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Thoughts and observations of an Enneagram Type 7 INFP Beatles fan. I prefer baths to showers, late nights to early mornings, cats to dogs, and Mary Ann.
The perfect blog for all featherless bipeds.
Gooblek
is a 2-to-1 suspension of cornstarch in water. It acts like a liquid if you
move it slowly, but a solid if you hit it or squeeze it. Click below for info
on Asparagus Pee.
Recent Entries
Archives February 2003March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 January 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 March 2007 April 2007 June 2007 July 2007 February 2008
Interesting Sites zefrank.comJames Randi Ray Kurzweil's Site Internet Beatles Album Ken Wilber's Site Phsychological Self-Help Today's Front Pages Online Magnetic Poetry Doonesbury Democracy Means You Hedweb Links Weblog Resources Mandarin Design (CSS)Slacker's Guide Creative Commons CSS Properties Stylesheets Tutorial Open Source Web Design Dan's Tips My Bloginality is INFP !!!
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Saturday, February 28, 2004
I'm blogging to you live via Wi-Fi from a Dataflex developer's summit in Carson City, so I'm just going to drop a bunch of linky-doodles on you:
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
 I've had this idea for a long time that it would be a cool cartoon for someone like Bizarro to have a beggar whose sign would say 'Will beg to differ,' instead of 'Will work for food.' I even e-mailed his syndicator, but I guess either they didn't tell him or he wasn't interested.If anybody out there is interested and can draw a decent cartoon with this idea, I believe it to be original and I'd love for someone to use it - just let me see the result, OK? While I was looking for a picture of a beggar to fold, spindle, and mutilate, I accidentally ran across a site called beerisgoodforyou.com - Got Beer?  I was just reading a news article about an outbreak of infections in some kids who had their upper ears pierced in a mall in Oregon, and I'll be darned if it don't turn out there are risks associated with punching holes through people.Here's what the National Institutes of Health have to say about Piercing and Tattoos.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
 I get right around 200 spams per day now, and I'm often amused by the senders, the subject, or the content - it's really scary, but I'm beginning to consider spam glancing a form of entertainment, and I'm toying with the idea of having an occasional "Worst Spam" award, but I'm torn, so please feel free to comment. Yesterday, what got me was the sender's name, Pusillanimity G. Romanticizes - reminds me of Phoebe from Friends calling herself Regina Philanges. So here's todays winner, from my good friend Feminism I. Tobaccoes: Ave! :)
Monday, February 23, 2004
J-walk told me I should go look at Grow-a-Brain, and I do whatever he says, so here's a link to a really cool page of theirs, growabrain: Beatles Archives.
Saturday, February 21, 2004
This is too cool not to blog - Dialect Survey Results as a map. Do you pronounce the sound in aunt like the a in ant, the au in caught, or is it the same as ain't? You probably won't believe this, but I'd love to believe that President Bush is a capable, competent representative of a powerful collective of 300,000,000 free-thinking individuals. I'm just havin' a little trouble with that.  See, I'm not sure this man understands the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion. Some people don't, you know.I mean, when he asked for $87 billion, I did a quick calculation ($87,000,000,000/300,000,000) and figgerred this was about $300/head * me+my wife+my daughter, and got $900 to fund the Iraqi reconstruction. Well, OK. So I was reading this article from some financial site like Motley Fool, and it turns out I really was confused about the distinction between the budget deficit and the national debt. See the deficit tells you the difference between what we have available to spend and what we plan to spend, and the debt tells you what we already owe our own bondholders and other nations. It's kinda like, you know you make $35,000 a year, but you spend $37,500, which means that at the end of the year you owe $2500 on your Visa at 13.5% interest. So that year, you have a $2500 budget deficit and a $2500 debt. But it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that if you keep this up, next year you'll have a $2500 deficit, but a $6000 debt, and so on. So my understanding is that we currently have about a $500 billion deficit, and a $7 trillion debt. What that means to me and my family, if I understand this at all, is that we owe somebody somewhere around $75,000, and Bush is a) cutting taxes and giving rebates, and b) asking for more spending. At least the Democrats have the god-given sense to 'tax and spend' instead of just spending. For an extra-special Asparagus Pee perspective, consider this: A trillion is a million million, so if there were 7 million millionaires in America, our national debt would take all 7,000,000 of their fortunes.  Looks like our daughter is going to need some dental work, so here's a joke I thought of earlier today: 'Four out of five dentists recommend chewing Trident Sugarless Gum. The other guy, who has a much clearer understanding of his own business model, recommends sucking on sugar cubes.'
Friday, February 20, 2004
I don't really think about gay marriage all that much in my day to day life, because I'm not gay, and I am married. But recently, I seem to keep butting my head against this issue wherever I turn as something that needs to be thought about. (I should probably mention that we live exactly 121 miles from San Francisco.) I think the main problem is not the whole gay vs. straight dilemma, Christian morals, or 'American Values,' but rather, the fact that in our society over the last 91 years, taxes and social benefits have been deliberately structured to benefit married couples who own property and bear children. Now, after several thousand years, marriage has a lot of baggage associated with it. I guess the bible folks still think the man and the woman cleave together to become one flesh. I think there may even be an element of 'Adam gets his rib back,' which neatly mirrors the ancient Greek ideas about needing both halves to make the Platonic whole, which in the vernacular becomes 'my better half.' (Despite the fact that Greek philosophers were generally homo-pedophiles.) So my bottom line is, I think they're fighting an uphill battle to call it 'same-sex marriage' but I believe with all my heart that serious same-sex alliances should be granted all of the rights and privileges of temporarily married wannabe breeders, or else the straights shouldn't get any special treatment. (As long as the Government wants to reward me for gettin' hitched, buyin' a house, and gettin' it on, that's fine, but let's spread the love, OK?) My very best and only real friend in the world was a gay man who lived a confused life filled with shame and died of AIDS about 10 years ago, so don't you dare even ask me about a special amendment to the constitution to document our idiocy about same-sex couples. 
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
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!
Sunday, February 08, 2004
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™:
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.
Monday, February 02, 2004
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.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
 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? 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
Back to Chris & Janet & Emily Get Wired!
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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.
