The Correct Way to Spell Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap, the greatest fake/real band ever, is typically spelled incorrectly. The official spelling contains umlauts over the n and no dot over the letter i. However, there is no Unicode n-umlaut (or n-diaeresis), so you can't exactly type it. Somehow, Wikipedia managed to do it. (Note: diaeresis would be more accurate versus umlaut, since the umlaut represents a change in the sound of the letter.)

N-umlaut does occur in three languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar), Jacaltec (a Mayan dialect spoken in Guatemala and southern Mexico), and in Cape Verdean Creole.

The dotless i, or ı, occurs in Turkish, in addition to a dotted i. So of course, there are dotted and undotted capital i's as well: İ & I. The dotless i also occurs in Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tatar, and (traditional) Irish (which has no dotted i).

Metro & Elevation Burger Have the Same Designer

Kissing Under the Mistletoe Is A Norse Tradition

Much like Santa himself, reindeer, Xmas trees, wreaths, and more, kissing under the mistletoe is yet another Xmas tradition that predates christianity. Therefore, I highly advocate it at Xmastime.

Baldr, the Norse god of light, beauty, love, and happiness, was the second son of Odin. He often had prophetic dreams, including one where he dreamt his own death. His mother, Frygg, made every object on earth vow not to hurt Baldr. However, mistletoe never took the vow, as Frygg thought it was too unthreatening to hurt Baldr. So of course, the gods had a new pasttime: throwing things at Baldr since nothing can harm him. Naturally, Loki, the asshole of the gods, made a spear of mistletoe and went to the chuck-things-at-Baldr party. He gave the mistletoe spear to Baldr's blind brother, Hodur, who threw it at Baldr and killed him.

Then a bunch of fire happened, but that's not important here.

Frygg pleaded to the goddess of the underworld, Hel, to let Baldr return to earth. Hel agreed on the condition that all objects alive and dead wept for him. And everything did, except for the giantess Þökk (actually Loki in disguise). So of course the gods hunted Loki down, tied him to three rocks, and put a serpent above his face to drip venom onto him.

Anyway, Frygg was so happy that Baldr was revived, that she commanded anyone standing under mistletoe to kiss as a reminder of how love conquered death.

So there you have it.

Festivus

I hope everyone is having an adequate Festivus!

The Truth About the Salvation Army

Note: I'm not (just) writing this because those damn incessant bell ringers make me violent.

The Salvation Army is a right-wing evangelical Christian organization that actively discriminates against homosexuals. During the Bush administration they were trying to get the White House to issue a regulation that would allow them to be exempt from any local antidiscrimination laws so they wouldn't have to hire any gay people. Gay people who just want to help the less forunate. When people found out about this and complained, the White House immediately changed their minds.

They could almost make the point that because it's more or less a "church" (Where are their churches exactly?) the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows them to discriminate due to their religious beliefs when hiring people. But these aren't people answering phones at some backwoods hate-filled funeral-protesting church. The Salvation Army is a highly visible, worldwide charitable organization whose churchiness is nowhere near the level of their charity.

The Salvation Army cares so much more about hating homosexuals than helping the poor that when New York City proposed a law that would require any organizations doing business with the city to provide equal benefits to unmarried domestic partners, the Salvation Army threatened to close all soup kitchens in New York City. I guess they think in god's eyes, it's more important what you're putting into your ass than whether you have anything to put into your mouth.

Fuck the Salvation Army.

Verizon Center's Seats

...still have the old Caps logo on the end of the rows. Imagine how expensive and tedious it would be to change every single one.

Green Power?

This was taken in the Woodley Park-Zoo/Adams Morgan station of the DC Metro.

I Was on HBO!

My lovely fiancée and I were on the first episode of HBO 24/7 Presents NHL Hockey Penguins vs. Capitals.

I'm the blue blob in the top left corner. That's right, I was at a Caps game wearing my Leafs jersey. Give me a break. I only get to wear it twice a season. The lovely fiancée is the reddish smudge to the right of me.

Mercury is Smaller Than Some Moons

Mercury is the smallest planet (unless you still count Pluto). Its radius at the equator is 2440km. This means that it's smaller than Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, as well as Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Mercury is just barely larger than the second-largest of the Jovian moons, Callisto.

Small world, eh? HAHAHAHAA.

