mining progressively closer to the surface:

• Typo of the day: Macaronesia.  I guess that's what you call it when you put a Canary Island in your cap.
• After watching Pacific Rim, I want to write a story in which, every time a plot hole is introduced, it lets monsters through until the characters can make up an explanation to close it. Oh, wait, that would be Doctor Who...
• I read the title of an article on ViralNova.  NOTHING could prepare me for what I read.  I can't BELIEVE this kind of superlative language EXISTS.  It totally BLEW MY MIND.  I will NEVER be surprised again until I read the title of the NEXT ARTICLE.
• My friend Theodore said that when he was working as a nurse in the '80s and '90s, when giving patients who were chronic drug users their prescription medications, he would take them aside and tell them back-alley style, "Between you and me, if you take two of these, you'll feel FINE."  He wasn't doing a controlled study, but he found they reported much better results when he did this as opposed to just telling them the dose to take outright. [link to an article about how thinking positive improves effectiveness of migraine drugs]
• You know how when you keep a grazing animal in a pen for a short time, it will only eat its favorite foods, but if you leave it there longer, it will eat everything edible?  I think something similar happens with people who get used to their spouses doing the grocery shopping when those spouses go away for the weekend.  Call it a human tractor.
• Every time someone shows me a picture where people's faces are blurred out, I am grateful that I don't have to pass it on to someone else within 7 days.
• Wouldn't it be cool if the calendar expanded like the periodic table? We just have to figure out how to access a new valence shell, and we get a whole new week of new days, just after the weekend.
• Yesterday I was trying to remember what we used to do about bullying before today's apparently ineffectual zero tolerance policies.  We tattled.  Those of us who were good at it didn't tell teachers that we were being picked on (because that was embarrassing), we told them the other stuff we had seen the bullies doing or heard them bragging about.  When the bullies got older and no longer feared the teachers, we threatened to tell their (often abusive) parents that cops would soon be on the way, or tell their girlfriends' parents what they had said about their girlfriends (usually not anything a parent would want to hear!).  If we expect authority figures to enforce the rules, how will our pacifist children learn to be sneaky, manipulative, and cruel?
• [re headline: Homeless children grows in Wichita schools] Lest you think the editor just accidentally left off the "Number of" from this headline, the article ends with, "Martinez says the children often bounce around after their families are evicted."  Now, that's just rude.
• An incomplete simile is like
• Whenever I hear hipsters talking about listening to music "on vinyl," I imagine them listening to their iPods in the bathroom.
• There is something under the seat of our truck that squeaks like a dog toy at unpredictable intervals, and I'm afraid to find out what it is.
• Watching the Olympics and remembering how Brian Lin and I once pretended to play the live Wimbledon broadcast on his NES controllers. We very briefly had his mom fooled...
• Syntax error of the day: an energy auditor is looking for an "ascetically acceptable" way to air seal a log house.  Who says saving energy has to be comfortable?
• Every time I receive a Jung Seeds & Plants catalog, I expect a disclaimer that each plant is accompanied by its shadow self.
• Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of advertising.
• I think Google's Street View cars must be the most self-photographed cars ever.  It's hard to imagine any other cars that take pictures of their own reflections more often.
• Olympic commentators: "Henrik Harleaux, seemingly looking for a sponsor for undergarments." "As he has been all afternoon."
• I took the "Which Personality Quiz are You?" quiz and got the "Which Personality Quiz are You?" quiz.
• Unclear headline of the day: "Bill to open police records to public advances." Make sure you have a good pick-up line in mind before you approach Bill, 'cause he's heard it all.
• I started a conversation about people's worst career setbacks, and it turned into a conversation about whether making friends with a river otter would be a good idea.  True story.
• Aww, poor Jim Parsons doesn't want to be mistaken for the TV character he's played for the last 7 years. This is the cue for every waiter, makeup artist, etc. in his life to insist he remember their names. If he didn't want to be typecast, maybe he should have done more to differentiate the character from himself to begin with, as Mayim Bialik and Kunal Nayyar and Melissa Rauch did. Nobody would confuse those actors out-of-character with their Big Bang Theory characters.
• Jessie just used "baa ram ewe" to cuss.
• Canadians may talk about the need for affordable hosing, but it takes an Aussie to talk about needing a spice hater.
• Ohhhh, the name of the Thai restaurant in downtown Lawrence is a bilingual pun!  "Zenzero" is Italian for ginger.  Someone is clever.
• There is a WiFi network here called angelscare. #dontblink
• I wonder, if CSS had been created after Twitter instead of before, would IDs be specified as @idname and classes as #classname?
