Monthly Archives: September 2010

Unfantastic Plastic

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I had an interesting discussion the other day with a guy about plastic surgery.

I mentioned the famous women who are generally considered “the most beautiful,” whatever that really means. Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Scarlett Johansson. He added Angelina Jolie to the list, and I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting a few of the girls.

But then he wondered how many of them have had plastic surgery. I said I couldn’t recall that any of those particular ladies had, but that you could often tell who had and who hadn’t.

This was apparently news to him.

It’s not that I go around looking for the signs of plastic surgery. I don’t. It’s just that I really like style and often check galleries of red carpet events to see what everyone’s wearing. And many of those outfits are fairly revealing. This means I have seen an awful lot of unconvincing bosoms, even though I am definitely not looking for them. Here’s a hint, boys: If they don’t sag a bit when you’re standing up, they’re not real.

A giveaway for liposuction: your belly is weirdly lumpy, like a bowl full of oatmeal with raisins. Tara Reid, for example.

And then there’s the lips. If your lips haven’t been stuffed with collagen, the top one is generally going to be smaller than the bottom one. There are a few exceptions. Lisa Rinna would be an example of lips gone horribly wrong, although for some reason, plenty of people actually like this creepy look.

Beautiful Images

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There’s quite a bit going on here at the Daily Globe today, so I thought I’d link three galleries of beautiful images and leave it at that.

Two are historical; the rest are historic.

In the late 1860s, a little girl sailed on a whaling ship and wrote a diary. These are images of the diary, complete with poor spelling, iffy penmanship and “Good bye for to day” notes. It’s a fascinating read from the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

Would you like to learn how to photograph an atomic bomb? Look no further than this series of photos from the New York Times, all from a book, “How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb,” by Peter Kuran. There is audio with it; alas, I have not listened to it as yet. You’ll have to tell me how it is.

Finally, we have a series of photographs of our flooded region, taken by people who live here: Gallery I, Gallery II, and Gallery III.

…Happy Holiday!?

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Today is National Punctuation Day!

I would like to take some time to speak up about a pressing problem in our culture that demands action: apostrophe abuse.

Yes, that’s right, friends, apostrophe abuse. Not only do people make the  mistake of referring to the 1960′s and or the 1800′s, but they also mix up your and you’re and make possessives out of plurals. We must stop this growing threat to the sanity of English geeks worldwide, giving apostrophes equal rights and recognition with other punctuation marks, such as commas, periods and exclamation points. The poor apostrophe has been abused enough!

Quick Guide

  • If you can’t substitute the words “you are,” use “your.”
  • If you can’t substitute the words “it is,” use “its.”
  • Unless you are expressing belonging or ownership, do not use apostrophes in plurals.
  • Be aware of trends. While the old style of writing held that “James’ apples” would be the correct way to express “the apples belonging to James,” current styles are sliding more toward adding another s, just for clarity’s sake, so that it would look like “James’s apples.” The single-S method is still regarded as the correct option, but the double-S method is clearer. Since clarity is one of the major purposes of punctuation, we’ll have to wait and see how this shakes out.

Weather… or Not

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These are trying times in Minnesota, when stare into our closets in the morning, wondering what exactly the weather is going to do. This is the time of year when we see people wearing shorts and a winter coat at the same time–and it actually seems sensible.

We’re not sure whether we need our sunglasses, our umbrellas, or both. Probably both is the sensible option, but then we’re sure to forget about the sunscreen and get a weirdly-shaped autumn sunburn everywhere the sweatshirt doesn’t cover. You’ve heard of farmers’ tans. These are Minnesotan tans.

On King Turkey Day, temperatures plummeted to 39 degrees and hovered in the mid-40s for most of the festivities. It wasn’t a big deal. People brought sweaters and rain gear to fend off the threat of drizzle. We’re Minnesotans. A lot of us go outside in January–on purpose, too.

But two days after Worthington’s famed fowl bash, the temperatures shot back up again, and, caught unawares, I ended up wearing a sweater and my shabby leather coat to work. It was more than 80 degrees. I looked like my Californian cousins, who on an early October visit to Minnesota wore parkas and shivered uncontrollably throughout my phy ed class when they visited my school.

All the other kids were wearing shorts.

When you wear a huge sweater on an 80-degree day, there’s really only four things you can do. One, you can roll up the sleeves and face the fact that people will point at you and snicker the rest of the day. Two, you can go home to change. Three, you can claim you’re on one of those fad weight-loss programs where you try to “sweat off those pounds.” Four, you can claim there’s a bomb on a bus and if you change out of the sweater, it will blow up.

I’m saving the last excuse for next week.

Georgia on My Mind

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I dreamed I had been arrested in a former Soviet bloc country, along with a group of about 20 other travelers. I don’t know why my dream took place in Georgia.

We approached the border in our bus, surrounded by fences liberally bedecked with barbed wire. Uniformed men with machine guns were everywhere, and the bus stopped. We were transported to some sort of incarceration facility, where we were given hideous overalls made of some sort of coarse material and put into a large room, all together.