Holiday Simpsons Episodes

If Fox ever makes a calendar, I won't buy it. Judging by the dates they air Simpsons episodes, their calendars are all kinds of wrong. Observe the table below:

Holiday	Date of Holiday	Associated Simpsons Holiday Episode	Date Aired	Days from nearest Sunday to Holiday
Halloween	Sun Oct 31, 2010	Treehouse of Horror XXI	Sun Nov 7, 2010	7 days earlier
Xmas	Sat Dec 25, 2010	The Fight Before Christmas	Sun Dec 5, 2010	21 days later
New Year's Day	Sat Jan 1, 2011	Donnie Fatso	Sun Dec 12, 2010	21 days later

The first Simpsons episode ever ("Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire") was an Xmas episode. It aired 8 days before Xmas 1989.

The first Treehouse of Horror was aired 6 days before Halloween 1991. Airing the Halloween episode 7 days late I could understand if Halloween hadn't fallen on a Sunday (regular air day for The Simpsons) this year! In fact, the Treehouse of Horror episodes have been showing after Halloween for years now! It has to stop.

Furthermore, it's mind-blowing that the Xmas and New Year's episodes are on  3 full weeks before the holiday.

Get your act together, Fox, and stop ruining The Simpsons.

Tomas Kaberle Has No Chin

Suitcase Guitar!

Santa Steals Children

22th Floor

The True Story of Santa

Which Way is Up?

This gets more confusing: I was on the top level of the building!

Troll Math

Seems pretty solid until you realize that if you cut squares out infinitely, it's still not a circle. There will be an infinite number of perpendicular lines instead of a curve.

Autostereograms

Want a headache? Read about autostereograms.

To be able to see these images, your eyes have to pretend they're looking far away but focus on a closer object. If you are looking at the image normally, your eyes are focused and converge at the distance the image is from you. To see the autostereogram's 3D image, your eyes are focued at the correct distance, but are converged at a different distance (infinity), making the image hit your eyes at the "wrong" angle. Each eye is looking at a different part of the picture, which is why the edges never look right. Your brain sticks everything together, thinking that you're seeing a 3D image but in reality you're just looking at it all wrong.

In a simple "wallpaper" type of autostereogram, they take a repeating pattern or two to trick your brain into making you perceive them as being on a different plane than the background.

The tiger is repeated every 120 pixels, the shark every 130 pixels, and the person riding the tiger every 140 pixels. So, when your eyes go all crazy, the tiger seems closest, the shark is farther away, then the person riding the tiger is on the background plane.
Then if you mess with size and spacing and such, you can do all sorts of crazy things. For example here is a bunch of tigers at different depths. This image shows you how the spacing of the pattern affects the depth you perceive.

So of course no one wants to sit down and make these, so they made a computer program that builds these images for you. This program takes a grayscale image of the image you will see in 3D and a random dot pattern, then figures out how to adjust each reiteration of the pattern to make you see the 3D image.

And of course, someone figured out how to go too far with this.

Similar Power Metal Drum Intros

Listen to the first 5 seconds of "Sword's Song" by Battlelore:


Then listen to the first 5 seconds of "Blank File" by Sonata Arctica:


"Sword's Song" came on randomly on my iPod today and I thought it was "Blank File". Lame.

(FYI, "Blank File" by Sonata Arctica was released in 1999; "Sword's Song" by Battlelore was released in 2003.)

Mail Goggles

Mail Goggles is a Google Labs feature for Gmail that makes you solve math problems before sending an email late at night on a weekend. It's set up so you don't drunkenly email people you probably shouldn't be talking to anyway. More often than not, I end up sending real emails on purpose on weekends, so Mail Goggles doesn'r help much.

Plus, it turns out that I can still do math when I'm pretty drunk.

(No, there's embarrassing story to go along with the above statement.)

Fox News's Response to the Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Fox & Friends on Fox News, which some people unfortunately think is a source of news, responded to the rally with a well-researched, well-thought out response to the message of the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Just kidding. They missed the point entirely and attacked Jon Stewart.



If you can't stomach the video, here are some of the extremely moronic things they said:

• They claim Stewart attacks the right, then "attempts" to work the crowd into getting out to vote. But then they show a clip of him defending Tea Partiers and Juan Williams and not talking about voting at all. (In reality, the rally attacked all the stupid news networks, even NPR.)
• They pretended not to know Colbert's name.
• They claim he and Colbert are not news men, they're comedians. Reading the news every night on a news show makes you a newsman, goddamnit! Using their logic, it's good to know that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are just DJs and not news men/political commentators.
• They justify the large crowd by pointing out that Oprah and the Huffington Post bussed people in. I'm sure that's where they all came from. No way people could actually be fed up with the idiocy of 24-hour news networks.
• They belittle the message and diminish it by (again) saying they're comedians. They also comment that he looks sharp in his suit, "just like a real newsman." So, to be a newsman at Fox, you need a suit and to not be a comedian.
• Then they have a conservative comedian talk about the horrors he and Fox News went through while being at the rally, claiming there was more animosity there than any Tea Partiers would have (nevermind openly hating immigrants and homosexuals). This guy then missed the point of the rally (news networks don't help anyone anywhere ever).
• They said they were surprised there wasn't more violence.
• At the bottom of the screen it says "Thousands attend DC rally yesterday." No, it was over 200,000. That should say "Hundreds of the thousands attend DC rally yesterday."
• They speculated that people only came for the bands.
• Then they show Ozzy doing "Crazy Train" but of course they chose the one part where his singing is the worst.
• Then they briefly show the duel between "Peace Train" and "Crazy Train" ... but completely left out the "Love Train" compromise.
• Then they claim that Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) -- who sang "Peace Train" -- was involved in a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, nevermind the fact that he never supported it. You see what they did there? They had a Muslim! Muslims are bad! Let's all ignore the part of the rally where they warned against treating all Muslims like terrorists. Furthermore, they acted like he just changed his name. He changed his name OVER 30 YEARS AGO.

