This is too insane not to link to: Ballooning into the Sky. This guy actually ties himself to a bunch of balloons and flies around. I smell a Darwin award!
Via Slashdot.
Author: Jon
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December 1st
December is upon us already. Bust out your advent calendars (we did), hang your wreaths (we did), Christmas is a mere 24 days away. Was Thanksgiving really less than a week ago? Jeez, having this cold must be screwing with my sense of time.
I made my traditional fruitcakes over the weekend. Really! I (loosely) follow a recipe from an older Betty Crocker cookbook, it’s better than most modern fruitcake recipes I’ve seen, and I wrap the fruitcakes in brandy-soaked cheesecloth to mellow for a month (or more, depending on when I make them). That’s the secret, soaking in brandy and aging. I love my fruitcakes. You would, too. Maybe tomorrow I’ll post the recipe I use.
Gotta gear up for more holiday baking, too. Gingersnaps, sugar cookies (shaped and cutouts), fudge, at least. I remember one thing my mom used to make for the holidays: dates stuffed with almonds and cream cheese and rolled in powdered sugar. Awesome! More work than I want to take on right now, though.
Mmmmmmmm, December.
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Jeopardy
So Ken Jennings finally gave up the ghost on Jeopardy today. Actually, to those of us who already knew about the rumors flying around the net and even listened to yesterday’s spoiler audio clip from the show, it’s no surprise. Of course, everybody will be—is!—speculating on whether he threw the game on purpose (out of boredom) or genuinely lost.
My own thoughts at first were in the threw-the-game camp, but after seeing the show I’m on the fence. It seemed like an obvious Final Jeopardy question to miss, so maybe his loss was a little bit of both factors? Only Ken Jennings knows for sure.
Is it just me, or is that Wikipedia page on Jennings that I linked to above totally insane in the amount of detail it has? Good lord, people need to get a life.
Myself included.
One last note, though. I should be on Jeopardy. I would totally kick ass. Especially against the kids!
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Water vs. Pop
monkeyinabox: “Mind you, this was back in the days before bottled water was all the rage. Water came from the tap, unless you bought gourmet water, Perrier, or whatever rich people drank. Growing up in a place with good tap water, it makes that kind of stuff seems pretty stupid.”
Great bit on being a “soda pop junkie.” I remember back in the days when I worked graveyard shift in Spokane doing (essentially) data processing, I’d take a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew to work and often finish it before I left.
And yeah, I never really got the bottled water thing, either. Growing up, we had a well, so our water was pretty pure and uncut.
Well, except for this one time in the cistern… that’s a story that almost turned me off of water for good, but I think I’ll save it for another day.
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20 pounds
I hope everyone had a pleasant Thanksgiving this year. Ours was, except for the fact that I was sick. Nothing serious, I just came home from work early Wednesday totally drained, achy, throaty—all the usual signs of the flu. Went to bed for awhile, got up for dinner (soup), went to bed early. Took much medicine. Slept poorly, but fortunately it “merely” turned into a troublesome cold. (This is the latest I’ve been up since Tuesday, and I won’t be up for much longer.)
We had a small group for Thanksgiving this year—just us and my mom. Despite that, we still had a 20 pound turkey to roast for some insane reason. That thing was a monster. It’s still a monster, sitting in the fridge waiting to be carved… but it was delicious.
Okay, enough for tonight. Gotta go cough some more before bed.
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Pink Powdered Soap
I was thinking last night (during our blogger thing at McMenamins) that if McMenamins really wants to capture the feel of a school, they should fill the soap dispensers in the bathrooms with that pink powdered soap I remember using in grade school.
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The Jones Soda Holiday Pack
When I was reviewing the server logs, I kept wondering why there were occasional searches for “green bean casserole soda” leading here, which seemed totally random. I figured it out today; it’s part of the new Jones Soda Holiday Pack, which is related to the Turkey Soda post I made last year around this time.
Holidays can be busy and down right stressful. How can you squeeze in eating when you have much more important tasks like shopping, decorating, and partying? Well the makers of last year’s popular Turkey & Gravy Soda have come up with a solution: the complete holiday meal replacement set equipped with a square meal, a straw, and a toothpick.
