Irrelevance Glorified

As stated earlier this year, I feel this web page is a great place to reveal my latest obsessions. It is now one of those times. The latest focus of my attention is Sporcle, a mostly user-generated database of timed quizzes. The great thing about Sporcle is how easy it is to do one of the quizzes. Just hit the green “Ready? Click To Start” button and start typing. For most of the quizzes, you don’t have to answer the questions in order, just type for answers. That works best for stuff like “Name the 3-Letter Body Parts.” Sometimes, you need to click on the blank that you want to fill, and then type in the correct answer. That works best for things like “Can You Name the Listed Country From Their Name Origin?” They have a large amount of user-generated quizzes, and then every day the Sporcle staff fact-check some of the best and post them as “official” Sporcle tests. All in all, a highly enjoyable distraction.

If I find a quiz I enjoy, I’ll just share it. Today, the quiz is “Can you name the city that each metro/subway system is located in, based on the names of three of its stations?“. For this one, you’ll have to select the blank that you’re trying to answer, since otherwise you could just start spamming famous cities. The reason I found this one interesting is that I got 28/32 correct, even though I had only ridden on 10 of them. You can tell a lot, just based on the names and character set.

Last Thanksgiving, I decided not to go back to Chicago, mostly because flying back to the Midwest is a pain in the butt and sorta expensive as well. I like to travel within the time zone, to minimize those hassles. So when Bruce and Tina extended an invitation to me to visit for Thanksgiving, I accepted it before they could explain that it was mostly sarcasm.

Visiting them is “interesting”, mostly due to their two young boys, Nile (20 months when I visited) and Cyrus (3 months), who are slowly draining their parents’ sanity. This was actually my first time meeting Cyrus. He was still blob-like at this age, but I liked Cyrus; he did not fuss when I held him, and we had some good conversations during tummy time. Nile was a bit suspicious of me, but allowed me to read some books to him. He’s pretty verbal at this age, although Tina is much more skilled at comprehending him than I am.

We were pretty ambitious for this Thanksgiving meal; I convinced Tina to try out the Good Eats Brined Turkey recipe, which makes for a deliciously moist turkey. It turned out well overall, although we were hampered by not having a true probe thermometer. I also made a slow-cooker cabbage dish that turned out pretty well, and a sausage stuffing that was delicious, although I should have chopped the walnuts within it a bit finer.

Overall, though, this was just an excuse to visit Bruce & Tina, two of my favorite people.

Anyways, here are some pictures of my visit, which will probably be used as evidence someday by Child Protective Services.

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures And Descriptions After the Break.

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As some of you might have noticed, I managed to score a Bag of Crap on Christmas last December. I was helped by the fact that they employed an “anti-cheat” mechanism. That is, if you just went to the site front page, it said it was sold out, but if you took the time to read the text for the time, it explained that you needed to click through to a special page in order to order the Crap. This is intended to foil any sort of automated buying program/script anyone was running. And it worked! I was actually able to score one, something that I hadn’t done in just about a year.

However, I did experience a problem : it didn’t arrive. Well, the tracking indicated that it did in fact arrive, but when I got home…nothing was there! Was there a thief in my area? Was there an incompetent mailperson? We may never know. Luckily, Woot believed my sob story and was nice enough to send me another Bag of Crap. This in itself was awesome, as I was expecting them to just refund my money. Apparently they have redundant crap in their warehouse that they were willing to send me.

See the video below to see my dramatic unboxing. Hit the jump (and scroll down past all the whitespace I’ve added so as to not spoil the video) to see individual pictures of my loot.

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I’m a man of obsession. Obsession over stupid things, mostly, but obsession nonetheless. My latest obsession has been Top Gear. I don’t claim to have discovered this show, of course; Top Gear is a British car show that’s been around for decades. They had a reinvention of sorts at the turn of the century, though, and became quite a bit more eccentric. I had seen some clips of the show on YouTube, so I was aware of the crazy stuff that they did, but it wasn’t until I caught Series 10 on Netflix streaming that I realized just how often they did awesome, hilarious stuff.

As I watched that series (originally aired in 2007), I came across this segment, where the Top Gear crew pay an homage (of sorts) to the quality of British craftsmanship. It’s four YouTube videos (32 minutes total), and it’s just about the funniest thing I have watched in the past six months, perhaps even the past year. If you aren’t laughing hysterically at some point in time while watching this, I’m afraid that we can’t be friends.

Back in November, I used up some of my vacation days and visited Japan. Not just on a whim, mind you; when I travel, I travel to visit people. In this case, it’s my good friends Yusuke and Tomoko, old compatriots from High School (Yusuke) and undergrad (Tomoko). While I flew in from San Francisco, another friend from undergrad, Becky, flew in from Boston along with her boyfriend Steve. So in many ways, it was a little reunion with a lot of my favorite people.
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When delivering their distinct brand of satire, the folks at The Daily Show make heavy use of sarcasm, with devastating results. These two clips were from the January 5th show, and they are fantastic.

I don’t normally post stuff from the Colbert Report, because I don’t really have time (or make time) to watch both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, so I’ve picked TDS, and rely on other websites to recommend any extraordinary segments. Talking Points Memo posted this one a week and a half ago, and I finally got around to watching it. Overall, a solidly hyperbolical segment, with a great use of elemental symbol humor.

