Local headline

"Turkey hospitalized after barn fire at Farm Sanctuary"

Don't worry, no turkeys were killed. But one male turkey ("Chicky") might have suffered smoke inhalation.

Thank you, Ithaca Journal.

E.: when our father announced this at the breakfast table, I misheard him. I thought he said "Turkey hospitalized after bar fight." This would have been more exciting.

A Blast From The Past

As Lila was checking her RSS feeds tonight after dinner, she said, "A ha! Geekologie blogged that video that we blogged first!"

"But Lila, did we actually blog that?" I astutely questioned. "I think we just put it in our gchat statuses."

"Blast!" Exclaimed Lila, without that joy in her heart that she was so known for.

So, here is the video that we found so amusing two days ago. Our critical eyes appreciate the contrast between the low-key, poorly-acted beginning and the action-packed, Cylon-reminiscent conclusion.

Another cute---yet inexplicable---video is here. No commentary is required.

Binary questions

Is it Christmas?

Has the LHC destroyed the earth?

Overheard

A.: "No." (M. swore I'd get money if I could get a word -- and I did!)

E.: "Princess Diaries? That movie changed my life!" Said with a totally straight face.

L.: "Why aren't you wearing pants?"
E.: "What? I was wearing pants when I got here!" Incredulity.

M.: "I know how to spell 'rutabaga'! I didn't win last year's spelling bee for nothing!"

J.: "... rabbits as a central motif."

R.: "Keeping in mind I've never severed, stabbed, pierced, or broken anything attached to me, ..."

M.: "Are you wearing a green bra?"
L.: "No."
E.: "Yes! ... I mean, no. Of course not. I'm also not wearing a green thong."


In the spirit of LilaPrime, this post's theme word: eponysterical, an adjective describing "posts/comments which are funny in light of the user's name." Eponymous, hysterical.

Turn off the reverse gear assist function now!

Actual transcript of conversation this afternoon; four people in the car. No fewer than two are talking at any one time.

"Who wants to drive?"
"I do!"
"Really?"
"No, just kidding."
"Ok, now E. and L., please look out your windows and tell me if anyone's coming."
We look across.
"No, look out your own windows."
"I see a car!"
"A window!"
"Ok, the car is stopped."
"They're waiting for you."
"Clear."
"Now they're moving a little."
"What?"
"Clear."
"But you're moving, too."
"I'm moving slowly like I'm mentally deficient."
"Still clear!"
"Cars!"
"Ok, now they're moving a little but you can see them."
"There are more cars out my window!"
"Look! -- some parked cars!"
"Oh, hey, a stop sign!"
"Wow, there are lots of cars in this parking lot!"
"Ok, turn off reverse gear assist function now!"

あぶない！

How is Santa related to mimes?

How is Loki related to Bigfoot? Find the answers to these, and other vitally important questions, on Santa Claus' family tree. Via Boingboing.

If programming languages were religions

I thought this was funny. You should, too, if you have any kind of nerd street cred at all.

Lisp would be Zen Buddhism - There is no syntax, there is no centralization of dogma, there are no deities to worship. The entire universe is there at your reach - if only you are enlightened enough to grasp it. Some say that it's not a language at all; others say that it's the only language that makes sense.

From here, via Slashdot.

This family is awesome

Hundreds of cookies, board games, dart guns, throwing flightless birds, configuring bluetooth devices. I had my grammar and vocabulary usage questioned within 20 minutes of being picked up. (Also, it turns out that puffins can fly. So, amend that: "throwing flightless stuffed animals of flight-enabled birds.") Breaking into long monologues from Hamlet. Dinner conversation about the mechanics of virus infections and mathematical models for evolution. Breaking into FotC songs. After-dinner telekinesis practice to make room for dessert. Unexploded cows. The monotonically-increasing awkwardness game. Exploded cows. Breaking into OE sketches. Spare computers everywhere.

My family rocks. What a piece of work is man!

This kind of thing just happens all the time

Intentional or ironic?

塊魂：すし

Katamari damashii sushi. It's adorable. It's hilarious. It's an ironic comment on the nature of appetite and eating.Via BoingBoing's Offworld.