• It's said that when Bell invented the telephone, he thought it would be used for listening to music.  We used to laugh at that dumb idea.  Now we're too busy listening to scratchy, distorted music while we wait on hold...
• Q: if I feel bad in the morning, will a 20-mile bike ride help me feel better?
  
  A: HAHAHAHAHA zzzzzzz.
• There are no hits for the phrase "Sue Dayton land" on Google.  Apparently it has never occurred to anyone else that people named Sue Dayton might worry about their land being annexed by Nazis.
• What if the story of Noah's ark is just an allegory about doing laundry, from the laundry's perspective?
• If you evaluate people based on how they feel about Princess Diana, does that make you Diagnostic?
• What if every movie had just one song in the soundtrack, like High Noon does? Star Wars gets the cantina theme. For every scene.
• Learning about the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals, and wondering if it resulted from Coca-Cola's global harmonization efforts.
• The head of the Kansas Bureau of Waste Management just said that 90% diversion rates are impossible and anyone who thinks that kind of rate can be achieved believes in magic. Congratulations to Eureka Recycling of St. Paul: you are magical mythical wizards! Also, I'm wondering if I'm the only person at this conference who thinks zero waste is not an optional goal. Anything less creates monster habitat. And though I'm sure the radioactivity-loving, styrofoam-munching critters will someday be grateful to us for making their lives possible, I would rather preserve life as we know it.
• Just walked past a parked car with an "I'm redneck proud" decal in the window in which one young man was attempting to pick handcuffs off another.
• Ohhhh, I get it.  The "Winter Soldier" was developed during the "cold war."  Too bad he didn't thaw out until more than 20 years after the joke in his name made sense to people.
• Best dream I had last night: Cooking with Gollum. Today we makes HAMBURGERses, Precious! First we takes the cowses and we GRINDS THEM UP! Then we shapes them into patties and we EATS THEM RAW! Gollum, gollum!
• In my mind, every link somebody shares that says something like, "you won't believe what happens next!" just goes to a video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up." It saves me a lot of clicking.
• I just searched YouTube for "Stan Rogers," and the number one hit was "Weird trick for baldness."  Either the Internet has gotten clever enough that it's realized Stan Rogers was bald, or it's stupid enough it hasn't realized he's been dead for 31 years.  Or both.
• [pic of a Hobbit Riddles for the Ring Lego set:] This ain't your mother's Easter morning gift. I'm not sure what the liturgical message is. "On the third day, we returns to the cave, and the tricksy Baggins is GONE, Precious!"
• Why do we legitimize weather prediction by calling practitioners meteorologists instead of meteorologers, in a class with astrologers where they belong?  Wishful thinking?
• Malinda! I just met a MAN named Malinda! And suddenly that name will never be the same to me. Just minutes later, I met a woman named Laurence.
• [Link to a TARDIS shower curtain:] I'm on board with the assertion that this makes your shower bigger on the inside... but "eco-friendly vinyl?"  That's science fiction!
• Spammer pro-tip: If you are pretending to be a real person and not a machine, try to pick a name that is not a disease. [The name in question was Candida Thrush.]
• That awkward moment when you realize you won't be able to reuse the wooden skewers you stuck in your pet fungus, because it ate them.
• What is the word for when you can't think of a word?
• Cool things I've learned about Julie Andrews from listening to just the first half of the commentary track on the Mary Poppins DVD:
  • she performed the carpet-bag and medicine-bottle slight-of-hand tricks so well that neither child actor could tell how the tricks were done, and their astonishment was genuine
  • when the professional whistler who recorded the robin's part in "A Spoonful of Sugar" sounded a little too professional, she performed it herself, and a similar thing happened with one of the voices in the "hum diddle diddle" chorus
  • she actually put both child actors to sleep filming the two lullaby scenes
  • when the kids got tired of munching their taffy apples during the interminable filming of "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," she suggested they request different flavors of taffy, and the Disney staff obliged them
• The Nervous Wreck should be a superhero. "You wouldn't like me when I'm anxious..."
• Among the many things I'm grateful for is the fact that that face-eating guy in Florida (a year ago? two?) did not signal the start of the zombie apocalypse.
• Does that paper made from elephant dung need to have a warning label saying, "manufactured on equipment that also processes peanuts?" [a friend pointed out that comic strips need this warning]
• The wind beneath your wings is all well and good, but it's the suction above them that gets you off the ground.
• Sometimes deleting a word from a headline makes all the difference. ["Travis Tritt officially sold out"]
• Waterless urinals at the water park. Because I'm sure they were a major cause of water loss.
