John Petrie’s LifeBlag

Ah, I love 4th of July weekend. Not necessarily because of anything intrinsic about it, but I loved this one and I loved the one two years ago, so it’s becoming a trend.

Today I got up early and ran in the Tortoise and Hare 5k in downtown Ann Arbor, hung out at home and finished editing a paper that I was unable to finish last night, and went out to lunch at ABC with Dave. Lame-ass Theresa and Rich didn’t join us, but that’s okay, they probably didn’t feel well or have time. Since I had no particular thing to do or place to be, and I didn’t want to go back home and sit in my hot, stuffy apartment for 6 hours, I decided to drive around to a couple stores and look for furniture or electronics that I could buy in the future (after I move next month or next summer). I headed for Art Van, the furniture store, to look at coffee tables, end tables, night stands, and couches. I saw lots of good ones, probably plenty of things Kathy and I would like, but it felt kind of pointless without her there (for her knowledge of home design and her opinion of every piece, as they will be joint decisions), but then I saw the TV store that existed in an annex in the back of the store: Paul’s TV. It is like the “home theater” section of Best Buy, just a medium-sized room in the back of the store, and it operates as an independent store. I’m sure they have plenty of TV/furniture deals in coordination with Art Van, but other than that, they’re separate.

I went back to Paul’s TV and sat down in an armchair to watch a plasma TV (Panasonic P50S2) and an LED-backlit Sharp (LC52LE700U) that were set up perpendicular to each other. I had a good angle to watch the Tigers game on both, though it was closer than I’d typically sit at home. The reason I sat down to watch those two, mainly the Sharp, is that the local appliance store ABC Warehouse had given me a guaranteed price of $1500 for the Sharp, to be delivered in August after I move, if I paid a down payment on it, but I saw that Paul’s TV had it for $1197. THAT…is insane. Paul’s TV never charges for shipping, whereas ABC Warehouse would have charged $50.

Naturally, my first thought was that this was too good to be true, but I double-checked the model number and size. I had been keeping track of many TV prices in a spreadsheet over the last year (yes, total loser-geek), so I had gotten good at memorizing model numbers and was already familiar with this one anyway. It was definitely the same TV, for $350 cheaper. Its MSRP is $2000. My second thought was also along the lines of, “This is too good to be true,” but referring to the picture quality—maybe this TV isn’t all that great, despite great reviews (at both Amazon and Newegg, which is a ringing endorsement, considering the tech-savvy videophiles who populate Newegg). It is that great. I thought that its colors might have been a little too bright or washed out compared to the plasma, but, first of all, that’s adjustable, and I don’t believe that the Sharp’s colors will be the slightest, remotest bit sub-optimal after I adjust them. One strong point of the Sharp LEDs according to reviewers is the color accuracy. The motion of the ball and players seemed nearly identical to the S2, with the edge probably going to the S2. I don’t know if that’s a by-product of the colors being turned up too bright, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The big advantage of the Sharp LED was, surprisingly, its black levels (and other dark levels). They were better than the plasma’s. Its blacks were blacker, and it was easier to distinguish a few details in dark places than on the plasma. This is despite the incessant claims by videophiles at CNet and everywhere else that plasmas’ black levels are so superior to LCDs’. Not these two. (Nor any plasmas in ABC Warehouse, which is the very thing that swayed Kathy and me towards the Sharp in the first place.) In and around the backdrop of Comerica Park, which is the dark, empty part behind center field that enables the hitter to see the pitched ball, more detail was distinguishable. It was July 4th, so the Tigers and Mariners were both wearing these special “patriotic” caps (here’s the Tigers one). Before the start of one inning, the camera zoomed in very close to a Tigers hat that was sitting in the dugout or in a shaded part of the stands or somewhere; I guess the Fox Sports crew had set it up there for the purpose of zooming in one inning. The LED-backlit TV was far, far more detailed and accurate in showing the lines of the Tigers’ English D and distinguishing the navy-blue textures of the middle and left side of that logo from one another. It was a mess of navy blue on the plasma, and a clear English D on the LED-backlit screen. Sold.

To make the end of this story rather shorter, I took this price to ABC Warehouse to challenge them to beat it, but I had no documentation, so all they could beat was the website’s price of $1497 (the $1197 was a special 4th of July sale). I went back to Paul’s TV, paid a 10% down payment on my credit card, got the receipt, brought it to the ABC Warehouse manager, who eventually told me he would not only match it but beat it by $100. I don’t know if he mistyped, misspoke, or miscalculated, but he actually gave it to me for over $160 less than Paul’s TV: $1102 after tax and shipping, compared to $1268 in total from Paul’s TV. That is INSANE, people.

When Kathy and I had first picked out the Sharp LED-backlit TV in June, I walked out of there telling her it wasn’t quite a steal, but it was a very good or great deal on a great, long-lasting, highly reviewed TV that we both witnessed outperforming every TV in the store with a remotely similar price. But $1100, THAT is a steal. It’s unbelievable. I am ecstatic. This has made my month.

I am amazed at how familiar the American public is with my favorite line from Not Another Teen Movie, “Oh, it’s already been broughten!” One of my friends made her Facebook status simply “bring it.” Of course, someone else commented before me with something like “it’s already been broughten.” But I still laughed, not so much at them but at one of my favorite parody movies. I know a lot of people who haven’t seen that movie, and it isn’t a really popular, famous, memorable movie, and it certainly didn’t get good reviews…but people sure know that line.

My brother told me about the web page Symphony of Science, where its proprietor, John Boswell, mixes the voices of famous scientists (e.g., Carl Sagan, Michio Kaku, Richard Feynman) with an autotuner and puts them over R & B–style music. You should check it out.

