 
• Oakley Pub & Grill - 34 
• Quatman's - 32 / 34.5
• Troy's - 32 
• By Golly's - 32
• Wildflower Cafe - 31.25 (scaled from 26/40) 
• Sidetracks - 31
• Virgil's Cafe - 28 
• Tank's Bar & Grill - 28
• The Pub at Rookwood Mews - 28
• Smashburger - 28
• Habits Cafe - 28
• Graffiti Burger - 27
• Arthur's - 26
• Sammy's - 25 
• Skinny Legs - 25
• Gordo's (Fairfield) - 20 

Here's another review of Sonny's that provides a bit more detail.

Others said a truck was running into a television...

What's the microwave truck doing to the computer?

Film school by Jim Emerson

Jim Emerson apparently knows a little something about film - editing, cinematography, framing, etc - and he's kind enough to have shared his lessons via vimeo.

Too easy?

Maybe I made things too easy - no fun comments today

Odds and sodds

My list of bookmarks waxes and wains over time. Many things are items that I had planned to turn into full posts but just never could find the time or voice to write into a full post. When the list waxes enough to overcome my patience, I sacrifice my list to you as an offering to appease my tolerance of unkempt lengths.

• Berkeley Pit - In our summer material science courses, the topic of Berkeley Pit, a now closed open pit mine in Butte, Montana. The site is a Superfund clean-up site and one of the more polluted sites in the United States or the world. It's also the site of impressive findings in extreme lifeforms and of the death of 342 geese that died when they landed in the waters filling the pit. Link and link
• Things you really need to learn - The idea that we are teaching students facts, trivial things rather than larger concepts, how to think, how to learn, how to understand consequences for their actions is a great failing in our educational system - of which I am a complacent part. I don't have any idea how we can change something as large and with as much momentum as the educational system and the socioeconomic problems that lead to many of the problems in our educational system, but I continue to think that what we're doing isn't working for the vast majority of our students. Link
• A Town Divided Against Itself - In 1982 Sports Illustrated wrote an article looking at the rivalry in Hamilton, Ohio between Taft and Garfield High Schools. Sometime after this article the two merged to form Hamilton High School. Link
• WVQC - I'm a big fan of community radio. I've started listening to WVQC from time to time. The nature of the schedule is such that there are entire shows that don't interest me so it's hit or miss. Link
• Superman 2000 - Apparently Mark Wait had a proposal for a major overhaul of the Superman franchise a few years back. It's the kind of thing that pops up on the web from time to time, like Alan Moore's Twilight of the Superheroes that I posted a while back. Interesting to see what writers want to do but don't get to do a lot of the time. Link and link
• Missouri Bans Student/Teacher Facebook Relationships - The shifting sands on which teachers stand in terms of social media and communication with students in almost any format make our job just that much tougher. I don't blame states and school districts for trying to provide guidance. I don't know, however, that this is the right choice. Link
• Best Running Music - The Girl gave me a project sometime last fall: put together a good one-hour running mix for her. I initially made a few suggestions, but they weren't right for various reasons (mostly because they weren't songs she liked). I've found that putting together a running mix is a weirdly personal task because everybody has their own tastes, their own paces, their personal hope for the ebbs and flows of a workout. Here's the best resource I've found. Link
• The shame of college sports - If I had everything to do over, I would completely divorce sports from education - at the high school level as well as at the university level. I don't have any idea how to clean up the dichotomy between the alleged amateur status of college (and to a lesser extent high school athletes) and the huge amounts of money that are generated by their play, but it's something that needs to constantly be guarded against. Link and Link
• Riders on the storm - This is a terrifying/fascinating story of a military pilot who ejected from his fighter plane into the middle of a storm where he fell and caught updrafts, fell and rose for forty minutes. The post is one of the many lengthy but somewhat infrequent posts on Damn Interesting. Link
• All My Books - A friend of mine has cataloged all of his books, cd's, and movies in a single program on his Mac. He used a program that isn't available on a PC system but that used the Mac's webcam to automatically grab the items from just the ISBN/barcode. I'm looking for a similar PC-based program. Link and Link and Link 

Bahía de Cochinos

For the past couple of years, I've taken to writing the day's date on my school board with the wrong year. Instead of the current year, I look up some date in history. I think I've mentioned this fact before. For the past at least half year, though I've been drawing a reference to the date instead of directly telling the students what the day's event is. Each day surprises me as many of my students guess - often quite wrongly - about the day's events. Some of the confusion is due, of course, to my drastically limited art skills and four colors of marker. Some, however, is because they're entertainingly ignorant about our world. I think I'll show you each day's drawing along with the most entertaining quote about the drawing. Each day I'll link to the actual event, so click away after you take a guess.

"Why are those people shooting at cats?"

Fluer of Scoland...

