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.