Sometimes we find things on the Intertubes that we just have to share with everyone. And these three are related. They are all different versions of people dancing to the song “Happy” by Pharrel Williams. The first is set in Tunisia, where the old Star Wars sets have become a tourist attraction. The second is set in Poland. The third is a school choir from Detroit, Michigan.
Enjoy!
-Geoff
We got a slight covering of snow today, maybe an inch or a little more. And the temperatures plummeted a good bit from the mid-50s we had the other day. Right now it is about 18 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature tonight will probably drop down to around 9 or 10 degrees.
So while I was doing laundry and crafting cover letters, I popped in a movie that is just about as far away from winter, cold, and reality* as I could get…
Sharknado.
I used the mutton stew recipe I mentioned yesterday to make this, but I did make one change: I added yellow carrots, which would certainly have been known in Europe by the late middle ages. Orange would not become the typical carrot color for a few more centuries. Red would also have been common, but those are a little more difficult to come by these days, at least outside of a farmer’s market full of heirloom gardeners. It just felt like the stew needed something besides meat, an egg, and seasoning.
Note to self: get a better background for medieval cooking photos.
-Geoff
This week has become one snow event after another, and we are starting to actually run out of places to put the snow when we shovel. There are really only two piles: the big one on the other side of our trash and recycling bins, between them and the neighbor’s fence; and the small one in this little corner between the steps and the house, where there is a stump I want dead anyway. So the little pile is getting close to its maximum practical size, and the other one has reached the height of the bushes. And trying to chip away all the melted, compacted snow that had refrozen as ice all over the walk and steps took almost an hour of hard work. Thirty degrees outside and I was sweating.
Continue reading “More medieval cooking on a snowy winter’s eve”
On the day I wear black and refer to as The Crispus Attucks St. Valentine’s Massacre Memorial, the rest of the world celebrates Hallmark’s day and overspends on chocolate, jewelry, flowers, and all things pink and red. Last year we presented valentines in this space of a special variety. This year we’ve gathered some of the best that showed up in our Twitter feed. And by “best” we mean Geekiest. Enjoy.
On February 3rd, 1943, a small convoy named SG-19 was making its way across the Atlantic to Greenland from New York. It consisted of the United States Army Transport Dorchester and two smaller merchant vessels, the SS Lutz and the SS Biscaya, escorted by three Coast Guard cutters: Tampa, Escanaba and Comanche. Somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland at about 12:55 AM that morning, a German submarine torpedoed the Dorchester, knocking out her power as well as opening up her hull to the sea. Below decks were hundreds of young American servicemen, many of them on their first ocean voyage. They had been instructed to leave their life preservers on in case of attack, but the heat of the ship’s boilers and engines led many of them to take the jackets off. And with the loss of power they were all suddenly in the dark.
Among the personnel on board were four Army Chaplains, all First Lieutenants: George Fox (a Methodist); Alexander Goode (Reform-Rabbi); Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed); and John Washington (a Roman Catholic priest). The four had become fast friends at the Army Chaplains School on the Harvard University campus, right here in Cambridge.
Kelly found an article recently that she knew would interest me.
One of the things about zombies that is commonly accepted within the genre is that they are dead and rotting.* And in the normal world, all dead flesh is eventually broken down and picked apart by Mother Nature, leaving only bones, which will also one day disappear. Everything from bacteria to bugs to birds to bears, all feast on whatever carrion they can find. And so one scientist finally asks, how would zombies fare in the real world? Pretty poorly, apparently. As the author puts it:
Relax. Next time you’re lying in bed, unable to fall asleep thanks to the vague anxiety of half-rotten corpses munching on you in the dark, remember this: if there was ever a zombie uprising, wildlife would kick its ass.
-Geoff
*There are notable exceptions. The zombies in films like 28 Days Later and Zombieland, as well as the zombies in the Left4Dead video games, are technically alive, but have been turned into rabid/feral monsters due to some nasty disease.
As dumb as it sounds, one of the things I love about George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the heraldry. Specifically, the house sigils, as they are more commonly known, are some of the most iconic things about the show. Of course Martin based this on medieval heraldry practices that, at least technically, still exist to this day. Plenty of families have coats of arms, as do cities, towns, universities and colleges, etc. And the central part of any coat of arms is usually a shield of some sort. In the world of ASOIAF these tend to be fairly simple (the direwolf of House Stark, both the HBO version and book-ish version) although a few do get more complex (like House Tarth, HBO version and book-ish version). And GRRM goes to a lot of trouble to describe the sigils of a great many houses in ASOIAF. To give you an idea of the sheer amount of creative calories burned, check out the Heraldry page at the Citadel website and this awesome Westeros map some uber-geeks put together. I totally geeked out about both of those.
Well, Kelly and I decided a while back to make our own sigil (in true geek fashion) and now I will share it with the world via the Intertubes. A lot of people did something similar with the “Join the Realm” promo web page done by HBO for Game of Thrones. But I wanted to do our own, with symbols that meant something to both Kelly and me.
This is probably more like what I’m reading now as these are all my geeky contributions. Either way, this post was inspired by this first link. Enjoy.
I’m as interested in design and the engineering behind things as the next person. I’m also interested in Star Trek and I think Wil Wheaton is a great writer. That being said, I grew up watching Star Trek TNG and I’ve heard all sorts of stories about it over the years. Somewhere I heard a story about how the uniforms on TNG required special Star Trek issued underpants. I can’t find it ANYWHERE on the internets, but I remember reading it somewhere. That’s why I found this article so interesting.
There’s a joke somewhere on the internet about how you can use your cat to tell how cold it is. At some point around freezing the cat gets friendly enough to let you pet him, below freezing he’ll actually cuddle with you, and at some point near zero the cat tears open your midsection while you sleep and warms himself in your viscera a la Luke on Hoth.
That’s not quite how it works in our house.
The Books are Taking Over... 