Blog Jones

Stay far away from SuDoku. It’s a Japanese number puzzle. You’re given a board like this one:

And you have to fill in the blanks. Each row, column, and marked 3×3 square must contain the numbers 1-9 exactly once.

It sounds really simple. And it is, for the first few squares.

It’s the last few squares that bite you, and then you have to go back and change things, or start over.

Why should you stay away? Because this will eat your time. I picked up one of these today, and it took me over two hours to finish.

Actually, if I had to do another one, it’d probably be a lot easier. The trick to this game comes in the extended entry.

This is from the dining common menu this week.

Sour Cream Crunch Cake? Can one of you dorm students tell me if that’s any good?

Is that boring white toilet paper too passe for your tastes? Why not try black toilet paper?

Hey, it’s worked for other products…

I think that this is hilarious.

Brought to you by Jeri Massi. If she made a BJU version of this shirt, I’d definitely buy one or two.

In the Falkan Islands, there’s a bunch of land mines left over from some war. Normally, that’s a bad thing, but for a bunch of penguins in mating season, it’s a great thing.

Since they’re too light to trigger the mines, they can run around freely, while predators, people, and sheep (which compete for resources) stay away.

That’s pretty cool.

I love the Demotivators series of anti-inspirational posters from Despair.com. They’ve just come out with a new set of four posters; my personal favorite is Beauty. Go take a look.

(click for a bigger picture)

It’s nice to see parents who care about their children.

(Via my Dad)

Ever wondered where you’d end up if you dug a hole through the center of the earth? Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, you can finally find the answer.

(Via Lifehacker)

You should read it.

Wouldn’t that look great in the ceiling of your church?

Pretend you’re a teenager with money to burn. Are you going to buy an iPod shuffle:

Sleek, stylish, and the toy all your friends are buying. Or will you buy:

…a Sony Walkman Bean?

Seriously, it’s called the Bean.

It’s actually a pretty nifty device; it has an OLED display, a 50 hour battery life (!), and some kind of rapid charge technology that’ll give you 3 hours worth of music on a three-minute charge. It’ll play MP3s as well as Sony’s proprietary audio file format. And it comes in colors other than white.

On the other hand, it costs thirty dollars more than the shuffle. And then there’s the name, which I can’t say without chuckling.

My biggest disappointment: There’s no green Bean.

Boileryard Clarke examines an issue I’ve thought about many times: Who in the world would have thought of eating the things we do? A brief quote:

Specifically… did you ever think of the first person who determined that something was or wasn’t good to eat?

Like… who is the character that looked at a hog in the mud and said “wow… I bet that’d be really tasty!”

Or… who connected the dots that started with wheat in a field and ended up with bread?

On those same lines: Who’s idea was tobacco? Who would have thought to take the leaves of a plant, wrap them up, stuff them in your mouth, and set fire to it?

Coca-Cola has announced the development of a new product: A soda that actually burns calories, just by drinking it. Kind of a super diet drink. “Enviga, a green tea-based, caffeinated, carbonated drink, is in clinical testing and is said to speed up the user’s metabolism.”

Mmmm… carbonated tea. Tasty!

This is clever: A game called StreetWars: Killer - NYC. Instead of being a board game or a video game, this game is live-action. Each player is given a packet of information about their intended target–things like name, place of residence, and a photograph. Once they get their information, they are to “find and kill (by way of water gun, water balloon or super soaker)” their target(s).

There are a few safe zones–the block around your place of work, subway cars (but not stations), and buses for example–but otherwise, you’re not safe anywhere. You could be walking down Fifth Avenue and suddenly–SPLAT! You’re soaked with a water balloon.

The game is arranged as a round-robin tournament, and the winner gets an undisclosed amount of cash (which comes from the $17 entry fee).

Doesn’t that sound like fun? We ought to arrange something like that around here….

Something I’ve been meaning to blog for a while: Jeff Jarvis has a link to a speech that Lyndon Johnson gave in 1967 that sound eerily prophetic:

I believe the time has come to stake another claim in the name of all the people, stake a claim based upon the combined resources of communications. I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education….