Budget Pad Thai

At work today, A. couldn't find plates to heat up her pad thai. Is this really an acceptable alternative?

They are but pawns

There's simply too much political optimism lately. How about a reality-based perspective?
Alternatively, this would be a rockin' episode of Doctor Who.

All I want for Christmas

Is a pomegranate -- it does everything; cell phone, projector, coffee-brewer, real-time spoken-language translator..

Geek alphabet: Z

Thus ends the Geek ABCs.

Geek alphabet: Y

Geek alphabet: X

Geek alphabet: W

W00t!

Geek alphabet: V

Geek alphabet: U

Synchronized Presidential Debates

Via BB, a timely video about how similar those presidential debates really were. Link.

Geek alphabet: T

I love the mechanism of tapping. It can be easily applied to other card games, too!

Geek alphabet: S

Geek alphabet: R

I've never played. I guess I'm too young.

Geek alphabet: Q

I wonder how often this song is parodied. It's so easy.

Happy Halloween!

I like the in-camera color substitution performed here:The color, sampled from the front of a physics textbook, seemed well-suited to Halloween. Especially since it was applied so thoroughly over the original color, as seen here (in a different camera-effect experiment):

Geek alphabet: P

Geek alphabet: O

An intervention for MySpace

An intervention for MySpace (SLYT).

I saw this intervention on a website last week.

Hat tip to A. for sending this. People in the future will never understand. I imagine whole areas of historical research devoted to reconstructing the cultural meaning of videos like this.

Geek alphabet: N

How fresh? And when? How hot, and when?

Geek alphabet: M

Geek alphabet: L

Geek alphabet: K

Geek alphabet: J

I recall a week of college where J. recited this as every other sentence.

A webcomic recommendation

It's comics like this that remind me how much I enjoy the conflux of mysticism and teenage love in Gunnerkrigg Court. The story enchants while keeping the world veiled in a thin layer of WTF-is-going-on-here on top.

I think fantasy storytelling is all about the combination and balance of good surprises and good explanations. Surprises draw the reader in and explanations make the story worthwhile. On one hand, we could consider Lost, a show with many surprises, few explanations, and no satisfying conclusions. On the other, we have The Matrix Revolutions, a movie full of explanations about things no one cared about. Both fail at good storytelling, but in my opinion Lost definitely comes out ahead.

But what am I talking about? Go read Gunnerkrigg Court: you'll like it.

Geek alphabet: I

I like eggplant.

Geek alphabet: H

Geek alphabet: G

Reminds me of:

There's an alternative:

Geek alphabet: F

Used to... oh divisive games.

Footbal existentialism

I know it's out-of-season, but I just got around to watching this podcast:
Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life
It is hilarious. If you can spare any attention from the script, the various tickers/headlines across the bottom of the screen are also amusing.

Intellectualism is so cute juxtaposed with football.

Geek alphabet: E

I'm squarely in the hobbit classification (as per Randy's people-classification-by-LotR in Cryptonomicon), but my ever-increasing collection of diplomas and higher education inches me towards wizardry.

Geek alphabet: D

The uninquisitive corpses are kept elsewhere. (The phrase "curious corpses" reminds me of Edward Gorey.)

Geek alphabet: C

Cyberpunk is in the right collection of genres for this blog. I don't know why we haven't discussed it before. We shall, we shall.

Geek alphabet: B

Yep. Reminds me of the delightful Penny Arcade shirt: "Some people play tennis, I erode the human soul."

Geek alphabet: A

This reminds me of D.'s terrible (and effective) backstabbing in Diplomacy.

Geek alphabet

Having visited E. last weekend, I know that we will both be quite busy for the rest of the semester. But we might have some readers out there, and there are always RSS subscribers happily surprised by our eccentric posts. So, for the next n days, we'll be featuring a letter from the Geek Alphabet (don't click it! then these posts will be superfluous!), possibly with some commentary from fontes or efontes.
Via MetaFilter.

