SO everything on Pandora is hexapod except for humanoids with DNA just like ours. Presumably seeded by ancient astronauts or unsubtle God. THUS Pandora proves God exists, or we’re exhibits in an alien’s zoo, or Neanderthals had spaceships. Why wasn’t THAT the plot? “Unobtanium”?
My nephew is 12 weeks old, but his Facebook page says he was born in 1978. Still, it’s better than being used as your mum’s profile photo.
The Aughts were a good decade for novelty New Year’s glasses. Though novelty-glasses manufacturers can eke out one more year with balancing punctuation. Happy 2010! Or should that be Happy 2010?
I suspect that ABBA never actually used an a·b·b·a rhyme scheme in their songs, but I’m too frightened to find out.
Wittgenstein’s brother was a one-armed concert pianist, and his sister helped Freud escape the Nazis. Also, he went to school with Hitler.
Yay Rowan Atkinson re: the Danish cartoons: “The right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended.”
Horrible French toast at Dixon St Deli, now just a café; “Deli” thus a vestigial organ, like an appendix. Which might be tastier. Now they’re playing the entire “Queen’s Greatest Hits’ CD. Flash! Aaa-aah! Queen: less breakfasty than you would think. The Deli must not like me mooching unsecured wireless (thx, “Studio”) for Twitter kvetching: Ben Harper medley. No, Queen. Rock Me —> out.
Helping hold the banner at a Republican protest is an excellent way to get a good view of Prince William. He so dreamy. Also balding. Unfortunately by the time I got my camera out I only managed a photo of the Royal Bald Spot. “What about our leaky homes?” shouts megaphone man. Yes, Prince William. It’s your fault. Royals: fix our leaky homes!
What do you call a “fusion of yoga and pilates” anyway? Yolates or piloga? They supply yoga mats. I hope they also supply spray-on deyogarisor. For that piloga odour. Man, I’m on fire today.
@adzebill
Archive for: March, 2010
Tweetdump
Tweetdump
The platypus lays eggs and produces milk, so is the only animal that can make its own custard.
Is the apostrophe in Hallowe’en a wankapostrophe or a jackostrophe? Or a jackasstrophe? A jerkostrophe? Too many choices. Help.
Chagrined to realise that Methven bathroom fittings are not, and never have been, made in Methven (pop 1326). No reason to visit now.
Practising “The Ballad of Toshihiko Fukui (Former Governor of the Bank of Japan)” on my ukulele, from Haywood’s fab NZ Reserve Bank Annual 2010.
Hint: when starting a discussion on “Digital Information: Order or Anarchy?”, using a £44.95 hardcover book is not a good look.
“CVs” are archaic. They should be 140 chars: Name, email, website, www-thing-I-did, ditto, ditto. Database that.
Why a “peer-reviewed” Wikipedia is doomed: en.citizendium.org/wiki/Bach_flower_therapy in the, ahem, Biology section. Très scholarly.
Citizendium has 12,836 articles (a whole 121 of which are “expert approved”). Wikipedia has 3,128,945. So it’s anyone’s game, I guess. Hmm.
M2 magazine plugs $15,000 watch. There are cheaper ways to say “I am a douchebag,” but few so portably efficient. Bonus: it tells the time.
Highlander canned caramel is “not suitable as a complete milk food for infants.”
Laredo, TX (pop. 230,000) will soon be the largest city in the US without a bookstore. Of any kind. Which towns in NZ will lose theirs?
Dylan Thomas in a 1950s recording of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” sounds completely un-Welsh; he’s as RP as an RSC Lear.
@adzebill
Good Stuff
Zero Punctuation, hilarious foul-mouthed rapid-fire videogame reviews (and I don’t even play videogames)
Jan Morris’s Europe—like Last Letters from Hav (one of my favourite books), but not fictional
The Twist, by Frightened Rabbit, from the album The Midnight Organ Fight; I can’t stop listening to it, but have no idea who these guys are
XKCD does it again, with a flowchart on how to read flowcharts
Beethoven, endearingly, never got the hang of multiplication (he’d calculate 9 × 7 by adding up the number 9 seven times)
ReCaptcha, which takes all that useless effort spent typing distorted words (to prove you’re not a robot), and applies it to proofreading blurry text from old scanned books
Instead of saying “music piracy” (because, after all, real piracy is alive and well and not very much like downloading MP3s), reviving the excellent term “bootlegging”
Thomas Benton’s Chronicle advice on graduate school in the Humanities: “Just don’t go”
Sports Night marathons via YouTube
The pleasure of actually throwing out a hopeless, waste-of-mental-space book (Cliff Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil, or anything by Ayn Rand)—not all book-burning is bad.
How to Use a Blackboard
Some old-school teachers shared their wisdom with me, that this dying art might be preserved.
- Divide the board into sections.
- Hold the chalk horizontally, so as to avoid squeaking.
- Use the same colours for headings and subheadings each time.
- Underline with a squiggly line rather than a straight line (because nobody can draw a straight line).
- Reserve a section for first appearance of terms and new vocabulary.
- The blackboard duster makes a useful missile.
- Chalk, though, is light and tends to veer about when thrown; it might bounce off a desk and fly up a student’s nostril. Theoretically.
- Erase section by section, so slow scribblers can catch up on copying what you wrote ten minutes ago.
- Learn the Jedi trick of writing whilst keeping your eyes fixed on the class.
- Have blackboard monitors or helpers, because kids love erasing and clapping out dusters.
- Completely colour in a brand-new blackboard with the side of a piece of chalk, then erase normally to “prime” it for use.
Fun fact: chalk is not actually made from chalk rock (calcium carbonate), but from calcium sulfate in its dihydrate form, gypsum. So now you know.
Thanks to Maureen Bell (University of Wollongong) and Alan Hoskin & Gregor Ronald (UCTL, University of Canterbury).