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NASA wants your pee. Seriously? Urine, for Orion? And it’s part of the constellation program? (This works on a number of levels…the old NASA pee joke as heard in ‘Apollo 13′, and the fact that ‘Orion’ comes from the greek word for ‘urine’).

• co-ed naked monopolacrosse
• closet lambada
• shik shik
• mcfreshman
• hungry hungry hippoes in the government
• frosted cross puffs
• gwar (whatever happened to eddie munster? I’m lookin’ at him!)
• hairball’s unsuaveness
• nid, the mailbox chinchilla
• is this in color or black and white? (duck for the ‘3d effect’)
• whooooosh

We went to see the new Indiana Jones movie last night. I think I would’ve been happier if they’d gone out with Last Crusade.

I should’ve known when I first listened to the soundtrack earlier in the day; lots of nostalgia there, but I didn’t feel as if there was much new or interesting. The best parts were recycled from Raiders.

The worst part was the relentless action. It was as if they were afraid if any of the characters slowed down for a second they’d realize their only plot function was to get the skull to the lost city, where everything was wrapped up in the most predictable and hackneyed way possible (and the heroes ceased to be useful well before the conclusion). Believe me, you’ll see it coming, and probably be wondering, like I was, how many more Rube Goldberg-machine-like action setpieces it would take before the evil communist villianess’s face was going to melt off (not literally; I mean it felt that much like a rehash of Raiders).

While I’m willing to suspend some disbelief about these characters being able to make it out of any scrape (think the inflatable raft-jump in Temple of Doom), it was unbelievably cartoonish here. You just wanted to laugh because it was so incredibly stupid–from Indy’s nuclear test site escape to the triple waterfall scene.

And aliens? C’mon. My least favorite theory about various ancient civilizations–that the only way they could’ve done it was by copying the answers off someone else’s test paper. I know this is an Indy movie and the supernatural is expected, but jeez. (Incidentally, there’s an article in Archaeology this month about the crystal skulls. Guess what, not elongated, and they’re also fakes. :)

A few of the jokes and reveals worked (Indy’s age, and who didn’t like seeing that little corner of the Ark during the Area 51 scene? And the Marcus Brody references were a nice touch.) but it was mostly just hokey. The Marion character ceased to be interesting just about instantaneously, when the ‘big secret’ (like nobody saw that coming) was revealed and during the subsequent love-fest (conducted on the run, of course, because they couldn’t possibly give up ONE action scene apparently). I felt like the best scenes (like the one where Indy’s packing to leave and discussing the current political environment with the dean of the college) were just rewrites of scenes from Raiders or Last Crusade (with Marcus). The backstabbing colleague seemed a bit too much like Benny from ‘The Mummy’–especially in the treasure scene. Between him and the giant ants (read ‘carnivorous scarab beetles’) you realize that this was Indy ripping off every movie that came after, and ripped off, the previous Indy films. The Mummy was better at it, unfortunately. Maybe the genre is just played out.

Silly, lacking in dramatic suspense, and a tacked-on ending that felt too little too late. Gee, when does it come to blu-ray?

Paul found Leo dead in the silkie pen this morning. Oddly enough, he had seemed fine. Hopefully whatever it was isn’t contagious.

Leo was named after ‘Big Leo’, the character from The Freshman. Leo. Big Leo. They’re synonymous (”That’s right!”). Love that movie.

Please don’t feel sorry for us. If he attacked my legs one more time this summer Paul might’ve decided to help him on his way to the big chicken coop in the sky anyway. so in a way, this was easier on everyone. Sumo, our remaining silkie rooster, seems ecstatic…he’s left with 3 hens all to himself, including Squeak. When Paul went into the barn, the three silkies were STANDING on the corpse but Squeak was nowhere to be seen (top was purposely left off last night, so Squeak could roam the barn)…she didn’t return until we removed him.

Pizza and a plow!

