The Straight No Chaser video I linked to a little while back has been taken down from You Tube over a copyright claim; the only version now available is the newly released December 2008 concert.  I'm presuming this is an effort by Atlantic Records (the company that signed them after it became a viral hit) to drive traffic to the new version.

Well, I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

• Is Happiness Contagious? - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

  • They use Fowler and Christakis’s approach on another dataset, and show that it leads to the unlikely conclusion that height, headaches, and acne are also contagious. The more likely explanation, of course, is that all are subject to similar environmental influences. For instance, the same jackhammer causing your headache is likely causing mine.

Here's a rule of thumb: if you see an interesting conclusion from a study reported in the media, it's wrong. Either the reporter has misunderstood or cherry-picked the carefully-worded conclusions of the study to make the most sensational claim possible on the topic, or the study itself is flawed.

I have thwarted the sneaky UPS delivery guy, who was going to sneak off leaving a note on the door saying there was nobody home without having rung the bell by opening the door as he was heading back to his vehicle.  Fortunately my acute senses detected the sound of the door opening (for the package he was allowed to leave without signing).

Thwarted, I say!

And now I'm busy setting up my new Asus Eee PC...

Merry Xmas to me!

No, we ain't gonna take it! We're not going to take it any more!

Recently Google has decided to inflict upon its users some extremely ill-advised design changes to the iGoogle home page, and the Google Reader.  In the former case they moved the tabs for the various widgets (does anybody even have more than a page of these?) from the top where they were reasonably unobtrusive over to the left side where they squashed the whole reading area of the screen off to the right in order to provide a completely redundant list of the gadgets on the page.  Hello, why would I want a list of the gadgets on the page when I can see them right on the page?  Why would I want to click on one of the gadget links in the side bar when I could just click on the gadget on the page?

In the reader they decided that it was too easy to look at, or something, so to make it "faster" (maybe this has to do with optimizing it for the Android phone...at least that would be a reason, however evil) they decided to remove any of the useful visual cues like having the list of feeds have a light blue background and the contents of the feeds have a white background to make it all look the same...that is, as if a stylesheet had failed to load correctly.

If you're using Firefox, it turns out you don't have to stand for these shenanigans.  Go to userstyles.org and install the Stylish firefox plugin.  Once you've restarted Firefox you'll have a little paintbrush on paper icon in the lower right hand corner of the status bar.  Visit your iGoogle home page and click on it, and you'll get a menu that includes Find Styles for this page... you can experiment with the different ones or just go to this one or this one and tell it to save it. (You might want to preview to see which you like better)  That should get rid of the left-hand tab crap immediately.  If you don't like it you can just click on the Stylish icon, choose manage styles, and delete it.  No harm, no foul.

Now go to the Google Reader screen and do the same, or just use this one that was posted in response to Google's boneheaded blinding white design.  It's not perfect, as far as reverting it to the same fonts as the old one, and it doesn't fix the hiding of the Refresh button down in the subscribe menu (though clicking on Subscribe itself will refresh...how intuitive) but it makes it usable again.

There, now you're all set until the next round of Google "improvements."  Honestly, the thing that cheeses me off the most is that they rarely give you an option of keeping it the way it was (I was about to say never, but they have with GMail) or even beta it.  Google's idea of a beta is to slam thousands of customers with the change and say "welcome to the beta, before you ask, no, there's no way to revert or opt out".  They honestly did that to my account with the iGoogle changes before they rolled them out to the whole world.  They didn't provide any obvious way to provide feedback; there are discussion groups for google apps, and they were full of threads of people venting, but there wasn't any obvious monitoring or response by Google employees.  I don't really understand what's going on with Google right now. Is the corporate culture breeding arrogance?  Or do they just have dozens of little groups doing whatever they feel like, and some of them (the Google maps folks) just get it, and others (iGoogle and now Google Reader) don't?  You can only afford to get people mad at your software if they can't do without it.  Even if you feel, hey, they get what they pay for, and that's nothing--if they switch to something else, there goes your job.  It's not like there aren't other free RSS readers out there.  Switching is just an OPML export/import away.  Heck, that's how I ended up on Google Reader in the first place, when Bloglines started to annoy me.  I was only moments away from switching to a Firefox-based reader when I discovered the Stylish plugin.  And once I switched, I'd be unlikely to return, even if they addressed the specific issue that drove me away.

