I made a flower!

Big thanks to Neusole Glassworks for offering up a groupon through which Calen and I got to take a class and each make a glass and a flower on our fall break (a new thing this year - supposedly to help with second quarter's discipline stats).

It'll be a week before we can go pick up our product (annealing and grinding and all, natch), so no final pics just yet. For now it's just production stills.

Last week's rainbows

This rainbow was hanging over my house last Wednesday.

Or, rather, these three rainbows were hanging over my house last Wednesday...

The highest rainbow, the one going the opposite way from how you would expect, probably came from the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere because we had our first few flakes of snow the night.

Guys, we gotta stay away from 32 Elm Street...

• Time is a dimension - I like the effect.
• 50 things you probably didn't know about The Big Lebowski - other than the fact that it's the best comedy in the past thirty-some years
• First trailer for Captain America: Winter Soldier - I'm already in line, posting from there.

It's like Ron Cougar Mellencamp says...

It continues...forever...

My comic recommendations

Because I'm always trying to hunt these three posts down, I'm putting them here together with one single tag that should help me find them quickly.

• Comics for comic fans
• More adult comics
• Starting points for non-comic fans

Red Hot Nickel Ball is red hot

It seems to amazingly simple: heat a ball of nickel up to red hot and drop it into stuff.

But it's just so fascinating to watch.

Click through to see my favorite, Pop Rocks.

I'm even better...shall we say greater...in theatre...

• Tom Hiddleston's impression of Owen Wilson as Loki - It's not perfect, but it's still funny.
• 11 stories of winning lifetime supplies of Pepsi, Airheads, & more, via Reddit - The Krispy Kreme prize would kill me.
• Undeniable Proof that Disney is a Magical Place - Has anybody tried the Toy Story thing?

Listen to your autovetture

Songs about cars...

In cars... from PHSChemGuy on 8tracks Radio.

One-album wonders

I was listening to the brilliant 3 years, 5 months, and 2 days in the life of... album by Arrested Development and got to wondering about other one-album wonders, artists who popped into the popular consciousness for a single album then receded or disappeared entirely.

In doing a bit of research, I found a number of sites with pretty good lists of one-album wonders:

• Rocksound - never heard of any of their choices
• NPR - I had no idea Milla Jovovich, but I want to track down her album soon. Sounds good.
• SitarHero - I've head some of these albums. Good choices
• Flavorwire - Interesting list...makes me want to track down The La's and The Avalanches.
• 411mania - First list with Arrested Development on it, but I'm starting to get some overlap with the albums. Why are The Cars just off the list?
• Alan Cross - Again, overlap developing (Lauryn Hill, La's, Buckley, Death From Above 1979, Sex Pistols, Derek & the Dominos)
• IGN - Overlap continues
• Paste Magazine - Same overlap...
• Treblezine - I don't know any of these albums.

 As it turns out, I don't have much to offer to these lists.

Heck of a blog entry there, ChemGuy.

Good call...

I need a few new ties...

I've been wearing more neckties again this year, something about trying to be good and work with the culture plan in the hopes that the situation at work can get better. So, I'm on the lookout for a few new ties...

I want but am to cheap to pay for some new chemistry ties like...

This one...

This one...(really want this one)...

This one...

This one...

This one...

This one...

This one (and in red, too)...

I already have a few novelty science-themed ties...

• DNA double helix (actually, I have it in blue)
• museum artifacts in yellow (and in maroon and in navy)
• atoms in blue
• chemistry novelty tie (had it, got cream pie all over it, ruined it)

And there are a number of science-themed ties that don't do much for me, just kind of meh...

• burgundy experiments
• navy blue elements
• most everything from zazzle
• Trust me, I'm a chemistry teacher
• white periodic table 
• navy blue periodic table
• black lab
• blue periodic table
• structure of the atom
• black periodic table
• elements & symbols
• test tubes

So take a look at me now...

• Kid has a conversation with himself in the bathroom - Potty humor from our neighbors to the north
• Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall - That bottom photo is absolutely marvelous.
• 9 out of 10 Americans are completely wrong about this mind-blowing fact - The 1% aren't anything like us. Income inequality is becoming a larger and larger problem in our country.