Merry Christmas everybody! I’m not Christian myself, but I do enjoy myself a day off. For all my loyal readers out there, I have a special treat for you, one that’s been on all your wishlists : a new post about a hiking trip I took in September! Yeah, towards the end of — wait, what? That wasn’t on your Christmas wishlist at all? Well, I don’t know, I have the whole list right here, and it clearly shows “A new hiking post from Ranjeet” for all of you. I don’t know what to say, take it up with Santa. At least it’s not a lump of coal.

Back towards the end of September, I visited The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, a redwood-centric state park a little bit southeast of Santa Cruz. It’s pretty much the southest I’ve traveled for hiking, although the trip took less than an hour, thanks to its proximity to major highways. Although the area stopped being a logging camp in the 1920’s, it only became a state park in the 60’s. Compared to a lot of the other state parks, that’s pretty young. This park is close enough to “civilization” that many people eschew the Park’s parking lot. They park at businesses that exist right outside the park and then bike or run inside, thus avoiding the daily park fee. I kinda think this is a rude move, because they are using the park while not supporting it. It’s also a tiring move, because even if you park right outside the park, it’s a long, windy, uphill climb to the park interior. Basically, if you park outside, it’s a 5k just to get to anything worth seeing.

Nisene Parks State Park was sorta disappointing. Not too much signage, so I often didn’t know where I was. This is especially true near the park entrance, where the trails meander and I found myself back-tracking quite a bit. There are some very long hikes available here, but I found myself wanting to hit trails that were really far apart, so I ended up driving between trailheads. The first trails I hit included really old growth trees, including some real monsters, while the later trails were ridgeline trails through previously logged areas.

Alongside the issues with trail signs, there was a real dearth of historical information as well. The pictures I show pretty much detail the entirety of the documentation on site, which was disappointing, because I like to think that I’m learning while I’m hiking. Also, one of the main reasons I picked this park was that the epicenter of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake is actually close to one of the trails! There is even a sign! Imagine my horror when I got there to find out that the Aptos Creek trail was closed! A great disappointment. Whatever. Overall, I grade this place a C. Again, no one punched me in the face.

Anyways, enjoy the pictures, and Merry Christmas to everyone! I successfully ordered a Bag of Random Crap from Woot today!

Flickr Set Here.
Slideshow Below.
Pictures & Descriptions after the jump.

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Over the past weekend, I caught this video up on Fark’s video page. I had never seen it before, and I have to say, I find it positively entrancing. I watch once a day, often more. It’s Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol , this video is from roundabouts 1973, and there are few things I don’t love about it. I love the beat and the growl of the guitar. I love the choreography and the outfits. I love the disco-dancing blonde (Should I have been a child of the 70’s? Perhaps. Without the internet, I probably would get a lot more done) Heck, I even like the horns, and in general I hate horn flourishes in songs (you can thank the ska fad of the late 90’s and early 00’s for that). It’s like something Tarantino would put in his movies.

However, the most fascinating thing about this video, in my mind, is that fact that it’s gibberish. He isn’t speaking Italian (except at the very beginning of the video). He isn’t speaking any language. But it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s supposed to sound like English, with its bluesy edge and faux-American accent. And because of this, your mind starts to try and make sense of and form intelligible words (as has been done with great success in some Bollywood videos). The Japanese have a word for it : Soramimi : mishearing words in one language (or in this case, no language) for another language. The intralingual equivalent is mondegreening, like all those people who thought Jimi Hendrix was saying “Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy.” Since Adriano is singing in something close to an American accent, it also makes me wonder if non-English speakers hear their own language or just assume that it’s English.

I am an ignorant American; while I know a bit of German and a slight amount of French, I couldn’t really carry a conversation in anything other than English. But I’ve always thought that if you had me listen to people talking in Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and Hungarian for one minute, I would identify 6 out of 6 at least 90% of the time, just based on what I know about the languages. What this video makes me wonder is that if I had each of those people pretend to be speaking in one of the other languages (Assuming it doesn’t just devolve into racist stereotyping), would I do just as well?

So, if you know me, you know that I don’t like Tom Brady. In fact, even if you don’t really know me, you might suspect that I hate Tom Brady, considering that I’ve made two posts consisting solely of the fact that I hate Tom Brady, on occasions where he has suffered devastating losses.

So why do I hate Tom Brady? Well, it doesn’t help that he played football at Michigan. My loathing of Michigan football is even deeper than that for Tom Brady. But it’s more than that. You see, I dislike all “good-looking” quarterbacks. Tom Brady is already a quarterback. He plays the most important position for the most popular sport in America. He makes millions of dollars because he’s actually really good at it. He has probably spent his entire life, since high school, as the center of adulation and attention. He should not get to knock up famous actresses and then marry supermodels. It’s just not right. If you’re going to be a successful quarterback, you should be homely. Otherwise, this is all just unbalanced. Booo, Tom Brady. Yeah, Kyle Orton!

Basically, though, my argument is seeded in jealousy and an inapplicable standard of justice. That’s just petty and irrational. Luckily, science has stepped in an gave me a plausible, legitimate reason for my prejudices! Continue Reading »