Fun Fact Friday II

The United States military is aspiring to become the aliens from H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds.

You can now get all the myriad health benefits of coffee and doughnuts in one. I was personally hoping McDonalds or Burger King would inject their burgers with caffeine first in their pioneering tradition of wholesome food. Now they will seem like unoriginal hacks.

Nick has a new blog for his puntastic t-shirt ideas. If he made a Cafepress store for some of them I'd probably buy a hundred. Okay, that may not be a fact. Maybe I'd buy one. But still, check them out.

It was -22 last night, without windchill. While not Prairies cold, that's still pretty fucking cold. Today we got dumped on with snow all day. I'm sick of this 'winter' shit; I'm gonna go tell Al Gore to talk some more so he exhausts more carbon dioxide, and water vapour, and accelerates this climate change thing.

99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

I finally got around to moving my ever growing beer bottle collection out of my room to make way for the also consistently expanding collection of textbooks. For the most part my work with those beer bottles is done, while with my textbooks it seems like an impossibly long time until they can be shoved off to the side somewhere.

The bottles aren't lined up around the top of the wall yet like I want. Nor do they set the mood around a small basement bar with a permanent keg fridge and tap like I also want. But the best things in life aren't free, so such grand schemes will have to wait. For now they'll have to stay crammed together with other beers of the same national origin, begging me to add new friends to their group.

The society thus far are strongly Belgian, with large minorities of Germans and Poles peacefully coexisting. That's not to say that some of them haven't combined to create their own little Auschwitz's in my stomach before. I need to add to the Dutch and Czech minorities, with some attention to the dry Asians out East. The problem is that the turnover on new selection at the liquor stores in town is less than spectacular, even when visiting multiple stores.

The easy, and infact ideal solution would seem to be to travel the world and get some of these things straight from the tap, but I don't see a windfall of money blowing in from the horizon. If it wasn't all regulated by the provincial government, it might be easy to go to a private liquor store with a request. Hell, if alcohol sales were privatized here, I'd consider opening my own store for import beers. The grocery stores are allowed to sell wine in their booths after the checkouts, why the hell shouldn't I be able to sell good beers?

In the mean time I'll have to sit down relax and wait on some new stock. Until then I'll take one down and pass it around...to myself...98 bottles of beer on the wall.

Fun Fact Friday...Part One?

Charles Darwin was formally educated in Theology, and married his first cousin. He also apparently invented irony.

Darwin didn't study African or European swallows; he studied finches, at least so far as the H.M.S. Beagle was concerned. His wife was English as well and, being his first cousin, was clearly open-minded. Thus, the European swallow may have been an inevitable 'hobby study'.

Schneider Weisse is still a delicious winter beer.

It is the weekend.

I am out of Schneider Weisse.

Goin' Off The Rails...

I've been annoyed lately with my sleep patterns. One night I can get into bed, nod off, and sleep until the next morning dead to the world, and completely forget any dreams I've had in that time. And then the next night I fall asleep quickly enough, but wake up 20 times through the night with a million different stresses on the mind, as well as the intermixed dream sleep that I tend to remember more vividly on those nights. After finally giving up on sleep, and getting to the day's trivial exercises, I'm still left with an uneasy feeling for hours.

Normally I'd be able to attribute differences in my sleep to some boozing, but that hasn't been the case much lately. The mind-racing sleep isn't anything that's new to me either, its been something that I've done since I was a kid, but not with the same frequency, and it was never as chaotic as it seems now. What I'd like is a big red e-stop button for my brain on those nights. Something to turn all the crap off, and let me just forget about things for a good night's sleep, and a holdover until morning when everything can come rushing back to me. Without the bonuses of a damaged liver, pounding head, and vomiting would be ideal.

Something tells me a winning lottery ticket, and a cereal box degree would take me a long way in finding that stop switch. For now a snow day, and some catch-up reading will have to suffice.

Geek is as Geek Does

When you're a big nerd, with little money, and few other available options available despite the freakishly warm weather, activities like geocaching seem like a good idea. When I was a kid it used to be getting dressed up in full camouflage outfits and playing manhunt in the park behind my buddies house, now its aggrandized treasure hunting. For those too lazy to check the link, it basically amounts to using a handheld GPS unit to look for otherwise randomly hidden taped up peanut butter jars filled with trinkets and a notepad.

I don't infact own a GPS unit, but Steve scored one in his x-mas stash and has become fairly addicted. My girlfriend and I, on the other hand just use, him as an excuse to get out and do something without spending much beyond the cost of gas, and extra loads of laundry to wash out the inevitable caking of mud. Like I say, its really just an excuse, as I was just as engaged in scrambling up and down the muddy slopes of the trails next to the Grand River as anyone while twilight settled in last night. However, the line for me is drawn at logging in to an online community to document, with an obscure set of acronyms, my nerdly glory.

Instead, I take my pocket protector, with a dash of nostalgia, and embrace the online community that is become Facebook. Its really like a rolodex status symbol combined with a highschool reunion, with only a small side of catching up with people you lost touch with that you otherwise actually liked, or the networking with new acquaintances. Its more addictive than it really should be for what it is, a less annoying version of MySpace. A review of some awful home videos from the past last night affirms that sometimes things from the past are sequestered there for very good reason.

The Home Stretch

Nothing will quite make you feel old like walking in to a first year arts course in the last term of your bachelors degree. All so young and naive and still pretty much straight out of highschool, and most without a clue of what they actually want to do, but just going through the motions. I suppose I incited the same feelings some 6 plus years ago already when I found my way into my first university class.

It was a general interest course in descriptive astronomy, listed under the science department, but not valid as a credit towards a science degree. It was a night course on top of that, so the spread in the class had me, at 17, to a man who appeared to be in his early sixties taking classes to keep the mind fresh. It took me about 2 classes to learn that you didn't actually have to try to jot down every single word of the lecture. Combined with the advent of profs making coursenotes more readily available online, the note-taking practice has been carefully revised over the years following, and a sixth sense for the actual relevant/exam worthy points has been well developed.

That skill too will grow on the kids in my 1st year classes this term, but in the mean time they will sit there scribbling every passing comment made, and chatting it up incessantly over the lecturer in between. And I will sit there feeling older than I am, but not young enough to be amused by it all anymore. Four months from now if I was in the States I'd be accredited with B.S., but I'll have to settle for my B.Sc.