My Noodly Appendage is all tense.

You know how I've been having wrist and arm problems lately (partly due to repetitive motion/poor ergonomics, partly due to excessive cat's cradle)? Well, now I'm mad. The marathon stats reporting session yesterday tired out/tightened up my mousing hand. I know this because I only converted 14 Pastafarians. Oh, the shame. I should have to wear two eyepatches, or something.

(I was playing the Flying Spaghetti Monster game because right after I finished my piece of business plan draft , I got a piece of spam that said "Take a break! Play a game!" and I thought "Good idea!", but of course was not inclined to play the game proffered in the email. Yes, it's almost 8pm. Yes, I'm going home now.)

Mutant Super Power

As you may know, I have a mutant super power: being able to identify actors from one role to another, even through full-head Star Trek alien makeup or a 40-year age difference.
A slightly alarming variation just occurred: I'm watching the 1963 film Tom Jones. Susanna York[1] stars as Sophia Western. "She looks an awful lot like Samantha Morton," I thought. I paused the movie to check imdb to see if they are blood relations. They aren't.
But in the 1997 miniseries The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (which I have not seen), Sophia Western is played by...Samantha Morton.

[1] There do not appear to be any pictures of Susanna York circa 1963 available on the Internet, alas, so I can't demonstrate just how eerie this is.

Sic transit gloria(2)

Candey Hardware is going out of business.
They've been open since 1891.
This is disorienting. Candey Hardware has been part of my professional universe for 14 years. In fact, now that I look at the map, they are literally the center of my professional landscape.
What's a girl to do when she needs potting soil, or some keys, or some WD-40, or a knife for birthday cake, or a decent staple gun (not like the one Staples sold me once, for which they did not carry refill staples, but I digress)?
I guess I'll be going to the True Value at 20th & P from now on, which is inconvenient. Just barely too far for a there-and-back-at-lunchtime trip.

(You kids today and your non-walking-distance hardware superstores. Get off my lawn.)

I'm gonna need some Epsom salts.

There are approximately 35 YouTube videos of cat's cradle tricks.
My hands are cramping up just thinking about it.
Some of them are in French, which is exciting--extra bonus skill points!

Ball Home Canning Jars...

...are no longer made by Ball Corporation.
The jars still carry the "Ball" logo (exactly the same as that used by the Ball Corporation), but they are now apparently made by "Jarden Home Brands". More info at the URL "freshpreserving.com"[1]
This might be the most confusing branding issue I've ever seen.

[1] This site looks pretty thorough and useful, despite the Flash-into-with-music.

Get ready for the zombie hordes

I'm pretty sure this means zombies.
(My kinsmen are in general agreement. We might skip Watermelon Park Fest in favor of some fortification activities.)
Luckily, we've all been training for this.
(I literally just looked around the office for something that could be used to remove the head or destroy the brain. Dibs on the swingblade from the paper cutter.)

On Avoiding Emoticons

From Wikipedia:

It's hard to know in advance what character-strings will be parsed into what kind of unintended image. A colleague was discussing his 401(k) plan with his boss, who happens to be female, via instant messaging. He discovered, to his horror, that the boss's instant-messaging client was rendering the "(k)" as a big pair of red smoochy lips.^[8]

Talk like a pirate...

...in German!

(It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

Eddie's in the Onion.

That's it, really.
Oh: Except there's a comment after the interview that Americans always pronounce his name wrong. "It's Iz_Ard. Doesn't rhyme with Lizard."
We *have* to pronounce it wrong, unless we want to have the "invokes Linus Torvalds" problem. We're Americans. It's either "rhymes with lizard" ("IZerd") or "talk like a pirate" (izARRRD), because we sound pretentious to ourselves if we pronounce it "izAHD."
'Course, "invokes Linus Torvalds" partly pissed me off because so few people care about pronouncing words that are not Amer-English. The fact that we're at war in eyeRACK is witheringly embarrassing. If we're having a war in their country we should at least pronounce it eeRAHK. How come we just make up names for other places? Those places have names. Perfectly good ones. Good enough for the people who live there. Turin/Torino was a good example—we should have been calling it Torino all along. How pissed off would we be if the Dutch addressed all their Brooklyn mail to Nieuw Amsterdam, NY?

Feel the burn. (Or not.)