New Time Machine features

10 Big Announcements from Apple yesterday:

1. iPhone now available in three slightly different shades of black; pre-orders crash AT&T’s network yet again
2. New iPod PicoShuffle randomly plays up to three songs
3. Upgrade to OS X takes away some feature you really liked, replaces it with another way to access the iTunes Store
4. MacAir meets cousin Duncan MacAir who has the exact same specs and same release date but was never before mentioned, for some reason
5. Apple to buy up the last functioning remnants of the global finance system
6. New iPod Taste uses proprietary TongueScreen technology
7. Time Machine now allows access to the future, but some timelines are alternate so using it violates warranty
8. The entity known as Apple Inc. is actually a front for the Federation of Light
9. New commemorative black turtleneck that plays mp3s
10. Coming next year: US Festival ‘09

Why I'm Giving Thanks

I was subjected to in-house "deep tissue massage therapy" last night. I was rendered unconscious and immobile for the following twelve hours. Today we beat our old records at Kings.

Office robots do "Fight Club"

Not. But didn't the title hook you?J. once told me that some kids at her high school tried to start a fight club, in imitation of the movie. This was conveyed in a tone of incredulity. Come to think of it, who would recreationally try to get beaten up? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And this is coming from a devoted rugby player. But at least rugby has points, and teams, and rules. (Well, fight club does have rules; the first one is, you don't talk about... oh. You are a moron.)

Valuable, important members of a team!

My office has no windows. I empathize with Bob.

Nested glass Klein bottles

If we have any readers out there who are not yet subscribed to Boing Boing, let them know:When I grow up, I want to be a glassblower. A mathematician-glassblower. And Ernie will be a time-traveling geometer. (Is "geometer" a job? Are there non-academic jobs where one simply does geometry all day? Maybe he'll be a member of a time-traveling a cappella group. Any gig, anywhere, any time -- we can make your event truly special! Add dinosaurs for only a small fee!)

Sherlock Holmes rap

I know that, by posting this here, I (potentially) open the floodgates for all the other nerd raps to come pouring through. But this has such high production values (funded by MTV!), and captures several white rap memes so well, that I could not resist.

(Via Metafilter.)

Vote now for "Oddest Book Title of the Year"!

You can vote here. I was really torn between the following:

• "The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling"
  It just doesn't seem like there's much more to it than just, well... rolling. Sometimes I mess up and accidentally roll things widthwise, but usually that's easy to correct.
  
• "Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality"
  Just for the unexpected phrase "oral sadism."
  
• "How to Avoid Big Ships"
  Is it difficult? They can't sneak up. Deserves a vote for the fact that an entire book was written on the subject. Maybe the obvious strategy ("sail away") doesn't work? My curiosity is piqued.
  
• "Highlights in the History of Concrete"
  There are highlights?
  
• "Bombproof Your Horse"
  A must-read for all serious horse owners.
  
• "People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It"
  I have no idea what this title refers to. Am I ignorant of an endemic problem with undead-parasite-people? I want to read the book to find out.
  

All of these would be great band names. Even the long ones. (As of the time I voted, the last -- "People Who Don't Know..." -- was in the lead.)

Uniqueness

It seems that there are four Ernest Fonteses in the US and only three live in my family.

I hold two great disappointments from this matter. Not only I am not unique outside of the equivalence class of my family, but I also cannot live up to my lofty aspirations of living off the grid.

Fontesefontes loose in Toronto

Ernie narrowly avoided being eaten by herbivorous long-dead dinosaurs. Darwin's legacy was skewed in the basement exhibit.We have a new favorite musical genre.
Delicious vegetarian buffet. Picturesque arrangement of food.
The lighting worked really well with my five-year-old digital camera here.
We were loose. Loose in Toronto. Now it's over. The next Fontesefontes excursion will be in October, for Canadian Thanksgiving.

Rubik's cube cereal

The environment

Ernie and I both like the environment, and enjoy living in it (not elsewhere!). We are not in favor of boats on which the the front falls off.

Edit: Credit goes to Natalie for showing this to me. ---Ernie

We detest Olympic commentators

It seems that they are employed to be logorrheic, often abhorrently so. At least, we of the axis believe so. (This post is authored by fontesefontes++, i.e., "axis".)

Men's all-around gymnasts are like Chinese pandas: they're extremely rare, and decreasing in number.

... and we establish breeding programs for them!

If there's one thing that's important in Japan, it's honor.

Also, rice. Let's not forget any stereotypes!