I have seasons 1–5 of South Park on DVD, and I don’t ever plan on buying any more because every episode is available for free 24/7 at its official website, southparkstudios.com. I know there is abundant evidence that giving something away for free actually increases its sales, but I at least understand the basis of where the RIAA is coming from. I won’t pay a penny for South Park as long as it is available on demand for free.

One of the worst things Amazon.com has ever done is lump the reviews and ratings of the DVD version and the Blu-ray version of every single movie together, so that you can’t tell whether someone’s review and star-rating refers to the DVD version or the Blu-ray version, unless they state they’re reviewing the Blu-ray version specifically. What idiot thought of that? I can’t imagine the level of stupidity required to approve of that idea at multiple levels of management in the Amazon company hierarchy. It is inconvenient, counterintuitive, and simply inaccurate because the two different products are, um, different products!

So, it turns out my TV is a hell of a lot sweeter than I had ever thought. It is a Samsung SlimFit high-definition television. It is capable of displaying 720p and 1080i video. It’s only 30 inches diagonally, and it’s a cathode ray tube TV, so it isn’t as awesome as the larger TV I’m going to buy next summer, but, hey, that means it has a higher pixel density. I found this out because Kathy got me a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and I hooked it up to an HDMI port in the back of my TV (hmm, that should have made it obvious to me that it was an HDTV, but it never occurred to me), and it plays Blu-ray movies in very nice quality. I tried out my new Blu-rays of Star Trek: First Contact and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I’m pretty sure they looked as awesome as they could on a 30″ TV. Maybe a new LCD (or plasma, if they existed at 30 inches) would show an improvement over my 3-year-old TV, but the Wikipedia articles on plasma displays and LCD screens indicate that, other things being equal, CRT produces the best picture in terms of color accuracy, sharpness, and blur. (The problem is, other things aren’t ever equal, not anymore.) However, CRT picture quality fades a lot sooner than the flat-panel displays, so I’m sure mine doesn’t look as good as it used to in high-definition. Those two movies looked really awesome, though; you could tell the source and the display were both high-definition.

I began to suspect that my TV was capable of playing video at some level of high definition (either 720 or 1080 vertical resolution) the night before I discovered it for sure, as I was reading my TV’s manual for probably the second time. I don’t remember reading a lot of it when I got it in August 2006. I think I was reading it to determine if it might be possible for me to use my TV’s remote control for both the TV and the Blu-ray player (both Samsung). I know it’s possible to use the Blu-ray player’s remote to control the TV, but I don’t think it’s possible to change the picture’s aspect ratio/zoom with the Blu-ray remote, and I’ll need this for watching regular TV content that is widescreen because I don’t have high-definition cable, so most things are 4:3, so I have to zoom in on a widescreen program to avoid having black bars on the sides and top and bottom. It might be possible, but first I’ll need to figure out how to navigate my TV’s menus with the Blu-ray controller; all it can do so far is power-off, power-on, and change the volume, channel, and input source.

Well, fuck you, you fucking Redditors! I submitted this article from the Daily Mash (Britain’s Onion), about how Santa hates ginger kids, to Reddit, thinking at least a few of them would get a kick out of it, especially since it is reminiscent of a glorious South Park episode. But, no, I went to check on it a day or two later and saw that it had a score of 0, meaning one more person down-voted it than up-voted it (it starts with a score of 1 upvote—yours—so its vote-score at a given time is the number of other upvotes minus the number of downvotes, plus 1). Probably one loser down-voted it and no one else liked it enough to vote. That person was probably a red-headed abomination himself, goddamned ginger motherfucker, I’d like to bash his face in…

At some point on this public, personal web page, I suppose I should admit I’m not as big of a Jimmy Fallon detractor as most people. I got annoyed at his giggling and breaking of character on SNL in every single skit he was in, but whether people realize it or not, his impersonations are all very good, and the Jimmy Fallon/Tina Fey Weekend Update was, too.

So I have liked most of the clips of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that I’ve seen online, but nothing prepared me for the blinding white light of brilliance that emanates from this clip. I first saw it posted on my friend’s Facebook page and have watched it about 10 times since.

You know what’s stupid? That old saying (I guess it qualifies as an “old saying” now) that if a million monkeys banged away at a million typewriters, they would eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare. Obviously you could fill in any other writing(s) and it would remain equally true, i.e., not at all. It would literally never happen because the universe would end before it happened. Oh, it isn’t a metaphysical impossibility, but it is a physical one.

Let me give you some background. I recall reading this article from the BBC News about the futility of the WEP wireless encryption protocol and the superiority of WPA. One of the network security experts they interviewed said something that blew my mind. Do you know how long it would take the best computer-hacking (password-guessing) programs to guess a 20-character password by brute force? (On average.) What would you guess? I assume it could only contain letters and numerals. So that’s 36 possible characters, times 20 places, and computers can try an awful lot of them per second. Would it take weeks? Years? Decades?

This guy said that on average, it would take longer than the entire history of the universe to guess a 20-character password by brute force. Fourteen billion years! Wow! This is verified by the all-knowing God Himself.

A computer that could perform a billion billion computations per second would require 10¹³ years to guess a 128-character phrase, which is 1,000 times longer than the age of the universe. A 256-character password would require 3×10⁵¹ years.

No one has any way of even guessing how long the universe will last. It could be 3×10⁵¹⁵¹ years. If it lasts that long, it probably will have died in ice many eons before, killed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It doesn’t matter. That old saying about monkeys on typewriters has no relevance to the actual universe. Not just monkeys, humans, the Earth, and the solar system, but the entire universe itself could not last long enough for it to happen. You could make it a trillion trillion monkeys, who can type as fast as Lieutenant Commander Data can read, and they would never come even remotely close to producing a single page of any Shakespeare play.