I got takeout from Wasabi^[1] for lunch today^[2].
Chicken with "herb salad"^[3] and a spicy tuna scallion roll.
Got back to the office and realized they had left something out.
Guess what they didn't give me.


Hint: It starts with a "w".


[1] I'd link to their site, but it's a seasick Flash experience.
[2] I know we said we were done with them, but I'm trying not to eat wheat lately^[4], so my options are limited.
[3] This is, as far as I can tell, mesclun mix. They should change the name of the salad (see below, "Crouton Madness") unless they intend the word to be taken in its botanical sense (that is, "This salad is made from tender-stemmed plants, not wood"), rather than its culinary sense ("Tastier than lettuce!"). How hard is it, for crying out loud? I know they have a kitchen. I know they have shiso. I bet they have cilantro, too, because they are all about fusion. Just throw some herbs in the salad, already!
[4] I've been feeling marginally less well than usual for a while now, and my brainstem says that wheat is a major contributor to the less-wellness. I'm not completely eliminating it—Barbara got me a French mixed-fruit tart for my work anniversary on Monday and I did not say nay—but I'm trying to demote it from "staple" to "treat".

Flotsam

(1) A² + B² = Opportunity²
This is a slogan on a billboard (is it really a billboard if it's not gigantic/on a roadside?) at Farragut North. It makes me pause every morning. I don't think I like it, but I do enjoy the mental sensation of trying to figure out what the factors of opportunity might be. From a marketing perspective it's a failure: I know it's promoting math and science, but I don't know why or by whom.

(2) Joke I heard from Scot the Viking:
Q: In an elevator [in Finland, presumably], how do you tell an introverted Finn from an extroverted Finn?
A: The introvert is looking at his own shoes. The extrovert is looking at someone else's shoes.

(3) Teenage girl suicides are on the rise. This opens a giant chasm of fury in me, rage at our culture, fear of powerlessness to protect my beloveds from the forces around them. Don't really have anything else to say about that. Just the chasm. Of fury. (And flippantly: This is what happens when there's no Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television...)

(4) Belief-o-Matic: For some reason, belief.net comes up first in the Google search for the article above. The site also features the Belief-o-Matic, a nice questionnaire that in my case was spot-on. Oddly reassuring: "Yep, that's the religion for me, all right!"

I need a new guru.

Jakob Nielsen is dead to me.
I'm thinking a lot about web design and usability, and while he understands usability, he wouldn't know design if it came up and bit him in the face.

Ehren withdrawal

He's not just not blogging. He's not here. He's in France on his honeymoon. (Probably in the Loire Valley or Brittany right now.) I keep forgetting to eat lunch. Shital's doing a pretty good job trying to remind me but it doesn't always work.


pine.

Sic transit gloria

Pavarotti.

Crouton Madness

I want people to stop calling things "Caesar Salad" that are not Caesar Salad.
Chopped romaine with pre-shredded parmesan cheese and this odd assortment of croutons (I'm looking at pumpernickel, rye, and some kind of multigrain) is not a Caesar Salad.
I'm sure a pumpernickel crouton in its natural habitat is a fine thing, but what I wanted was a Caesar Salad and I have not gotten it.

I think my basic objection here is the Martini Problem.
I like complex nomenclature. Language differentiates things by using different names for them. That's what language is for. That's why we have it. If you make something new, you should make up a new name for it. That's how we got all those great cocktail names, like Singapore Sling and Rusty Nail and Hoptoad. Just serving it in a martini glass (which, incidentally, is also called a "cocktail glass") and putting "-tini" on the end is a mediocrity-driven nomenclature cop-out, which impoverishes and demeans our language.

So, for example, if this lunch object were called a "Daily Market Romaine Salad", I'd be fine. I probably wouldn't have bought it, but I wouldn't be feeling all unfulfilled.

I break for Beethoven.

WETA is conspiring against me, professionally.
Normally they are a tremendous help. More often than not, they get me through the workday.
But twice already this afternoon they have played pieces that are so beautiful/stirring/heartstring-catching that I can't work with them in the background. Have to stop working and only listen for a bit.
Albinoni's Oboe Concerto in D Minor (from the Concertos a Cinque, Opus 9), and now Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4.
Lalala! (Or more accurately, "La, lalalala, lalalalala-la-la-laaaaaa, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, dee-deedledy-diddledy-diddledum, dum-dum-duuuum...")
It's good, though, really. Because of joy.