10 years of this crap

And I think we're done here...

It's been ten years and ten days since my first post, and I think it's time to draw the shutters closed and lock this place up.

I started this blog as a place to put down some of my thoughts and possibly connect with my students. I think I managed some success in both of those realms, and I was able to connect with a few other friends along the way as well.

I want to thank my many readers for the past decade, especially those who commented and challenged my missives. I hope that my 3599 posts have provided you a fair bit of entertainment over the decade.

Feel free to check my ongoing material science blog, Materials Witness.

Mr Tea is peeing in a cuppa

The Guardian's resident food equipment blogger, Rhik Samadder, has been suffering for our entertainment for a couple of months now, trying out all sorts of horrific kitchen gadgets and the food produced therefrom...

There's Mr Tea, quietly and horrifically peeing into your cup of brewed goodness...

There's Garlic Zoom, a stagecoach of garlic chopping fun...

And most horribly the Egg Master, creator of tubular eggs...

Two more for the pile

From TYWKIWDBI...

From Neatorama...wait for it...

Let's get through as many as we can...

• Kelsey Mitchell throws out first pitch at tonight's Reds game - I taught her!
• John Kasich: "We Shouldn't Try to Fix Climate Change Because That's the Creator's Wish" - The Republican side is a wasteland of people I can't stand.
• Donald Trump solemnly promises he will "change tone" after he's elected president - See note immediately above...
• In defense of puns - I love puns.

Update: Collectible Minifigs series...um...14?

MinifigPriceGuide.com has an image of collectible minifigure series 14, subtitled Monsters, confirming what we've already known about the series: that they're going to be Halloween-themed.

The image isn't in high resolution because it's a scan from a small image in a print catalog.

Of more interest, though, are the various figure prototype images on the same story, some of which we hadn't seen before.

Robert Downey, Jr's paycheck

Today I'm providing just a few facts about what Robert Downey, Jr is paid for the Marvel movies:

• The Avengers - $50 million
• Iron Man 3 - $75 million
• Avengers: Age of Ultron - $80 million
• Captain America; Civil War - $80 million

My source: Uproxx (whose sources are Forbes, IGN, CBM, and Variety)

Plus, he has the big, giant A from the side of the mythical Stark Tower in his house.

He really is Tony Stark, isn't he?

Freemium = 'not really'

I've been playing QuizUp, a freemium game, for a year and a half now. It's a free app, but it does allow in-app purchases of 'experience point' multipliers, a buck to double your experience points (or whatever the game calls them) for ten minutes, a couple more bucks to double the experience for half an hour or an hour. I have yet to pay a single penny through the game, but I know that freemium games are wildly profitable - Clash of Clans had more than $1.8 BILLION in revenue in 2014.

Thankfully, South Park laid it all out...



This last one, I warn you, is more than a little NSFW.

The Summer Media

Quick hit reviews as I continue not to accomplish the tasks on my summer to-do list...

Movies

• Lucy - moderately interesting for the first half, less so for the second half. Scarlett Johansson is attractive but plays an thoroughly unlikeable and not-engaging character. Don't bother
• Ant-Man - Possibly the funniest of the Marvel films and way better than I expected it to be. Computer generated effects during the shrinking scene are wildly inventive and entertaining. Paul Rudd is charismatic and engaging, too. The young effects on Michael Douglas at the very beginning of the movie are impressive as heck, too.
• A Million Ways to Die in the West - kinda chucklesome but not entertaining enough to sit all the way through a second time. I can't even suggest you make it a first time.
• Superman: Unbound - passable adaptation of a far more interesting comic book 

• Knights of Badassdom - A movie about LARPing that loses most of its entertainment value when Peter Dinklage dies. From there it's mostly a long slog to a predictable ending.
• Chasing Amy - I rewatched this for the first time in at least a decade. It's still pretty entertaining but didn't connect as well with me this time around. I'm pretty sure I've moved on from Kevin Smith.
• Don't Be a Menace While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood - It's been twenty years since I watched Boys in the Hood, but this parody echoes that movie and its era marvelously. Funny even if it's dated
• Frank - Weird, weird film...far less chucklesome and entertaining than the trailer suggested, but it's well acted and written, just weird and kind of depressing
• I Hate Christian Laettner (30 for 30) - Like most of the ESPN 30 for 30 series, this one's very well done. It's not Bo Knows or the one on Brian Bosworth, but it's still impressive.

