| Well, it was bound to happen… the geniuses over at The WB have cancelled Angel. Another dark day for television, and once again, Asparagus Pee salutes Joss Whedon for the years of pleasure we’ve gotten from his immense creativity.
Whedon, ever the philosopher, quotes the poet on the subject: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN’ SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.” (via MediaSharx & The Bronze) Here’s a link to Whedonesque Weblog. |
Another nine days – where does the time go? After I griped below about my typical visitor, I got a very nice entry in my guestbook from Brian ‘Big Bri’ Lewandowski saying, ‘I read your site daily… I swear…’, which was nice, and I had someone over the weekend who spent like 50 minutes crawling around here, so I’ve decided not to give up. Brian is a stand-up comic and a published author and he has a nice blog called L’il Kernels of Insight. Here’s a link to his book Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind over on Amazon, and here’s a blog entry I like about competition and Ants in the Pants called I MUST WIN!.
By the way, my very first blog entry was February 9th, 2003, so Asparagus Pee, Gooblek & Other Neat Stuff is over a year old already!
I can’t believe it’s been over a week already since I’ve blogged, though honestly, I’d take it a lot more seriously to have 50 people a day coming here if 30 of them weren’t looking for ‘pee pictures’ and what not, or if anybody actually stayed longer than 30 seconds. (If you’re a real live regular who comes here to see what I’ve got to say, please do sign the guestbook or vote for baths vs. showers or something.)
It’s almost midnight here, so just in case I don’t get time to write about some of the things that are on my mind, I’m going to start with a long list of Linky-Doodles™:
- Dennis Miller used to be so cool – what happened?
- Spot the Fake Smiles – I got 17 out of 20, and I’m a schlemiel, a schlimazel, I’m tryin’ to say I’m a real schmuck – oh, wait, that’s right, I don’t know yiddish… I’m just a patsy. (Via The Presurfer)
- Einstein’s Theory in Words of Four Letters or Less (Via Reality Carnival)
- Did Edison really Invent the Lightbulb?
- Does this parrot really talk? (On a related note, the rumors that Churchill’s 104 year old pet parrot was still suggesting we ‘f**k the Nazis’ has since been discredited).
- Confessions of a Car Salesman.
- I’ve got a bunch of personnel stuff I’m behind on at work, and I think I really need to reread this article on How to Manage Smart People.
- One of my heroes from a long ways back is a man named Win Wenger who wrote a book on increasing your intelligence that I read back in 1980 when I was a college freshman at Iowa State. Here’s some music he’s improvised directly to tape as a creativity exercise, and I haven’t decided yet if there’s any point to it.
- Here’s an inventor who’s Imagination Engines create new inventions for him.
- Turns out there was this guy, Raymond Loewy (1929-1986) who was an incredibly influential industrial designer – cars, logos, furniture, appliances, Lucky Strikes cigarette package, Airforce One’s paint job, etc. Here’s his sketch for the Exxon logo.
OK, I promised myself that I wouldn’t blog about Janet Jackson’s half-time indiscretion, because frankly, I’m waiting for her to go full-time, but these two parodies that are going around are pretty hard to pass up – Face on Mars… Coincidence? and Amateur Gourmet’s Cupcakes.
Here’s the actual transcript of Dubya’s Meet the Press interview that everyone’s reading. It took me about 15 or 20 minutes to read it, because Bush is basically, well, I was going to say ‘incoherent,’ but I’m going to pull out all the stops and call him ‘inchoate,’ which is a word I’d hoped I’d never have to use to describe a president, so let me explain, no wait, there’s not enough time, let me sum up:
Russert: So, you’re blowing smoke about inviting a special investigation into the lack of legitimate intelligence going into the war with Iraq?
Dubya: That’s right. It turns out there was no threat, and there were no weapons, and I had no support from the international community or the UN, but let’s back up for a second – it was still the right thing to do.