We used to worry that we didn’t have enough space in the chicken coop for 18 chickens. Apparently there isn’t (64 sq feet), and the way they’ve chosen to remedy the situation is by having chicken cage match fights every night.

First one Rhode Island Red turned up with a bare, bleeding rear. We put her in a cage in the barn. Next day we noticed another one, so we set up a little pen in a kiddie pool in the barn. Not a big deal; last year every one of our hens and the rooster ended up with bare spots. At least there are two so they can snuggle together when it’s cold.

Next one of the silkie hens turned up with bloody peck marks and tears all over her back. She was starting to moult anyway, so we moved her into a large guinea pig cage in the house. She is VERY quiet for a chicken and managed not to stink up the house like Squeak’s been known to. We were ready to let her stick it out another month until her feathers came in.

But then, yesterday, Squeak was making weird neck motions as if she’d been injured. We figured the silkie hen was healed at least, so we swapped them.

This afternoon we went out to check and as we opened the coop door, only 4 silkies hopped out. The moulting hen was nowhere to be found. We feared that the others had killed her and covered her with litter (not intentionally; they do a lot of digging and scratching during the day). Then we heard some plaintive ‘buck, buck buck’ing coming from somewhere inside the coop. We have the waterer on 4 hollow cinder blocks set tall-wise…this little chicken had managed to wedge her way INTO one. When we extracted her from the block, we saw why, or perhaps saw a result of her wedging in head-first…her entire tail and back end feathers were picked almost completely off and most of her back end was torn skin! Paul had to make a quick run to Country Max to buy another cage…we now have a chicken duplex in the kitchen. Now get this. While I’m home waiting for the cage, I put the silkie in with Squeak. That ‘poor’ silkie pecked Squeak 2 or 3 times! There is no empathy in avian society.

At this rate we’re going to blow our coop budget on 18 individual cages or pens. WTF?

multi groin bread

• I was an extremely early e-book adopter–Rocket EBook. I bought all sorts of titles for it which I can no longer access, now that the device is a brick; nor could I transport the content elsewhere when they went belly-up. I will never buy another reading device that will not allow me to transfer content easily between either the same type of devices (what if it breaks?), or to a different device should they go out of business.
• I an not a technophobe, but I can’t shake my paranoia about any company holding on their servers the content I’ve bought, such as books and movies. This is why I’m not keen on the idea for video, either; what if they decide to withhold it someday for whatever reason, or if something breaks and they claim I never bought it, or decide they don’t want to offer it anymore (I could easily see a content provider like Disney, with their ridiculous ‘back in the vault’ releases, doing this)? I like having books and DVDs, or even downloaded content that I can back up, because once it’s home I (generally) don’t have this concern.
• Pay 0.99 a month for a freakin’ BLOG subscription? Are you kidding me? They can claim all they want that they’re paying for the wireless, but really you *are* paying for it; that’s why the 0.10 charge for sending FREE content to it, probably. Sure, I could use the usb connection, but there goes the convenience of content anywhere, anytime I want it. I guess only if you’re willing to pay for it. Not to mention having to translate certain content into the proper format.
• E-Ink is really cool and all, but hell, I paid a similar price for a black and white e-reader 10 years ago. I know the technology for color e-ink isn’t there (or cheap enough) yet, but I expect color in an e-reader…especially if I’m thinking of using it to replace magazines.

Bottom line is really the content protection. After being burned once, why would I want to buy a lot of content for a device that might not be around someday, and lose all of it, like I did with the Rocket?

Left brain/right brain test…if she’s rotating clockwise, you’re right brain-dominant; counter-clockwise is left brain-dominant. If you’re a guy and you think primarily with the other head, you will mostly notice that she’s naked.

Last week I had my first mammogram (routine for age 35, if you had a family member with breast cancer–maternal grandFATHER for me, oddly enough). Now I know why women all over the world have to be encouraged so hard to get them done.

