Focusing on college-level and semi-pro competition BattleBots will be returning to ESPN on ESPN2 and ESPNU. I now have a reason besides darts and pool to watch ESPN2. I think we can all agree that this is better than when it was on Comedy Central.
For geekiest show on TV that tries to be somewhat popular, I think the BBCs Rough Science wins.
The freezer at work is continually shrinking due to the steady encroachment of idiocy and icing. There’s an obese woman the hoards diet freezer pops and the frost has extended to the point that I can barely squeeze in an ice tray where once I had three.
The power went out at some point last night for four or five hours and the fridge died in the process. when I got in this morning my ice had melted, even though the freezer frost was completely untouched and possibly bigger, in clear violation of the second law of thermodynamics. I was angry and pouty over my lost ice until a fat-laden voice bellowed “my health bars!”
The 2nd day of the 5 day meeting marathon went down today and again, around 6 PM there was a cornucopia of coffees, drinks, individual serving cakes and cheeses including what tasted like peppered mozzarella (genius!) I enter the room and shortly afterwards a facilities fellow walked in, presumably to change some ceiling lights, and I offered him some of the bounty to which he responded “I’m like a mouse, I might have some Swiss cheese”. I carry out six or seven cans of soda and return to find the food trays stripped. All the food is completely gone and even the utensils and tea bags had been taken. Yeah, mouse-like, a mouse with a forklift.
A few days ago our home was appraised to provide a value estimate for what will probably be a bloody drawn out divorce between my parents. The estimate came back lower than what I thought it’d be based on zillow.com and I immediately began cheering. My coworkers thought I was insane and my more liberal cohorts started railing against the fed, et al. They don’t realize that my brother and I want to buy our own house and any drop is a plus. If we can reduce the value further by re-directing the Mill Race Creek to run through our kitchen, we have a backhoe, a front-end loader, and a construction contractor that owes us a few favors.
During Spring break I enjoy the long-time tradition of college students with jobs: overtime. Yesterday I was tooling around the building look for morsels and scraps from meetings when I hit a stockpile of goods: 12 bottles of water, 6 granola bars, about 20 cans of soda and a bowl of mixed nuts. From the fact that there were no Brazil nuts in the mix I could tell this meeting was for important people. Then I found a cache of leather folios for the meeting attendants. I took them, in an effort to curry favor with my coworkers as I couldn’t reasonably use more than one.
I brought them back to the lab and presented them, in a moment one person asked “thanks, but who’s Rebecca Stimpton?”
Apparently I didn’t notice the engraved steel name plate on the back of each. Oops.
I had a co-worker propose the following riddle: In a sealed room there’s a refrigerator with the door open. Will the room increase or decrease in temperature? I said it’d increase over time due to the 2nd Law of thermodynamics and after I got a blank-eyed stare stated that “the fridge generates more heat than it takes away”. He looked at me grinning, said I was wrong, and stated that he never said it was plugged in. I said his point was stupid and he called me unobservant, I shucked off the point until I remember as with most situations at work, there’s a XKCD comic that discusses it. I found it.
Cat is fine. Wound is scabbing over nicely and he’s lazy and cranky again. And yes, Joe, should my cat ever die (which seems pretty unlikely at this point considering how long he’ s already lived) you may mock his passing incessantly. Should I feel insulted, I will do the manly thing and re-direct all my incoming voicemail to the program director’s mailbox.
The Social Security Administration publishes a list of popular baby names. Fine. If you do a search for a given year there’s a little notice at the bottom: “Note: Rank 1 is the most popular, rank 2 is the next most popular, and so forth.” Wow… I want to complain that this is ambiguous and see if they’ll add “popularity is determined based on the total number of children with a given name”.
The lodge banquet went surprisingly well. Why you may ask? Well, THE FIREPLACE IN FOSTER HALL ACTUALLY CONTAINED A REAL FIRE. That was the first time it’s ever been lit for a public event without the building having been smoked out.
The food was unimpressive and the quality has dropped each year but there were some redeeming aspects. Dave Hasel, the council executive, made a delightful little speech about the importance of the Order of the Arrow, so short in fact, that Bill Schilling and I didn’t have enough time to make a complete Buzzword Bingo board including such phrases as “this is their Philmont” and “the average time a boy spends in Scouting is”. He did bring up the cliche of “it doesn’t matter how much money you have when you die as long as you helped a child” crap, this statement obviously ignores the deceased’s children as well as their family’s financial needs but after the “I have nothing profound to say” affair I’ve kept my mouth shut at Scout funerals. Bill Schilling whispered to me “God, this speech is so boring the fire’s falling asleep” and I agreed.
Then, I saw a whole bunch of people get angry as Dave left before Bill Kuhn’s memorial. It was the first time I’d seen the Broken Arrow ceremony done and it was impressive as the folks standing directly in front of the fire didn’t say anything as their pants nearly caught on fire and the ceremony was done from memory.
Towards the end, I had an idea. Every major Order of the Arrow event attended by Unami Lodge #1 involves their stupid film canisters full of dirt from the first ceremonial site. Now that they’ve gone underwater so many times I think they should now give people flood water from the first ceremonial site.