Ahh, I don’t know why, but I found these pretty funny: rejected Mortal Kombat fatalities. Here’s the first one:

Also, see the 2nd one and the 3rd one.

This is a hilarious video of some guy playing a Super Mario Bros. game that was created with a level-designing program by some really sadistic son of a bitch. The hellishly difficult game play is entertaining enough, but the player’s commentary is absolute comedy gold. He sounds like he was born in Eastern Europe but grew up in New York. Incidentally, he seems extremely skilled at playing Super Mario Bros., but no one is a match for this game.

John’s new favorite video of the month (possibly of the year, after some more contemplation) is this mashup of clips from dozens of TV shows and movies edited into a catchy electro-pop music video.

I’m disappointed in the World Series result last night, with the Yankees winning their 27th World Series, but not as disappointed as I would have been if my team had been the one to lose to them. Not nearly as much as in 1996.

On SportsCenter this morning, their daily internet poll was “How do you feel about the Yankees, Love ‘em, Hate ‘em, or Indifferent?” and the result was funny. See for yourself (this is several hours later, after I submitted my “Hate” answer and screen-grabbed this image for blagging purposes…so the time and sample size are both large):

When I heard that Pedro Martinez would start game 2 of the World Series for the Phillies at Yankee Stadium, I was excited to watch it, preferably with my other baseball-following friends. You can read a nice summary of Pedro’s relationship with the Yankees here and see the famous September 2004 press conference sound bite where he called the Yankees his daddies here:

After that press conference, the Red Sox ended up facing the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series. That series is one of the most famous postseason baseball series because the Red Sox came back from a deficit of 3 games to none to win the series, 4-3. That’s the only time in MLB history that a team has won a series after being down 3-0. I never thought I’d see it happen. (It happened twice in the NHL and still hasn’t happened in the NBA). It was also famous for the two appearances Pedro made in Yankee Stadium, in which the Yankees’ organ player and 50,000 fans combined to rouse Pedro with their famous “Who’s Your Daddy?” chant. It started in game 2 when Pedro started and lost, and it continued in game 7, also at Yankee Stadium, when Pedro came in for two innings of relief with his Red Sox up 8-1. He didn’t pitch very well in that outing, either, giving up two runs before settling down and keeping his team up by a comfortable margin.

I tried as hard as I could to find a video of one of those two outings so you could hear the chant resonating through Yankee Stadium, but thanks to the idiots at Fox, it is surely unavailable to the human race forever. But if you’re not familiar with it, imagine what a chant of “Let’s go, Yankees!” would sound like, with the organ going, “Dun dun da-da-dun,” in between the chants, going up an octave each time, but the fans were shouting, “Who’s your daddy!” instead. It sounds just like the “OVER-RATED” chant.

I did manage to find a fan’s video of the “Who’s your daddy!” chant at Yankee Stadium this past Thursday when Pedro pitched for the Phillies in game 2 of the 2009 World Series. I’m sure this video doesn’t do it justice. It must have been louder than that, coming from every corner of the stadium. I couldn’t hear an organ, either, which gave it a nice, old-fashioned baseball touch in 2004.

I didn’t hear the chant on TV myself because I went downtown to watch the game at Bar Louie with five of my friends. It was a lot of fun watching it with them and all of us cheering for the Phillies. Pedro pitched well in Yankee Stadium for the first time since at least 2004, but he still lost because A.J. Burnett pitched better.

I wore my new red Detroit Red Wings hat because I wanted to wear a reddish hat that was close to the dark red of the Phillies to show my support for them that night. That sounds kind of lame because they aren’t even close to the same team, and Philadelphia fans, in fact, hate the Red Wings, but it’s the gesture that counts. (My red Georgia hat feels too tall and awkward on me, so I don’t wear it anymore, and it’s a brighter red than the flimsy, pre-faded, worn-out-looking Red Wings hat that I bought anyway.) However, my Red Wings hat came in handy in a very unexpected way. Near the end of our night there, after we had finished our meals and most people had finished their drinks, the waitress came over and said the bartender wanted to give us a free round of shots because I was wearing a Red Wings hat! Ha! We obviously laughed in disbelief about that. But not in front of the waitress. I’m not even a good Red Wings fan. I’ve never been to a game, I only watch them occasionally, and I only know their famous players. I jumped on their bandwagon and bought a hat so I could wear it to softball next year and because I couldn’t find a new copy of my flimsy, worn-out-looking Braves hat (which is smelly and dirty from wearing during softball). The shots were the bartender’s own creation, the first time he’d ever made it. I forgot what he called it, but I think it had triple sec and some kind of blueberry syrup in the bottom. We all agreed it was good.

These are some of my favorite examples of technological impairment from the Parents Just Don’t Understand articles at CollegeHumor.com. The best ones are the ones you could never, ever make up.

My mom asked to see my pictures on Facebook. I thought about all the drinking pictures that are on it and then I thought about my mom’s computer skills. So I said, if you can find them by yourself, sure. I came back 5 minutes later and she had an empty Microsoft word document up. I think I’m safe.

Instead of using the kitchen timer option on the microwave to time whatever she’s baking, my Mom turns on the microwave and lets it run for the hour or so she’s baking something.

My girlfriend’s dad typed a huge letter out on the computer. After he was done, he printed it and decided the font was too small, so he erased the whole thing, changed the font size, and retyped it.

My mother claimed she could not read my latest email because her printer was broken.

