DID YOU KNOW? Fred Savage from The Wonder Years graduated from Stanford. Man, smartest and most well-adjusted child cast of a television show ever.
Today in the internet:
Along with "Scott Tenorman Must Die" this is pretty much one of the greatest pieces of art of my generation. Seriously, the VP debate was my previous favorite, and I still walk around singing "Pakistan, that's where they live, that's where they are" every so often, which is cool because at least somebody remembers something poor Joe Biden said that night. But this new AutoTune the News, oh man... so catchy, so well-edited, and so profound.
"Do we choose liberty or do we choose tyranny?" "It all depends: who gets to be the tyrant?"
Seriously, that's some deep political philosophy. At least, I can imagine Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin saying it, which is my main criterion for whether or not something is philosophically sound or not.
As I was composing this quick entry Manoj tipped me off to an article with the ominous title "Cats Know How to Control Humans, Study Finds." Come on, I've been saying that since I was like 14 and people are just now getting around to studying it? I am the Al Gore of cat paranoia. Anyway, I read through that and confirmed my deepest fears and when I got to the bottom I happened to glance over at some of the other "most read stories" for today:
I have to assume that these represent only stories from the Department Of Sad And Implausible Headlines That Would Otherwise Seem To Have Originated From A Satirical Publication.
DID YOU KNOW? The German word for butterfly is "Schmetterling."
After an epic battle against a yard full of weeds that I personified in my head as Bushroot from Darkwing Duck, this afternoon I took some inspiration from this SFGate article about pasta + broth + vegetables = delicious and this Harold McGee article about cooking pasta in a small amount of liquid, with whole wheat pasta being especially delicious. With a little mental math I came up with pasta + broth + vegetables + Michelle "Biceptor" Obama - extra water = even more delicious.
So I made whole wheat penne in broth with cranberry beans and golden beans from my backyard, garnished with green onions and basil. I cooked the pasta in just about a pint of my homemade vegetable broth and, oh man. Everything kind of melted together, but still kept that awesome crunch that you want in beans. And once all the pasta was done--oh snap, that broth, thick with starch, slick with olive oil, salty with a kiss of basil at the end. Life-changing broth.
I might never make pasta in a pot full of water again, because seriously, it's usually all for me, and heating up a whole pot is such a drag.
Now I am going to make hot chocolate. I love cold summers.
DID YOU KNOW? Unpronouncable Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx won every possible award during his inaugural 1969 Tour De France ride, and would have also won the young rider award had it existed.
One of the things I've always been bitter about is my homeroom losing the Superintendent's Challenge when I was in fifth grade. The Superintendent's Challenge was a three-day Olympic-style competition pitting all the fifth grade students in the school against each other in athletic and academic contests, and also some crazy things like RC car racing and shoe golf. We came in second place behind Mr. Davis's homeroom, which is actually pretty impressive because after the second day of competition we were in fifth place and went on to win five out of eight events on the final day of the games. Yes, it was impressive, but still not enough to overtake Room 120's commanding lead.
The main reason I am bitter is that we totally lost because of a technicality. The athletic competitions were divided by gender, much like the Olympics, I guess, and because of a dearth of young boys in my homeroom, I was forced into competing in boys' free throw shooting on the second day of the games instead of Math Challenge. So, of course, the team of Chase Woodford and I came in last place in free throw shooting, with a total of two out of twenty shots between us (thanks for that Chase), and our Math Challenge team, captained by future second-round WNBA draft pick Jen Harris, also did not place well against its formidable competition. If only there were some mechanism that had allowed the two of us to be switched and six-foot-tall ten-year-old Jen Harris had schooled all those boys at free throw shooting, and I had helped the Math Challenge team into first or second place (there was this kid, I think his name was Billy Lyons, who beat me in the schoolwide 24 competition earlier that year before moving to a different middle school over the summer), I know that we would have seen our names engraved on that inaugural Superintendent's Challenge trophy.
At the awards ceremony Mr. Davis copped out and decided that instead of putting "Homeroom 120" on the trophy they would just put "Class of 2003" to celebrate everyone's participation in the competition, but Mrs. Bruce was totally not about compromise. One time she gave the entire classroom recess detention for a week because we had failed to win the "classiest cafeteria class" award for best-behaved homeroom during lunch for the month of October.
I'm thinking about all this in lab this morning because I had a weird dream last night where I ended up in some small mountain town in Pennsylvania at a county fair called Alpaloosa where I entered a "triathlon" competition allegedly containing a running, biking, and hiking component. "Oh boy, no swimming!" I thought, and paid the entrance fee. It turns out that it actually involved doing sprints, stopping, catching baseballs shot at us out of a cannon, sprinting some more, and then cross-country skiing through a giant wooden maze. I did not have any skis, but I borrowed a tiny pair from a kid and skied into the maze, eventually overtaking all the middle-aged women in front of me because there were cryptic clues that revolved around finding a brass rat to unlock the secret exit, and I was able to correctly interpret them, slide down the secret slide, and into a final-stage victory. Despite this, I had neither sprinted quickly enough nor caught enough baseballs to overtake the leader on points, and ended up finishing in third with the "silver hand" and "maze master" consolation awards. It felt like the Superintendent's Challenge all over again.
Basically the moral of the story is that you should always let me win, because if I ever lose at anything it will haunt me for decades.