Television

• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - I watched the entire first season. Chucklesome if formulaic sit-com. The characters are likeable enough as are the actors, but the pattern (something mentioned in passing during the 1st act turns out to be the solution during the 3rd act) does get repetitive by the end. 
• The Spoils of Babylon - Only watched the first episode but wasn't too interested in watching more than that. The comedy is very broad as is the satire. Big, big cast of funny people, though.
• Arrested Development - I'm currently halfway through the second season. I appreciate that the gags are repetitive and recurring. Funny stuff

Morbid Monday

I happened upon a great article titled "The Man Who Dissolved His Wife"...

On May 7th, Adolph reported his wife missing, but her family suspected foul play. Police questioned relatives and friends and searched the city for Louise Luetgert or her remains.

During a search of Luetgert’s factory on May 15th, a watchman suggested they look in a steam vat in the cellar that was used to dip sausages. The police looked inside, and found that the vat was filled halfway with a putrid-smelling, reddish-brown liquid. When the police pulled a plug near the bottom of the vat, on the outside, the slimy liquid and small pieces of bone fell out. Inside the cauldron, police found a gold ring with L.L. engraved on the inside.

But it turns out that article is just one in a series of Morbid Monday articles from Atlas Obscura.

They've a bunch of sick, sick articles, most of which are worth a read.

Yeah, wow...beginner's luck

• 2008 ESPYs Justin Timberlake "I Love Sports" - He's a showman.
• Chastened Amy - scroll down to the Ant-Man review (spoiler: better than you think it will be)
• Why do you keep hearing "Shut Up and Dance" everywhere you go? Here's the scientific answer - It's a catchy song.
• Stephen Colbert pleads with Neil DeGrasse Tyson over Pluto's status as a planet - Amazing facts at 5:35 and 11:25

A new Beaker?

I've taken a lot of photos of Beaker around the country, and some other folks have taken Beaker outside the country, even.

But Beaker's gotten big or at least gotten to be a hassle, so I haven't been taking Beaker much of anywhere for a while now.

I wonder, though, if I might not be looking at Beaker's replacement in the multicolored ModiBots.

They've be less weight to carry, more poseable than Beaker ever has been, more varied (coming in eight different colors with lots of different accessory sets), and small enough to throw into a pocket.

I might just get some of those printed for myself this year thanks to PHS's 3d printers.

Miley's weird...but "Jolene" isn't

She can sing pretty well when she isn't being intentionally provocative (read: weird)...

A Gray Day

You could do a lot worse than to listen to this David Gray acoustic playlist on YouTube today.

Lincoln Heights

The Atlantic published an article titled "What Happened to Lincoln Heights" that explores the loss of population, tax base, and hope of the Cincinnati suburb that I've come to know as I teach students from there.

The article is interesting enough, but there's so much more information and history along those lines in the book Fly in the Ointment: school segregation desegregation in the Ohio Valley. The book isn't perfectly written, but it was hugely informative for me in learning about the history of Lincoln Heights.

2015's first half lists

One of my great musical struggles is finding new music. It's easy to buy the new Wilco, Richard Thompson, Ryan Adams, Avett Brothers, and a few others, but it's not going to help me expand my musical horizons.

Thankfully, NPR is helping me out. I particularly recommend the Songs we love 2015 (so far) link. It's a whole bunch of playlists

• NPR Music's 25 favorite albums of 2015 (so far)
• Your favorite musical discoveries of 2015 (so far)
• Here's the best music of 2015 (so far), and the best of what's to come
• Songs we love 2015 (so far)

I love it when people make me cocktails.

• Should this lake exist? - I learned about the Salton Sea when I was out at the Hoover Dam. Amazing...
• Why Oreos might as well exist in their own cookie stratosphere - I need to stop buying them.
• Suicide Squad trailer - I am far less excited about the DC movies than I am about the Marvel.
• Batman loves to backhand bad guys - I like the Pac Man backhand at 1:45. 

