I stumbled across this news article, and grew quickly excited as it looks like a wormhole opened up above Norway the other night.

Mysterious Blue Light.

Not only is unexplainable, but there are pictures and youtube videos of it, which is something we just didn't have back in the X Files glory days. Regardless of if it is a Russian missile or not ( Read more... )

December is a quiet month for me during the daylight hours. School is out, and as such most of our customer interaction will only be with faculty and staff through email, with very infrequent instances of people actually coming in person to see us. In between shooting out resumes to various "real jobs" (as my mother calls them) I will need to ( Read more... )

I am still relatively new to the experience of being a member of a work organization with things like an HR department, holiday "merit banquets", and an obsession with a mediocre football team with a terrible color scheme. In a few short weeks, our Christmas meal will occur. I will trundle upstairs to get a plate and perhaps watch, again, the ( Read more... )

These are some words I love, but hardly ever have the opportunity to use:

feck, bonny, ammonium, cider, corollary, postulate, apsis and periapsis (or particularly the phrase "perogee and apogee"), gherkin, phoneme, wasp, and Nunavut.

Most of the above words are best appreciated when said aloud over and over again, preferably in ridiculous accents ( Read more... )

There is a hierarchy of Nerdom. This is not a natural order, as there is no ecosystem or balanced biosphere were everything has its place. Nerdom is more like Dante's Purgatory, a massive tiered pinnacle, an Olympus Mons rising from the florid fungal landscapes of distant Alpha Centauri ( Read more... )

As per John's request, a photo from the late Halloween party I attended last weekend...

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Two fine Victorian gentlemen, equally wealthy from the windfalls of African colonisation, meet for tea and crumpets. Over their fourth crumpet, they decide to make a game out of comparing the contents of their wallets. Each is ignorant of the contents of the two wallets. The game is as follows: whoever has the least money receives the contents ( Read more... )

I loved Harvest Moon in high school. While my friends were perfecting their Counterstrike headshot, or doing yet another Protoss Carrier swarm tactic on Starcraft, I was often found ploughing my virtual fields and living the quiet life of a Japanese villager. I played other games a plenty, and Harvest Moon was by no means the majority of my ( Read more... )

Having scrounged and scavenged for my meals the last couple of days out of a tenacious loathing of the act of going to the store, I find that it is unavoidable tonight. No longer are warm summer evenings about me as I head home, instead they have been replaced with autumnal darkness and headlights, headlights, headlights. So I had best take up ( Read more... )

With the annual Halloween fiesta that we share with my brother and various Crossville people having been put off a week do to our host needing jaw surgery and a biopsy (he found out he's ok!), last night I prepared to receive a horde of trick-or-treaters. I very much live in "the hood" of Knoxville, but not the bad hood, the good one. The bad one ( Read more... )