My dad uses the word “video” every time he searches for something on Youtube.

My dad works from home, and often needs to receive updated blueprints. His office has now given him 2 different computers which I set up, and he refuses to turn on. Instead of including him on emails, they have to print their emails and fax them to him. In an odd twist the younger interns in the office had to spend 8 hours on a training day to learn to use a fax machine.

I sent my father a long Google link to a photo, and he proceeded to print out the actual web address. He thought the printer would “decode the link” and turn it into a photo.

I work in a small computer shop in my town. One day a woman walks in, and tells me she has a problem with her computer, that it has broken. I then ask her the problem and she shows it to me and describes her situation. She told me that she had been online, ordering something off the net, when she had put her card in and it hadn’t done anything, just got stuck. Naturally assuming it was something to do with the machine i start booting it up and examine things, this is when she asks me “can you get the card out first please,” curious i asked what she meant. It had turned out that with her limited computer knowledge that she had managed to go online, start ordering items, get to the checkout and wanting to pay with a credit card, she had push her card into the floppy drive. She never came back to the store, but did have to order a new floppy drive.

My cousin, who is my age, recently found a bunch of pictures of us when we were really little and she told my mom. My mom then called me and said “Leanne found some pictures of you two from a long time ago and is going to tag you on facebook, whatever that means. I guess you’re it.”

I bought my mom a new laptop for her birthday. As I’m showing it to her I explained that she needed a power outlet converter because the cord has the ground plug while none of her outlets have the ground inlet. At this point she stops and looks really confused. When I asked what was wrong she said, “Why do I have to plug it in. I thought it was wireless.” I explained that the wireless part is for the internet, but she needs to plug it in for power and to charge her battery. Her response: “So, what’s the difference between the internet and power?”

While my grandpa went online to manage his bank account, there was a box that read “sign here.” He either scrolled down the screen a few times or there was more than one box…his name and initials were written about three different times on the monitor. In ink.

My mom thought that an iPod worked like a cassette player. When I heard her complain that she had to listen to songs she really didn’t like on her playlist to get to the ones she wanted to hear, I suggested she just take those songs off her playlist. She replied with, “Well then I’ll just have to listen to 3 minutes of silence until the next song comes on.”

You know the little image with the wavy letters that sites use to make sure you’re not a robot? It can also be used to make sure you’re not my mom. I have to fill them out for her.

My dad doesn’t know how to send me e-mails. Instead, he just uses the customization feature on stuff like e-cards. I recently got an e-card of a cute kitten with the message “I transferred $100 into your account”.

Our printer ran out of ink, so my Mom bought a new printer.

My grandma kept complaining about how she couldn’t get her new alarm clock to stop displaying 12:00. I went up to her room and took the sticker off of the display screen.

My high school Spanish teacher, on multiple occasions, has been known to photocopy blank pieces of paper in order to get more blank pieces of paper. She’s completely oblivious to the fact that you can open the copier to take out the paper.

My mom thinks Google’s “Suggestions” are the only options available. If she’s trying to find something and it doesn’t come up in the suggestions, she’ll say, “Sorry, it’s not on the internet.”

My dad called me to ask about removing a virus from his computer. Somewhere in the middle of the instructions, he interrupted me to ask, “Are computer viruses man-made, or are they like real viruses?”

My mom was once using my desktop to check her email while I was away at school. I got a frantic phone call that afternoon because the mouse was at the edge of the mousepad but the “thingy” wasn’t at the edge of the screen.

I had fairly bad eyesight for most of my life, so I ended up getting Lasik eye surgery as soon as I was old enough and had enough money. My mom apparently never heard of this procedure, so she was amazed when I told her about it, and is now always asking me how many fingers she is holding up while she is right in front of me, and if I can see the license plate of cars that are up to a mile away. She also tells all of her friends about my amazing “super laser vision”.

I was watching “Jurassic Park” with my grandmother a few months ago. During one particularly scary moment she leans over to me and, with a very worried tone in her voice, asks, “The Dinosaurs…they’re only for the movie, right, they didn’t breed any extras?”

I was in a very dimly lit restaurant with my parents and I asked my mom what time it was. She took out her brand new iPhone (which has the time displayed in huge digits on the screen) and used it like a flashlight to read the time on her watch.

When my parents got the internet, I spent hours explaining how to type in a web address, but my dad still doesn’t understand that it has to be a real website to work. When I look at the previous addresses they read, “www.golfcoursesnearmyrtlebeach.com” or “www.insurancepoliciesforseniors.com”.

My dad got a cell phone a few months ago, but he never turns it on. He thinks that you get charged for every minute the phone is on.

I told my parents I wanted the new MacBook for school. Two weeks later I received “Macs for Dummies” in the mail.

My parents don’t have a debit card. Anytime they need cash, they make out a check to cash and go into the bank.

My mother has never sent, nor attempted to send me a text message ever before. Earlier today, I inexplicably found this waiting for me on my phone: “We r on ca nif eigh six mail gmom”. Anyone want to take a crack at what she meant to say?

My friend just got a text message from her mom that said: “What day do you come home question mark”

A friend of mine found a cell phone. She called the owner of the phone’s parents to see if they could get the phone back to their daughter. Five minutes after she got off the phone, a text message came through from the girls dad saying “Lizzy, some girl found your phone…call her at ***-***-**** to get your phone back”

I’ve worked at an internet company for about a year. One day, a lady called and told me her computer wouldn’t turn on no matter what she did. I said “Ok, can you look at the back of the computer and make sure the power cable is plugged in.” She responded, “Just give me a second, I have to find a flashlight because the power is out here at my house.”