Out of nowhere comes this wonderful, energetic performance

• The hidden genius of Monopoly's rules - I might actually play that game.
• Compound Interest store - Anybody wanna buy me a gift? ...you know, for the classroom?
• Let's watch Senator John McCain botch this foul ball - We do remember that he has limited use of his arms because of his time as a POW, right?

The things I have seen

Here's what I've poured into the brain of late...

• The One I Love - Interesting premise of a married couple working through romantic struggles are recommended by their therapist to take a weekend away at a specific countryside villa. The couple find the the villa's guest house has a surprise in store for them, a surprise that at first seems positive but then turns darker, threatening their marriage and even their lives.
  
  The secret of the villa is never revealed - some suggestions of both magic and technology are suggested - and the rules of the game aren't always consistent making the twist a little less acceptable to me. The actors did a fine job with their parts, each changing their character just enough to fit well with the villa's secrets, but the film felt largely predictable and never paid up on its promise. Good, not great...
• Wet Hot American Summer - With the decidedly NSFW preview of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp making its appearance this week, I thought it time to give the original a try. I started by reading "The Ultimate Oral History of Wet Hot American Summer" from Details magazine and finding out some entertaining tidbits - particularly that the weather was awful for almost the entire shoot and that the cast often found nonsensical ways to move from one scene to the next (simply walking off piers, handing trophies off-screen). The movie, however, was a disappointment. It certainly has a cast with enough comedy chops to produce something glorious - and I'm still hopeful that the sequel can be glorious - but that promise never comes together to provide more than a few chucklesome moments. This is clearly the work of sketch comics who were learning to write beyond the sketches but hadn't yet found a way to write a complete film.

• Irredeemable vol 7 & 8 - Thankfully PLCH didn't pick up the last two volumes to finish collecting this series, especially since volume 9 collected only two frickin' issues. The story continues to get darker with every opportunity for hope ending with another few million people dead as the Plutonian (a Superman archetype) kills more people to definitively remind people not to mess with him. Don't spend as much time with this series as I did.
• Batgirl vol 5: Deadline - Meh...there are some redeeming qualities to this version of Batgirl: her reliance on family, her intelligence, her red hair. But the continuingly incestuous nature of her storylines (brother's a serial killer, ex-roommate is a secret agent trying to recruit Batgirl, a schoolmate being the Big Bad of this story arc) has become tiresome. The writers need to stop looking inward, trying to apparently tie the entire Gordon clan into one big Gordian knot. I'm hoping that Batgirl of Bensonhurst can redeem some of the good but clear the rest.

• Batman/Superman: Game Over - Eight issues collected from two series (Batman/Superman and World's Finest) and apparently drawn by a half dozen different artists makes for a very jumbled read, the constant art changes drawing a reader abruptly out of the story, which is sad because some of the stories are actually interesting reads. Batman and Superman are threatened by a Toyman-created video game augmented by Mongul's interference, Mongul's son appears to avenge his father's defeat, and Powergirl and Huntress (both from Earth 2, something that I thought wasn't going to exist in the New 52 universe) come to the Batman/Superman pair seeking help. Even more egregious than the use of frequent artist changes (sometimes even in the middle of a story arc) is the use of horizontal pagination for two issues. Seriously, they made me turn my whole comic 90 degrees sideways to read two of the issues - for no reason that I could understand. Meh...oh, and weirdly, I kind of like how Jai Lee draws his characters, but I cannot stand that he doesn't ever draw backgrounds. His people just float in smoggy/smokey/hazey multicolored clouds.

• Batman Beyond: 10,000 Clowns - Seriously, does every new supervillian have to be an estranged brother (or sister or ex-roommate or childhood friend) of the hero? Yeah, here the Big Bad is the hero's girlfriend's brother, but it's still too tightly wound for my tastes. I really like the Terry McGinnis version of Batman with Max and Bruce as his technological helpers. The television series was incredibly well made, and most of the comics I've read in this run have been as well. This volume, too is well written and drawn, but I do tire of the incestuous battles that all of the heroes seem to perpetually face.
• Wonder Woman: vol 3 Iron and vol 4 War - And yet, I dig the familial ties throughout this run of Wonder Woman. Here we have Diana winding her way through her Olympian family trying to recover and protect their newest member, baby Zeke, about whom a prophesy has vaguely foretold dire events to come for the Olympians. Diana is forced to ally herself with Olympians who may or may not be trustworthy - and whose allegiances seem to shift from moment to moment. The center - Wonder Woman, herself - always seems to hold, however, and that keeps her motley band together...barely. And now Wonder Woman has the power and responsibilities of the God of War imbuing her. Where do we go from here?

