Look at our dogs

I know you've been desperate to see what's up with the animals at Case de ChemGuy, so here you are.

Our first pet was Aylah, a white cat who was with The Girl in college and moved with us to Cincinnati, Aylah passed away last summer on the morning of July Fourth after fighting cancer and eventually having her leg amputated.

We also had two more cat, Piddiddle (rescued from a friend of The Girl's who was going through a nasty divorce) and Minnie (rescued from The Girl's mother who happened to have life-threatening cat allergies.) Apparently we took one digital photo of Minnie and none of Piddidle, though.

The first of our dogs was LeRoy, a mutt who was loved terribly by Aylah and by us. I still can't write about LeRoy without getting a bit of dust in my eye. He was a spectacular dog and the one pet who was closer to me than to The Girl.

About a year later, Harlan came into our lives thanks to the Save the Animals Foundation over on Red Bank Road. Harlan, LeRoy, and Aylah were a trio with us for nearly a decade, and Harlan and Aylah passed away within a few days of each other last summer.

We were a one-dog, one-cat family for a short while after LeRoy passed away, and The Girl went hunting for a young dog to bring in and keep Harlan company, maybe to be able to pass some of his spectacular personality on to. That's when we got Clementine, a loveable pit bull who came to us pudgy, quickly got fat, and now is a gorgeous, lumbering dog.

Hollis is the last dog to permanently join our home, and he also came - as did Clementine - from the Adore-a-Bull rescue group. He's energetic, loving, desperate to lick everyone incessantly, and a great addition to the family.

We've also taken to housing foster dogs for the Adore-a-Bull group, having had Hattie for a couple of months...



...Walker for a couple of months...

...and now Dot for less than a week so far.

Pepper - a friend's dog - has also visited on a few occasions...

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)