Midwinter is fast approaching and I'm going to have a bonfire to celebrate. Actual midwinter is the 4th of February, but for the sake of having a good party, I'd like to celebrate on the following Friday, the 6th. therightwaye has agreed to host the fire and party at his house. I'd love it if people could bring contributions of snacks and drinks and ( Read more... )

I've bought in to a silly meme, courtesy of kitaraThe Make Stuff Meme ( Read more... )

The returning champion on today's Jeopardy won using my strategy. He was in third place and everyone got the answer wrong. He wound up with $2 more than the next-highest person because he bet enough to leave him with 2A - 2B + 1. He didn't figure out that he didn't need the extra dollar, but there's not a lot of time to do the math.

So, we bought a super high-techy LED lamp thingy from IKEA that we liked a lot. It promised 10,000 hours of life operating on a mere 11 Watts. What's not cool about that ( Read more... )

Sometimes I watch Jeopardy and I've been thinking about the end-game wagers ( Read more... )

If you've been thinking of coming to give this karate thing a try, now is the time ( Read more... )

The recent series of tremors at Yellowstone have raised a lot of fun talk. For anyone who doesn't know, the quakes that have hit don't indicate to vulcanologists any trend towards a gigantic humanity-annihilating eruption. For one thing, they've all been too localized in the Yellowstone Lake region. For another, they've been too small. Also, ( Read more... )

Last Sunday was the Solstice, the beginning of winter. Here, it was preceded by about 6" of total snow accumulation and several days below -20C. It used to be that the Solstice was Midwinter, and winter officially begin on the cross-quarter day in early November, a holiday which I believe migrated over time to become Halloween. Winter officially ( Read more... )

As much as Vivaldi's Four Seasons is overexposed and cliche as classical music, it really is quite beautiful ( Read more... )

This is an amazing little game. Everyone should download and play it, especially you, especially if you're a subset of everyone. It's elegant and immersive and actually fairly relaxing for what is technically a real-time strategy game. That might just be because it's easy, but I think it's also because it doesn't have that feeling of juggling a ( Read more... )