skulking

I point you to this article, which is mildly amusing because it's about a guy who claims adding Viagra to the water perks up his Christmas tree (Racine? medical/botanical basis?). But this is the best part - a quote from his wife: "I’d had enough. I told Ray we should get a fake tree instead. But Ray wasn’t keen. He skulked off to the pub to meet his mate for a moan...."

I love that somewhere in the world is an actual human who talks like that. Meets his mate for a moan. Ha.

vanilla google

When gmail first came out, privacy advocates were all up in arms about how google was going to use the text of your e-mails to target ads to you. And I see their point, but google swore nobody was actually going to read your e-mail and I personally was willing to risk it for the awesomeness that is gmail.

It turns out, I actually like the gmail ads, especially the ones that run in one line across the top of the window. There are so many goofy small businesses that buy ads. I keep seeing one for a website that has nice-looking cheap peruvian yarn. (Of course, now that I *want* to find it, I can't. Trying all kinds of searches in my gmail. Perhaps the ads expired. I did get several other knitting ads. And this, which could be useful.)

Just now I was trying to find my notes from a story I wrote about vanilla, because I wanted to buy some vanilla beans and I couldn't remember the names of the online sellers my sources had recommended to me. I searched and searched and finally found them, but then they were both way more expensive than I wanted. But then I noticed this ad for a store at the top of the window and was like, hey, guess I can check there - and they had the best prices I'd seen. So I went for it. What the heck. I like the google ads, I might as well support the people who buy them. I hope the beans aren't bad.

P.S. Ha! I've blogged about this before! And now I know how to knit...and those recycled silk yarns are still beautiful....

don't mess with me

This makes me laugh every time I look at it.

my feet

I had the best pedicure of my LIFE today. Also the worst. And the most expensive. And the cheapest. Ok, if you get right down to it, I'd never had a pedicure before. It was pretty great. It was at a fancy little spa a few blocks away from here, and at the end, while the polish was drying, I totally conked out in the nice comfy chair with the pretty music playing and woke up, like, 45 minutes later. I could get used to that.

Falling asleep might had something to do with the fact that I watched the synchronized swimming team finals last night, or should I say this morning, from 3 to 4 a.m. It was excellent. And even though they played the finals again on TV today, I was happy I watched it online, not only because there were no commercial breaks, but, much better - there was no talking. You just watch the event and listen to the music while someone's comments occasionally appear below the screen, IM-style.

-iers and -ants

Hey - someone from Estonia found my blog by googling "russian occupants out of georgia." Unfortunately, I don't think they stuck around long enough to learn that it should be "occupiers." (My original post.)

omg I thought I was the only one

Sometimes when I drink certain things I get a shooting pain around my jaw joint. (The TMJ, if you prefer.) Usually it's sweet alcoholic drinks. Hard cider can be lethal, and last night's May Punch started stabbing me toward the end of drink #2, particularly when I ate the alcohol-soaked strawberries. But it doesn't have to be alcohol. I've had it happen with orange juice, too.

Today for the first time it occurred to me to google this thing and see if I could come up with any explanations, and the *only* thing I could find was this. It's a forum on some kind of health site where basically everyone says, omg I thought I was the only one! Which I did. But people seem to be describing a variety of different pains and anyway, nobody has any idea what it is. Well, people have many ideas (allergies! blocked salivary glands! Hodgkin's disease!) but no evidence.

Ever heard of this? What the heck?

those chairs again

Hey - someone took my advice!

They're still ugly chairs, but it's a much better picture.

what do you get if you multiply six by nine

I was just reading the rules for a win-a-free-ticket contest from SAS and came across this rule:

"Due to Canadian law, if a potential winner is a resident of Canada, he or she will be required to correctly answer, without assistance of any kind, a mathematical skill-testing question administered by telephone or e-mail to receive his or her prize."

Huh? What do you think that's about?

stimpera

Ok. My curiosity has gotten the best of me. Google tells me that I get visits every weekday from someone who finds me by searching for "stimpera." I would think that this was, in fact, our friend Stimpera, except that these visits come from here in my fair city, and not there on her fair island. Anyone care to shed some light?

Huh. On further analysis, I think that these visits actually come from *me.* But I don't find my own blog by searching for stimpera. I think somehow Google Analytics remembers that I once searched for stimpera (and learned that my blog comes up, which will be even more true now that I keep writing stimpera) and from then on, has attributed all my visits to the keyword stimpera. That's kind of annoying, don't you think?

free rice

Want something fun to do on the internet? How bout a vocab quiz? It's called "Free Rice" and it's one of those things where, if you click on something, someone donates something. But this one gives you a word to define and, depending how you answer, gives you progressively harder or easier words. And you just keep clicking...and clicking...and clicking.... So far, I top out at level 47. You? (My advantage: they think medical words are difficult.)

my wild self

Yes, of *course* you can make one, too.

blog

My blog is boring me these days. I'll have to think of something else to talk about. Here is what's not boring me these days: Facebook. Yes, it was only three short months ago that I declared myself to be over social networking sites. That's ok - I'm a big girl, I can admit I was wrong.