Russert: Senator Kerry is promoting the idea that you weren’t a very good National Guardsman, not showing up for duty, going AWOL, etc.
Dubya: Well, I’ve destroyed or hidden all the records, so “Bring it on!”
Russert: We can’t help but notice that the economy is in the toilet and you’ve singlehandedly turned a tidy $281 billion surplus into a $521 billion deficit. The debt has gone from 5.7 trillion, to $7 trillion – up 23 percent.
Dubya: Hey, you can’t pin that on me – I was only in office 3, maybe 4 months when all that stuff started to happen, so it’s Bill’s fault. And that deficit is how us patriots fight evil the American way, so suck it up.
Russert: So no more tax cuts until we balance the budget?
Dubya: What? Are you crazy? Read my lips.
This is fun. Bartleby’s has The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy on line, and it’s searchable and browsable. Here’s the idioms page: 4. Idioms. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002
I know a lot of these, but I need a refresher on things like NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), and some of the foreign language borrowings like in vino veritas.
I’m sorry to keep blogging about my horrorscope, but this one’s also dead-on:
Your mind is an awesome thing to behold. All will agree that you’re a brilliant and truly inventive soul, even if they can’t understand most of what you say. Get it down in writing or the recording medium of your choice, because you might soon be distracted by something even more fun. As it is, your strategies are miles ahead of what anyone else is thinking. If you give in to your wicked streak, it’s almost too easy to toy with your opponents, just to watch them dance to your tune. Don’t make too many powerful enemies.
I’m absolutely way too excited that Survivor All-Stars starts tonight! I can’t wait. Here’s a fan site, Survivor Fever – Survivor All Stars, and the official CBS Site.
I like so many of these familiar faces so well that I’m honestly having a hard time figuring out who I’d like to see win. Ethan’s still my favorite of the 1st-time winners, with Richard a close second. But they don’t really need to win again, right?
So, I’ll knock out all past winners from my ‘hope’ pile. OK, I think for now I’ll just root equally for Rupert, Rudy, and both Robs, and I’ll narrow it down later.
In case you’re wondering why I’m still cheering ol’ Rudy along, it’s partly because I actually met the man a few years ago at a BEA convention, where he was signing postcards and taking pictures with people in preparation for his impending Book of Rudy release. He is not a tall man, but please note that he is sitting behind a table in this picture and I am standing.
Update: Surprised to see the first person voted off was a past winner – I realize they constitute a real threat, but I’m afraid the tribes are overlooking what I’m going to call “the wisdom of the elders.” I mean these guys were around for the whole shootin’ match, and someone like Richard knows more about Rudy than we were ever shown. They also have a proven ability in the challenges, which is crucial in the pre-merger phase of the game. I’ll be curious to see if picking off winners will be a pattern or an anomaly.
More on Hydras! I dug out one of my old biology textbooks, and it had a whole chapter on hydras, so I learned a lot more about them this week.
It turns out there was a guy named Abraham Trembley back around 1740 who performed all kinds of experiments on the little guys to try to figure out if they were plants or animals.
Among other things, he discovered that they can move around using several different means of locomotion, that they can reproduce either sexually with sperm and eggs or asexually by budding, and most amazing of all, they exhibit regeneration of lost parts.
If you cut the head off of a hydra, it can grow a new head. If you cut a section out of the middle, the head end grows a new head, and the foot end grows a foot. Here’s where it gets interesting: if you graft together two sections from the middle of one or more hydras, and deliberately try to foul things up by grafting the two head ends together, the bigger piece wins and grows a head, and if both are exactly the same size, whichever piece was originally closer to its donor’s head wins. It gets even better – if you squish a hydra through a fine mesh, like a piece of silk, its components get scattered and it can’t regenerate, but if you heap them up into a pile, it can actually reorganize itself into a hydra.
Wow!
Here’s a great article with historical background and some good pictures: Andrew Skolnick – Science and Medical Journalist – Smithsonian Hydra Article