A mercurial element

Mercury is among the most fascinating of elements. It seems on the surface so absolutely magical in that it is a metal that flows as a liquid, not quite like water because its intermolecular forces are far stronger meaning that it holds together much more tightly than does water leading to a number of interesting properties.





It looks so very much like water in video, clear, brilliantly colorless water, but it is almost five and a half times as dense as water at room temperature meaning that a liter of water would weigh 2.2 pounds, but a liter of mercury would be nearly 12 pounds, shockingly dense in person, as dense as most solid metals tha people are used to. But the metal flows, parting and reforming beautifully.





This contradiction - a liquid metal - has lead scientists, alchemists, ancient believers to attribute to mercury magical properties - those of liquid moonlight, the tears of Diana, the transformative properties of the philosopher's stone.



Mercury can be found as a solid, but it isn't an easy thing to work with because of its - for a metal - remarkably low melting point.





For years mercury's tendency to react/amalgamate with metals has lead to some interesting security regulations.





Mercury is also one of the most insidious poisons and industrial pollutants because of the extreme difficulty in ever removing it from our environment, its tendency to lead to madness and birth defects, and the concentration increase as it travels up the food chain.



The environmental effects have lead to increasing regulations by the EPA and other agencies while businesses have fought back against these regulations.

But like the rest of the country, Maine has reached an impasse, for most of the mercury that fouls our skies, waters and land comes from outside our borders.
Tom Allen

One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism - there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath.
Daphne Zuniga

President Bush's mercury rule is a gift to the big energy companies that helped put him in office.
Tom Allen

I do care about the mercury contamination which this country will be experiencing because of the attempted sellout by this administration to special interests which will result in more mercury in the blood of young children in America.
Jay Inslee

And yet, mercury has been used in medicines for centuries...

A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.
[For centuries mercury was used as a treatment for syphilis.]

— Anonymous

Saying. In Michael J. O'Dowd and Elliot Philipp, The History of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (2000), 227.


How is it that mercury is not safe for food additives and Over the Counter drug products, but it is safe in our vaccines and dental amalgams?
Dan Burton

Be careful, however, when looking up mercury medical information as there is a lot of barely scientific, entirely unscientific, or refuted scientific information out there about mercury fillings, mercury in vaccines, and mercury in homeopathic medicines.

Update: Craig Ferguson

If you hadn't noticed, the YouTube theme from the past week was Craig Ferguson's Scottish guests.

He's apparently had three more...

Untitled weekend links post

• Very Young Avengers Assemble for Target Toy Commercial - So friggin' cute
• We all crave it, but can you stand the silence? - Please? 
• Early Bird Special - This man sure can blow the mouth organ.

• "The Arbitrary English Language" - I think I heard Gallagher do something similar, but with more watermelons. Futility Closet hits this fairly frequently, to be honest.
• New trailer for Rock of Ages is big and flamboyant - I'm so in for this. Big, stupid, looks like a lot of fun.

• Jell-O Cloud Parfaits - How to...gorgeous stuff
• Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark - Bio(luminescence) warning, Calen...
• Wanna bet? - The man, the myth, the pants...

• Phrase anatomy - That thing about intestines is kinda cool...as are lots of these facts.
• Cherry cheesecake stuffed French toast - I know what I want for my birthday breakfast.
• Ask Chris: #101 - The Riddler -  A far-too-thoughtful-than-the-character-deserves exploration of The Riddler
• The Masters Putt-Putt Course: Tiger Woods Used to be Good at This, Too - I would pick-up golf if it was like this. 

• Meeting of the Rhone and Arve rivers in Geneva - I had to look this up on Google maps to make sure it wasn't faked. 
• The horrific practice of food spherification - Chemistry & cooking, very cool...occasionally creepy 
• It's time to give the punt the boot - Math, man...math run up against job safety
• How old books get that distinctive smell - Not what I always thought.

• Mike Mitchell art show at Gallery 1988 - Such cute, giant heads
• Crucial decisions lead to revised top 25 -  Really? Indiana #1? It seems too soon.
• Krispy Kreme Donut Smores - Heaven from a toaster oven
• Fortune - I think fortune cookie makers should have more fun with things...like this one.
• Give me all the years without a championship you have - Ron Swanson...always cool...

Daddy, get real gone...

Today's 8Tracks playlist is a bunch of songs about the father/son relationship...

And I'm in the photo there...try to guess which person I am...

Songs for an Early Father's Day from PHSChemGuy on 8tracks.

Serious eats

The Serious Eats blog is a bit of a Frankenstein of food blogs. The blog's makers have apparently sewn together parts of a food geek blog, a food travel blog, a fast food trick blog, trash food review, and a straight-up cooking blog and ended up with something with posts appealing to just about every cross section of epicurean interests.

