soapbox

As in, this post is worth only that, but seriously, check out this crazy baseball play. Statistically everything has to happen once, right?

I has come to my attention that there is a family stage at Lollapalooza. WTF? Or in the words of Tony Kornheiser, when did that happen? They’re calling it Kidsapalooza, but I like my title better.

I discovered this fact while reading an article on the neverending-and-stomach-churning-saga-of-stupid-Brett-Fah-vrah: the thesis was that both Slash and Favre are above the law, but I have to salute the creative opening and the laugh-out-loud story, which I will quote directly b/c I’m lazy.

We have Slash to thank. He and Perry Farrell were the headliners at the kid’s stage on Sunday. Slash walked out wearing a hat that said “(expletive)” in large, black letters. He lit a cigarette, then flicked it into the crowd of children at the conclusion of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” A young boy caught it, dropped it when it singed his hand, then picked it up again and screamed excitedly.

Slash was awesome. And the kids seemed to fully appreciate his awesomeness, even though most of them were not yet 10. He just stood there, rocking, smoking, wearing the obscene hat, and a bunch of very small children loved him.

After the set, it seemed necessary to have a brief evils-of-smoking discussion with my daughter, since we’d both just lunged for a discarded cigarette. But she cut me off.

“Duh, he’s a rock star. He can do whatever.”

There are certain lessons that only Slash can teach your kid, and that’s one of them. The rules are very different for rock stars.

Well, they don’t say what games are being played, but lazy students have a new excuse in their arsenal now that surgical residents in a Phoenix AZ hospital are now being required to play Wii games as part of their training.

Q: Can a video game really help somebody improve as a surgeon?

Smith: We used cyber gloves which computerize hand movements of surgeons and we put those on surgeons. We have data on that. We put them on people playing the Wii. There is a very, very high correlation between the two and this is documented statistically.

I remember reading earlier this year an article on how marble madness was a particularly good training exercise for fine motor control - to noone’s real surprise. Those clever little accelerometers.

Believe it or not, webapps can do more than just let you play games! For example, you can use your computer as an alarm clock using the unfortunately-initialed KuKu Klok. It’s a rather simple but somehow entertaining little webapp - you set a time for an alarm to go off, you choose a sound to wake up to, and you hit “Set Alarm.” One advantage it has over Online Alarm Clock is that is that it’s Flash-based and goes off even if your internet connection cuts out.

Honestly I don’t know how/when you’ll ever need it, but any webapp that has “Slayer Guitar” in its preferences deserves a mention. Of course, maybe more fun is the pseudo-functional Sleep Blaster where you can yell at your Mac to turn of the alarm. Now if only that worked for the car alarms outside my office that are set off by low-altitude F-16 flybys.

We continue our series of belated postings with what-happened-to-me-last-saturday.

I went here.

Now in fairness, K said that I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to, that she could go with just her sister-in-law and they’d wander about, but I ended up going along with my soon to be brother-in-law.

whoa.

The Bridal Expo that we went to was held in the SD convention center, and in hindsight it had a lot in common with one of the poster sessions at a big APS (March Meeting, etc, or AAAS I guess?)… imagine a huge airplane hanger filled with row upon row of different vendor booths. That sounds innocent enough, right?

For starters you have to pay $10 or $15 bucks to get in the door (they do have door prizes, so maybe that’s fair), and they greet you with “are you a bride or groom”? which is actually a funny question if you think about it, but the fallout of your answer is that they give you a nametag with “Groom” or “Bride” on it, and you’re supposed to put slap it on somewhere. Then you play plinko and other little games to win little (and demeaning) prizes before being sent off to wander up and down the rows of Photography people, Cake people, Honeymoon people, three different Mary Kay booths, Floral/decorations people, etc. In one corner of the hanger, I mean, convention center they had a stage and seating - this was the site of a bridal fashion show. It was pretty much what you might think; models strutting up and down with various outfits, girls swooning, guys sneaking off to buy a beer and rest their tired eardrums, etc.

All in all, I’m glad I went if for no other reason than I am more certain now than ever that K and I are a good match and that I’m very glad she’s not like a lot of her fellow brides that I saw there. That said gentlemen, when you are faced with such a situation, make sure to (a) stay hydrated, (b) get a good night’s sleep beforehand, and (b) bring lots of $5 bills and a few ones for tips to the beleaguered barman at the beer booth.

Best $5 I ever spent was on that lukewarm Bud Light.

It’s kinda hard for me to believe that Larry Jones (more commonly known as “Chipper”) has been playing pro ball for about a decade now. That means that I’m old, in case my most recent birthday didn’t hammer that home.

This season he started off red-hot, and there was all sorts of foolish “can he hit .400″ talk a couple months into the season. The problem is that Jones isn’t the most injury-free player around, and recently his hamstrings have been acting up to go along with past knee, quad, shoulder, and other injuries.

Which leads us to the entire point of this post - Chipper’s quote regarding his hammy:

“It’s sore right now,” he said. “I don’t know what the timetable’s going to be. Hamstrings are a little more delicate than quads or groins.”

Let the debate on the relative delicacy of hamstrings, groins, and quads begin.

I would say that the best part about this movie is that you get the comic genius of Jack Black without having to actually see his face, but that’s not fair to the movie.  This film is very well done, both conceptually and technically.  A clean but engaging animation style and several strong performances combine to produce a very fun and funny movie.  

The ‘plot’ is 100% folk tale/fable/etc, but that’s not a bad thing.  In this case predictability allows you to sit back and just enjoy the movie in all of its awesomeness… there were really maybe only two slow spots out of the whole film.  Good stuff.