• Fantastic Four: Island of Death - Welcome to sunny - and deadly - Puerto Rico. This volume collects four stories of the FF in and around the island nation. In fact, the island's beauty and charm are so much at the forefront of the stories (and of the natives' words) that I'm curious whether this was produced in conjunction with the Puerto Rica board of tourism. In all, the stories and art are entertaining enough, though, that I don't really care. It's fluff, but it's fun fluff. Interesting, too, that the comic was also released in Spanish.
• Suicide Squad: Kicked in the Teeth - blech...just blech...nasty, nasty blech
• Harley Quinn: Hot in the City - I'm going to quote from Collected Edition's review of this volume to start...

  Conner and Palmiotti's Harley Quinn series is not uproariously funny, but it is entertaining and goofy. Most appealing about the book is its bizarre range -- ultra-violent battles with ludicrous assassins we maybe expect, but it's wondrously confusing when the audience suddenly finds themselves, in the midst of it all, with Harley watching a burlesque, competing in roller derby, or holding a rooftop party for the tenants of her new apartment building (a trick Palmiotti pulled in Superboy, too). To some extent the new Harley Quinn series doesn't know what it is, except that it's not superhero comics as usual, and that may be its biggest selling point.

  That's about right. It's fun but it isn't brilliant fun. The first issue, however, is well worth finding and reading as Harley destroys the fourth wall auditioning various artists for her first solo book, each artist getting a couple of pages to showcase how he or she (I didn't actually pay enough attention to see if there was actually a female artist included anywhere). The rest of the volume never lives up to that excellence, but at least it's a fun read.

• Batwoman: World's Finest - Here we get more gorgeous Batwoman artwork from JH Williams and a continuation of the previous two volumes' ever growing and tightening noose of conspiracy centered around the apparent crime organization Medusa - until we find that Medusa is The Medusa, the Gorgon, the sister of Greek mythology - which requires Batwoman to step up her game and team up with Wonder Woman, with whom she stands side by side, holding her own every red-booted step of the way. This is a fascinating Bat-family title in that is almost never overlaps with Batman, Robin, or even Batgirl, and I think that makes for a stronger character, one who doesn't need to be part of the Family in order to be successful. And there's the character-developing plot of her relationship with Maggie Sawyer as a well-written bonus. Check this one out, for certain.

An old skit...

I dig the sketch Le Jeunes de Paris on Saturday Night Live. It's just absurd enough for my tastes.

I am curious, though, why the videos rarely survive on YouTube for long - issues with music licensing, perhaps?

Luckily other video streaming sites aren't quite as legally-bound...

Les Jeunes De Paris from pete theman on Vimeo.






There are still two more I'm trying to embed - one with Anna Kendrick and a second with Emma Stone. I'll see what I can find. 'Til then, I'll link to them.

Collectible Minifigs series...um...14?

The info's not out in English yet, but it looks like the French (and then some English sites) are getting some advance info on the upcoming September release of the next series of collectible minifigures.

We've heard before that the release would be Halloween-themed (or monster-themed, maybe) and gotten a few leaked photos before, but this is a confirmation of that theme from the Lego Group, itself.

September 1, here we come, 16 for 16 again!

Kanye...smh...smdh...

There are so many things to say about Kanye and particularly about his performance at Glasontbury from this past week.

We have to remember that his voice is actually awful, as the above video shows us. He can't sing. He can't carry a tune in a bucket without electronic assistance.

His electronic voice, however, is fascinating and musical, and this, I think, has to be viewed as an instrument in his case. Most trumpet players I know can't make trumpet sounds without the assistance of their instrument, and Kanye can't make musical noises without his electronic assistance.



He's also a fascinating showman. His set, the gigantic rig of white spotlights, must have been gorgeous for the crowd, and it makes for brilliant television, providing gorgeous silhouettes of a solo black man stalking an empty stage in front of the spotlights.



But I would imagine that watching a single person stalk an empty stage under lights too bright to stare directly into would've made for awful watching from anything but the most close-to-the-stage fans.