My 75-year-old grandfather just bought a laptop so he could learn to use the Internet. I got an empty email from him yesterday, and the subject heading was, “Andrew what does it mean when it asks ‘are you sure you want to send an empty message’ when i click on the send button??? —-love grandad”

Every time my dad wants to check his email, he goes to Google, types in www.hotmail.com, hits search, and clicks on Hotmail. He recently told me he discovered a shortcut—he can just hit “I’m Feeling Lucky.”

My grandma always reminds me to turn my GPS off a few blocks before I get home “so that the man giving me directions doesn’t know where I live.”

Whenever my mom doesn’t feel like answering the phone and lets the machine get it, she makes everyone be really really quiet because she thinks that the person calling can hear us while they’re leaving a message.

My boss thinks that Google is slang for find. Just this week, I’ve heard him tell our interns to google old documents in our file cabinets, google meeting minutes saved on our server, and google some sugar packets for the coffee bar.

Mom’s Text Message: “Can u go 2 niketown to buy a Pacquia shirt 4 dad size lrg? B careful swine flu.”

My mother got my father a GPS for Christmas. He told me the reason why it wasn’t working in the house was because it couldn’t see the stars.

My dad thinks that he can only check an e-mail account on the computer he made it on. Therefore, he checks his work e-mail in his office and his personal e-mail on our house computer. It wouldn’t be that bad, but he works at home and those two computers are about 20 feet apart….

My mom has a contact in her cellphone named “?.akj.e0″

I showed my dad the BustedTee with Mao Tse Tung on it that reads, “LMAO” and he didn’t get it because he doesn’t know what LMAO means. I showed it to my mom, and she didn’t get it because she doesn’t know who Mao Tse Tung is. Which is worse?

My mom just got a Facebook account a few weeks ago and on Valentine’s Day she posted on my wall:”I HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR VD!!!”

My grandma cannot grasp the functional purpose of a thermostat. She cranks it up when its cold, then proceeds to regulate the heat by opening and closing the windows.

I made the mistake of trying to explain Wikipedia to my grandmother. She’s now convinced that anybody can modify any website at will, and she won’t use Weather.com anymore because she’s worried that vandals will change the temperature on her.

I caught my father on google the other day typing in “show me snow machines”. I later found out that he starts any and all searches with the words “show me”, or “I want to see”.

My mom needed to transfer pictures from her digital camera onto her computer. After a few minutes, she was hopeless and asked me for help. I took out the memory card and put it in the computer. Nothing was on it. I hooked up the camera to the computer, but still, there were no pictures. Finally, I had to ask my mom what she had tried before she asked me for help. She put the camera’s batteries in the mouse.

My professor has tried to show different DVD’s in class for the past 4 weeks. She couldn’t get any of them to work so tonight she decided she was just going to show a VHS tape because “it’s simple and I know how to work it.” It took her 20 minutes to get it to show on the projector. Now she’s trying to turn the volume on. Class ends in 10 minutes.

While my mother was looking over my shoulder at an AIM conversation:
Mom: “What does LMAO mean?”
Me: “It’s an abbreviation”
Mom: “Let’s Make An Omelette”?

A few years ago my mom tried to call my brother and reached his voice mail. She left a 2-minute message calling out for him to pick up the phone, as if it was being played through his speaker phone.

The other day I was at work and an older lady came in and wanted to buy Firefox. I explained to her that Firefox was a free download. I then told her to find it by going to Google and searching for it. She told me, “I don’t have Google; I only have Yahoo.”

I was showing my mom how to get pictures from her camera to her computer. I told her to click on the desktop icon which she clicked once. I told her you have to double-click and she said, “Is that where you click something twice?”

My dad makes the subject for all of his emails “Hi, It’s Mitch.”

My mom sent me an email with the subject as my cell phone number. The email said “Is this a text?”

My mom deleted friends off Facebook in an attempt to free up her hard drive space.

I just saw an old guy working out with a discman inside a fanny pack.

My mom just got a new cell phone. She was setting up her voicemail on it and wanted to see if she did it correctly so she asked me to call her. I called her phone and she picked up so I told her to just let it go to voicemail. She said OK. I called back and she picked up again. This happened two more times until I took the phone away from her.

One time I opened a Firefox window, minimized it to look at something else, and then brought it back up again. My mom freaked out and yelled, “You just wasted twenty dollars!” “Huh?” I eloquently replied. “It costs twenty dollars every time you open up The Internet,” she continued. “Our plan costs twenty dollars.” I assured her that this was a monthly charge, but she remained unconvinced. She demanded that I repay her $20 for “wasting The Internet,” and then reminded me to “turn it off as soon as you’re done with it, we don’t want to use more than we absolutely need.”

I tried to teach my grandmother basic computer skills, but I wasn’t able to get anywhere with her because she kept rotating the mouse on the mouse-pad. She thought you had to steer it like a car when you wanted the pointer to go someplace.

My grandfather literally used the screen as a mousepad because he thought the cursor was controlled by the mouse being on the screen.

My dad has a Zune.

The Shirelles were, along with the Supremes, probably one of the two best girl groups of all time. Their song “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” is beautiful, sad, forlorn, and longing all at the same time. It seems to me that for the girl to even ask that question of her lover implies that she already suspects the answer is “no,” but she clings to the love they shared that night and hopes that he feels the same way.

The Shirelles’ version is by far the best and will always be considered the definitive version. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find the song was co-written by Carole King, who wrote or co-wrote “Locomotion”, “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman”, “One Fine Day”, “You’ve Got a Friend”, and “Jazzman”.

Tonight, you’re mine completely.
You give your love so sweetly.
Tonight the light
of love is in your eyes,
but will you love me tomorrow?

