Posts filed under ‘Stuff’
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas, y’all.
(Turn your volume up a bit for this one.)
(Freely downloadable on Carrie’s website)
Santa is on his way!
Santa flying over Asia
So I see that NORAD is tracking Santa Claus again this year. Evidently, he is on his way to Jakarta, Indonesia, even as I type this. So far Santa has…
- delivered 537 million presents;
- consumed 33 thousand cookies.
And since it’s only 10:00 a.m. in Chicago, he’s got a lot more delivering and eating to do before he returns home tonight.
But watching Santa fly around Oceania and Asia has raised some questions for me…
1) Does Santa deliver presents to everyone? Or only people who deserve them (however you might define “deserve”)? Or only people who both believe in Santa and deserve presents?
2) Who decides whether someone believes in Santa or not? The elves? Santa’s wife? Santa himself? An editor at The Sun newspaper? And if so, is that a liberal or conservative newspaper?
3) What do you have to do to demonstrate that you believe in Santa? Pray a “Santa prayer”…
Dear Santa,
I’ve been a bad child, but I didn’t know that you existed. But now I know that you exist, and I’m going to try to stop being bad. Please help me to be good and to love my family.
Amen.
…or do you simply have to be nice, as opposed to being naughty? Does proper behavior a la Santa’s expectations constitute belief?
4) How does the value of the presents that Santa delivers correlate with the per capita GDP of the location where he is delivering? What does this imply about Santa?
5) Regarding NORAD: I suppose that if anyone can track Santa, it would be them. But their website also has a FAQ about Santa. Do I really want them to influence my belief in (and beliefs about) Santa?
And finally, does all of this questioning make me a heretic? Will I be getting anything in my stocking this year?
Like this:
There’s a spot in Indiana
This is my school, but I was never that cool…
The Goshen College Maple Leafs!
(We’ll photosynthesize you!)
A lunchtime walk, aborted
One of the odd things that has happened with this blog is that I now subconsciously think of myself as a writer. Sometimes, it’s even a conscious thought. Not that I have any illusions of grandeur. I’m not a good writer. Nevertheless, I write. Therefore, I’m a writer.
Today at lunch, I decided to go out for a leisurely stroll in a nearby forest preserve. For the fun of it, I thought that I’d stroll slowly, observe some things closely, and learn some new words to describe the things that I noticed. It was to be one part enjoyment of creation, one part stress relief, and one part writer education.
Alas, it rained. My walk was short and quick.
So as not to call it a total loss, I recorded my impressions of some of the colors that I saw, since 1) we’re in the middle of a gorgeous fall palette right now, and 2) my color vocabulary is awful. Case in point…
The prairie outside my building is a mix of green, orange, yellow, red, purple, and brown today. The walls inside are pretty much off-white.—
ordinary (mostly) (@ordinarymostly) September 28, 2011
When I returned from my walk, I looked up the names for the colors that I saw. Here are those names for your color edification, whether you wanted color edification or not.
1) Ghost white, lavender mist, and heliotrope
These were the colors of three different wildflowers. Unfortunately, I don’t know the names of any of those flowers.
2) Golden yellow, gold, golden poppy
These were the colors of the goldenrod flowers that I saw. Interestingly, I didn’t think that the color of the goldenrod flowers matched the color ‘goldenrod’:
3) Magenta (fuchsia)
Magenta is the color of pokeweed stems in the fall. I probably could have told you that before. However, I did not know that magenta and fuchsia are the same color.
Random blogging, part 0
I’ve posted four times to my blog this month, and that means that I haven’t taken enough time for rest. The sad part is that the month of September should be a slower month for me: the APS is in the middle of one of its maintenance periods. There aren’t any users calling me at all hours of the night to come to the beamline and fix their problems. On the other hand, it has been a very busy time at church. Sometimes, the “sabbath” ends up not being very restful – pastors get to take Monday as a day of rest, but the lay ministers aren’t always so lucky.
So today I’m taking a little time for myself and blogging anything that I feel like blogging. And believe me, you aren’t going to care about most of this. Those of you subscribed by email may just wish to get your finger on the ‘delete’ key. Here goes…
Too much of a good thing
I was born in Maryland, and I tend to be pretty proud of our state flag. (Ordinary Spouse will attest to this.) But, hey – judge for yourself. I think you’ll agree that this is a pretty nice flag…
Actually, I think that Maryland does a very nice job of branding itself using its various symbols. They share a consistent color scheme, or a compelling narrative about the state, or both. For example, we have the state bird:
(The Baltimore Oriole)
The state flower:
(The Black-eyed Susan)
And the state butterfly:
(The Baltimore Checkerspot)
The colors are those of Maryland’s founders, the Calvert family, who were the Lords Baltimore. Some of the state’s other symbols relate to the Chesapeake Bay (e.g. the state dog, the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, or the state crustacean, the Blue Crab). Even the sports teams get into the act. We’ve got the Baltimore Orioles (Major League Baseball), who are named after the state bird, of course. And the Baltimore Ravens (National Football League) are named after the famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe, who was a resident of Baltimore. Even though the primary color of their uniforms is purple, they include a very tasteful patch with the arms of the Calvert family.
And then there’s the University of Maryland football team. They’re known as the Terrapins, a name which they adopted from Maryland’s state reptile. So far, so good. This past weekend, the team unveiled a new uniform. It also draws on the arms of the Calvert family. But perhaps they’ve taken things just a bit too far…?
(Image credits: Maryland state flag, Baltimore oriole, Black-eyed Susan, Baltimore Checkerspot)
Say what?
This morning, I created a Facebook event. The last step, when I submitted it, was to prove that I am, in fact, a human. You’re probably familiar with these ‘CAPTCHA’ tests – if not here’s the Wikipedia article. Here was my test:
Now what am I supposed to do with that? They cut off the bottom of the double summation!
I chose ‘Try different words’.
One more wordle for Oldest Daughter
I thought that Oldest Daughter might like a Wordle of the words in her blog. Here it is!