Oh, and Kanye brings out the dumbest in people...



I will forever say that I think Kanye's public persona is as obnoxious as it comes, but he produces some outstanding music.

He is probably a pretty intelligent man - building a public persona that has made him rich beyond any level I could ever imagine.

I wish I could somehow listen to his music without knowing anything about him, but that seems to be impossible.

Long live the long peace

The Fallen of World War II from Neil Halloran on Vimeo.

We live in a time of historic peace.

May we say that for decades to come.

...if you need reminding of that, check out the above video and the associated website.

You know all that. You know the whole story.

• Featherbowling explained - A sport that I would happily play...like curling...
• The best state for business? High-tax Minnesota - taxes are an investment...a worthwhile one
• I spent 12 years in the Blue Man Group - fascinating interview with a former BMG member
• Do not go swimming in this beautiful looking lagoon - I like the dye idea, but it's still not Berkley Pit.

On my mark: One month

Vonne Gut Reactions: Timequake

Ting-a-ling...

I recently completed my quest to read and review all of Kurt Vonnegut's fourteen novels, a task I had originally set for myself during school year 2012-13 and which I completed in the summer of 2015.

And so it goes.

First, let me point out that Timequake was the least fictional of Vonnegut's novels. He offers up the following in the book's introduction after speaking about Hemingway and he last novels, his fish, as it were...My great big fish, which stunk so, was entitled Timequake. Let us think of it as Timequake One. And let us think of this one, a stew made from its best parts mixed with thoughts and experiences during the past seven months or so, as Timequake Two.

Hokay?

And that's a fairly apt description of the Timequake that I held in my hands. It's not a linear story, but it does contain parts of a linear story. It also contains what might be called essay fragments written from Vonnegut's point of view that aren't any part of the story, that only sometimes relate to the story, and that are told directly to the readers without any pretense of inclusion in a fictional narrative.

This is, in the end, the purest of Vonnegut. He includes Kilgore Trout - offers a far more sympathetic salute to the man than he did when the character first met his author and alter ego in Breakfast of Champions - and the Tralfamadorians. He offers up his viewpoints sometimes couched in fiction but quite often without the thinnest of veils that Vonnegut has offered us through the course of his writing. Vonnegut even gives us a sketch of Trout, himself, as shown above.

Here Kurt - it feels wrong to call him by his first name, he's too big for that, too massive in my head - Vonnegut is saying good bye and possibly realizing that he doesn't have another novel in him any more. The book was published in 1997, and though Vonnegut would live another decade, he never published anything more that would be called a novel.

To my notes...