Is this a lasting treasure?
Or just a moment’s pleasure?
Can I believe
the magic of your sighs?
Will you still love me tomorrow?

Tonight with words unspoken
you said that I’m the only one.
But will my heart be broken
when the night
meets the morning sun?

I’d like to know that your love
is a love I can be sure of.
So tell me now
and I won’t ask again:
Will you still love me tomorrow?

So tell me now
and I won’t ask again:
Will you still love me tomorrow?
Will you still love me tomorrow?…

From Randall Munroe’s Wikipedia entry I learned he founded the Limerick Database to collect all the funny classics and new limericks that people could submit. It changed my life. I highly recommend reading the 150 top-rated limericks. However, since the website now seems to be defunct, I won’t try to submit my brilliant creations to it.

Instead, for now, I’ll publish them on my LifeBlag, and I’ll start with a limerick about the book and movie that have been on my mind for the last couple weeks: The Silence of the Lambs. I realized I was remiss in never having seen the movie, but after I discovered it was based on a novel I committed myself to reading the novel first. I added both the novel by Thomas Harris and the movie on Blu-ray to my Amazon wish list. Luckily, the novel was very cheap, about $5.50, so I bought it in the summer and read it this month. I don’t own a Blu-ray player yet, nor do I plan on buying Blu-ray discs or players for a couple years, but Kathy insisted that after I finished the novel, we had to watch the movie; we rented it and watched it last week.

To save you and myself from an overly detailed comparison, I’ll say the movie was about as close in content and in quality to the book as any movie/book combination I’m familiar with. Even though Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor (not Best Supporting Actor) Oscar for his portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter with less than 17 minutes of screen time and the English-speaking public is almost unanimous in regarding Hannibal the Cannibal as the greatest movie villain of all time, an additional few exchanges or perhaps an entire scene between him and Clarice would have made the movie and his performance more powerful. The deleted scenes included some bits of their conversations that were almost verbatim from the book, that would have given Hopkins even more chance to shine, and that would have given viewers more insight into Clarice’s psyche.

Anyway, here’s the long version of The Silence of the Lambs in limerick form. It takes some things that were exclusive to the book and at least one that was exclusive to the movie, but it’s all basically the same story:

In Behavioral Science they sought
murderers who victims caught
one after the other
to rape, skin, or smother
and regarded their humanity not.

Young Starling was but a mere student
whom, Crawford thought, ‘twould be prudent
to send on an errand—
she’s young and she’s fair and
she might reach the madman we couldn’t.

Alone in a sunlight-less cell,
Lecter burned in his well-deserved hell
To get in his head,
to avert one more dead,
to glean clues he won’t straightforward tell:

Young Starling was charged with this task.
Jack needn’t a second time ask;
she was eager to prove
she could easily move
up from her roots, which were white trash.

Down behind plexiglass screen,
he dropped clues for Starling to glean:
A head in a jar
in an old victim’s car
told more than it would, at first, seem.

Another young body emerged,
a girl of considerable girth.
Clarice helped to print her
and noticed that in her
mouth a cocoon was insert’d.

By feigning impairment he caught her,
the tough junior senator’s daughter.
About a fourteen?—
his judgment’s quite keen
for a fiend who takes women to slaughter.

Back to his lair they sped.
Mere scraps and lefto’ers she was fed.
Trapped in a well
in his dark, homemade hell,
her heart filled with mis’ry and dread.

Her pleas and her promises failed
to sway the man who had her jailed.
Put lotion on skin,
send it back up again,
in exchange for her excrement pail.

He doesn’t just capture and kill,
nor does he rape for the thrill.
He covets, Clarice,
to transform, find peace:
the motive of Buffalo Bill.

Clarice divulged long-hidden pains—
quid pro quo was the name of their game—
of horses and sheep
that haunted her sleep,
but Hannibal gave her no name.

In his new high-security cage,
Lecter showed neither malice nor rage
until, with a key,
he broke himself free
and escaped with a cop’s borrowed face.

The first body wasn’t the first;
’twas the third, weighted down to divert.
Why try to hide it
so no one would find it
till after the second or third?

The rationale didn’t quite register
till Clarice grokked the clues Dr. Lecter
had fed her in pieces,
and then said, “Oh, Jesus!
He must have resided in Belvedere!”

To Fredrica’s hometown she went
to interrogate family and friends.
But what gave her a start
were the girl’s sewing darts
like the ones in the last victim’s skin.

Their former employer to seek,
hot on the trail was Clarice.
A sewing professional,
rejected transsexual,
he’s skinning himself a boutique!

“Yes, we know, from Johns Hopkins, a name
with a typo: not Jamie, but Jame.
An address near Chicago
where he shipped pre-imago
caterpillars that later became

the moths and the grand butterflies
with which Jame Gumb identifies.”
Far away’s where the game is!
She was feeling quite anxious
but was closer than she realized.

He acted aloof but complied.
Nothing he said seemed contrived.
A moth in the air.
Mr. Gumb met her stare.
The moment of truth had arrived.

Chasing him down underground.
He was hiding and couldn’t be found.
The girl screamed in fright,
and then out went the lights
and Clarice was left feeling around.

Silently watching her search,
with his night-vision goggles he lurked.
His pistol he cocked,
she turned and she shot,
and he toppled there…dying…inert.

Now Hannibal Lecter’s in hiding,
but doubtless his time he is biding.
On Doc Chilton’s trail,
but he still didn’t fail
to send Clarice Starling his tidings.

Our heroine has proven supreme
and ended the psychopath’s scheme.
And now the lambs’ cries,
as Lecter surmised,
will no longer torment her dreams.