A fantastic Olympics quote

TV commentator on the US girl's gymnastics team: "It must be like Waiting for Godot for those girls waiting up there."

... No, no it's not. The only similarity is the title.

The Smallest Integer

A quick summary of The Incredible Hulk:

You wouldn't like me when I'm... hungry. Don't make me hungry... Do you remember when we were at Harvard and we participated in those induced hallucination experiments? It was like that, only a thousand times more intense... I want to get rid of it, not control it... They want to make it a weapon... You don't understand, something very bad is going to happen... If I am off by even the smallest integer, this could go drastically wrong...

Things that can happen if you are off by even the smallest integer:

1. Nothing. By absolute value, zero is the smallest integer. Additive identities have a habit of not doing much... under addition!
2. Immediate death. It just sometimes happens. A doctor said so. Reference.
3. Partial credit.
4. Off-by-one errors. (If you are not convinced that zero is smaller than one.)
5. Wouldn't 'The Smallest Integer' be a great name for a rock band?
6. Bad dialogue (cf. 2, above).
7. One is the loneliest number that you ever knew...
8. The other integers feel slighted. You won't get invited to their parties any more. Good job. Working in unary sucks, doesn't it?

Barbecue cleaning

It's the most wonderful time of the year -- time to clean your barbecue! Did you bring your HAZMAT suit? This guy's expression indicates that he's not too happy to be fighting the illustrated demons, poison, rain clouds, and orbiting grime and filth."We clean Barbeques, that's what we do."

As if the name were not enough to explain. Looking at this postcard, I wonder: "What do they do?"

Food segregation

These watermelons were isolated from the other fruit at the supermarket, possibly because of their raucous behavior.We were relieved to see that a Thai restaurant had this anti-[food-]discriminatory sign in the window:

We serve brown rice.

The brown rice appreciates it! Thank goodness that, in these modern days, brown and white rice can peacefully be eaten in the same restaurant. (Is there a word like "coexist" that means to be eaten together? "Coeaten"?)

Unfortunately, the nearby "Three Peppers" restaurant does not serve brown rice. In fact, there are only six dishes on the menu (fewer if some of the peppers are interchangeable).

The winning place, the losing place

Today was an unscrupulously random "civic holiday" in Canada. In our unexpected downtime (waiting for opening hours), we battled each other even as a nearby wasp battled the windowpane.Drama on the go board.

On the radio

If we could wrap our kids in bubble wrap, we would. Because we love them and want to protect them.

...and want them to smother. ---Lila

...but don't love them too much. ---Ernie

Thus begins the storm!

Visiting home is the only situation where I am exposed to television. On this visit, I haven't actually watched any television, but it has been a frequent conversational topic. M. mentioned the show Jon and Kate Plus 8, whose stars are a family with eight children from only two pregnancies (twins, then sextuplets). Nevermind the fiddly details or our ridiculous conversation. The take-away message was this: it would be improved if, each week or month, they all voted one kid off the show.

Please?

This post begins the fontesefontes co-vacation. Expect more!

Passive-aggressive recipes

My favorite of these 14 passive-aggressive appetizers (hat tip: A.):

Top thick slices of country bread with fresh goat cheese. Sprinkle with herbs and bake until crusty; serve to everyone but Jeff.

I invite you to add your own passive-aggressive recipe in the comments. A quick brainstorm of everyone at the table yields jalapeño fudge brownies as (1) an excellent experiment, and (2) quite passive-aggressive, if inaccurately labeled ("fudge brownies! try one!").

Existential gchat opening

Ernie: Lila you there?

Lila: Yes, are you there?

Ernie: no

Ernie: aaah!

Iranian Photoshoppery

At this point, probably everyone has seen the report that Iran's publicity photo of their supposed four-rocket test contained only three distinct rockets. Here is a link to the NYT blog on the subject, a link to their original article. The picture is no longer included in the second link, but you can see a snapshot of their cover page with the original image in the blog link. You can see the obvious edits made in this picture from the NYT blog:


The BB coverage of the photoshoppery includes several selected upgrades to Iran's job. My favorites include a commercial re-edit


and this rather fetching, classical interpretation.


To see more cleverness, check out the BB comments.