I’m not terrifically well endowed in that area to begin with. It’s the one part of me that hasn’t gained significant weight since high school. Then, apparently, I got scheduled for exactly the wrong time of the month. I avoided caffeine for the two weeks prior, but I don’t see how it could possibly have been that much more painful had I been taking it. I think it’s an old wives tale, personally, that caffeine makes mammograms more painful…I think it has far more to do with size and time of the month.

Now picture taking some soft part of your body and clamping it in a vice, tightening it down until the pain is such that, had you done such a thing accidentally, you probably would have headed straight for the emergency room. Which was ironic, since I was about two doors down from one. Now repeat three times. Good thing for guys they don’t use this method for testicular cancer (I hope, anyway. ;)

The one bit of good news, the booby prize, as it were, is that they can now release the machine remotely as soon as they’re done taking the image. Must have sucked when you had to stand there while they walked back and uncranked the machine.

I don’t want to discourage people from having mammograms, because prevention has saved a lot of lives. But damn! I wish some other method were as cheap and effective, but not as painful. I’m glad I’m not due for another one until age 40.

BTW, it was negative. Negative in the sense of lack of bad stuff, not in the sense of being sick. It’s almost like a double negative (I don’t got no cancer). I’m reading Guy Deutscher’s ” The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention”, which is making me more sensitive to why we say things certain ways.

A few weeks ago I submitted a contact lens invoice to BlueCross/BlueShield (Rochester area). On Friday I got it back in the mail with a letter that said ‘illegible attachment’, along with a copy of the form I submitted and the offending attachment.

It was illegible all right. It was also not my attachment. It was a form from Westfall Dental showing services for someone else.

Nice to know BC/BS could’ve sent my invoice to someone else, maybe Westfall Dental. Maybe they sent them the reason *my* form was being denied (as I know *my* invoice was not illegible).

-epe

Thanks to Otmar for passing this link on =).

The chicken suit.

-pee

Today is, besides being Grep’s 12th birthday, also the hatch date for our second set of chickens from last year. Unfortunately, our favorite, Beardo, didn’t quite make it; she got taken, probably by a fox, on Monday the 23rd. :( We were too complacent since all previous attacks had been in the afternoon; this time it was at 7:40 am and all I found was a pile of feathers near the barn. Of course, Pee was out of town so I feel guilty.

We have not had terrific luck with birds. Of 37 we’ve had in the past year or so, we lost 19 to predators (mostly fox/dog/coyote, 1 to hawk), 3 to illness (all guinea fowl), had to kill one rooster for people aggression, and we have 14 left alive. We nearly lost a silkie hen to a hawk the other day, if the silkie roosters hadn’t come along and kicked its ass.

At least we get to watch Ellie the IG this weekend!

I’m on the 13th floor… cue the TZ music.

Horse Apples and Horse Radish are not related.

Because I forgot to post it xmas time, our wii code is 3424 4761 2230 8167

No matter how you spin it, there can’t be a good way to combine the etymology of “corn-hole” and “pie-hole”.

See this article about the recent DRM problems they’ve been having. If you’ve got one of the 20 or so defective titles (of which I haven’t seen a list but it includes at least Stranger than Fiction, Casino Royale, The Holiday, and The Pursuit of Happyness), you can call 800.860.2878 and they will take your name, phone number, address, and UPC off the box and will send you a replacement disc.

Glad we didn’t send the player back. I feel certain we would’ve gotten stuck with the shipping fee and gotten absolutely nothing useful done to the player.

Sony, you and your ARccOS suck. Sure, you’re replacing discs. Maybe if you weren’t so anal retentive you wouldn’t be having this problem to begin with. It doesn’t prevent illegitimate use, just pisses off the people who actually bought the damn movie for their own use.

Bravo to EMI for releasing DRM-free music. Now if Apple would sell it in a lossless format, I’d probably even start using iTunes!

<eom>

The sequoia watermelon hybrid.