Signs

Away

This afternoon I'll be going away for a few days with my family, so aside from a vending machine post tomorrow things will be pretty quiet around here, probably until next Wednesday (or possibly Tuesday evening).

We'll be driving to Kagoshima and getting on a car ferry that will take us overnight to Osaka, where we'll be spending a day and a night at Universal Studios Japan. I'm looking forward to the ferry ride. And if I can survive USJ (these places are my own personal hell on earth), on Sunday we'll be heading to Hiroshima for a day/night followed by Fukuoka for a couple of days (with a stop at Costco before we come home--hmmm.... blocks of cheddar...).

Have a good weekend, folks!

I'm Easily Amused

This headline made me giggle: Blackhawks trade Barker to Wild. I'm sure he'll fit right in.

Left/Right

From the New York Times:

According to sales figures from [hockey] stick manufacturers, a majority of Canadian hockey players shoot left-handed, and a majority of American players shoot right-handed. No reason is known for this disparity, which cuts across all age groups and has persisted for decades.

Most Canadians, like most Americans, are naturally right-handed, so the discrepancy has nothing to do with national brain-wiring. And how you hold a pencil, say, has little or no bearing on how you hold a stick. A left-handed shooter puts his right hand on top; a right-hander puts the left hand there.

This difference extends to golfers too, by the way, for reasons that might be obvious only to a Canadian: the swings are somewhat similar, and most of us have held a hockey stick long before we've ever heard about golf.

The article, thankfully, makes no attempt to politicize this fact. Neither will I. It's just a quirky thing that I, as a one-time hockey player, find somewhat interesting. I myself shoot right, so I guess that puts me in the minority among my countrymen.

The article puts forward some possible explanations for this phenomenon, but the best one is not really an "explanation" at all. From the staff at a hockey shop in Vancouver, on how to decide if a kid will be a left or right-handed shot: "We give the kid a stick and see what they do."

I envision a world in which this basic hockey principle is extended into all areas of pedagogy, ushering in an era of worldwide brotherhood and equality. Well, you'd still get 5 minutes for fighting.

Note to Self

You haven't been playing drums/music at all lately. Best get on the horn to the guys and get some jammin' together before your brain turns completely to mush. Yeah, Miyazaki (and probably most of Japan) kinda sucks when it comes to gigs for middle-aged guys doing classic rock shit, but there's always the rehearsal space. Playin' is playin'. Get that bass drum pedal you've been pining over for the last few months. Spend the money and you won't want to see it wasted gathering dust in the closet. Get those practice CDs done up and pass them out to the boys. How can you hope to make them see your musical vision of "post-psychedelic death folk" if you can't give them some idea of what it might sound like? Buy some new sticks. There's nothing like holding a brand new, un-nicked set of sticks... testing the weight--which one for which hand? ...testing the balance for a nice, loose grip... a few light, tentative taps on the snare and hats... Now they're nicked...

Possibility.

One, two, three, four...

Little Toy Gun

Busy... impending brain death... got nuthin'... huh...?

Please enjoy this fine musical selection from honeyhoney:

Licorice Schtick

There is a lot of strange stuff on the web. I mean, it's strange because it has no apparent meaning or use.

Just tonight, for example, I was wondering why the Japanese seem to hate licorice. My own data sample, while yielding compelling evidence, is statistically small. I was hoping that perhaps there was somebody doing similar work and who had a broader test sample. Failing that, I was hoping at least that someone, somewhere, had had a similar notion and had written about it somewhere on the web. I found a couple of tantalizing leads, but nothing conclusive.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, meaningless and useless stuff on the web. Right. In the course of my licorice research I stumbled across a site called DopeStats, which claims to track "drug prices, drug statistics, and drug use" in 3,140 American counties. From the website:

Welcome to DopeStats, a public awareness project. Our data is compiled by anonymous users providing information about their use of substances ranging from common psychoactives such as alcohol and cannabis (marijuana), to chemicals like nicotine and crack/cocaine.

Now I know what you're thinking--you're thinking, "gee, Rick, this might actually be useful information." And you'd be right!

But then I saw this:

Followed by this:

The United States faces an on-going drug problem due to the lack of an easy method for the people to report this kind of data. The most familiar ways include local law enforcement, a counseling or rehab center, or an out-dated survey. Neither of these attract the recreational drug user at the necessary level, which leaves society with a very limited picture of today's illegal drug markets [...]

But the real stunner was this:

And so friends, it appears that the U.S. does not have any kind of problem with the illegal use of licorice.

You can't read this sort of stuff just anywhere, you know.

A Peace of Cake for Dessert

I've been trying to come up with something clever and/or witty to say about Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but all I can manage is a somewhat maniacal cackle.

I'll keep working on it.

I don't know why, exactly, but this seems strangely appropriate:


Well, it's pretty fucking funny, anyway...

'Nuff Said

Busy, Busy, Busy

This should give you a clue...

It's the Weekend...

... but, dammit, I'm still busy. This is pretty funny, though...

Still Busy...

Please enjoy this video presentation...

Three Pucks, One Blender

Very busy these days. I found this amusing...

Diet Coke

160 ml. can of Coke.


Sometimes a little common sense is enough...

Kreativ Kyklops

Blogging friend Absolute Vanilla, in a display of either perverse humor or the early signs of oncoming dementia (Happy Birthday, sweetie!), has given me one of those blog award thingies:


[Is there some rule that says these things have to be designed with colors I would never be caught dead wearing? Just kidding!]

I generally do my best to avoid these meme things, but since it's AV's birthday, and since she's one of only a handful of people that regularly drop by and leave a comment, and in the interests of fostering world peace, saving the rain forests, feeding the poor, being the best that I can be, and all that other stuff, I figured I could play along this one time.