The only worthwhile thing that Fark.com has given me in a long time is this discussion thread about this completely pointless, worthless, empty news article. This thread is comedy gold. The comments posted below the article itself were hilarious until the newspaper’s mods deleted all of them. If you read the Fark thread, you can find some of the funnier comments that they copied and pasted from the article’s comments section (most of which were undoubtedly written by Farkers).

In my searches related to the aforementioned 3D puzzles, I came across some puzzle vendor and enthusiast sites, one of which contained the text of this New York Times article about the stomachion, a children’s game that seemed to be the subject of a manuscript Archimedes wrote 2200 years ago. From what I can tell, this is almost universally believed to be the oldest known example of a puzzle. This website points out that the stomachion is the same type of puzzle as the more familiar tangrams, which most of us did at some point in our youths.

The fascinating thing about Archimedes’ investigations of the stomachion was not that he wrote a treatise on how to play a children’s game, but rather that he founded the discipline of combinatorics by trying to figure out how many different ways the strips of paper in the stomachion could be arranged to form a square. As Gina Kolata wrote in her New York Times article, which focuses on the efforts at restoring and interpreting the manuscript as much as on its contents:

…a historian of mathematics at Stanford, sifting through ancient parchment overwritten by monks and nearly ruined by mold, appears to have solved the mystery of what the treatise was about. In the process, he has opened a surprising new window on the work of the genius best remembered (perhaps apocryphally) for his cry of “Eureka!”…

The Stomachion, concludes the historian, Dr. Reviel Netz, was far ahead of its time: a treatise on combinatorics, a field that did not come into its own until the rise of computer science.

The goal of combinatorics is to determine how many ways a given problem can be solved. And finding the number of ways that the problem posed in the Stomachion (pronounced sto-MOCK-yon) can be solved is so difficult that when Dr. Netz asked a team of four combinatorics experts to do it, it took them six weeks.
[...]
The diagram involved 14 pieces, and the word “multitude” seemed to be associated with it. Mr. Heiberg and those who followed him thought this meant that you could get many figures [of animals, plants, household objects, etc.] by rearranging the pieces.

“This is part of the reason people didn’t see what it was about,” Dr. Netz said. …[T]he old interpretation seemed trivial, hardly worth Archimedes’ time.

As he examined the manuscript pages, piecing together their text, he realized that what Archimedes was really asking seemed to be, “How many ways can you put the pieces together to make a square?” That question, Dr. Netz said, “has mathematical meaning.”

Archimedes was truly an amazing person. I use that word with the fullest extent of its meaning. It is difficult to understand, much less appreciate, how extraordinary and seemingly superhuman his mind was. I put him in a class with Da Vinci and Einstein and no one else who ever lived (that we know of). His founding of the field of combinatorics only adds to my already reverential and awestruck feelings towards him.

While I was watching college football at a friend’s apartment, she brought out a few wooden 3D puzzles that her grandfather makes as a hobby, so we could fiddle around with them during halftime and when there wasn’t anything going on in the game and after the game was over. I don’t recall ever seeing any puzzles like this, but a Google search of woodworking 3d puzzles reveals that it must be a pretty widespread hobby.

They were really hard, to me. There were four such puzzles that we passed around, and I tried my hand at two of them over the course of a few hours. The other five guests, who had never seen them before, each solved two or more of them, eventually, and I didn’t solve a single one. One of them is demonstrated in this video, where the guy makes it look a million time easier than it really is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsXBLyiPzQo

The other one was even easier. It kind of resembled this, but wasn’t the same:

It consisted of six wooden rectangular planks each with a peg sticking out perpendicularly, either from the middle or from one end, and each wooden rectangle had two or three holes for other pegs to go into, and you had to put them together into a cube-like block with no pegs sticking out or visible anywhere. I tried that damn thing forever and came close so many times, but could never change my strategy enough to solve it.

I have never solved a Rubik’s Cube, either. I never owned one myself, so that could have helped, but I doubt I would have had the patience or the ability to figure it out. It would have taken years of diligent attempts, probably. I did own a similar puzzle called Square One, which is like a super Rubik’s Cube because its pieces are not all cubes; as you can see from the Wikipedia image, it contained mostly irregular-shaped pieces. Obviously I never came close to solving it, either.

I’m not sure if my problem is that I don’t have a good enough imagination or don’t have good enough spatial reasoning skills, but it’s probably both. Remember those standardized test questions, or IQ test questions, where you were supposed to imagine folding a piece of paper up a certain way and cutting it with scissors in a certain way, and then discern what the paper would look like after it was unfolded? Yeah, I was always kind of bad at those. I’m sure I could figure most of them out eventually, but they didn’t come easily. These 3D puzzles that I could hold in my own hands and fiddle with in any way I wanted and look at in real life and try and try again proved impossible for me. Everyone else had a pretty hard time with them, but like I said, they all eventually got a couple of them.

It just really depressed me. That is all.

Where did the name Windows 7 come from? I thought maybe it was just a working title until they could come up with something clever to market it as, and then when I kept hearing about it I figured people like the number 7 so they left it as Windows 7. But I count eight previous versions of the Windows operating system that have been pretty successful and widely used: Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, Me, XP, and Vista. Obviously there was a version 1 and a version 2, so with them added I really don’t understand where the 7 comes from. Microsoft General Manager Mike Nash said in a blag post that it was the seventh release of Windows, so therefore “Windows 7″ just makes sense. Maybe NT, 2000, and Me all counted as one?

Speaking of Windows, this is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a while.