• Just dreamed a Winnie-the-Pooh quote in which Piglet asks how he will know when they reach tomorrow, and Pooh observes, "the turnpike changes color." Which says a lot more about the purpose of sleep than of dawn.
• A bit of folksy wisdom from a farming book from the '40s: "Hay is the only thing that is better [quality] when it's cheaper."  There's a lot of information about hay and microeconomics tied up in that tidy statement.
• My goldfish are not afraid of me as long as I look at them with one eye.  As soon as I turn to face them with both eyes, they see me as a predator.
• Last night Jessie got the most hilarious scam phone call.  When it rendered her speechless, she handed the phone to me, and I strung the guy along for a good 15 minutes.  He claimed in a thick accent (Jessie later ID'd the number as being from Rajasthan) that she had won 1.6 million "US dollars" from the Publisher's Clearing House -- no need to enter the sweepstakes, she was automatically entered by paying her bills on time and being a "good customer" at some of a number of American chain stores he namedropped -- and the cash was in a package on his desk, but to send it to us he needed my "total corporation."  When he asked me how I felt about that news, I said I felt skeptical.  He then said that Donald Trump and Megamillions were behind the deal, and he asked again if he had my "total corporation."  After establishing that he meant cooperation, I said no, he didn't have that, but he could feel free to ask me questions.  His first question was my name.  I thought it was fishy that he was talking to me at all when Jessie was the supposed winner, but then it occurred to me that he didn't know her name either!  He said some businesses go by names and others go by phone numbers, and his went by numbers.  I asked if I could speak to Donald Trump, and he told me to hold the line, but we accidentally hung up the phone.  Seconds later he called back, and in the same voice said he was Donald Trump!  At that point we told him not to call again.
• Since it looks like we'll never see a Wonder Woman film, maybe Michael Bay's next film could be about Amazon Prime.  What does she transform into, how did she meet Optimus, why did she choose to take his surname, and how did she happen to save Jeff Bezos's life so that he named one of his company's services after her?
• The difference between running a corporation and playing a role playing game is that gamers know its not real.
• It just occurred to me that Westboro Baptist Church's letterhead must necessarily have the number of the beast on it.  (Because Topeka zip codes start with 666)
• Be sure to celebrate American independence from England this July 4 by using the archaic system of measurement that England long ago abandoned and speaking a dialect of English more similar to Shakespeare's than the way they speak today.
• Is it just me, or should the Planet of the Apes have had its Dawn before its Rise, instead of the other way around?  How does a rise happen before a dawn?  I'm confused.
• If you actually whispered of how you were yearning to mingle with the old time throng, by the time it got to the 4th or 5th whisperer it would be a totally different message.
• I enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, but I really wanted to see Rocket Raccoon go into his room, only to find Gideon's Bible.
• Ten years ago today I was on my way to cross Lake Michigan on a bicycle, I got a second cell phone to save money, I still had no health insurance, and unbeknownst to me, my future wife turned 24.
• Quote of the day: "you can eat any mushroom once." yesterday: "let me get my bike out of the bar." Wednesday: "need a little more chainsaw and a little less yoga."
• Scene from a permaculture conference: waiting in line for dinner, people start eating the weeds.
• Quote of the day: "hey, where'd you guys get the mushrooms? [blank stares] ...marshmallows. I meant marshmallows."
• It's nice to see Steven Moffatt getting back to what he writes best: painfully awkward dating scenes. But one wonders where Doctor Who will take them, and vice versa.  Are we going to learn that all the bogeymen of neurotic single life are actually alien monsters? Perhaps Jeff from Coupling was a prototype for the Doctor after all...
• Anytime I wonder if I take things too literally, I just have to think about the phrase, "Ducks Unlimited."
• Observation: Grace Hopper's saying, "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission," really means, "it's better to take responsibility than to ask someone else to take responsibility."
• Just got a call from someone at a Nebraska number claiming to be from "The American Chamber of Commerce."  No, dude, that is not a thing.  Either you said the name wrong, or that's not who you're working for.  Either way, I don't want to talk to you.
• Filling out a customer satisfaction form, I found it had pre-filled my nickname as "The Enabler" and my location as "San Diego."
•  think it's odd that in romance languages being born is something you actively do yourself (for example Spanish: nació), but in English it's something that happens to you.  Even when you say who gave birth to you, it's all abstract and roundabout and weird. We can't even translate the Spanish word directly because we have no word for it.
• How did Prince Humperdinck know the footprints were from a duel, when both Inigo and Westley left prints fencing left-and right-handed? Wouldn't it have looked like there were four people fighting?
