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Thursday’s Random Stuff Post

– Ever wonder what life’s like for people who pirate Windows? Windows expert Ed Bott decided to “go underground” and see how pirated copies of Windows 7 actually work. The results are pretty interesting and worth a read, even if you’re not a tech person.

– Starting St. Patrick’s Day, Continental Airlines will offer flyers “a new option allowing you to purchase seat assignments for unreserved, Economy Class seats that feature extra legroom.” In other words, they’re going to start charging more for exit row seats.

– Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day, head over to this site to find a McDonald’s near you that offers Shamrock Shakes!

– The NFL has released their new conference logos, playoff logos, pre- and post-season logos, Super Bowl logos, and conference championship trophy designs. And they’re absolutely horrible. The new AFC logo, in particular, is pretty awful. What say you?

– Research in the academic journal Psychological Science shows that darkness increases dishonest behavior. It’s not just that darkness provides practical advantages (like “cover” for criminal activity); people genuinely think that the darkness can provide a measure of anonymity and invisibility… like a kid closing her eyes whilst hiding in a game of “Hide and Seek”.

– Lots of movie and TV stars get their starts in corporate training videos. Here’s a clip of Lost’s Michael Emerson… in a prison training video from 1992!

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Out with the new…

… in with the old!

As you can see, I have reverted back to the previous theme for the site. Hopefully, this will be a temporary change.

The new theme had a couple of bugs in it, and I’ve been in touch with the theme’s author to see if I can get them fixed. The author apparently works full-time for Facebook, so I don’t know how quickly a fix will come.

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Even MORE trivia!

As mentioned in this post, I have a ton of trivia items to share… so here’s today’s Amazing Trivia Bonanza:

– John Tyler (born March 29, 1790) was tenth president of the United States, holding the office from 1841–1845. Amazingly, Tyler has two living grandsons: Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr., (born 1924), and Harrison Ruffin Tyler (born 1928).

– One of the very last “Confederate widows” died in 2008. This one’s a bit of a trick, though: a girl named Maudie White Hopkins did the laundry and housekeeping chores for Civil War veteran William M. Cantrell. She was 19 and he was 86. Cantrell told Maudie that he would give her his land and house if she would marry and take care of him. Being one of ten children from a dirt-poor Ozark family, Maudie agreed. Cantrell, who enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 16 and served with the Virginia infantry, died in 1937 after the couple had been married for three years. Maudie lived on until August 17, 2008. Read more here.

– If you took a piece of paper .1 millimeter thick and folded it in half 100 times, the resulting stack of paper would be 13.4 billion light-years tall – almost as large as the entire observable universe! It sounds incredible, but it’s really basic math: .1mm (the height of the paper) * 2100 (the effect of doubling the height of the paper 100 times) / 1000 (to convert mm to m) / 9,460,536,000,000,000 (the number of meters in a light year) = 1026 meters, or  13.4 billion light years.

– William Moulton Marston was not only a psychologist, feminist theorist and inventor, he also wrote comic books, too! He’s mostly remembered for creating the systolic blood-pressure test, which detects deception and is still an important component of the modern polygraph machine. Oh, and he also created a comic book character known as Wonder Woman. Read more about him here.

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Sean Payton punks Jerry Jones

Now this is just 29 different kinds of awesome! From si.com:

On Friday night, the Saints’ staff at the combine gathered in a private room at St. Elmo Steakhouse, an 108-year-old Indy landmark, for a final celebratory nod to the Super Bowl win over the Colts. This is a group that likes its wine, and likes to have fun.

At the restaurant, word passed that Dallas owner Jerry Jones would have his Dallas group in this exact room Saturday night for a team dinner. Jones had even phoned ahead, according to a waiter, to make sure a magnum of a wine he loved, Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, was ready to be served at dinner.

Sean Payton told the waiter he’d like to have that wine, too. The waiter told him: Sorry, sir. We have only one bottle left, and it’s reserved for Mr. Jones.

Payton said he’d like to have the bottle nonetheless. I assume there was much angst on the part of the wait staff at that point. My God! Who do we piss off? One of the most powerful owners in the NFL, or the coach who’s the toast of the NFL, the coach who just won the Super Bowl?

Here came the bottle of Caymus Special Selection, and the Saints’ party drained it.

But drinking Jones’ wine wasn’t enough. Payton gave the waiter some instructions, took out his pen … and, well, the Cowboys party found at the middle of their table the next evening an empty magnum of Caymus Special Selection cabernet sauvignon, with these words hand-written on the fancy label:

WHO DAT!
World Champions XLIV
Sean Payton

That’s the kind of thing Jones will get a big laugh out of. And remember.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-28

  • The Japanese version of "A Secret Wish" with extra tracks? You really CAN download anything you want off the Internet these days! #
  • @heyred704 What up, girl?? 🙂 #
  • @heyred704 No tips, but there's this: http://tinyurl.com/n7xqfq #
  • Sorry for the rash of Facebook notes from me today. I had a plug-in installed on my blog that went crazy. It's been disabled now. #
  • FX is airing a mini-marathon of "Archer" tonight at 10pm. It's the funniest show you're not watching! Check it out! #
  • Sounds dirty but it isn't: "You have poked Lisa King". #
  • Take THAT, Finland! #
  • @heyred704 Hey – be sure to let us know how it is! Them menu looks AWESOME! in reply to heyred704 #
  • Sheesh! @aimeemann hates EVERYTHING! #
  • @heyred704 What's wrong, girl? in reply to heyred704 #
  • Woot! Almost hockey time! #
  • Testing! #