And because word_geek 's post reminded me of it, my favorite version:

Because the greed-heads pulled this from YouTube, no more link-love from me.

The Typealizer is a web-page that purports to analyze a blog according to the Meyers-Briggs personality test.  It does some kind of analysis, even if it's only hashing the name of the blog, since it gives me different results depending on which of my blogs I point it to, ranging from the absurdly wrong (at least according to every M-B test I've ever taken before) ESFP for this blog, to the pretty darn wrong ISTJ for Foolippic, to the absolutely correct INTP for Tales of the Rambling Bumblers.  It's also consistent... it gives the same analysis for the same blog every time I try.

So what type is your blog?

Sarah Reuben's Chocolate Chocolate-Chip Bundt Cake

4 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 box Devil's Food cake mix (I usually use Duncan Hines)
1 package instant chocolate pudding (the small 3.9 oz size)
1/2 cup milk, room temperature (to be honest, I hardly ever bother letting it warm up)
12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips

Mix dry ingredients, then add wet ingredients and beat with a hand-mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes.
Pour into a greased Bundt pan. I usually grease it even if it's non-stick, just to make sure that it comes out neatly.
Bake in a 350 degree oven for 50-55 minutes until a toothpick comes out brown but not gooey (you're not going to get a perfectly clean toothpick out of this cake)
Allow it to cool a little before you try to remove it from the pan, which can be done quite easily by covering the mouth of the pan with a plate and flipping it, then tapping the pan gently.

You'd have to be insane to frost it.

Posting this because I keep misplacing the recipe

The rules:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J Sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - cognac while people around me smoked fat cigars...
37. Clotted Cream Tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried Goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin -- don't know what this is other than a type of clay
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini - just had this on our honeymoon, in fact
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom Yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft Shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican blue mountain coffee
100. Snake

from Milkbreath and Me

Thursday was a fairly relaxed day for us; we got up late, splashed around in the pool at the Mandalay Bay (the lazy river was the best, we just went around and around), and headed to lunch.  It turns out that going during the week--and during the slow season--was a good idea; the crowd at the hotel must have doubled between Wednesday and Thursday, and doubled again on Friday.  We also lucked out that the room upgrade we were given was to the upper floors of THEHotel... the lower floors actually had a wait at the elevator banks on Thursday.

Another thing that surprised us was how early the restaurants closed, at least during the week.  When we came back from Penn & Teller the night before it was just past 11 and the only thing still open in the hotel and concourse was the Raffles Cafe...the Cafe puzzled me, because there was always a line, but the place was huge and always more than half empty.  I can understand that it just might not be worth the extra staff to fill it closer to capacity for rare surges past 11 on weeknights--but why the hell wouldn't you want to fill your restaurant at lunch time or dinner time Thursday and Friday?  If the marginal cost of additional staff is more than the marginal profit from additional diners, then why are you paying for so much space in the first place?  Unless something was going on like this was vacation week for most of the staff or something...

Anyway, we basically just hung out until it was time to go see Cirque du Soleil: Ka.

I don't think there's anything like Ka in the world, or in the history of the world.  And I doubt that anyone will build anything like it ever again.

Take a look at the wall in this video.

What they don't tell you in the video is that whole huge wall they're going up and down--that's the stage.  It is mobile.  It can rotate anywhere from horizontal to vertical, spin a full 360 degrees and move towards and away from the audience.  The shafts and gears that move it around look like something from the Hoover Dam tour.  It is awesome.

The whole show is incredible...much more of a single story than a set of pieces around a theme than the usual Cirque show, but it's the stage/wall that really moves it into the realm of astonishing.  I couldn't find a clip of the human pachinko game the acrobats play in the archery/chase sequence, but it has to be seen to be believed.

