Mebbie-bumkins posted about her brand spanking new skill at poker, which made me recall the gift Jenn (sorry, Santa) gave me in my stocking.
Three Dragon Ante at first elicited my thought of “oh, just a D&D version of 3-card ante,” but it’s nothing at all like that. When I started reading the rules, I realized that there is a large element of strategy involved. I look forward to playing it. Now we (Jenn and I) just need to find some nearby people we can con into playing our weird games with us.
Of course, I, being the good centrist that I am, prefer to say “Political Shenanigans” as I have no confidence that this kind of crap doesn’t go on with democratic staffers too.
What would I do without Pharyngula to feed my funny-hunger?
Well, my brief experiment with Dvorak is at an end for now. The system works well; I learned the keys quickly and my speed was picking up. Unfortunately, I hit a small snag: work.
When I am needed to write-write-write, I must fall back on my best available typing option, i.e. QWERTY.
So, I will have to find another opportunity to learn Dvorak. Sometime when I know I won’t be needing to write large documents for a while.
Happy Christmas Gift-Return-Day, by the way!
…and all through the house, the trees are being decorated, by crazy felines who have owners who document their every move.
Happy Christmas Eve, everyone.
J.K. Rowling has named book 7!
I object, though. When I read this bbc article it said, “The announcement was made on the writer’s official website.” I immediately (we’re talking nanoseconds, here) went to the official website and found…nothing. Just her update from the 19th.
Hmmmm…
Maybe it got retracted? Maybe BBC jumped the gun? Who knows. There’s a title and that’s awesome.
I’m curious about the title. “Hallows” usually referes to samhain/halloween/all hallows eve. I wonder [dum dum dum] if something critical and important will happen on halloween? It would be unusual for her book to end on halloween, but we’ll see. She might throw the school-year idea out the window, but then Harry still needs time to track down the remaining horcruxes.
For more of my idle speculation, go here.
This one is for all the bunny lovers out there. Especially Annie.
Gacked from myconfinedspace via Pharyngula.
Through random occurrence, I popped over to the Troubled Times website. I was under the impression before clicking through that it was a survivalist/preparation website. Given some of the apolocalyptic fiction I read, there’s interest for me there.
However, survival was only the skin of what I found.
Troubled Times believes that a world-wide cataclysm, of massive proportions, will strike the Earth in 2003 or shortly thereafter. The cause of this natural event will be a monster planet, known to the ancients but as yet undiscovered by modern man, which will pass very near the earth as part of its normal 3,600 year orbit around the sun.
If you poke around, you discover what will happen when the 12th (what happened to 10th and 11th?) planet goes by:
…as this magnetic giant passes by, it will force our North and South Poles to rotate 90 degrees. The shifting poles will drag the Earth’s crust with them, ultimately producing a new global map in a matter of hours in a massive cataclysm affecting all life on earth. These events have occurred before, as ancient legends and Prophecies fortell, creating what man interprets to be ice ages, wandering poles and the flood, and have resulted in the extinction of the Mastodon and the sinking of Atlantis.
We know this because the aliens told us:
The Zetas are a group of Service-to-Other Beings who are assisting this planet and it’s people in the transformation from 3rd to 4th density. This Transformation is happening now, and will be completed sometime after the passage of the 12th Planet, and the resulting Pole Shift that this passage will cause.
I recommend this website just for the amusment.
Of course, this is all bogus crap. Leaving aside the fact that Spacewatch as well as a host of amateur astronomers would certainly have seen anything that is, “…4 times larger and 23 times more dense than Earth,” the website is chock full of alien gobbledygook and bad physics and alien conspiracies.
I wrote an entry concerning a Carl Sagan anecdote as a part of his 10th deathday memorial.
While I was writing it, I thought it would be cool to do a google-esque change to my blog header for one day. Put up an image of the night sky, or the moon, or something spacey. Of course, I’ve only had a digital camera since 2002; I haven’t accumulated too many different types of images, especially night ones. I tend to take pictures with an eye toward inclusion in a photo album. I do have a lot of roadway/traffic related pictures, but most of them are pretty boring
So, a new task. A quest, even! Take some pictures that are blog-worthy and useful under different circumstances. I believe the first ones I get will be night images around Atlanta. You can do cool stuff with long exposures around highways.
Sounds like it is time to break down and get a flickr account.