According to the rules I guess I'm supposed to list "seven things that I love." In an attempt to make it interesting for you, the reader, I'm going to leave out the obvious: my wife, daughter, mother, family, etc. So, OK, seven things I love, in no particular order:

1. I love the perverse genius of this, surely the greatest photoshop of all time (the "DK" in the background is a nice touch):

Image Source

2. I love this album, the best Stones album ever:


3. I love the coolest game on earth, and the childhood memory this picture evokes:

Image Source

4. I love The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. (I've been an SF geek since childhood).


5. I love beer.

Image Source

6. I love pina coladas and making... doh! Actually, I love William Shatner. Seriously, I can't think of a funnier, more honest, more entertaining actor on TV. And don't even get me started on James Kirk. That guy had the best job in the history of jobs...

Image Source

7. Well, OK, I love my wife, my daughter, my mother, my sisters, the rest of my family, and all you zombies, too!

Kyklops Sans-Serif

So I'm reading a Wall Street Journal article about the much-maligned Comic Sans typeface and something strikes me as odd. I can't quite put my finger on it at first, but then I realize: Comic Sans looks just like my own printing--as opposed to cursive, style! (Well, when I'm trying to print "nicely," anyway.) Look:


In fact, it probably looks a lot like your own "nice" printing style. (Or at least it did until you got out of elementary school...)

Anyway, I don't really understand what all the fuss is about. I have yet to see a novel or newspaper or magazine or any other "serious" literature published in Comic Sans. In fact, as a guy who needs to wear glasses when he's reading, I'd say that Comic Sans is one of the most readable typefaces I've come across. Big and blocky, with none of that annoying curly stuff that makes most text so blurry to my aging eyes--what's not to like? And if I think back to a time before I needed glasses, I imagine all those monotonous pages of Latin I had to translate back in university. If there is a more dull-looking language on the printed page than Latin, I don't know what it is. How much more fun reading Virgil would have been if the text had been in Comic Sans!

Behold:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem,
inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum,
Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso,
quidve dolens, regina deum tot volvere casus
insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores
impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?

Pretty lame, eh? Now check this out:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem,
inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum,
Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae.
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso,
quidve dolens, regina deum tot volvere casus
insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores
impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?

Damn, the words almost leap off the page (er, screen)! It almost translates itself!

And they called me a Philistine...

Hmm...

Yuck

As a brief follow-up to some comments I made a couple of weeks ago about inept users of Google, I give you:

I WASH MY MOTHER FUCK

Yeah, caps and all... Whatever, dude...

Rock!

You can make your own here.

Unrelated Segments

On the boardwalk: An interesting post by a Canadian guy covering Canadian troops in Kandahar, Afghanistan. "The boardwalk at KAF [I guess Kandahar Air Field--K] is just about the worst strip-mall you've ever seen." Strangely, reading this got me feeling homesick for Canada.

As a personal aside, I happen to believe that going to Afghanistan was the correct thing to do. It made sense to me, if only for the simple fact that, viewed realistically, somebody was going to get their asses kicked for 9/11. And if you're going to kick someone in the ass, well, it's probably best to kick the right ass. Al-Qaeda was/is in Afghanistan. Right ass, right war. Iraq, on the other hand...

As a Canadian I feel it was the right thing to do for us to support the US in Afghanistan. I think President Obama is entirely justified in reasoning that it's time to re-focus American military efforts. I hope, in this instance, that the Canadian government will follow his lead.

(Although it's generally true that I have an easier time associating with more left-leaning views, I refuse to allow myself to be pigeonholed. My father was in the Canadian Army, and he served with UN forces in Korea and Cyprus. He was a good, decent man, and he taught me more than a few things about the world. Sometimes fighting is the right thing to do.)

[Link via: Daimnation!]

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Moving on to less serious stuff...

The other night I watched the movie The Number 23 on TV. It was the stupidest piece of shit I've seen in a while. (The preceding two sentences, by the way, are to be considered the official Kyklops "review" of that movie.)

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Playing The Beatles Backwards: The Ultimate Countdown: The writer has taken every Beatles tune, rather astutely reviewed all 185 of them, and then ranked them. I (or you) might disagree with some of the rankings but it's still a rather impressive bit of work.

[Via: Cynical-C]

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Some people just don't know how to use the Google. I mean really, if you're arriving at this site looking for English meanings for Japanese words (or vice versa), maybe you need a couple of lessons in an IT class or something.

In the interests of promoting international understanding (or some other equally stupid, vague sentiment), I thought I might write down a few of the more common Japanese words/phrases that have, through the wonders of Google, brought people from all over the world to this humble blog. You'll likely be bored by this list, but amazed that someone actually made it this far in their quest to find out how the Japanese say "penis." Without further ado, ten Japanese words/phrases and/or their English equivalents (in no particular order, because I'm like, just doing this from memory, dig?) that have brought inept users of Google to this site:

konnichiwa: "good day"
kombanwa: "good evening"
chinchin: "penis"
hajimemashite: "nice to meet you"
yoroshiku onegaishimasu: "you have no idea who the hell I am, but please be nice to me all the same" (generally follows hajimemashite)
gambatte: "do your best; try your hardest; break a leg; give 'em hell; etc." (basically whatever hackneyed phrase you personally would use in situations which should be clear from the preceding)
kanada: "Canada"
ohaiyo gozaimasu: "good morning"
hai: "yes" ("that's right" is probably more accurate)
o yasumi nasai: "good night"

I hope that wasn't as boring to read as it was to write...