• Quote from a podcast I just listened to: "...she would have been with us tonight, but she was bit by a pit bull. Sorry, I don't mean to promote discrimination, she was bit by a creature that may or may not have been a life form."
• Observation: "All About That Bass" is the Austin Powers theme, with lyrics.
• Whenever I see that Slate's domain name is slate.me, it makes me think of the monks in Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail.  I realize they were hitting themselves with Bibles, but given the ephemerality of the Web, a slate would be appropriate...
• People who like edge brownies so much that they buy the special brownie pans should cut to the chase and make Möbius shaped brownies so the top is the same as the crispy bottom.  The requisite pan would be kind of like a bundt pan, except the spacer thing in the middle would also be the outside.  Be sure to bake it in a toroidal oven so that any drips from the pan fall back down from the top and back onto the brownie. Those who hate edges need a cosmological pan, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. No need for an oven: heat comes from within.
• Simon's tail was in the bathroom sink, so I washed it. Now he's confused.
• You would think that since the telegraph and the railroad developed together, at some point a telegrapher would have sat down with an engineer and said, "You know, when you pass through a town you're just saying 'Q' over and over. What is 'QQQQQ' supposed to mean??"
• Deep thought of the morning: Do you suppose Eagle Brand Milk added the word "brand" to their name preemptively, or did some smartass have to write in asking how you milk an eagle?
• Howard: "God, when people use words inaccurately, they sound so stupid."
  
  Sheldon: "Well put! The words you're looking for are 'imprecisely' and 'ignorant,' but the way you put it *does* make you sound stupid!"
• If Crock Pot is "the original and #1 slow cooker," how come it's made by the Rival brand?
• Speaker on pond dynamics has a strong southern accent. He said "hybrid bluegill" half a dozen times before I realized he wasn't saying "pyroglubule."
• [on Halloween:] Merry Christmas (Oct. 31 = Dec. 25) and Happy New Year (Samhain) to all!
• I saw just enough of this morning's eclipse to verify that yes, that one would have confused the heck out of the ancients.  "You say that's the Earth's shadow on the moon... well, explain why the SUN IS RIGHT OVER THERE!"
• I like to joke that my grandfather was a pioneer of "digital photography," because he always managed to get his thumb in the shot.  Ten years ago today, I took a photo of the house he used to live in, and my camera strap got in the shot!
• [headline: Feds Flood Colorado River Through Grand Canyon] Oh, come on, I'm sure there are a lot of federal employees, but I doubt they're even visible from the rim.
• How come cars don't come with carbon monoxide alarms?
• [article about a TLC reality show featuring people living off the grid] It's about time environmentalists took their rightful place alongside "Gypsies," little people, morbidly obese people, fundamentalists with extreme numbers of children and/or wives, extreme couponers and/or cheapskates, people who regret their tattoos and/or want more tattoos, people escaping and/or returning to Alaska and/or Amish culture, people with strange addictions and/or obsessions, hoarders, and sexual horror stories.  I'm sure TLC will handle this subject with dignity and respect.
• What if Schrödinger's cat is the observer, and everything outside the box is the experiment?
• [headline: Man arrested; deputies say he aimed banana at them] Bananas are good!  Also, life imitates a Monty Python sketch.  Also, note the man in question is from Fruitvale.
• If we dropped the A-bomb on our enemies, and the H-bomb on our allies, and the F-bomb among friends, what is the next logical step?
• Since many of my friends are making semi-public position statements, I would like to go on record as saying that while killing people indiscriminately is universally regarded as wrong, killing them discriminately is also very unpopular, and it would really be best if white males in particular would please stop reinforcing the psycho bigot stereotype. Thank you.
• Big Hero 6 = How to Train Your Dragon 2 x Iron Man 3. If you gotta steal, steal from the best!
• What's really ironic is that the only people who actually live in our democracy (homeless people) are not allowed to vote in it.
• This is the first time I've ever been to the fitness center and not found one of the TVs tuned to Fox news. #electionnight
• Why does Cthulhu devour worlds? Ctharsis.
  
  Why couldn't Khan return his starship? It was bought on eBay.
• Why is it you need ID to buy a plane, train, or bus ticket, but you can send a package to anybody anonymously without the contents being checked?  Apropos of nothing.  Enjoy opening your mysterious holiday boxes, everyone!
• Pain is not weakness leaving the body.  It is at least more correct to say that smoke is darkness leaving the fire.  But that doesn't in any way mean all the darkness will be gone when the smoke stops.
• Hello O'Hare my old friend / I've come to stay in you again / because our flight has lost urgency / and the captain "had an emergency"