Trainer Bob says that Australians are lazier when it comes to losing weight. Ouch. I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I felt pretty bad when I saw the numbers that Rachel and JJ have posted since leaving the house. Maybe next year the producers will cast people who have a genuine desire to lose weight over those who just have a desire to stir the pot.

Ooh, I knew that Kaffe Fassett (textile artist and knitwear designer extraordinaire) was also famous for his paintings, but I’d never seen them before! So pretty.

Another day, another picky eater question on MetaFilter. This time it’s somebody who’s looking for healthy recipes… but doesn’t like vegetables or meat. Man, that just makes me sad. What the hell are these people eating? (It reminds me of a chick I lived with in London, who refused to eat anything but pasta. She had it EVERY SINGLE NIGHT.) I remember being shocked while watching The Biggest Loser last week, when they had a “temptation” to see who’d eat various foods, and Rachel nearly gagged at the thought of eating bruschetta. Because it had fresh tomatoes on it. That’s the most pathetic thing about these people, in my opinion. They’re not eating good food. They’re just stuffing themselves with empty calories. Yeah, I’m still weighing in on the chunker side of the scale these days, but that’s because I can’t resist blue cheese and wine and risotto and steak. If you’re going to be fat, you should at least be fat from eating tasty stuff, not from stuffing your gob with the culinary equivalent of wallpaper paste.

The 5 Most Badass Presidents of All Time. Sweet. They don’t make ’em like that anymore!

Wow. My mom was reminiscing to me a few weeks ago about the Blizzard of ’78, and how we’d gotten snowed in and the Fire Department had rescued her and me (as a baby) on the back of a snowmobile. Turns out that other people were being more productive with the enforced down-time. Two guys in Chicago came up with the idea for the first online community!

Ha. Roger Clemens has an entry in the Dickipedia. I especially like that it mentions the particular game that made me dislike him, the one where he threw a chunk of shattered bat at Mike Piazza.

This is awesome! I just discovered that you can read Thinking Machine stories online! I had a book of them as a kid. The “Thinking Machine” was a super-smart detective, sort of an American Sherlock Holmes. The author Jacques Futrelle hadn’t written very many when he went to Europe to promote the books… and arranged passage back to America on the Titanic. Yeah. So there aren’t any more. Anyway, I think these versions online may have been slightly edited in my book. There are details that I distinctly remember from the stories that don’t appear here.

The really glaring change to me is in “The Silver Box”. I distinctly remember that one of the clues was that the boss had originally given the secretary a gold box, which she’d asked to exchange for a silver one (because the silver one was high enough to lift the phone receiver). That little bit doesn’t appear in the online story at all! And hey, now that I think about it, calling the story “The Silver Box” is a really huge tip-off that the secretary had something to do with it, right?

Are you right-brained or left-brained? According to the spinny dancer, I am left-brained. EXCESSIVELY LEFT-BRAINED. I been focusing on that thing for five minutes and for the life of me, I can’t even imagine how you’d begin to see her turning the other way. (I wonder if this has some correlation with my geek score below…?) (Link courtesy of Danielle.)