In Rock Island, Ill., the wife of a man on trial for indecent exposure testified that he was not well enough endowed for anyone to have spotted his male appendage from 35 feet away.

Amount it would cost to fill the gas tank of the average car with ink-jet printer ink:
$175,000
Farthest a frozen cricket has been spit by a human:
37 feet, 9.75 inches

BRAZIL
At a soccer match in Anama, a referee went to pull a red card out of his pocket and came out with a pair of women’s red lacy underpants instead. The ref’s wife, who was watching the match, reportedly filed for divorce immediately.

Grandmom is doing okay. Her pluse rate has slowed to about 80, although her heart rate is still irregular. She hopes to get out of the hospital today, but won’t know for certain until she talks to the doctor.

Plans are that my Dad and I will go to Baltimore over the weekend. Michael is on call so he can’t leave town, and he needs the car in case he gets a call, so if Dad can’t go, then I’ll stay home.

If I go Michael gets to give Slate her medication all by herself. (Ha!) But it’s tuna flavored, so it might be okay. I gave her the first dose yesterday, and she didn’t seem to care for having the dropper forced into her mouth, but didn’t seem to mind the medicine. I suppose we’ll get quite good at it as time goes on.

And that’s about it. Agatha Christie beat out the brownies, which is healthier I suppose, but I still want yummy sweets.

And that’s the update. I’ve been keeping an ear on what’s been happening with the Democratic Primary, but it’s unlikey we get any say in the matter, so it’s hard to care much. Just as long as the Democrats elect someone who can beat Bush. That’s all I care about.

Talk about being a single issue voter.

Yes, there really is a St. Odo. He is not, however, the patron saint of shape shifters.

Had a bizarre dream last night. Most of it was incoherent bits and pieces taken from things I read throughout the day, making my normally surreal dreams even moreso. One part, however, stuck with me long after waking.

Walked in the door after picking Michael up from work and the phone almost immediately started ringing. Never a good sign.

Grandmom is in the hospital. She went to the doctor today (regular appointment) and after an EKG, her doctor put her in the hospital. Not ambulanced over kind of emergency, but she’ll be there until Friday at least.

Her blood pressure was relatively low for her (still too high, but…) and her pulse was fast. The doctor said her heart was fibrillating, which is bad, because if they don’t control it, she could have a stroke. That definitely falls into the realm of Bad Things. They’re keeping her, she said, until Friday at least, and putting her on coumadin and Something Else, and they don’t want her to leave until they get things stabilized.

However, she sounded good, although tired when I called her. Aunt Doris and cousin Pat were there, and my Aunt was on her way, although she told my Aunt not to come up, that it wasn’t serious. I’m planning on calling my dad in a little bit, to find out if he’s going up, perhaps this weekend.

And, when talking to Grandmom, she handed the phone to cousin Pat, so she could tell me her latest oncologist report, which is that although her surgical spots looked good, the CAT scan found a spot on her lung and a spot on her liver. Don’t know anything more than that, except that this too falls into the category of Bad Thing.

Right now it’s a toss up between making a pan of brownies, or a hot shower and curling up in bed with one of my favorite books.

Well, they say that the morning is wiser than the evening. We’ll hope that is so.

Spot the fake smiles

Results: You got 13 out of 20 correct.

This is neat. It does not, however, tell me what the average is, so I don’t know if I did better than average, or worse than average.

Ah well, it was still rather neat. Plus it’s science, so you can say you’re learning something to boot!

And you can also go through a whole slew of tests at the BBC. Rather fun actually.

Addendum the First:
Gina got 16!

Neil Gaiman posted:

And if the result of this mysterious panel’s deliberations was that the US Department of Education was to declare over 200 TV programs (almost no cartoons, except for things like Prince of Egypt. No more sports. Precious little drama…) were now inappropriate for closed-caption funding…

Yes, that’s right, sports will no longer receive funding for captioning, nor will several other types of programming.

You can read the complete list of approved/disapproved programming. The disapproved list includes:
Bewitched, Classic Cartoons, College Football, Law & Order, NBA, NBC Sports, NCAA Basketball, NFL, Power Rangers, and Powerpuff Girls.

You can also read a National Association of the Deaf (NAD) press relief on the subject.

Your Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 41%
Visual : 58%
Left : 61%
Right : 38%

michelle, you are somewhat left-hemisphere dominant and show a preference for visual learning, although not extreme in either characteristic. You probably tend to do most things in moderation, but not always.

Your left-hemisphere dominance implies that your learning style is organized and structured, detail oriented and logical. Your visual preference, though, has you seeking stimulation and multiple data. Such an outlook can overwhelm structure and logic and create an almost continuous state of uncertainty and agitation. You may well suffer a feeling of continually trying to “catch up” with yourself.

Your tendency to be organized and logical and attend to details is reasonably well-established which should afford you success regardless of your chosen field of endeavor. You can “size up” situations and take in information rapidly. However, you must then subject that data to being classified and organized which causes you to “lose touch” with the immediacy of the problem.

