Calvin & Hobbes Snowman Show.

Nice tits.

via MemePool.

I was stepping out off of the curb one night a couple of years ago, coming home from the mall after doing a bit of gift shopping, when two cars collided right in front of me. One of those '5 more seconds and you would be right in the middle of that' situations. One person had rolled out too far into the intersection and got smacked.

I had to run into Subway to call the police / etc, after making sure no one was bleading to death (knew that first aid training would come in handy one of these days.) One of those stories that you can make funny by taking the funny parts selectively, but truth be told I kind of sat in my chair at my desk staring into space for a couple of hours after that contemplating death and encounters with strangers and all the rest of it.

Another slightly spooky happening was last November / December, for about 2 weeks straight, every time I would go to the Y to go swimming or do body pump class, I would encounter a fire truck, sirens on, heading somewhere.

BREATHING EXERCISE FOR RELAXATION
One of the fastest and most effective stress-relievers is the "4-7-8 Breath." Place the tip of your tongue against the bony ridge by your upper front teeth. Breathe in through your nose for 4 counts. Hold your breath for 7 counts. Exhale through your mouth (making a whooshing sound) for 8 counts. Repeat this cycle 4 times, twice a day.

via beardy guy.

I am Pacman. I am an aggressive sort of personality, out to get what I can, when I can. I prefer to avoid confrontation, but sometimes when it's called for, I can be a powerful character. I tend to be afflicted with munchies constantly. What Video Game Character Are You?

Irony

An MSN-affiliated web site running on ... Sun?? hee...

Hey Ya; Charlie Brown (.mov)

www.booble.com! says:
uhm yeah dude its like minus fucking polar bear outside

Barf.

There's a typically Korean dish (ie throw a bunch of stuff in a stoneware pot with some water and heaps of red pepper paste and garlic and boiled furiously (not that I'm averse to this, mind you)) called, phonetically, 'boo-dae jjiggae'. Although Koreans don't tend to like to talk about this too much, the name means 'base stew' and comes out of the deeply poor decades following the Korean war, when food was scrounged from the garbage heaps outside American bases and thrown into the pot with whatever else could be found. It included, and includes, such un-Korean things as chunks of meat patties and hotdogs and stuff. It's actually quite retro-popular these days, particularly when drinking.

With clockwork regularity, some shik-tang ajummah ('cheap restaurant auntie', more or less) will be exposed and excoriated on the TV news (to much backward-looking handwringing) because she adheres to the old ways a little too closely in sourcing her ingredients, and someone has found meat patties with toothy semicircular bites taken out, for example.

Eww.

via MetaFilter.

Question: If everybody gives and receives cash for chinese new year, don't you theoretically just end up with the same amount you started with? It's like the Muppet Family Christmas special, where the Fraggles all give each other this one little round rock, each passing it to someone else... weird

anyway, if you just hit 'post' it doesn't actually send it to the website until someone else publishes.

Small wind turbines.

On PEI they are now getting ~10% of total electricity from wind power, and they want to expand it to 50%. Also talking about switching to net metering for power, to accomodate personal small-scale generation. Very very cool stuff.

Greg / Sabrina: Why wasn't it us who figured out this?

Yo momma's so crazy, she makes pi look rational.

Stolen from BBspot, but none of the rest are remotely funny.

PS. Chantal: if you click "Post and Publish" instead of "Post" when you're done writing it will show up on the actual web page right away.

Once again proving my theory.. korea is fucking stupid. Please if you do write about your travels, have that be your title.

The whole becoming a first world country in the space of one generation thing certainly makes for some interesting cleavages...

MONKEYKNIFE!!!

I wonder how many days I can survive on goodie shop samosas and coffee...

Had to chisel my fingers off of my doorknob this morning.

One of the best Strong Bad Emails yet. Or watch the rest.

Peter's right. Don't question the law of Madagascar. Miss Webber agrees, though I didn't quite manage to convince her to give "make a risk game" as a CS 2013 project. Came close though. Gotta love having to mark a game that takes 8 hours to play :)

Yay.

Knight vs. Samurai. Very interesting. Bursts a great many misconceptions about both.

Remember, kids, it's not how big your hard drive is that counts, it's how much RAM you have.

As seen in some dork's .signature somewhere.

Rats on Cocaine (flash)

via blort.

Recipe for homemade mozzarella sticks. You know, for the health-conscious individual.

Generally Crime and Punishment is Dostoyevsky's most influential book. Also recommended are his short stories, which was more his forte. The Idiot and Notes From the Underground (if you are interested in historical context, especially). The interesting thing to keep in mind when reading Dostoyevsky is that his political views changed over time, from being in line with the intelligencia of the time (the forerunners of teh Bolsheviks) to having a kind of spiritual re-awakening, and becoming rather Christian later on (though he keeps it under control, thankfully) In some of his writing he implies that Marxism can't work because it's too materialistic.

Interesting linguistic side note: the more accurate spelling of 'Leo Tolstoy' is apparently 'Lev Tolstoi', according to [caught you ego-surfing. google-proofed your name]. She learned Russian in school (yay communism) and says that the 'v' and 'w' are interchangeable, so Lev is pronounced 'Lew', which got changed to 'Leo'.

For Tolstoi my two favourites were War and Peace and Anna Karenina (sp). Both long, but very self-explanitory, and thankfully free of literary reference one-upmanship that made English writing of the time so irritating for me to read. (though that could just be because of translators ironing over such allusions)

Other Russian authors to look out for are Chekov (mostly short stories) and Pushkin (poetry). And moving into more modern work, anything by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is quite good, as well Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak is worth reading for a personal perspective on life under Lenin, and seeing the creaky underbelly of the revolution.

Chrysler Supercar

I'm as surprised as you.

Stevo joke update:

Q. Why do farts smell?

A. So deaf people can enjoy them too.

As a bit of a followup to my linking to the Elegant Universe series earlier, I'm currently reading A Brief History of Time by Hawking. It's an excellent high-level introduction to relativity and quantum mechanics, and does as good a job as is probably possible to illustrate the gap between the two. But I'm finding it a little light on the mathematics.

I figured Greg's probably covered this ground before, so I am hereby soliciting suggestions for further reading in this area from him, or anyone else who's read stuff in this area.

On the other hand, this is a great book for what it offers. The way it explains the relationship of time and space as an expanding cone emanating from any event in the universe (say, a star exploding) is the best way I've seen to explain the subtle implications of general relativity.

A Michael Jackson joke I hadn't heard before:

Q. What does Michael Jackson like most about twenty eight year olds?

A. There's twenty of them.

(thanks to Stevo)

Dear Paris Hilton,

Thank you but no, I do not with so purchase your video.

Please stop sending me email.

Thank you.

I had a big long post with one of those end-of-year email survey things all filled out nice and everything, then blogger ate it.

That's OK, it didn't end up being that funny, I let my guard down there for a while and put in honest, almost sentimental answers. Can't have that.

Oh well, that also would have pushed Heidi too far down the page too quickly ;)