• dedication - "All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental." This is a sentiment that has been espoused by Vonnegut in many of his books: that we are here entirely by luck. Some of his characters are crippled by this, and others are freed. It's all in your attitude, I guess.
• p5 - "Human rights? What could be more indifferent to the rights of any form of life than an H-bomb?" - Another common Vonnegut thought: that weapons of war are indifferent to who they are killing. This leads to the just and the unjust being endangered just alike.
• p10 - "I made sandwiches of German soldiers between an erupting Earth and an exploding sky, and in a blizzard of razor blades." - Vonnegut has frequently described horrific acts in odd, uncommon descriptions. Here Trout is describing what he did during World War II and how he viewed those acts.
• p11 - "If I had it to do all over again, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about ten blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city's public schools." - Vonnegut goes on to describe how he would live his life exactly as he had the first time. He doesn't think that doing things any differently would have made him any happier. 
• p12 - "If this isn't nice, what is?" - One of Vonnegut's most famous lines...
• p16 - The Booboolings (from another planet) have a 'weird' custom through which they talk to their offspring and explain how they should act, how they should feel, how they should believe. The Booboolings even make their youngsters read books and explain how they should feel about the situations therein. - Yup, Vonnegut observing his world and explaining it from the perspective of an alien.
• p18 - The Booboolings stop this custom when television is introduced. Instead of needing to divert themselves and their children from boredom (as they did with the books), they simply sit and watch televisions..."and automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on." - Technology hasn't made our world any better in Vonnegut's eyes.
• p19 - "The moral at the end of that story is this: 'Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.' "- Yeah, Vonnegut doesn't have the most positive image of women.
• p23 - "My great-grandfather Peter Lieber...was a Freethinker, which is to say a skeptic about conventional religious beliefs...as would be Kilgore Trout and I." - Vonnegut is long-known to be an areligious man. That comes up again later in the book again.
• p28 - "The late British philosopher Bertrand Russell said he lost friends to one of three addictions: alcohol or religion or chess." - I don't know that chess is a major addiction that I can think of, but the inclusion of religion there again echoes Vonnegut's areligious status.
• p30 - "in Timequake One...by the year 2000, [writers] had become 'as quaint', in the opinion of the general public, 'as contemporary makers in New England tourist towns of the toy windmills known since colonial times as whirligigs." - Again, echoing the Booboolings, Vonnegut thinks that writers have become obsolete since the invention of television, and I don't think he believes that's a positive thing.
• p43 - Tralfamadore makes another, final appearance. This time it's as a planet where 'representatives of all the chemical elements held a meeting...to protest some of their members' having been incorporated into the bodies of big, sloppy, stinky organisms as cruel and stupid as human beings." - It's actually a fascinating idea, and I would very much read the story, maybe even use it in class. It's not a short story that is developed beyond the sketch stage as are so many of Trout's short stories.
• p44 - In the short story of the elements' conference, "Sulfur...made a motion that all chemicals involved in medical research combine wherever possible to create ever more powerful antibiotics. These in turn would cause disease organisms to evolve new strains that were resistant to them." - We've seen the idea of antibiotics leading to stronger diseases, though there they were tests from the Tralfamadorians to make better space travelers (the diseases). Clearly the idea of antibiotic-lead evolution was an idea that stuck with Vonnegut.
• p46 - From Trout's memoir of the timequake, My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot, "Listen, if it isn't a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it's something just as mean and powerful." - In spite of Vonnegut's famous quote about how nice this is, he really does espouse the belief that much of life is suffering, that life is generally a horrible time.
• p51 - Here is the joke to which I linked at the very top. It's dirty, I warn you, but it's a great example of Vonnegut's characters making tragedy into dark humor.
• p56 - Vonnegut offers this quote from his sister Allie, "If there is a God, He sure hates people. That's all I can say" - Vonnegut saw some pretty awful things in his life - suicide, war, hatred - and that (or something) left him pretty skeptical about God and how He could create a world such as this.
• p57 - "For anybody who could believe in God, as you once did, it would be a piece of cake to believe in the plant BooBoo." - See, believing in God is like believing in a ridiculous, fictional story.
• p63 - Trout here, not Vonnegut, "If I'd wasted my time creating [three-dimensional] characters," Trout said, "I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter: irresistible forces in nature, and cruel inventions, and cockamamie ideals and governments and economies that make heroes and heroines alike feel like something the cat drug in." - Yeah, that's Vonnegut as Trout right there.
• p68 - Vonnegut's three favorite quotes...
  • A friend, Ted Adler, had rebuilt an ell for Vonnegut and at the end stepped back in shock and said, "How the hell did I do that?" because it was too well done for his understanding.
  • "The second is Jesus Christ's 'Who is it they say I am?' "
  • "The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player. I've already quoted him in another book: 'We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.' "
  • That about sums up Vonnegut's thoughts on the world...shock at beauty...skepticism and irreverence at religion...be kind to each other because the world's hard enough.
• p71 - Hitler's last words, according to a short story by Kilgore Trout: "I never asked to be born in the first place." - see the dedication...we're here randomly.