Here are some of the things I've done on Facebook in the last 48 hours:

1. Guessed songs in a christmas show friend's song lyric quiz. Ok, three friends' such quizzes. They're kind of sweeping the nation, or the nation of my D.C.-area music-nerd friends.
2. Been high-fived by J.Po; bought a drink in return.
3. Pwned Spice after she used the force on me. And threw a fish at me. I couldn't just stand there and take it.
4. Made moves in three different Scrabble games, against N.Lu, K619, and a guy I interned with at a newspaper in 2002. (N.Lu and K619 are totally kicking my butt; the guy is my only hope for winning a game.)
5. Posted a link to my work blog. (Know how to find my work blog? We put up a totally funny post the other day. Go read it.)
6. Carried on a "wall" conversation with Miss Shirley about how my friends think I'm punctual and likely to succeed.
7. Compared my friends. (Who's more likely to succeed? who would I rather marry? who has a better profile picture?)
8. Carried on a wall conversation with one of the teens in the Christmas show about how it's cool that all us big nerds find each other at the Christmas show.
9. Played part of a Traveler IQ Challenge game.
10. Watched a video of a bunch of us singing last night at a bar after rehearsal.

...and so on. I remember reading in a story after Friendster fell apart that the problem was, they let you build this great network and then they had nothing for you to do with it. And I thought that was weird - I mean, isn't the fun part just finding old friends? What would you really do with an online social network?

I think I know now.

teenagers are my friends

I joined Facebook a while back because of this quiz. I played it for a while, pretty much maxed out my points potential, and decided it wasn't worth getting carpal tunnel to improve my score further. Also, I'm not sure I *can* improve my score further. So I'm just going to have to continue being #3 in my network. (I made the mistake of telling my super-smart cousin and one of the map guys at work about it.)

I've found long-lost friends on facebook - I now know that my roommate from nerd camp in 1990 works a block away from me, and we're meeting up on Tuesday. You could debate whether it's all that bad to lose track of long-lost friends - if you can't be bothered to keep up by phone and e-mail, why keep up through facebook?

I expected to find old friends, but I didn't expect this: a bunch of my facebook friends are in high school. Of course, facebook is where all the teenagers hang out. This includes all the teens in the christmas show, and one by one they've been friending me. I'm oddly honored by this. And now I get to spy on them and their wall-to-wall conversations about the christmas show. Good times.

google

Check out this one google search that'll get you to my blog:
andswers to face books traveler iq chalenge
Wow. Well, let's see. I can't give you the answers, but I can give you this advice: learn to spell.

cultural exchange

You probably already know about Engrish, where people like you and me can enjoy the haphazard usage of English words in Japan. But perhaps Hanzi Smatter, "dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture," has escaped your notice. They cover everything, but their main topic is tattoos. Like this one. Which makes no sense.

Seriously. Why would you devote time, money, pain, and eternal skin real estate to something without having an actual Chinese person proofread it first? Or, if you picked Japanese, a Japanese person? Although you can't always tell with these tattoos which language they were going for.

facebook

Ok, I have to take back what I said. You know how I declared myself to be over social networking sites? Yeah. I joined facebook. But I wasn't going to socially network! It's not my fault! S.Vix and B.Vas were tempting me with tales of this game where you click on places on a map and you get points and it's awesome. So I joined and, indeed, it was. It's called the World Traveler IQ Challenge and I am no longer #1 among my friends because my cousin Haw Haw is better than me at maps, darn her.

Of course, now that I've joined, I also have to obsessively search for friends on it. Grr. Stupid social networking sites, sucking me in.

jigsaw photo

Hi. I'm busy these days. But not too busy to tell you that these puzzles rock and are kind of addictive. I mean, in a three (or, uh, six) minutes at a time kind of way.

my bodily worth

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friendster is dumb

Ok, it's official: I'm over social networking sites. I got onto Friendster three years ago when everyone else did, found all my friends, acquaintances, and high school crushes, it was all exciting, and - nothing ever happened with it. It just sat there. Everyone shifted over to myspace, I made a vague attempt at a myspace page but never saw the point. Everyone moved on to facebook, I haven't even tried.

And now the one useful function of Friendster is gone. It used to send an e-mail for your friends' birthdays, and it was a handy little tool (except for the people who put in a fake birthdate). Well, in the last week I've gotten messages about two different friends telling me "[Name]'s birthday is almost here!" and a handy button to See When. This little ploy to make me visit their pointless site was bad enough, but I just tested it and it doesn't even tell you when [Name]'s birthday is - it takes you to your Friendster homepage. It took me four clicks to find out that the latest friend's birthday is August first, and, frankly, I didn't care that much - I was in an internship with her in 2002 and haven't seen her since 2003.

Conveniently, this message also came with an "unsubscribe" button. Farewell, Friendster! I'll be getting my social networking without your help!