Here are a few of my favorite posts from their melange...

• Check out the winners of our 2012 Pi Day challenge (geek)
• The $1 poor man's Big Mac: worth it? (fast food)
• My favorite cooking hacks (geek)
• Remember Peepshi? (geek)
• Easter Basket 2012: A few bad eggs (trash review)
• Pie of the Week: Chess Pie (recipe)
• Cadbury Creme Scrambled Eggs (geek)
• Doughnut Style Guide (definitions, I guess)
• Key lime bars (recipe)
• 6 off-menu dessert mash-ups at McDonald's (fast food)
• We try every cheesecake at the cheesecake factory (fast food, kind of)

Animated GIFs - good ones

I normally save this stuff for the weekend links post, but this post from Neatorama was too good to pass up.

I pointed out If We Don't, Remember Me before, and they continue to sporadically post some fine selections from films.

Today's new tumblr of animated gifs, flux machine, is a little more regular in its posting of freaky animated gifs based on historical photos like these...




and

He's one bad mother...shut yo mouth...

...just talking about Neil Degrasse Tyson...

Another man's quest

I've tilted at my share of windmills in my time. Heck, I'm currently gathering every version of "Shenandoah" that I can find at PLCH and checking out the cd's ten at a time for a future post.

That's why I respect Chris over at A House of Lies for his Quest for the Most 90's Movie of All Time. I do wish he'd put up a leaderboard, however, so I wouldn't have had to make one for him...

• Singles  - 114
• Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead - 107 
• Blank Check - 101 
• I Know What You Did Last Summer - 101
• The Truth About Cats and Dogs - 100
• Airborne - 99
• Independence Day - 96 
• Mallrats - 96
• Point Break - 95
• Beethoven - 92
• Jurassic Park - 90
• Philadelphia - 89
• You've Got Mail - 88
• Hacker - 87 
• The Bodyguard - 87
• Kazaam - 86
• Little Big League - 83 
• The Santa Claus - 83
• The First Wives Club - 82 
• Varsity Blue - 82
• Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit - 82
• The Net - 78
• Clueless - 75 
• Encino Man - 75
• 3 Ninjas - 74 
• Happy Gilmore - 73
• Face/Off - 71
• Ace Venture - 70
• Home Alone 2 - 69
• Speed - 69 
• The Devil's Advocate - 64
• The mighty Ducks - 62 
• Mrs Doubtfire - 62
• The Fan - 60 
• Outbreak - 49
• Fear - 49
• Kindergarten Cop - 33  

Sure, I could nitpick on a few details - the list is far too white, his scoring method hasn't ever been presented in it fullness, he hasn't seen New Jack City (though I did recommend it to him in his blog comments.)

Don't nitpick, though. Just enjoy the sweet, sweet 90's.

Spring break can't be over already...

...can it?

• Teratogenic effects of pure evil in Ursus Teddius Domesticus - I love the source of the pure evil in this experiment.
• There's no speed limit. - This would be a great message for all teachers.
• The man who broke Atlantic City - It's amazing how thin the casino margins are and how much thinner the casinos are willing to make them.
• Surreal stop-motion short: Luminaris - Very cute little flick... 

• Real quick rant - We live in pretty awesome times. There are things we could do to make them better, but we're living in amazing times.
• PowerBalance admits their wristbands are scams - I am consistently amazed at what people will believe.
• John Wooden defines true success - The man was an idol.

• Scott McCloud on comics - His three books are excellent explorations of visual art. 
• Struggling Fairfield bar gets TV makeover - I've seen this bar from the outside. It's not far from home for me. 
• Lego Architecture MOCs - I love the architecture series, and these would make great additions - especially the Taipeh101. 
• Stop-motion "Old Man and the Sea" - great animation and a pretty cool song (updating "Come Sail Away" by Eric Cartman)

• The horrific practice of food spherefication -  Just because it can be done doesn't always mean it should be done.
• Google glasses project - Intriguing concept, but there are a couple of parodies that are worth seeing.
• Early Bird Special - The first movie appearances from... 

• The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Nice column from the Professor about the joy of the coming Avengers movie - in only a month, really? 
• Twin sisters of the day - Black and white twins born together? Genetics is fascinating.
• Ikea - I don't think Ikea really offers this kit, but Easter season would've been the opportunity. The original site, to which I'm not linking by the way, is a little offensive.
• What's in a school hamburger - Someday we might make a shift to all-local, all-natural ingredients. Until then, though, we might as well know what we're eating. 

• Angry Birds, Farmville, and other hyper-addictive 'stupid games' - Nice exploration of the change in gaming design from the NYTimes (with an embedded game...my high score is 3150)
• Are these the ugliest buildings in the world? - They are, indeed, ugly, but they're at least interesting. Better than a faceless, glass rectangle.
• Pac-Man: The Movie - This could be an interesting adaptation.