• p81 - Vonnegut is describing Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms as his nephew sees it, "he was close to tears because he had to read, having been forced to do so by a professor, A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway." Vonnegut recaps the novel and says thusly, "The tears Hemingway has made you want to shed are tears of relief! It looked like the guy was going to have to get married and settle down. But then he didn't have to [because she and the baby died]. Whew! What a close shave!" - Wow, Vonnegut on marriage.
• p93 - From Trout's My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot again, "I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of [poop]. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books." - Yup, a ray of sunshine, our little Kurt.
• p104 - Discussing Isaac Newton's brain, "And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog's breakfast [Vonnegut's description of a brain] from his three and a half pounds of blood soaked sponge. This one naked ape invented differential calculus! He invented the reflecting telescope! He discovered and explained how a prism breaks a beam of sunlight into its constituent colors! He detected and wrote down previously unknown laws governing motion and gravity and optics!" - Yeah, Newton is the bomb, but Vonnegut's description of all these idea (positive here, far more negative in the Booboolings) coming from a dog's breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge is appropriate.
• p117 - Jane, Vonnegut's first wife, died a believer in God, an Episcopalian after having been raised a Quaker. "She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her." Earlier, on page 73, Vonnegut mourned for his "buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now dead, [who] lost his faith as a Roma Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought that was too much to lose." - Vonnegut himself never had faith (he says as much in the next paragraph on page 74). He is happy for those who have faith and sad for those who lose it. That's really interesting.
• p139 - "In real life, as during  a rerun following a timequake, people don't change, don't learn anything from their mistakes, and don't apologize." - Man, that's dark.
• p152 - Vonnegut proposes two amendments to the Constitution, "Article XXVIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do, at a living wage." - Those are pretty liberal ideas there, Kurt. I wish they could come true, too.
• p162 - "[T]he British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin's theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747." - Not quite...more like believing a hurricane - given a billion chances - could put two parts together. Once those are put together and stay together better than they do separately, a billion more hurricanes will put a third part together. Repeat until a plane exists.
• p169 - " I had to add, though, that I knew of a single word that proved our democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a foreign word. That word was Nagasaki." - Vonnegut has repeatedly said that the bombing of Hiroshima can be defended (he won't, but it can be) but that Nagasaki's can't be.
• p183 - One of my favorite foreign phrases, "Esprit de l'escalier!" and Vonnegut never explains it, so I won't either. I love that phrase.
• p191 - The Girl got to hear Vonnegut speak at Indiana University once. She related to me a story that he told there about a postal worker woman with whom he was secretly - even from her - in love. Here he tells that same story. It's beautiful.
• p202 - Vonnegut quotes from Abe Lincoln in Illinois: a play in three acts and includes a large passage from Lincoln. I quote a short part of that, "I have heard of an eastern monarch who once charged his wise man to invent him a sentence which would be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, 'And this too shall pass away.' " - I'm actually kind of surprised that Vonnegut didn't ever use that phrase as one of his books' choruses. 
• p211 -

  "I got a sappy letter from a woman a while back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a northern Democrat. She was pregnant, and she wanted to know if it was a mistake to bring an innocent little baby into a world this bad.
  
  I replied that what made being alive almost worthwhile for me was the saints I met, people behaving unselfishly and capably. They turned up in the most unexpected places. Perhaps you, dear reader, are or can become a saint for her sweet child to meet.
  
  I believe in original sin. I also believe in original virtue. Look around!

  Vonnegut is just a walking contradiction - believing that the world is horrible, that the people in it do horrible things to each other, but also that there are saints.
• p216 - Vonnegut tells a story about a letter that he wrote once and anonymously to his uncle about his brother. It's too long to relate here (read it on Google Books if you want to). It made me laugh out loud.

Vonnegut ends the book in very touching fashion.

I'm thrilled that Kurt wrote such a wonderful and beautiful and meandering and personal final novel.

I thank him digitally.

And I am thrilled that he was here to make our world - my world, especially - a much better place.

Really Looney

Looney Tunes did some weird stuff...the above is just one of the five featured over on Mental Floss's article that says pretty much exactly that same thing.

Forward or Delete?

Yeah, there's Snopes, and they do have a pretty good fauxtography category.

Into this arena, though, comes the Forward or Delete column from Gawker, in which they take four or five photos making the rounds this week and either debunk or endorse their veracity.

For example...delete (not true), forward (true), forward, delete...in that order here...

I'm sorry, but Anna Kendrick

Sorry, but I love Anna Kendrick (of the great Twitter feed)...



I warn you, there's just more YouTube clips of Anna Kendrick after the jump.

Feel free to come back tomorrow if you don't love Anna Kendrick. You know, if you hate joy.

Please don't take my man...