At some point they gave us “our papers,” which we were supposed to keep with us at all times. This didn’t make a lot of sense, because we were already incarcerated–what good were papers going to do? They also handcuffed us when we were being processed to go into the facility, though they did let us out of the handcuffs afterward. I think they may have been trying to make a point about who was in charge.

The strangest thing, though, was that in our large area, where we prisoners were allowed to wander free, there was a stack of handmade, hand-written books. One of them was the Bible, painstakingly recreated by the many prisoners who had a verse or two memorized. Over the years the Bible had been completed. The other books were original writings by the prisoners, some fictional, and some detailing their lives both before they had been imprisoned and afterward. I was impressed at the workmanship of the handwritten texts.

It was a very strange dream.

Caption Contest

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Caption This!

Caption This!

I have removed the text from Keith’s balloon in this panel from a bad old comic in the public domain. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write the caption, and either be:

  1. As close to the original as possible, or
  2. As funny as possible.

Given the awful writing in the original comic, these two things are not necessarily different.

Your reward? Notoriety and the knowledge that you probably made somebody shoot milk out their nose laughing.

Sex, FarmVille and Social Obligations

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FarmVille works because it is not based on fun, but on social obligation, according to one analyst (it’s a great piece; you should read the whole thing):

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies.

As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11]

Just about everyone in the gaming industry agrees: Casual gaming and social gaming have induced people who don’t consider themselves gamers to start playing games in record numbers and for record periods of time, opening up new audiences and new possibilities for game design.

And women are supposedly one of the big “new” audiences out there. I often wonder whether they’re really new, considering how much my mom liked playing Dr. Mario and Tetris back in the 1990s, but that’s beside the point.

The point is this: of the 38 people on my FarmVille list who are active players, 18 are men and 20 are women. It’s a pretty even split, and the range in levels is pretty wide, too.

But when I look at the list of people who have sent “gifts” on FarmVille–which cost the sender nothing but the few seconds it takes to send them–almost every single person on that list is female.

With only a few exceptions, no one with a Y chromosome sends me anything.

Why is that, do you think? Here are a few conclusions that may possibly be drawn:

  • Men have no sense of social obligations. Also, they have cooties and smell funny.
  • Men have no idea what women want and faced with a page full of virtual goats, trees and fences, get gift paralysis and send nothing.
  • Men are afraid to give me anything, because they think I will interpret receiving a gift cow as a subtle message that I am a cow. And who knows what a “small hill” would mean…
  • Men have a different sense of social obligations, which doesn’t include sending people a bunch of crap on Facebook that they don’t necessarily want.
  • The men on my list are not typical, represent a tiny sample size and thus, no conclusions can really be drawn from this definitely non-scientific study.

Okay, I’m obviously teasing about the first few options on the list. But do you think the numbers mean anything? I’d love to hear from FarmVille players, too: Do you send stuff? Why or why not?

Just for the Hail of It

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I woke up confused last night, because it seemed like all the thunder in the sky had swooped down and decided to hold a party around my apartment. After a few confused seconds I recognized the noise as plain old garden variety hail, but because my bed is located on a second-floor corner and was being pounded by hail on three sides (roof and two walls), the sound was much louder than any sort of storm I’d ever heard before.

I always hear tornadoes described as sounding like a freight train, so naturally I decided to find out if there was a tornado. I wouldn’t have been able to hear a tornado siren if it had been two feet from my head at that point because of the deafening ice-shards pummeling the building.

I suffered a moment of absolute idiocy at that point, and instead of grabbing my laptop, bringing it downstairs and checking the weather in the bunker-like basement, I just wandered into the living room, closed the just-slightly-open window, and fired up the laptop from there.

If there really had been a tornado, I would have been sucked up into it faster than you could say “Auntie Em! Auntie Em!”

Fortunately, the freight train sound was just the roar of the hail.

When I went outside the next morning, I couldn’t believe there hadn’t been more damage. I really hope the farmers didn’t lose any crops.

Ickiest Noodles Ever

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A friend of mine recommended whole wheat-based noodles as a healthier alternative to normal noodles, and unfortunately, I actually bought some of the darned things at the store.

You may have a different experience. I am an extremely picky eater, and I am most picky about texture. So please don’t be afraid to try whole wheat-based noodles.

The noodles I bought were absolutely horrible. They had a creepy, nutty taste to them that overtook both the cheese and the marinara I poured over the noodles, but the worst thing was the texture. The wheaty noodles started out feeling like normal noodles, but quickly degraded into mealy, horrible bits of grit. It was not pleasant.

After choking down a bowlful of the stuff, I gave up on the healthier noodles and tossed the rest. While low-fat cottage cheese, low-fat cream cheese, skim milk, and lean hamburger are good substitutes for their originals, I would use caution in substituting whole wheat noodles for the normal kind in a recipe.

Maybe I should have tried them with butter instead of a red sauce. Anyone else have a different experience with whole wheat-based noodles?

Edit: Added the word “whole” in a bunch of times to better distinguish the brown nasty noodles from the normal kind, which are also made of wheat. Thanks, commenter!