…it’s a beautiful thing.
It’s one of the most beautiful days of the year – Opening Day. Hope springs eternal.
It’s like 80 degrees in DC today, so it doesn’t feel entirely Spring-like, but I’m not complaining. In fact, I’m going for a Tidal Basin cherry blossom run.
Here are some Red Sox goodies for you loyal Boston natives:
Sweet background:
MP3: Talkin’ Baseball (Red Sox edition)
Jimmy Rice
Was oh so nice
when he hit
when he hit
when he hit
Sadly no Butch Hobson mentions.
Well, it’s my first April Fools Day in the professional world, but today’s Sunday so all the wild employment-risking office pranks I had planned will have to wait.
This being a day of rest, I started the morning with Facebook and Gmail and found that those pranksters had some fun of their own:
UPDATE: Check out Lifehacker’s April Fool’s Day posts, such as how to cure seasonal depression with the Macarena.
And Google unveils broadband through your toilet – a “quick, easy and largely sanitary process”
First things first: sod the iPhone. Yeah, you read right, forget about it. Stop saving 10-percent of your pay-packet every month, don’t sign 18 to 24 months of your life away to Cingular, think laterally, not with the crowd. Helio have just blown everyone out of the water, and ironically they’ve done it with the Ocean.
Dual-slide for both number pad and full QWERTY. 3G for screaming downloads. Two-megapixel camera with flash, GPS, full HTML browser, 2.4-inch 260k colour QVGA display, on-board stereo speakers, 200MB of internal memory and microSD for more than 2GB more, USB Mass Storage Mode with PC and Mac compatibility… I’m throwing all this out in one fat chunk because if I were to talk you through it we’d be here all day.
$300. Half as much as the iPhone.
“Truth is, I’ve always been thirsty”
-Ed Bloom, Sr. – Big Fish
Even back when a sip of my Dad’s wine would make me spit fire in the backyard, I loved beverages. I would ask my parents to buy me a drink every time we went somewhere. My “cool empty bottle” collection was my favorite, if not the cleanliest, of all my packrat collections. As I started drinking alcohol and becoming a nutrition freak (the latter preceded the former by a few years fortunately) I found all kinds of new beverages to quench my thirst.
And apparently I’m not the only one who loves beverages. The New York Times’ most emailed article yesterday was You Are Also What You Drink.
In case you’re busy, I’ll summarize for you:
everything with high fructose corn syrup: bad
(pretty much everything at the store)
coffee: questionable
tea: probably good
alcohol: bad, red wine studies be damned
This Day In History:March 27, 1977 – Poorly spoken English caused the worst airplane accident in history on this day: the Canary Islands Crash.
Hot on the heels of Fox News’s hi-larious Daily Show ripoff comes Conservapedia. I guess I didn’t realize how liberally biased Wikipedia was, it being open-source and all.
The site’s content was written primarily by home-schooled students who clearly feel their world view is under attack. Although there are rumours that liberals and other anti-Americans routinely parody the site by posting the most ridiculous right wing rhetoric they can come up with, only to find it approved and published.
Some fun Conservapedia entries:
Also according to creation science theories, after the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land[5] — as it is thought that Australia was still for a time after the Flood connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart[6] — or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.[5] The theory that God simply generated kangaroos into existence there is considered by most creation researchers to be contra-Biblical.
Other views on kangaroo origins include the belief of some Australian aborigines that kangaroos were sung into existence by their ancestors during the “Dreamtime” [7] and the evolutionary view that kangaroos and the other marsupials evolved from a common marsupial ancestor which lived hundreds of millions of years ago.[8]
I like that two Captain Kangaroos floating on some buoyant turf is regarded as the accurate version of history while the entire concept of evolution shares a sentence with the understanding that species are created through song.
God:
It is claimed that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism worship the same God in different ways. This claim is regarded by some as a way to convert Jews and Christians to Islam, since it supports the idea that Abrahamic religion has “grown” from Judaism to Christianity to Islam.[3] However, many are skeptical of this idea.[4]
An extensive bibliography of sources for the god article:
* Cruden, A., Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments (Lutterworth, 1930)
* The Holy Bible (King James Version)
* The New English Bible (Oxford & Cambridge University Presses, 1970)
* The New Jerusalem Bible (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990)
* Peake, A.S., Commentary on the Bible (Nelson, 1962)
* Young, R., Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible (Lutterworth, 1939)
Good fun. Try also: Fox News, dinosaurs, and unicorns.
via Chris via Onion A.V. club
Fun fact: Did you know baby carrots were invented in 1986?
Last week was a great week for presents. Nicco came bearing gifts:
–Ditto Diet, the Safeway equivalent of…well, it’s billed as “lemon lime” but clearly tasted like Ginger Ale.
–bling stickers for my cellphone. My phone’s pretty old and pulling it out of my pocket has actually drawn audible gasps on multiple occasions, but the addition of pink and white bling has added at least a few months to its lifespan.
We stumbled across this while checking out Scribd at work today. Haven’t decided yet whether Scribd is a cool online library or, as Tom put it, “finally, a way to publish a document on the Internet”, but regardless, a fun and startingly accurate list:
1. Your houseplants are alive, and you can’t smoke any of them.
2. Having sex in a twin bed is out of the question.
3. You keep more food than beer in the fridge.
4. 6:00 AM is when you get up, not when you go to bed.
5. You hear your favorite song in an elevator.
6. You watch the Weather Channel.
7. Your friends marry and divorce instead of “hook up” and “break up”.
8. You go from 130 days of vacation time to 14.
9. Jeans and a sweater no longer qualify as “dressed up”.
10. You’re the one calling the police because those %&@# kids next door won’t turn down the stereo.
11. Older relatives feel comfortable telling sex jokes around you.
12. You don’t know what time Taco Bell closes anymore.
13. Your car insurance goes down and your car payments go up.
14. You feed your dog Science Diet instead of McDonald’s leftovers.
15. Sleeping on the couch makes your back hurt.
16. You take naps.
17. Dinner and a movie is the whole date instead of the beginning of one.
18. Eating a basket of chicken wings at 3 AM would severely upset, rather than settle, your stomach.
19. You go to the drug store for ibuprofen and antacid, not condoms and pregnancy tests.
20. A $4.00 bottle of wine is no longer “pretty good shit”.
21. You actually eat breakfast food at breakfast time.
22. “I just can’t drink the way I used to” replaces “I’m never going to drink that much again”.
23. 90% of the time you spend in front of a computer is for real work.
24. You drink at home to save money before going to a bar.
25. When you find out your friend is pregnant you congratulate them instead of asking, “Oh shit, what the hell happened?”
Bonus:
26: You read this entire list looking desperately for one sign that doesn’t apply to you and can’t find one to save your sorry old ass. Then you forward it to a bunch of old friends ’cause you know they’ll enjoy it too.
Cal Perry is not only an amazing photographer but also CNN’s Baghdad Bureau Chief. Check out this powerful slideshow and narration: Children of War.
This song brings me back to sophomore year of college, but it’s been reinvented so I’ll have an excuse to listen to it again.
Acoustic:
I’d like to think they’ll play this version at Andre 3000’s funeral.
And in case I’ve never made you watch this, the Peanuts version:
BONUS ROUND! (and slightly less outdated):
Ray Lamontagne’s acoustic cover of Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’
Just saw this cool video on the Inspired Protagonist:
There’s some debate on the IP about the video’s timeline and its myopic implications, but very interesting (and great soundtrack).