Elyssa's one word take on it: "Indescribable"

I think everyone reading this should make plans to go see Ka.  You don't have to drop what you're doing and book a flight to Vegas, but you should add it to your list of "Things I must see."  I'm totally serious about this.  We had a wonderful, wonderful time in Vegas, and we didn't do more than about half the things we wanted to, but the trip would have been worth it if we had flown in, gone to Ka, and flown home.

Since people are saying that they can't see the previous entries about our honeymoon (maybe because I used the backdate feature to post them the day prior to when I wrote them?  I don't know...) here are the links to the specific entries:

Wednesday

Tuesday

Monday

Here they are
They're not organized into any sort of album, because my "Pro" account has expired and I haven't decided whether to renew it, but it's all there anyway.

On Wednesday, we did another activity suggested by Matt (though this one we might have stumbled onto on our own): The Star Trek Experience, at the Hilton.  Yes, we went from the Star Trek convention in Baltimore last Saturday all the way out to Las Vegas to see some more Star Trek on Wednesday.  Elyssa is just that geeky.  And I love her for it.

We had a fabulous time, and actually spent pretty much the whole day there, after a somewhat late start in the morning.  We did both rides: The Klingon Experience and the Borg Experience, and we got the backstage tour.  Plus we got our pictures taken in the Captain's chair on the bridge, and the Borg chamber.  We'll be showing you those later.  Both rides were entertaining, though I preferred the Klingon Experience...I have some trouble resolving the 3D stereoscopic effect in the Borg ride, so most of the time when they thrust things towards my face I get double vision instead.  The real treat was the backstage tour.  Not only was all the stuff about how they built everything (and had to update it as new shows and movies came out) interesting, but you had time to actually look at some of the details that they hurry you past in the ride.  And to top it all off, you got to see the Klingon attack on the shuttle again... this time from the room that the simulators are in, standing below them and watching the film projected on the huge IMAX-like domed screen while the shuttle simulator over your head pitches, yaws, rolls, and whatever they call the other three degrees of motion it has.  It really is a NASA/Air Force simulator, with the interior done up to look like a Star Fleet shuttle instead of the Space Shuttle or whatever... There are two of them, side- by-side (there were four, before they changed the second Klingon ride to be the Borg ride) and when things get busy they run both of them simultaneously so the passengers see the same screen, just at a slightly different angle.  It's a pity that the whole thing is shutting down on September 1st--the lease with the Hilton expired and they're apparently not renewing, so the whole 70 million dollar thing is going to get dismantled.  There are apparently rumors that they might relocate it somewhere else, but the staff say if that actually happens they'll be the last to know.

After dinner at Quark's, we went back to the hotel and got ready for Penn & Teller.

If you book three months in advance, you can easily get front-row center seats.

And if you're sitting front row center, and are small, cute, female, and wear glasses, you can get pulled up on stage to assist in their first trick.

So that's how Elyssa ended up standing in the spotlight in front of thousands of people in Las Vegas, with Penn Jillette looming over her, and Teller standing nearby wearing a big cement block over his head.  After borrowing and examining her glasses, then pocketing them, Penn had her examine a billiard ball and pronounce it real.  (He had to hold it really close for her to see it at this point) He proceeded to pretend to vanish the ball, while actually "vanishing" the wand he was using--by sticking it behind his ear.  This fooled Elyssa for, oh, about two seconds by his estimation, so he offered to do something more impressive.  He picked up a big hammer, and smashed it into the cement block Teller had been wearing all along until it broke open enough to reveal Teller's smiling face beneath a safety visor.   And on that smiling face, beneath the visor, there were Elyssa's glasses.  He graciously returned them, along with a little glasses wipe packet, which Elyssa is keeping as a souvenir.

The rest of the show was fantastic, as usual, and kept Elyssa boggled, but nothing to top that.  Afterwards, getting the program autographed, both of them told her she was great.  And she was...she was adorable, reacted really strongly, was the perfect foil for Penn's banter, and neither of us is ever going to forget that moment.