Introducing 5 new, flavor filled, tasty holiday sodas:
- Turkey & Gravy Soda
- Cranberry Soda
- Mashed Potato & Butter
- Green Bean Casserole
- Fruitcake Soda
It’s only $15.95 per case! I think I know what I want for Christmas…
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The Old St. Francis School kicks ass!
I got to check out the Old St. Francis School after work for a bit today, and my capsule review is that it totally kicks ass! It’s amazing, classic McMenamins, and I think—no, I know—it’s going to be hugely popular. A giant win for them.
Since they’re doing their “soft launch” right now, you can pretty much go wherever you like to check the place out. So I did: scoped out the restaurant and the pub, wandered through the Fireside Room (a cigar-friendly room with pool tables), gazed in awe at the Turkish-style soaking pool, checked out the theater, picked up a beer (a Hammerhead) at O’Kane’s, the little brewhouse among the bungalows, one of which I toured. The guest house a bit rustic, I’d say; they’re trying to preserve the feel of the 1950s to a large extent. Also strolled through the hotel wing and got to see one of the rooms (all of which were formerly classrooms). All very impressive—like I said, classic McMenamins.
The restaurant was packed. I didn’t ask how long a wait there was, since I wasn’t eating, but I picked up a menu (nothing radical on it though). And the guy who I talked to was really helpful in pointing out all the rooms and features to check out.
The only drawback? Popularity; it’s going to be the hot place to go for a long time, and might be hard to get into (particularly if you want to sit down and eat).
But who cares? McMenamins is finally in Bend! This rocks!
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Referrers, search engines, trends
Going through my site’s logfiles, I figured it’s about time for one of those navel-gazing site-analyzing posts. I’ve noticed some trends along the way, I think.
By far, the most search engine hits I get are from Google; over the past 30 days, I clocked 2,617 hits from Google, nearly four times more than Yahoo at 763 hits. In fact, the top ten search engines are:
1 Google 2,617 2 Yahoo 763 3 MSN 188 4 Altavista 82 5 AskJeeves 61 6 AOL Search 35 7 Netscape 20 8 AllTheWeb 16 9 Mamma 4 10 Lycos 4 I’m a little surprised by the amount of variation there.
The trends I’ve noticed are in the breakdown of what people are searching for from each site. Most of the Google searches are for free Palm ebooks, Matrix names, and variations on those themes; it seems that people are using Google to find specific types of information, knowing the parameters of what they’re looking for—targeted. The other search engines, on the other hand, seem to better reflect pop cultural references and more general searching. Among Yahoo searches, for instance, I see such phrases as, “boba fett” (number one), “kermit the frog,” “dell dude,” “a-team movie,” and so on. Same for the others.
So I’d guess that in Google searches, when they find me I’m near the top of the lists for what they’re searching for and the users are looking for specific things. On Yahoo and the others, though, it looks like people are more into browsing on vaguer searches, and clicking through on links that look interesting, but may not be relevant. The conclusion I’d draw from this (not surprisingly) is that Google users are power users, and the search engine people go to who want to really find something and get the job done, whereas Yahoo users are more casual, not so worried about the results, but they’ll do in a pinch.
And of course, the best part of this whole entry: listing some of the best/worst search phrases people have actually typed to get here. All verbatim.
- thongs in public
- what’s your name
- purple flowers
- jones green bean casserole soda
- van helsing absinthe
- donner party cannibalism
- heroin
- green bean soda
- white trash sex
- pong is a violent game
- twas the night bush
- green bean casserole soda
- ugliest picture
- topless rotten
- skinsuits
- donkey brew
- if you had a male tiger what would you name it
- snoop dog fir shizzle
- frog master
- fett ass
- cracker ingredients
- beer mugs carved in pumpkins
- what is the proper way to charge cell and cordless phones
- on the sierra nevada summerfest beer label what mountains are featured
- is there a formula for figuring out when thanksgiving day will be
- how do i clean vomit from couch
- check out my wife
- turkey soda
- where is it snowing in the united states november 11, 2004
- donner party beer
- emachine turns it’s self on
- halloween hooch drink
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Bloggers at McMenamins
Looks like this Thursday the 18th will be the next Bend/Central Oregon Bloggers get-together, at the new McMenamins Grand Opening at the Old St. Francis School. We (my wife will be joining us this time) should be there sometime between six and seven o’clock, but I don’t know where we’ll be meeting anybody, as it might be kind of crazy.