So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge-not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and of storing information that the individual can rise.

Think of the lives that this would change:
–the student in a small college could tap the resources of a great university….
–the country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital;
–a scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York;
–a famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspirations into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected. Eventually, I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank.

And such a system could involve other nations, too–it could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind.

A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday’s strangest dreams are today’s headlines and change is getting swifter every moment.

I have already asked my advisers to begin to explore the possibility of a network for knowledge–and then to draw up a suggested blueprint for it.

And here we are, talking on the very same network. The internet is the best government project ever.

There are a lot of reasons to not fly these days,between the hypersensitive security, the cutbacks on basic services (”No pretzels for you!”), the lost luggage, the ever-increasing wait before you actually get on the plane, and the generally poor customer service.

Now there’s another good reason to drive to your next destination instead of flying : Insane German airline pilots.

Apparently, the pilot thought that a nearby British passenger plane was being flown by a friend. So he broke from his flight plan and attempted to fly close enough to take his friend’s picture, coming within 600 feet. The British pilot–who was not the German’s friend–was forced to take evasive action.

Fortunately, the pilot’s been suspended, but be on the lookout for more German pilots. There might be more of ‘em.

Did you know that Harry Potter is used as a torture device in Guantanamo bay?

Did you know that the book Oliver Twist is very popular in China, where it’s been retitled “Foggy City Orphan”?

Did you know that the position of the “Devil’s Advocate” was abolished by Pope John Paul II in 1983?

Neither did I.

(According to the BBC via Gongol.com.)

What if Powerpoint had been around in the days of the Civil War?

Lileks has a great column up about terrible summer jobs. I liked the whole thing, but this excerpt especially:

From Fred, a taciturn description:

Concrete block plant. Small. Owned by alcoholic. No stacking machinery, just me and three other low-end laborers, often alcoholic. too.

Learned: I could stack 70 tons of concrete blocks every day for minimum wage — and enjoy it. I might give up my current 52-year-old life, money, property for that health and strength again.

That’s the attitude. On one hand, there is no more mindless job: moving concrete blocks from one place to another. On the other hand, you strip your life down to the essence. Who am I? I am the man who moves the blocks. Someone has to. There’s more elemental satisfaction in moving 70 tons with your own sinews than moving $700,000 from one mutual fund to another; the latter is incorporeal, a financial fiction to which we all subscribe. The former is literally concrete: The blocks were there. Now they are here.

This is why I’m glad I was a waiter in college: I did something that was actually useful, as opposed to flapping my gums in a newspaper. There’s no column next Sunday? You’ll live. But the waiter disappears, and your Eggs Benedict cool on the counter, ignored, undelivered. The essence of the economy, of human labor, of our entire mortal existence, consists of moving stuff from here to there, and it’s good to learn this early on. If nothing else, it gives you respect for those who keep doing it after you’ve danced off to some soft-handed profession.

On the other hand, we had a problem with refrigeration at the restaurant, and I cannot tell you how many people got the 24-hour Egg Flu after eating our Hollandaise sauce. So if you spent your summers reading books in med school, that’s good, too.

Two things: How stupid does Jim Scancarelli think his readers are?

That’s what’s been happening for two weeks!!! You don’t have to explain it… unless your target reader is the senile old man who constantly babbles about the “good ol’ days” and how youngsters these days have no respect. He might have forgotten the previous two weeks of “storytelling.” Just like he forgot all the terrible jokes that were old back before the original author died in 1969.

By royal decree, I command that, for all comics, when the original author dies, the strip dies too. That means that Peanuts needs to come out of the comics now. So does Dennis the Menace. Please replace them with good comics, like Pearls Before Swine.

All right, second thing: Is this:

supposed to remind me of this:

?

‘Cuz it does. It’s not funny, and that’s what I come to the comics for. Hence the term, comics.

*sigh* Time for cleansing: