Beautiful Vowels

Although I'm not a big fan of poetry, I thought this was an interesting idea



"Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels - and it means 'beautiful thinking'"

BBC featured the book by Canadian poet Christian Bok, which has 5 chapters: each using exclusively one vowel. "Mr Bok believes his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language."

The link has excepts from each chapter, I think e is my favorite.

Freeze possible on Thursday Night

All critical plants should be protected or brought inside on Thursday night, as a freeze is possible.

We should probably also, close up the windows nice and tight.

Need more voting fun? Try a cartoonoff

Check out these two cartoonists facing off:
New Yorker vs XKCD

Candy corn poll

I feel personally affronted by the candy corn poll. I'm not sure who added "regular candy corn" to our white board survey, but the option is ridiculous. No one in their right mind would chose any of the alternatives over the original. The poll was to decide, which of the crappy replacements was worse/better. I am personally disappointed about the new poll and subsequent ballot stuffing.

food fight?

oh, who knew the troubles caused by hummus?!

Pot Oranges - using PCR to stick it to the man

Forget pot brownies, keep your eyes out for "special" oranges. Biochemist Hugo Nanofsky, after having been burned by current drug laws in Florida when his son was arrested and charged for possession of drug paraphernalia decided to pit his skills against the ineffective system. He succeeded in genetically engineering THC-producing oranges, and then proceeded to offer the seeds for free to the general public.

Geography according to the Republicans

According to Sarah Palin we're neighbors with Afghanistan.

News to me, though I suppose my geography skills have always been a little off. I mean, when I first heard that Sarah Palin was citing Alaska's shared border with Russia for her foreign policy experience, I thought "hey, we don't share a border with Russia. Canada, yes, Mexico, yes. Russia? Really?" And then I got out a map in which I discovered - hey, look at that, Russia is kinda next to Alaska. I mean, there's water in between the two, but they are really close. Most of the time maps will show the Atlantic Ocean as center, so North America and the Asian continent are on opposite sides of the map, but really, they aren't that far.

But I was pretty sure that Afghanistan wasn't anywhere close to sharing even a maritime border with us. But hey, what do I know.

HERE is an awesome map trying to help narrow down what Palin may have meant. Now, normally I avoid comments on blogs and articles like the plague, but some of the comments to that blog entry are pretty funny. I particularly like #3.

Also by the same blogger, HERE is another map trying to help decode the Republican version of geography.

Seriously, sometimes it seems like the Republicans live in an entirely different world, if not universe, from the rest of us.

My kind of science

HERE are some interesting grant proposals for new scientific research. I bet we could come up with our own list of interesting problems to study.

The REAL story behind the changing leaves.

Please someone blindfold me for the next month...

I made the mistake of reading political news today.

"Palin makes Obama terrorist claim"

The gist being that Obamo served on a charity group board that also contained Bill Ayers as memeber who during the 60's founded a violent anti-Vietnam group called Weather Underground.

Let's ignore the fact that Obama was 8 when that group was active why don't we.

This woman makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out, as do some of the comments after the second article...

name change? and pumpkins.

since owen never contributes or probably even reads our house blog anymore, i am tempted to rename it, "the lovely ladies of beacon hill." any other suggestions?

in the meantime, you crafty young whippersnapper girls can take a stab (no pun intended) at some of these. i am still the old fart of the house, so i might have to get my eyes checked to make sure i don't need bifocals before i start poking pumpkins with knives and such... xo.

Slime Molds

An interesting short article on slime molds with some beautiful photography (including the one above).