Tuesday morning we got up bright and early to hop on the tour bus to go see Hoover Dam.  It was the deluxe tour package, so it included a buffet lunch at the Hacienda in Boulder City, and a tour of the Ethel M chocolate factory and the botanical gardens just outside.  The driver was an entertaining old fellow, though perhaps not quite as funny as he thought he was, who gave us the history of the Las Vegas area and Boulder City in between corny old jokes.  Elyssa was struck by how being a tour guide was in a sense a theatrical profession, remembering also the National Park Service guide at Alcatraz, who was (or had been) an actor part-time before settling in a career as a guide.

The Lake Meade area was spectacular, and the Dam even more so.  We have a lot of pictures, which I'll upload when we get home.  The whole dam tour was fascinating--our tour included the power plant, as well.  Elyssa would like to come back some time and do the rafting thing on the river below the dam.  It was really great, and we never would have thought to do it if it weren't for Doug, so yay Doug.

One of the highlights of the experience for her, though, was a brush with celebrity.  As we were standing in line for the start of the tour, she looked up and started squeeing.  RIght behind us in line was the actor who plays Bubbles on The Wire, with some of his family.  They had a nice chat about the series, and the big shocker at the end of Season Three, which Elyssa had just watched on the flight to Vegas.  That really was the cherry on top of the experience for her.

The buffet afterwards was nothing fancy, but tasty enough.  The tour of Ethel M's (a high end chocolate factory founded by the guy who founded Mars and sold it) was a bit of a disappointment, since they weren't actually making chocolate that day, but the botanical gardens, with cacti from all over the world, made up for it.  We've got lots of nice pictures of those.  I'd like to come back some time in the Spring, when they're all in bloom.

That night we walked to the Hard Rock to eat at Nobu.  It was good, but unfortunately I think it revealed that Elyssa wouldn't enjoy Morimoto's very much--or at least not the omikase dinner.  After that we hiked to The Wynn and sat down at the Parasol Up, where we stayed long enough to see three of the light shows (every half-hour).  That was just mind-boggling.  The bar is on an artificial lake surrounded by artificial mountains (something like 140 feet high) and real pine trees, with a huge curtain waterfall, onto which they project colored lights.  The shows use that waterfall as a projector for really trippy music videos--the ones we saw were Lady Marmalade, some techno thing that I think was called Fiesta, and Low Rider.  There are additional props that come up through the lake or from behind the waterfall--things like a sheet of swirling red silk to look like fire during the Fiesta number, or a big silhouette of a woman's head that the singer's face is projected onto, or, our favorite, a gigantic inflatable chameleon puppet that sings Low Rider.  The service was lackadaisical--we could have been enticed to spend a lot more on drinks if the waitress had come by more than about twice in that hour we spent there--but it's still a must-see.  Big props to my co-worker Matt, who suggested it.

Live-blogging our honeymoon....  ok, maybe not (particularly because internet connection is $14 a day here... what's with that?  Even the crappy HoJo we stay at in Harrisburg is free now...) but I figured I'd at least give an update on the first day.

Easy plane flight, if you don't count getting bumped from our seats to ones right next to the restroom by the family with the screaming baby that screamed for five hours.  Friends, don't be that family.

As cosmic compensation, when we arrived at the Mandalay Bay we found we'd been bumped again...but this time to a suite in the fancier tower: THEHotel at Mandalay Bay.  And yes, that is how they spell it.  I don't know why, but everything associated with it is "the": The Shop, The Coffee Bar, The Spa, The Restroom (ok, I made that last one up).  Anyway, very swank, with a big screen tv and DVD player in the living room, another TV in the bedroom, and another in the bathroom.  We have a magnificent view of the mountains out of our window on the 32nd floor.

When we got in we were starved, so we hit the House of Blues for a late lunch; it was decent...the pulled pork was recognizably pork and not meet shreds drowned in bbq sauce, and the blackened chicken sandwich was almost too spicy.  The beer selection was weak, though, but it was satisfying.