The entry for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the featured article on the Wikipedia home page on October 6. Freakin’ sweet. I LOVE that movie. Probably my favorite Star Trek movie and definitely in my top 10 or 20 favorite movies of all time. Please don’t read any of the plot summary if you aren’t familiar with it. You should get ahold of the DVD’s of Star Trek 2, 3, 4, and 6, and watch them in close succession. You will discover a strong appreciation for the Star Trek universe.

I am not as good of a speller as I was when I was a child. This kind of disturbs me because I feel it is indicative of reduced perspicacity and failure to pay attention to detail as well as I used to. Maybe my mind is lazier or doesn’t retain information as solidly as it used to. That shouldn’t start happening until I’m really old, like, my parents’ age. I never had a photographic memory or anything, but I used to be able to look at a word once and pretty reliably spell it for years and years after that. (This certainly wasn’t 100% true, and it didn’t help me win any spelling bees, as I missed simple words that I had read numerous times before. In 4th grade, I won my class’s spelling bee but lost in the school-wide competition by spelling apology “apolagy”, and in 5th grade I expected to win my class’s competition again so I must not have studied very much, and I misspelled balcony as “balcany” on my first word of the day! Identical errors, two years in a row, but I didn’t actually think balcony was spelled that way; it was more like a typo than an error of thought or memory. It was a speak-o. “A” rushed out of my mouth when I knew “O” belonged there.) Now I forget all kinds of things I used to know and should have retained. I don’t expect to spell everything right, but words like “broccoli”, “accommodate”, and “preferable” have really enraged me in recent months. I haven’t misspelled “privilege” in a long while. That’s good.

(Btw, the one and only reason I would ever use the word perspicacity in speech or writing is because Lisa Simpson uses it to great humorous effect in the episode “Lisa the Simpson”: “Oh, my god! I’m losing my perspicacity!”)

One of the five or so country songs that I like is “Alcohol” by Brad Paisley. Only recently did I understand all the lyrics of the chorus, because of a Jack Daniels commercial I saw. The chorus begins, “Ever since I left Milwaukee, Lynchburg, Bordeaux, France/I’ve been making the bars lots of big money/And helping white people dance….” I didn’t understand the word Lynchburg. I thought it could have been Pittsburgh, but that didn’t make any sense and it didn’t sound like a P at the beginning, so I was pretty much clueless. And then I saw a Jack Daniels commercial that showed a close-up of the bottle, and the label said, “Lynchburg, Tennessee.” So I knew he was referring to Jack Daniels whiskey at that part. I don’t quite think beer originated in Milwaukee or wine in France any more than whiskey originated in Tennessee, so…I’m not too sure about that chorus.

Speaking of alcohol, there’s a professor here at the medical school who must be kind of a lush (then again, lots of them are) because he is a regular at one of my favorite bars, and somehow he is well-known for ordering a hazelnut daiquiri at happy hour every week before he gets into his beer drinking. It’s like his schtick. I saw him there last Friday, and I don’t know him personally, so I didn’t say anything, but he sat close to where I was at the bar. Somehow I felt privileged to witness him first-hand saying, “I’ll have the regular, [I forget bartender's name], my hazelnut daiquiri.” The bartender said, “Sorry to disappoint, but we were clean out of hazelnuts. Try this instead, on the house.” The doctor looked kind of annoyed and silently drank it. He said, emotionless, “Hmm. Pecans?” The bartender responded, “Nope. It’s a hickory daiquiri, doc!” Rimshot!

Some people, including myself, kind of make fun of me for buying so many DVDs without ever having seen them. I heard they were good, I think I would like them, they were on sale in a weekly ad, and I don’t feel a particular need for high-definition copies of them, so I buy them. But did you ever think about this—how many books have you read before you buy those? The upper threshold of price I’m willing to pay for most movies on standard DVD ($5 or $8) is less than or equal to the price of most paperback books, so really there’s a higher chance of waste in paying $8 or more for a book when you don’t know that you’ll like it. It takes a lot longer to finish and occupies more space on your shelf.

Oh, and lest you think I’m a DVD-buying maniac like Mike, I have about 120-130 movies on DVD plus a couple dozen seasons of various shows on DVD, but my Amazon wish list contains more movies than I already own. The vast majority of them are Blu-rays. I am waiting extremely, excrutiatingly patiently for Blu-ray movies to break the $10 threshold and for good, reliable Blu-ray players to break the $100 threshold. (If I get a good job and a cheap-ish apartment somewhere, I’ll settle for $150. Then again, I’ll probably make my first Blu-ray player a PlayStation 3, so that negates the price considerations.)

I have read a lot about high-definition technology online, mainly Blu-ray movies, Blu-ray players, and TV’s. Most people who pay attention to these things know that downloading movies to a hard drive and streaming movies on-demand is the way of the future. On-demand streaming from Netflix, Amazon, and other companies is already available via your ethernet-connected television, Blu-ray player, or X-Box. Considering how often we experience buffering delays with simple embedded flash videos on the internet, especially with a wireless ethernet connection, I am surprised the streaming services are so reliably smooth and fast with those huge video files.

But I suffer from a bit of Picard’s Syndrome even with movies, so that I want physical copies of movies on my shelf. I like owning them and seeing them all on my shelf, just like all my books. I don’t think I would be satisfied with an on-demand streaming service because I wouldn’t actually own my own copy of the movie or TV show, and what if you don’t have an ethernet connection or that video becomes unavailable for some reason?

Link of the day: The Parents Just Don’t Understand series from CollegeHumor.com. Some of the items therein are truly hilarious.

Gigagalaxy Zoom

Because the universe is awesome and beautiful. (HT: Dark Roasted Blend.)