{"id":1454,"date":"2008-08-26T23:01:20","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T03:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=1454"},"modified":"2008-08-27T07:59:25","modified_gmt":"2008-08-27T11:59:25","slug":"things-i-did-not-know-last-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/26\/things-i-did-not-know-last-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Did Not Know Last Month"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>The reason I didn&#8217;t know what a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rowan\">rowan tree<\/a> looks like is, apparently, that I&#8217;ve always seen them labelled as either &#8220;European Mountain Ash&#8221; or &#8220;Dogberry&#8221; trees. So, rather than being some esoteric European tree, they&#8217;re all over the place. This will make my offensive against the malevolent beings much simpler.<\/li>\n<li>The oldest joke in the world is <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20080731\/lf_nm_life\/britain_joke_dc\">a fart joke<\/a>. Followed closely by a &#8220;boat full of girls in lingerie&#8221; joke. Based on a couple of movies I&#8217;ve seen lately the science of comedy hasn&#8217;t advanced at anything like the rate of the physical sciences, that&#8217;s for sure.<\/li>\n<li>Australians know <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/business\/7540480.stm\">a lot more about good coffee<\/a> than North Americans.<\/li>\n<li>Canada <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thespec.com\/News\/CanadaWorld\/article\/419026\">is getting a supercomputer<\/a> 30 times more powerful than our current best one&#8211;that&#8217;ll be enough power to place the machine in the top twenty in the world. In case you were just thinking &#8220;who still builds supercomputers in the era of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.beowulf.org\/\">Beowulf clusters<\/a>?&#8221;, note that this machine is equivalent in power to 30,000 desktop machines.<\/li>\n<li>There is seriously a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.downhomeshow.ca\/Entertainment-MissDownHome.html\">Miss Downhome<\/a> pageant. And those are seriously the events in the competition. Sigh.<\/li>\n<li>Much of anything about beyond the obvious (at least &#8220;obvious&#8221; to the seriously progressive people) generalities about the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/National_Endowment_for_Democracy\">National Endowment for Democracy<\/a>. Amazing the difference that <a href=\"http:\/\/shetterly.blogspot.com\/2008\/08\/understanding-eloi-ned.html\">two minutes<\/a> can make.<\/li>\n<li>I am remarkably unfamiliar with which words constitute <a href=\"http:\/\/codebox.no-ip.net\/controller?page=misc.QuizCommonWords\">the 100 most common<\/a> in the English language.<\/li>\n<li>Squirrels are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=C3he2BstmLs\">metal<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>There is no definitive answer to the question &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordsmith.org\/awad\/awadmail90.html\">where did the term &#8216;eighty-sixed&#8217; come from?<\/a>&#8221; Most of the theories sound plausible, but as you read through the list you start to feel like someone is playing games with you. For the record, I have never been eighty-sixed from a bar (although I should have been at least one time), but I have been from a house party.<\/li>\n<li>Google Street View will happily show you <a href=\"http:\/\/wordsmith.decenturl.com\/ca-melbourne-office\">a picture of the building<\/a> I work in when I visit Melbourne. You can only see interstates near the Boston office, though.<\/li>\n<li>2042 is the year that the US Census Bureau predicts that <a href=\"http:\/\/delendaestcarthago.blogspot.com\/2008\/08\/interesting-news-from-united-states.html\">&#8220;whites&#8221; will no longer be the majority<\/a> in the USA. This should be even more fascinating than watching the world change as the Boomers age.<\/li>\n<li>You can play a kind of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/index.php?option=com_content&#038;view=blog&#038;id=3972\">D&#038;D on Facebook<\/a>. That&#8217;s still not enough to get me to change my position as a militant Facebook Luddite, but it did make me pause for a moment.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Fripp\">Robert Fripp<\/a> does <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fumetti\">fumetti<\/a> comics <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dgmlive.com\/diaries.htm?entry=11389\">in his diary<\/a>. <\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/hcsoftware.sourceforge.net\/gravitation\/statement.html\">Video games<\/a> can be used to provide a kind of metaphoric understanding of some aspects of mental illness.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s pretty simple to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boingboing.net\/2008\/08\/21\/cbcs-danny-michel-re.html\">get something posted to Boing Boing<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bruichladdich.com\/\">Bruichladdich<\/a> has the wackiest web cam going: the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.watch-whisky-mature.com\/index.php\">Watch Whisky Mature<\/a> cam.<\/li>\n<li>Some things that might, on a naive analysis, seem a bit ridiculous are actually completely self justifying. Like an <a href=\"http:\/\/williamlamson.com\/#\/work\/video_work\/video\/1\">exploding banana mask<\/a>. (I am now using the term &#8220;exploding banana mask&#8221; whenever I am asked to justify a ridiculous decision that I utterly disagree with.)<\/li>\n<li>US border guards are <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5040401\/sexual-gadgets-can-now-be-seized-at-us-borders-too\">now checking for &#8220;external penile rigidity devices&#8221;<\/a>, and will seize them. They actually have a (newly revised) guideline on them. This is possibly the funniest thing yet in the post-9\/11 security theatre category. (It&#8217;s also a very spooky reminder of creeping authoritarianism, but we&#8217;ll ignore that in the face of the funny.)<\/li>\n<li>Canada Post delivers to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Canada_Post#Overview\">a larger area<\/a> than the postal service of any other nation<\/li>\n<li>Cattle <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/science\/nature\/7575459.stm\">align themselves<\/a> on a north-south axis. Now I should never get lost on a cattle ranch.<\/li>\n<li>There is <a href=\"http:\/\/atheistblogger.com\/2008\/08\/24\/the-only-bad-thing-about-atheism\/\">a serious downside<\/a> to my atheism.<\/li>\n<li>They are planning not one, not two, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/arts\/film\/story\/2008\/08\/25\/hardcore-sequel.html\">three sequels<\/a> to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hard_Core_Logo\">Hard Core Logo<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">The reason I didn&#8217;t know what a rowan tree looks like is, apparently, that I&#8217;ve always seen them labelled as either &#8220;European Mountain Ash&#8221; or &#8220;Dogberry&#8221; trees. So, rather than being some esoteric European tree, they&#8217;re all over the place. This will make my offensive against the malevolent beings much simpler. The oldest joke in the world is a fart&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/26\/things-i-did-not-know-last-month\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[282],"class_list":["post-1454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkapalooza","tag-things-new-to-me","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-ns","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1454"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1458,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1454\/revisions\/1458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}