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The Mystery Slab

The town of Beit She’arim, in Galilee, has an important place in Jewish history. Founded during the reign of King Herod in the first century BC, Beit She’arim was a prosperous market town that became the de facto capital of Israel in AD 70, after the destruction of the Second Temple forced the Sanhedrin (the Jewish legislature and supreme council) to evacuate to Beit She’arim. The town was destroyed by fire during a rebellion in AD 352, and although it was resurrected by the Byzantines and later the Arabs, the town never regained its luster. In fact, it was a sleepy Arab village named Sheikh Bureik when it was purchased by the Jewish National Fund in the 1920s.

Beit She’arim was also the site of a large and important cemetery. Historically, the most desirable burial place for Jews was the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. But once Jews were barred from the area in AD 135, Beit She’arim became the main alternate burial place. Jews from as far away as Tyre and Palmyra were buried there, as was Rabbi Judah HaNasi, the second century AD Jewish leader who codified Jewish oral tradition into the Mishnah, which itself became the basis for the Talmud. Needless to say, HaNasi is a really important guy in Jewish history.

Because of all this, archaeologists had studied the area around Beit She’arim as far back as the 1880s. By the 1950s, the area around the cemetery had been excavated so well that it was decided to build a museum on the site. And so, in 1956, a bulldozer was brought in to flatten a small, archaeologically insignificant cave. But shortly after the bulldozer went to work, it hit a gigantic item that it couldn’t move. The item – which was 6½’ x 11′ and 18″ thick – weighed 9 tons and was, strangely enough, perfectly level on top.

Continue reading “The Mystery Slab”

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The Funniest Show You’re Not Watching

With the Olympics bumping NBC’s Chuck, 30 Rock and The Office off the air – and many other networks airing re-runs – it’s kind of slim pickins right now when it comes to TV comedy. But there is one show out there that’s absolutely hilarious, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you need to do so as soon as possible:

ArcherArcher is an animated series on FX. It stars H. Jon Benjamin (Coach McGuirk from Home Movies) as Sterling Archer, an attractive and classy James Bond style secret agent who works for ISIS, a private intelligence agency. However, Sterling is also barely competent at times, has severe “mommy issues”, treats his butler like a dog, drinks at the office more than Don Draper, and thinks nothing of charging thousands of needless dollars on his expense account, especially for prostitutes.

He is also insanely jealous of the developing relationship between ex-girlfriend and fellow secret agent Lana (Aisha Tyler from Talk Soup and Friends) and ISIS comptroller Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell of SNL and 30 Rock). Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development) plays Malory Archer, Sterling’s mother and CEO of ISIS (which explains how Sterling manages to not get fired no matter what happens). Mother Archer has problems of her own, including an obsession with her dog which leads her to get an erotic portrait of her and the dog which mimics the iconic photograph of a nude John Lennon and Yoko Ono in bed. And speaking of issues, Mallory’s secretary Cheryl (Judy Greer from Miss Guided) has her own issues, mostly about wanting to be strangled to death during sex.

It sounds silly, and it is. But the show packs more hilarious one-liners in 20 minutes than other shows could do in an hour. I can’t help but giggle every time I hear these lines:

“Now let’s go bury this dead hooker”

“Seriously, call Kenny Loggins. Cause you’re in the Danger Zone”

“Oh god, with the curry again. This shirt smells likes Indira Gandhi’s thong”,

“God it’s like my brain’s that tree and you’re those little cookie elves!”

Sterling: “You killed a hooker!”
Cyril: “She was a call girl!”
Sterling: “No Cyril, when they’re dead they’re just hookers!”

Seriously, check it out. This show really brings the funny. It comes on FX at 10pm on Thursdays; your cable company might offer episodes on demand as well.

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Testing, Testing…

Well, as you can see, I’m trying out a new theme on the site. I used a tweaked version of the default WordPress theme for ages, and last night I just decided that it looked… old. So this morning I woke up and spent an hour or so looking through themes on the WordPress site.

Although I’m not really excited about the dark blue header, I do really like the rest of the theme, especially the giant font. As I get older, I realize that I don’t like reading long articles in tiny Arial type, so I find this theme much easier on the eyes. And unlike a lot of other WordPress themes, this one more or less worked right out of the box. I did have to tweak a few things, so let me summarize the changes for you now:

– I removed the “Archives” widget from the sidebar. WordPress, by default, puts a monthly summary of your posts in a widget called “Archives”. The thing is, once you’ve had a WP site for a couple of years, the Archive widget becomes extremely long, and there’s no way to compact it (say, by having a collapsible hierarchy for previous years). I’d been using a plug-in called “Collapsible Archives” which was supposed to collapse all previous years’ posts and only display the current month. However, a bug in a new version of the plug-in listed the titles of all posts in the  current month, making the list almost as long as it was without the plug-in. So I disabled the plug-in and removed the widget from the sidebar.

– In its place, I created an Archive page, which does exactly what “Collapsible Archives” used to do, only on a separate page, therefore reducing clutter on the home page. Beware that the plug-in uses JavaScript, so it takes a few seconds to load.

Continue reading “Testing, Testing…”