Your logical and methodical nature hamper you in this regard though in the long run it may work to your advantage since you “learn from experience” and can go through the process more rapidly on subsequent occasions.

You remain predominantly functional in your orientation and practical. Abstraction and theory are secondary to application. In keeping with this, you focus on details until they manifest themselves in a unique pattern and only then work with the “larger whole.”

With regards to your career choices, you have a mentality that would be good as a scientist, coach, athlete, design consultant, or an engineering technician. You can “see where you want to go” and even be able to “tell yourself,” but find that you are “fighting yourself” at the darndest times.

I used to be more right brained when I took tests like this. I suppose this is what working with computers all the time does to you.

And, ahem… Tendency to be organized? Tendency? (giggle)

(via Old Oligarch)

The schedule for the 2004 Festival of Ideas is finally out:

February 24 . Sylvia Nasar
A Beautiful Mind: Genius, Madness, Reawakening
February 26 . Minnijean Brown-Trickey
Return to Little Rock
March 1 . Barry Scheck
DNA Evidence: The Innocence Project
March 22 . Leon Wynter
American Skin
April 6 . Jon Meacham
From FDR and Churchill to Bush and Blair: The Changing Face of Leadership
April 7 . Steve Squyres
To Mars and Beyond
April 20 . Ken Auletta
Who Rules the Media?

All talks will be in the Mountainlair and will begin at 7:30.

Had a lovely non-mushy weekend.

I made a lemon cake, from a recipe I found. I won’t say it was a disaster, because that would be a lie, but it certainly didn’t go perfectly. The big mistake was when pouring the batter into the pans I discovered that no, these were not 9 inch pans I had, but were 8 inch pans.

My cake floweth over.

The other problem was that the cake was fairly dry, and not very lemony. I guess I’ll have to tweak the recipe I have and see if I can fix those problems, because there does not seem to be a lot out there in the way of lemon cake recipes that I’ve been able to find.

The frosting however, is very delicious, but then I didn’t exactly follow the recipe there. That also needs tweaked, but only for consistency, not for taste. (Tangy lemon! Yum! Yum!)

And, I made Minestrone soup, which I hadn’t done since last winter. I’d forgotten how good that soup smells. Definitely have delicious lunches this week.

And that’s about it. I gave Michael season 4 for of Deep Space 9, so much geekiness occurred at our house this weekend (Season 4 is when Worf joins. He’s so cute!)

And that is it. I’m not sure if Michael is enjoying the Tai Chi class or not, but he needs both the exercise and the relaxation, so I’m not excessively worried about it. We really need to work exercise for him into our schedule, but I’m just not sure how to do it, unless we start getting up early to go to the gym. (Getting up early. Yuck.)

And thus the conclusion of another weekend. Nothing exciting, but I’m not complaining. “May you live in exciting times,” is a curse you know.

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

I liked the fact that the protagonist is an antihero. Ostensibly, no good qualities, although the author does managed to sneak some in there.

Read More about Artemis Fowl

Very nice Valentine’s Day Eve post from Eve at Body and Soul.

She says it far more succinctly and eloquently than I can.

Thought it would be nice to have some good news to end the week.

As half of the crew continued working, Dan Martin, a van driver from Lancaster, watched as the barn roof was carefully placed across trusses. “When I got here Monday morning, it was a pile of debris; and look what they have now,” Martin said. “It burned Saturday, they don’t work on Sundays, and they’re going to have this finished in less than a week.”

What struck me most about the story was that it was not just the Amish community that gathered to help, but the entire community.

I was also fascinated by this quote:

“Years ago, the Amish were all farmers, and you wouldn’t have seen all these electric tools,” King said. “Now, probably half of Amish men work in construction, work as carpenters. If you’re going to be competitive with the English, you can’t show up with just a hammer and saw.”

I thought that “worldliness” was the cause of the split between the Amish and the Mennonites. It would be very interesting if these groups were converging, even just a little bit.

Not yummy, but useful:

Cod Liver Oil really can slow the onset of osteoarthritis

86% of pre-operative patients with arthritis, who took Cod Liver Oil capsules daily, had absent or significantly reduced levels of the enzymes that cause cartilage damage compared to 26% of those given a placebo oil capsule. In addition, the result showed a marked reduction in some of the enzymes that cause joint pain, in those patients taking the Cod Liver Oil.
…
“To put this into perspective, it is highly likely that if the Queen Mother had taken Cod Liver Oil as a young adult, she may have needed her first hip replacement much later on in life.”

Still, I think I’ll continue to hope that by the time my joints deteriorate that much, they’ll have come up with a better solution.

Lies and Phones

(L)ies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls.
…
People are also more likely to lie in real time- in an instant message or phone call, say- than if they have time to think of a response.

Now I have justification for not wanting to talk on the phone!

Nano-origami

A hat, a brooch, a teradactyl….

Unfortunately, that’s not what the article is about.