Most of the rest of the day was wandering around the hotel and the connected hotels (the Luxor and the Excalibur) and getting oriented.  Elyssa hit the pool while I took a nap, then we went out for dinner, which was basically just drinks and appetizers at the Red Square, the faux-Russian vodka bar in the hotel.  That was fantastic:  we ate blinis with caviar and steak tartare, and Elyssa had some kind of froofy pomegranite cosmo, while I had the "flight" of USSR Vodkas.  Hers was better actually; not that the vodkas were bad, but I'm not a big vodka drinker.  But when you go to a vodka bar and sit at the ice bar designed o keep your shots of vodka cold, I felt you had darn well better give the vodka a shot.  As it were.  The best of the four was an Estonian vodka called The Tall Blonde, very smooth, almost tasteless.  The second best was a somewhat citrusy Ukrainian vodka.  The other two were just too medicinal for me, with the Russian Ice Goddess vodka being particularly brutal.  The bartender told us that Russians actually drink that stuff at room temperature, which is a bit hard to imagine; it would be like doing shots of turpentine.

Then it was more wandering around the casinos, where Elyssa played a couple of slots ("Is that it?" she asked, after putting her money in, pressing a button, and losing) and watched some roulette.  Then it was bed-time, to get up early in the morning for the Hoover Dam excursion.

Fairly accurate, though my Hawaiian shirts don't really fit any of the questions; apparently they are outside the ken of the fashionista who made the quiz.


Your result for The Fashion Style Test...

Librarian

37% Flamboyance, 45% Originality, 42% Deliberateness, 30% Sexiness

Take The Fashion Style Test at HelloQuizzy

via badgerbag  

• 
  

  Who are the aggressive drivers?

  
  
  
  
  • 
    
    
    

    Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

    
    

    That's the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

I think this is interesting on several levels, particularly (if you click through and read the excerpt) that it doesn't seem to matter at all what the substance of the personalization is merely the fact that it is personalized, and the more stickers the more aggressive.  Also that it's not whether you get angry behind the wheel, but whether you act it out.  So stay the hell away from that car plastered with "Visualize World Peace", "You Can't Hug a Child With Nuclear Arms", "Let's Not Elect W in 2004, Either!", "My Other Car is The Millenium Falcon" and such over every inch of the back.



It's not clear whether removing stickers and other territorial markers from your car will make you a less aggressive driver...it could, after all, be that the type of person who is prone to territorially marking a car is the type of person who is aggressive behind the wheel (correlation doesn't imply causation, and all that), but I can certainly envision a psychologically plausible mechanism by which choosing to treat your vehicle as an extension of your personal territory influences you to take "threats" to that territory more personally and be more likely to act on your anger.  In which case, you might be able to influence your future behavior and moods by deliberately choosing to downplay the personalization and emphasize the simple utility aspect: a car is just a box on wheels that takes you where you want to go.

This should fix that.  A Firefox add-on that lets you play about 2500 NES games online, from Kirby's Adventure, to Double-Dragon, to Battle Toads, Castlevania, Galaga, and just about every other game I've ever heard of and plenty that I haven't.  It's all online, so no legally dubious downloading of ROMs or emulator software. (Whether the site maintainers are doing something legally dubious is another question.)

One caveat: it appears that if you use No-Script you have to temporarily Allow Scripts Globally.  At least, it doesn't pop up the usual notice to let you know what it's blocking but it does block the java plugin that the add-on is using.  If I can figure out a specific site to white-list, I'll update this post.  Otherwise just turn the No-Script blocking off while you play and back on afterwards.

Alphabet songs, courtesy of  woodwindy who assigned me D...

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

Day-O (Banana Boat Song) - Harry Belafonte
Do I Love You, Do I? - Ella Fitzgerald
Do You Want To - Franz Ferdinand
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - The Animals
Drift Away - Uncle Kracker

Originally I had a couple of different ones (Dinah, by Louis Prima, and the Darkwing Duck theme) but I couldn't find them on Napster so I figured I'd go with ones that you could actually listen to if you liked.

I've set up a new version of the Tales of the Rambling Bumblers blog, using WordPress, because MovableType seems to be getting flakier and flakier on my site, despite a version upgrade.  I'm going to see how WP goes for a while before trying to move the other blogs... particularly Rachel's, since it's by far the biggest and most active.

I've posted the recap for the Sunday Night massacree, if you want to check it out.