Revenge of the Nerds

I think the nerds are out to get us. Or at least to scare the pants off us. Case in point, the periodic scares of impending doom from

• volcanoes
• tsunamis
• hurricanes
• tornados (they're not just for trailer parks anymore)
• meteors
• CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections)

Add to the list, GRBs (Gamma Ray Bursts) from black holes or colliding neutron stars. GRBs are also called "Interstellar Death Rays" by the media, who seem to be involved in the plot with the nerds.

Odd, isn't it, that two groups that probably wouldn't have had anything to do with each other in high school have teamed up to get their revenge on the rest of the community?

But we can now relax because the nerds have examined more data and decided that the risk of earth being hit by a GRB is pretty small. Now we can go back to watching the jocks on TV.

Mel Ott?

My local rag, The Plano Star Courier, runs the NEA crossword puzzle. I've been working them for the past few months and have noticed that certain words come up again and again. The repetition doesn't really bother me but some of the words they choose to repeat do kind of grate, and they did so the first time they showed up.

One repeated word, actually two related words, are "MEL" and "OTT", as in "Mel Ott", the baseball player. I have nothing against Mr. Ott — he is a hall of famer, after all — but he hasn't played in almost 60 years and the clue is usually something like "baseball slugger." Gee, who pops to the top of your mind when you hear the phrase "baseball slugger"? Maybe a current player like Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds (he's in the news a lot). Maybe Ted Williams, whose season home run record was smashed a few years ago by Androstenedione and other pharmaceuticals, or Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth? But Mel Ott? Give me a break!

Then there is one of my real favorites: "MOMA Artist". If you don't already know it, MOMA is New York's Museum Of Modern Art. Gee, how many artists have work on display there right now? Maybe a permanent collection? Go ahead and look at the web site and see if you can figure out who they mean.

The answer is KLEE. You found that name straight away, didn't you? Me, too.

Not in the realm of repeats, but certainly in the "you gotta be kidding" arena: MHO. Yes, MHO. The clue was "electrical unit". If you randomly asked me what a mho was I could actually have told you (the inverse of ohms) because I was an electrical engineering major for a couple of years in college, but what the hell are mhos doing in a syndicated crossword puzzle? The only way most people will get that is by getting all the crossing words (actually, that's how I got it). You can't even make the excuse that you're expanding someone's vocabulary (literary or cultural) because mhos will never come up in casual conversation.

I'll close with a few of my other favorite repeats: "ELS" (urban commuter trains), "ESS" (curve in the road), "CEE" (average grade).

22K and Counting (Slowly)

Way back on February 21, 2005 CE, I blogged about crossing 160,000 furlongs on the ol' oh-dough-meter. At that point, I was racking them up at the rate of roughly 1300 furlongs per fortnight.

Tomorrow morning the meter will turn over once more to three zeros on the right, this time to 176,000 furlongs (16,000 more than when I last blogged on this topic).

If you'll recall, the price of gasoline spiked to over $3 per gallon last fall (and is flirting with that price once more). You might also recall that my V-hickle averages about 80 furlongs per gallon of petrol. Naturally, I've cut back on my driving a bit and drive the castration-mobile more frequently (my wife's minivan). This reduction in use of the truck is reflected in the turning of the mile markers.

So I now seem to be averaging about 533 and a third; RPM — er — furlongs per fortnight. That's a decrease of nearly 60 percent from the previous rate. If this continues, and if 1 of 2 takes over this vehicle, it may have only 272,000 furlongs on it!

Then again, he may not be able to afford to drive it.

Where to Point the Finger

In many cases it is hard to figure out what causes some malady, though that doesn't seem to matter to legislators and other do-gooders.

Aside #4 out of 5: If someone does something bad in an attempt to do something good, are they still a do-gooder or are they now an evil-doer? Or can we coin a new name, a do-gooder-evil-doer?

Further muddying the waters is the difficulty of figuring out whether something is good or bad. An Israeli company has produced a kosher cell phone. That's right, kosher. It's a cell phone that only makes calls. No web, no games, no text messaging, no video, no camera. They consider all the of those extras to be evil because they make it easier to do or access evil things. But many people really like those features and don't do things with them that they think are bad. So are these features good or bad?

Which got me to thinking about the causality side of these features: if one goes blind wanking off to porn viewed on a cell phone display, was it the wanking off or the eye-strain which caused the blindness?

Shitty Venue

The wife and I went to the Meyerson this past Sunday for a concert. As usual, it was freezing in there. Uncharacteristically, my wife forgot to bring a jacket. So at intermission, while I was buying some refreshments, she bolted for the outdoors.

When I got outside she was returning, all hunched over and warning others to stay out from under the trees.

You see, the smokers also go outside and she was trying to get past them to fresher air. That took her under a canopy of trees full of grackles fresh from the fields. The grackles were settling down for the night and performing their pre-bedtime constitutionals. She got hit twice: once on the head and once on the shoulder (a black blouse).

01:02:03 04/05/06

By now you've all seen the news that shortly after 1 o'clock this morning the time and date could be written as 01:02:03 04/05/06.

I saw one email that said that it would never happen again.

Oh, yeah?

• What about this afternoon? I don't use a 24-hour clock, so 01:02:03 will occur in the p.m. as well


• What about next month? Most of the world writes the date in the form day/month/year, so for them the 4th of May will be written as 04/05/06


• What about every hundred years? The 04/05/06 example is omitting the century designation — is that going to change in 2100?

As for me, I think I'll just party like it's 1999.