Damnit, now I'm all pissed off. Time to vote.

Xmas Creep in Garfield

First, I will acknowledge that I'm perhaps one of the few people left who actually still reads Garfield.

Anyway the strip on Halloween ends with Xmas Creep! That's horrible! There are two places mentioning Xmas in October* is okay: craft stores and my house. In craft stores, you're selling things to people who need months to complete a project so it's fine to start those early. As for my house, I have Death Metal Xmas albums to make. To get it done on time, it's best to start in August. (I didn't start until October this year, so I'm already behind.)

Those are the two exceptions. Now let's not talk about Xmas again until December? Okay? Okay.

*This post is in November, so it's okay.

Holy Crap! RVG:TZM was mentioned in a Real Publication

Northern Virginia Magazine had an article in 2008 that very briefly mentioned Recently Vacated Graves! Here's the article.

All they really said is "mucho props to whoever came up with that one." (That "whoever" is me.) Still pretty awesome!

I also found this great quote on another website:

This [RVG] is a mix of well-crafted classic thrash and brutal death-metal outbursts. There are also gothic/black metal passages accompanied by organs and keyboards where there is an inclusion of declamatory vocals, too, in addition to the "duel" between the deep growls and the black-ish vicious snarls. You wouldn't be surprised if I tell you that quite often do the thrashy sections get lost in the rest which is sad, since when they're there, the music really takes off.

I find that rather interesting because I thought Former Human Sergeant had too many thrashy parts and it was getting a bit stale. Nonetheless, this guy is going to like the next CD!

We Should Have More States

We haven't admitted a new state into the Union since 1959! We were on a roll since the late 1700s. By the 20th century we got lazy (which is a trend for Americans it seems) and barely added any more states for quite a while. I say we should pick up the pace of the 1800s again so we can have 100 states by 2100, damnit! But first we need to make up for lost time. Dividing Texas into 8 states (none of which may be named Texas) and adding DC and Puerto Rico would be a good start.

Update: Smart T-Shirt is Stupid & Impossible

Previously...

I didn't notice the divide by zero, so even if you assume commutativity, STUDY still doesn't equal FAIL.

Europe 2010: Some Panoramas

Here are a couple panoramas made from pictures from my European trip last August. Click on them to embiggen.

Europe 2010: Stockholm, Sverige

More pictures from my August European trip.

Bacon in onion sauce. The Swedes are years ahead of us when it comes to food.

Europe 2010: Karlstad, Sverige

More pictures from my August European trip.

Toppings: ham, pineapple, banana, peanuts, curry powder. Not bad, surprisingly.

Karlstad

Passing time on the train....

Grocery Store Brands

Okay, I know Stop & Shop and Giant have been owned by the same company for quite some time now (stupid Dutch), but is it really necessary to make them identical right down to the smallest detail? At that point, why do they even have different names? And why does Giant-Carlisle get off scot-free from all this homogenization? It's owned by the same evil Dutch company!

Hmmmmmmmm....

Dairy Meat

I was at a Target recently in Maine only to discover that they have an odd definition of "dairy".

Europe 2010: Oslo, Norge

More pictures from my August European trip.

True Norwegian breakfast.

Vikingskipshuset

True Norwegian sod-roofed house.

This stavkirke wasn't anywhere near as awesome as Fantoft is in Bergen.

True Norwegian lunch.

Even the chairs in Norway are true.

Europe 2010: Between Bergen & Oslo, Norge

More pictures from my August European trip.

The entire train ride, I listened to Norwegian black metal. \m/

A shop in Oslo

Europe 2010: Bergen, Norge, Day 2

More pictures from my August European trip.

Damn right I had whale toast! It tastes like a tuna cow.

Reindeer sausage.

Outside the Leper Museum