Um...

"Do you like children?" I asked.

The tall, blond man smirked and replied, "Yes, with a nice hollandaise. Yum yum."

I glanced down at my platter of condiments and pulled out the closest I could find. "How about ketchup? You like ketchup?"

The blond shrugged. "Meh. It'll hafta do." He yanked the glass bottle from my hand and immediately proceeded to race off across the soccer field, right at the two teams of eight-year-olds.

"Ha-ha-ha-ha!!" he cried.

"Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!" the kids screamed as they scattered.

The ref blew his whistle and held up his yellow card.

The tall blond clocked the ref on the back of the head with his ketchup bottle as he charged past. The ref crumpled to his knees then pitched fowards onto his face.

A Song from Summer Camp

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your right hand."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your left hand."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your right foot."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your left foot."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your butt."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your forehead."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "No."
He said, "Push this button with your tongue."

Hi, my name is Joe and I work in a button factory.
I’ve got a wife and a dog and a family.
One day, my boss came up to me and said,
"Joe, are you busy?" I said, "Yes!"

IgNobels Announced!

The IgNobels are alternative prizes for scientists whose research isn't deemed serious enough for the Nobel committee, but still is pretty interesting stuff. This year's winners include:

Two Australian researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) have won an IgNobel for their research on how many photos you need to take to ensure that nobody in a group photo has their eyes closed.

Ivan Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip May, of the University of California Los Angeles, have won the ornithology prize for their pioneering work on the ability of the humble woodpecker to avoid head injury.

Wasmia Al-Houty, of Kuwait University, and Faten Al-Mussalam, of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, have taken home the nutrition prize for showing that dung beetles are in fact finicky eaters.

Francis Fesmire, of the University of Tennessee, has been awarded the medicine Ig for his report Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.

Physics laureates Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of Paris University are to be honoured for their insights into why dry spaghetti tends to break into more than two pieces.

Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, has been awarded the peace prize for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellent. The device makes an annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults. He later used the same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

Three US scientists - Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand - have been awarded the acoustics prize for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

While the conclusions of a group of scientists from Valencia University and the University of Illes Balears in Spain are not immediately clear, the judges have deemed their study Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature worthy of the chemistry prize.

Also honoured for cheese research, Bart Knols from Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands has won the biology award for his part in research showing that female malaria mosquito are equally attracted to limburger cheese and human feet.

The scientists take this award seriously nowadays, with 8 of this year's 10 recipients flying to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the ceremony.

New Hobby

I just had a great idea. You know how people sometimes use the strangest search words to find my/your blog? Wouldn't it be fun to do searches for random phrases and then click on the links to the blogs that have nothing to do with those phrases?

F'rinstance, at blogger.com, I did a search for "potatoes of death," except I didn't put the phrase in quotes, so it pulled up every recent blog post with "potato" and "death" even though they aren't together in the same phrase.

So if one of those bloggers is perusing his or her site meter, he or she will have a head-scratcher at why anybody could possibly be searching for potatoes of death. Cool, huh?

The only problem now, though, is that this very post will now be tops for "potatoes of death"!

Midday Malaise

I am quite ready to go home for the day. Why must work be such a drag sometimes?

Beta!

Yay! Today Blogger let me switch to Beta! I haven't changed the template yet, so it's still old school officially, but at least I can add some labels and I wonder what this is going to look like. . .

UPDATE: I changed it all to the new template. Look at the Archive! ---->

And another: I've added labels to my most recent 150 posts. So play around where it says "Index" below here.

Dry Falls

Last weekend, I went to Dry Falls in eastern Washington on a Mountaineers outing. We spent two nights in cabins at Camp Delany in Sun Lakes/Dry Falls State Park. Very basic amenities, but the scenery made up for it.



I went on a short dayhike on Saturday, wandering around the bottom of Lower Grand Coulee, up and over a gap in Umatilla Rock, halfway up Dry Falls, over to Green Lake, and to another viewpoint above Meadow Creek, and back to camp.





Green Lake didn't drain anywhere, so there was muddy salt flats around the edge. And it wasn't very green, either.

A short drive took us up to the visitors' center at the top of the cliffs.



For those of you who don't know, Dry Falls and the surrounding terrain of coulees and channels were created by repeated catastrophic floods at the end of the last ice age. The cliffs in the picture above are 400 feet tall. Try to imagine 300 feet of water flowing over them.



The floods left boulders scattered all across eastern Washington and even some in the Willamette valley of Oregon, south of Portland. The boulders were most likely stuck into icebergs from the disintegrating glaciers and just floated along top of the floodwaters.

On Sunday, we drove back via SR 20 through the North Cascades. We stopped at Washington Pass. The road to the lookout was closed for the winter already, so we had to walk the half mile.



My parents have a picture from this viewpoint, with Liberty Bell Mtn (above) in the background, of me as a kid clinging to a tree that looks like it's hanging over a cliff, but my sister is standing in midair beside me. I couldn't find that tree. Maybe it died or was removed for handrail construction. Or maybe I just couldn't figure out which three-foot cliff it was on.

The larches were quite yellow up there, but none of them are near the road, so I only have distant shots.



A little bit down the road is Diablo Lake.



I remember, from probably that same family vacation, the four of us renting a motor boat on this lake. On the way back, my parents let me steer. I recall driving at full speed through the narrow channel between the little rock islands in the bottom left of this picture. All my mom could say was, "Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark!" I made it through just fine, thank you.

The drive back to Seattle was stop-and-go in Everett, of course, but we made it home in time for about 45 minutes to unpack and clean up before it was time to go eat Mongolian food and watch The Amazing Race. Yum yum.

beta??

I was all ready to switch to Blogger Beta when I realized that I don't have that option. It's only available to a portion of blogger accounts currently, and apparently I'm not one of them. )-:

I thought for sure I'd seen that link last week.

La Lune!

When you see the moon this evening, make sure to sing her the following song (to the tune of London Bridge Is Falling Down):

La la la, la lune est là,
Lune est là,
Lune est là.
La la la, la lune est là,
Lune est là!

Because it's Her holy day, after all.

World Alphabets

Here's a map of the world's writing systems, as found on a site called World Standards:

TAR

The Amazing Race, in its first four episodes this season, has gone to three different East Asian countries: China, Mongolia, and Vietnam. Judging by the scenery in the previews for next week, I think they're going to Thailand next.

Do you know what I notice about those four countries that would make travelling between them disorienting? They all use different methods of writing. So as soon as the racers start to be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet in Mongolia, they're sent to Vietnam, where it's the Roman alphabet, but with all sorts of accent marks and specialized pronuncications of consonants. And then once they start to figure *that* out, they're packed off to Thailand, where the Thais have their own alphabet that's not used anywhere else.

Compare this to how all other seasons have gone, where the racers start in South America or Western Europe.

Bright Yellow

Am I just going crazy, or has somebody repainted the parking stripes on the Northgate south parking lot? Aren't they supposed to be tearing it up?

... Maybe they just cleaned it. Odd.

Beta

I created a blog in Blogger Beta so I could test it out, play around with it, beat it into the form I like, before I switch over.

You can look at it here: sotosoroto.blogspot.com.

I like the feature of being able to sort by "labels." I think I'll call it Index, though. With the click of a button, you'd be able to call up all posts with a label of "holidays," "political," "personal," "random," or whatever.