web-goddess

Eileen is taking a poll about sweet corn butter application: Butter roll, yay or nay? I grew up in a “roll” household (where you roll the sweet corn on top of a stick of butter for maximum distribution, but which unfortunately causes a dent in the butter and renders it unfit for any other purpose). But now here in Australia I can’t find butter in long skinny sticks, so I find myself doing the pat. I weep for my youth.

Wow! Does this story remind anybody else of Satomi Tiger?

Hey runners: John “The Penguin” Bingham has a new blog! My friend Susi lent me his book No Need for Speed earlier this year. Very motivating for us plodders…

In the interest of SCIENCE – and because this AskMeFi question is so facinating – I am going to see if Dr. Amy Jones can operate a computer laptop trackpad tonight. Stay tuned for the experiment results.

Later: Well, she moved it a little bit but not much. I think that mashing her whole paw against the trackpad was just too much surface. I would’ve tried it with a single digit but the test subject fled the scene. Hm. You’d think that a DOCTOR CAT would be more interested in science.

The Perils of Working with Socially-Challenged Nerds
My hair’s getting a bit longer, so this morning I decided to try pulling it up with a barrette. The first thing a co-worker said when he saw me: “What’s wrong with your hair?!” Grrr. Thanks. Thanks a lot.

How Microsoft Counts: Let me see if I’ve got this straight. 3, 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7. That is some of the worst product naming I’ve ever heard.

We are officially living in the Bizarro World. I find myself disagreeing strongly with Kevin Rudd… and agreeing with Malcolm Turnbull. And I bet a lot of you are in the same boat!

Edited to add: This is an excellent, excellent editorial on the Henson controversy. Elizabeth Farrelly brings up a lot of the points the Snook and I were making when we debated it at home last night. I fail to see much difference in a kid posing for Bill Henson and one competing in one of those “JonBenet” type beauty pageants. If you’re against the sexualisation of children, fine, but you’re going to be banning a lot more than just an art show.

Synesthesia
I watched a fascinating documentary yesterday afternoon called Derek Tastes of Earwax. It was about people with synesthesia, the condition where your senses get mixed up in interesting ways. Most synesthetes perceive numbers and letters as being colored in some way. The title referred to one gentleman who “tasted” nearly every word that he heard. I was pretty sure throughout the film that I don’t have synesthesia, because most of the examples and experiments they showed didn’t describe me at all. Then they started talking about number lines, and people who perceive numbers and dates in three-dimensional space… and I realized that I do do that, to an extent. I have a very clear mental calendar that runs from Janary (to my far right) to December (where I’m standing, no matter what month it actually is). Neat.

“Every girl online is fat, ugly and unsexy. Here’s how to get over it.” Interesting article on being a woman and dealing with harrassment. I had a great discussion about personal conflicts (both online and off) on Saturday morning with my girlfriends. It turned out that pretty much all of us had been subjected to it. On one hand that’s depressing, but on the other hand it’s nice to know you’re not alone, I guess. Things have been mostly quiet on the troll front here, but there have been a couple blips of contact in the past few weeks. I’m happy with how well my strategy of ignoring them is working though. They don’t bother me. I just feel sad at people’s capacity to bear petty grudges and surprised at the energy they expend posting hateful comments that no one will ever see. Life’s too short to spend two seconds thinking about people like that. (Oh crap, I just did, didn’t I? Consider that the next year’s quota.)