New Avett's

The Avett Brothers' new album, Magpie and the Dendelion, is available in full on NPR's site.

I'm not saying, but I'm just saying.

We're # 469!

I had no idea at all that there was a website that ranked every college football team in the nation regardless of division.

Luckily, though, I came across the Massey Ratings which ranks all 916 college teams together in one, giant list using what I'm guessing is a pretty complicated formula. The important things...

• The top of the rankings are about what you would expect: Alabama, Oregon, FSU. 
• An Ohio State University comes in at #14, far lower than where the AP Poll has them and just barely above Riverside Community College Tigers out of the California Penal League Community College Athletic Association (seriously - Riverside comes in at #16)
• Linfield College (out of Oregon) is the highest ranked NCAA DIII team, coming in at #255.
• The undefeated Wabash College Little Giants come in at #469, #33 in DIII after a thrashing of Wooster this past weekend.
• The worst team is the Itasca Community College Vikings out of Grand Rapids, MN at #916 who just lost 64-6 to #912-ranked Fond du Lac Tribal & Community College. Could be a rough year for the Vikes.

Looks like the Little Giants need to step up the strength of schedule. Playing the #816 schedule isn't going to help get into the playoffs if they have a down year.

I do wish there was a column to tell you what division the teams were in. It's one thing to see all the NCAA teams together, but it would be more informative to see which ones were DI FBS vs DI FCS vs DII vs DIII - as well as to see where the CCCAA comes in.

Update: ...because Eagleton sucks...

I mentioned on Saturday that Guillermo del Toro's Simpsons opening had a ton of references.

Thankfully, somebody has cataloged them.

Cartoons...in real life

From Real Life Adventures...

I think I could test out of the introductory-level course.

Be careful out there, folks, never know what could develop...

That's about how I feel much of the summer. It's rough, ya know...

...because Eagleton sucks...

• Watch the Guillermo Del Toro directed Simpsons couch gag - so many movie references...
• A Bad Night - I'm fine not knowing what this kind of a night would be like.
• Pascal Campion - pretty paintings...especially...well, all of them...

• Pumpkin Spice: The Movie -  I think I would be okay to live in that world.
• American ethnicity map - That's a lot of Germans.
• Meet BatDad, the most intimidating nice dad ever -favorite moment at 2:30 when he surprises his wife...again...

• Titanium rings - I'm tempted to get myself one of these...or maybe the tungsten carbide rings...
• The Leidenfrost maze - science at the scienceyest

Pride and...something else...

My job is becoming increasingly impossible to accomplish between the new methods of teaching we're supposed to use, the new materials we're supposed to teach, and the new ways we're supposed to be evaluated (which involves a whole lot more paperwork).

But...

Every now and again something pops up and that makes me think maybe this job - in this place - might be worth doing for a little while longer. Today's piece of evidence comes to us from AKC09 on LiveJournal.

See, AKC09's a PHS graduate from way back...like 2001. She recently posted some reflections on her time at PHS and reasons why it wasn't that bad.

I had a group of other nerdy girls. We talked about philosophy and biology and art at our little nerd lunch table and our little nerd slumber parties and kind of thought we were the s***. We lucked out that we ended up in the same class; this made a HUGE difference, and without having those ladies as my core group of friends, I have a feeling high school would have been practically unbearable. The effect here is similar to the fact that:

...

We had an incredibly diverse class. My high school, being a big public school in suburban Cincinnati, drew in many different demographics. We had rich kids, poor kids, suburban kids, rural kids, white kids, black kids (not a big Asian or Latino presence while I was there (ten years ago? Whaat?), but what can ya do). Because of this, there were a number of different social hierarchies, and it was basically impossible to be at the "top" of all of them simultaneously. This turned out to be a great thing, because hey, it mirrors the real world!

From the lone time I've met AKC09 and the religious following of her blog, I can say she seems to have turned out just okay, partially, I would like to think, thanks to her time at PHS.

Go AKC09!