• Bad opinion generator - Allegedly all true things that people said just before God's Great Banana Skin came out to get them.
• Movie trailer of the day - Savages by Oliver Stone (finally something that doesn't involve a vast conspiracy from the man)
• Community "Pillows and Blankets" - Another brilliant episode (but one that needs you to have watched the previous episode to lay the groundwork)
• Ted - the green-band trailer is intriguing...the red-band trailer if filthy

Update: Social Media, take a bizillion

It's been a few (maybe three) weeks since the PHS students started a Princeton thread on High School Memes and a week or so since I posted about them. I've been checking in every couple of days and flagging individual posts - particularly those particularly nasty about individual students - when they were offensive. Yesterday when I checked in, however, I noticed that all of the meme posts had been deleted and replaced with just these two...

In the site's terms of use, "We do not undertake to review all content submitted to us, but we reserve the right to do so. We also reserve the right to decline and/or take down any content that we deem to inappropriate, and the right to deny access to any user who uses the site and/or any content in any manner that we deem to be inappropriate, all in our sole and absolute discretion." Some of the memes were admittedly offensive (some toward students, some toward administrators), but they certainly weren't all offensive. I had flagged some of the posts, and those were taken down. Honestly, I assume that the site barely has time to glance at any flagged images so they automatically take them down.

Possibilities of what happened...

• It's possible that some student went through and flagged all of the memes and that they were taken down.
• It's possible some administrator went through and did the same.
• It's possible some administrator contacted the site directly and expressed displeasure, asking the site to take down the entire thread.

Which of those happened really didn't matter because the truth won't ever be known. The meme posts are gone, and how it happened doesn't matter in the least.

Here is a selection of what's been posted since the first round of meme posts were taken down.

What does matter is the reactions that the students have had to the disappearance of the memes. They assume it was one of the latter possibilities: that the administration betrayed them. Our administrators use social media extensively (Twitter, Facebook, wordpress), and they don't always pay attention to the negatives that can come along with using them.

When you encourage students - people, honestly - to have a voice, then you get the good AND the bad from those voices. If you choose to selectively allow them to use their voice, to censor their free speech that you claim to have been encouraging, then you run the real risk of serious backlash.

It's far tougher to teach someone how to use something properly - to educate them about the positive and negative aspects to speaking out - than it is to blankly act like something is entirely positive and then overreact when its negative aspects rear their ugly head.

LonniBurger Baskets: New sources

I'm always in search for new burger places to review in the LonnieBurger Baskets series. Here are a few blogs that I'll be checking out as well as new restaurants to try.

• Cincinnati Burger Guys - The blog's been dead for a three and a half years now, but the have nearly forty posted and archived reviews. They're top places that I haven't tried yet are 915 Pub & Grill (Ft Thomas, KY)...Zola's Pub & Grill (Covington, KY). Their favorites that I can compare to my tastes are Gabby's (Wyoming), Back Porch (Springdale), Arthur's (Hyde Park), and Oakley Pub & Grill (Oakley). Gabby's and Oakley Pub & Grill are decent to pretty good, but the Back Porch and Arthur's didn't terribly much impress me. I'm thinking our tastes might not quite align.
• Cirque du Savory - No reviews since August, 2009, so we're out of date here, too. Their top ranks that we haven't tried: Zip's (Mt Lookout)...Mt Adam's Bar & Grill (Mt Adams)...Bard's Burger. Their top that I am familiar with are Oakley, Five Guys, Terry's, Gordo's (in Norwood), and City View Tavern. I'd agree with City View, Terry's, Oakley, even Five Guys. Gordo's in Norwood we haven't tried...Gordo's by Jungle Jim's is awful. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. These folks might have tastes worth following.
• Whackburger - Their menu looks complicated, but it's a new burger place - with odd sides. Might be worth a try when they open up, which is supposed to be May.
• Baseball and Burgers - Here's a blog that's at least ongoing. They've only been reviewing for a few months now (since November). Their top I haven't tried are Herb & Thelma's (Covington) & Neighbor's Bar (Cincinnati on North Bend). They liked Arthur's (meh)...Flipdaddy's (pretty good)...Cafe de Wheels (excellent).  These might be one to follow along with. I'm hoping that they keep blogging - last post was in January.
• Sonny's Three Meat Burgers - Burgers made from beef, lamp, and chicken? Wait, seriously? I am intrigued.
• Polly's Burger Hall of Fame - I've mentioned this one before, but it's worth looking at again. Terry's is #1 (agreed)...Sidebar #2 (Covington - haven't tried)...Zip's #3 (haven't tried)...Mad Mike's #5 (Covington - haven't tried)...City View #6 (agreed)...Cafe de Wheels #7 (agreed). I think our tastes might align.