• One in a million beer catch - I find myself sadly suspicious of any internet video.
• Awesome pop-culture nesting dolls from Andy Stattmiller - probably expensive but certainly cute...where's DC, though?
• This is what 200 calories of different foods looks like - Clearly, I should be eating more celery.
• A surprise summer jam from Beck - not bad stuff, certainly different from the last, mopey album

• First Listen: Still by Richard Thompson - sadly meh - especially considering it's produced by Jeff Tweedy
• I renamed some of the paint colors at the hardware store -  Calm down, man...
• The Lego Movie's hidden meaning - Here there be spoilers - and humor...

The Simpsons and a bit of hubris

For two or three straight collectible minifigure series, I'd gone - with the help of Calen mostly - sixteen for sixteen, not getting a single duplicate.

I thought I was hot stuff. I'd helped kids in the stores and parents of kids, even.

This time was a little different as a student of mine gave me a trio of figures as an end of the year gift, three un-searched bags. Those turned out to be two unique figures and a duplicate, but that's not on me. I didn't pick those.

So, I had fourteen for fourteen in my sights.

Calen and I headed to the Lego store a couple of weeks ago, getting there around 10:30 on a Wednesday morning with our fingers all limbered up to pick the necessary fourteen.

At eleven-oh-five we left the store thinking we had our fourteen. Plus we'd helped one of the employees by filling in five or six of his needs, too.

Then I got home and found a duplicate.

Thirteen for fourteen.

Perfection lost with the slip of a stack, because there's no way we mixed up Martin Prince (the one we missed) with either Patty or Selma (whichever one has the blue dress and the eye chart). Selma's hair is way too distinct, plus she has full-size legs as opposed to Martin's short, hinge-less legs. And we definitely didn't get a book mixed up with a 2x2 tile.

Along the way, though, I did pick up two other sets (70166 because of the carbon fiber/conductive bricks and 60077 because the gold-helmed astronauts look awesome) so I could get to the $75 reward, Winter Soldier figure.

That's okay, though, because with five minutes (and five bags) of searching at WalMart, I found my Prince.

This week's big purchase

Bought myself two of each of these items...

It's kind of sad how excited I was when I found these on Amazon. I need to replace a few of my originals because they didn't survive the shipping for summer camp.

They're great for demonstrating that crystals with more empty space make for less workable metals. See, the top ones (the rainbow ones) have individual ice cube trays that are close together, little space between them. The trays slide back and forth past each other easily when they're turned so the ridges of one tray are against the ridges of the other tray.

The other ones (the white ones) have more empty space between them, bigger gaps. When you show the wider-spaced trays trying to slide back and forth past each other, the individual trays get stuck because they dip down into those gaps of the other tray.

More empty space = less workable metals

Would you like to play a game?

There's a new bar in Cincinnati, 16-Bit, down in OTR.

Their schtick is that they have a whole bunch of 80s video game consoles that are all set on free play. Buy a drink, play for free.

I've been to the Columbus version and had a blast. The Cincy location, though, is new.

I'm there as soon as I get back from SC.

Wonder if they have a way to play Falken's Maze.

Update: QuizMeUp

Some updates on where I am in my attempts to get every achievement in QuizUp...

I've passed 9000 games (actually up to 9265 as I post this) played on my quest to get the Ubreakable achievement (10,000 games played)...

...and am at 79% winning percentage which means I have about 7320 wins on my way to Praetorian status (needing 10,000 wins to earn it)...

Currently I'm working my way through the 80's Music category, having gotten now to level 43 and being (at least before this week's vacation in a South Carolina campground (and likely without much cell reception) in the top ten in the world in that category for this month...

.

...even having beaten the number one player in the world in that category.

Go me!

Her own name blog!

Kerry Callen has a blog.

On the blog, she posts comic-book-related artwork like the animated cover above (and others)...

...parody comic artwork...

...a search for the best 'battle of the century'...

...modern recreations of classic comic covers, and a whole bunch more comic-y goodness.

The new spin on food

I appreciate my food with a side of cheek.

That's why I'm enjoying Deadspin's epicurean offshoot, Foodspin. 

They've got chucklesome columns like Which animals are the worst to eat morally?

Food-related columns like their thoughts about new LiquiGlide-coated bottles.

And a bunch of recipe columns with a healthy dosing of vulgarity and snark like how to roast a chicken, make arrabbiata sauce, and cook lobster tails.

Be warned that the site is slightly NSFW, but it's at least entertaining.