Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

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  • Transformers. Live action movie. OMG.

    Okay, I was a little slow on the uptake for this one: Transformers: The Movie. Live action. For real. Opening July 4th of this year.

    I remember hearing the rumor about this way back when, thought, “Hey, that would be cool,” without thinking it would actually happen—you know, the usual Hollywood stuff, rumors are always flying. Then, suddenly, I recently spot the trailer online and nearly fall out of my chair.

    Yes, I’m fully aware I’m out-geeking even myself here, but back in the day Transformers were the toys to have and it was the cartoon on TV to watch. I even made paper Transformers, for crying out loud.

    Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the Transformers movie. I only have one complaint: Bumblebee will no longer be a Volkswagon Bug—instead, he’s a 1974 Chevrolet Camaro. WTF?? That just ain’t right.

  • Growing Up in Central Oregon: Livestock

    This is part of an ongoing series of articles that I’m writing on Central Oregon and growing up here; you can view the introduction here and the series as a whole here.

    Living relatively self-sufficiently on five acres, we always had some livestock. For all intents and purposes, we had a farm, but it was more of a small family farm than the big operations I usually think of when I hear the term (with cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, etc.).

    At any given time our livestock generally consisted of one milk cow and a coop full of chickens. Along the way we tried out different animals, but this was the general combination that held.

    (more…)

  • wikinovel

    I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later, but I don’t quite get how this is going to work: Publisher launches its first “wiki” novel. It’s:

    …a Web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to “wiki” software, the technology behind Web encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

    The novel, “A Million Penguins,” went live on Thursday and its first lines are already being written, edited and rewritten by enthusiasts on www.amillionpenguins.com.

    Penguin, which embarked on the project with a group of creative writing and new media students, says it is using the novel as a test of whether a group of disparate and diverse people can create a “believable fictional voice.”

    So, are they planning on “locking down” chapters as they’re finished? Because there’s really nothing stopping anybody from going in and changing, well, everything at any point, if it truly is open like Wikipedia. Suddenly chapter three makes no sense because chapters one and two are now telling a different story.

    Cool and interesting experiment, though. I might have to play around with it.

  • Making lunch (a vignette)

    Making lunches for the next day: my daughter’s, then my own. My daughter’s is simple: peanut butter and honey, carrot sticks, CapriSun, GoGurt, cheddar cheese sandwich crackers. Oh yeah, throw some candy for dessert in, too. Pack it all up in the Barbie cooler.

    Start on mine. Bologna and cheese on wheat, very original. Retrieve from the fridge: mayonnaise, dijon mustard, bread. Pause, then queue up some Journey on the computer. The kitchen is apparently in need of rock ballads tonight.

    Highway run
    Into the midnight sun
    Wheels go ’round and ’round
    You’re on my mind

    Sandwich comes together. Set it aside, back to the fridge. Carrots, celery… celery is droopy, good thing it’s the last of it.

    Any way you want it
    That’s the way you need it
    Any way you want it

    Oddly appropriate music to chop veggies to. Careful of the fingers, the carrot is rolling a bit. Now, cottage cheese or yogurt?

    Streetlights, people
    Living just to find emotion
    Hiding somewhere in the night

    Cottage cheese. It’s the big container, Costco-sized but not from Costco. Scoop some into the tupperware-that-isn’t-tupperware plastic bowl, snap a lid on it. Pack it all up into my lunch cooler (soft-walled), then grab an orange while Steve Perry tells me to Don’t stop believin’.

    Lunch is ready.

  • Truth(?) in advertising

    So there’s this article that appeared in the New York Times about Activia, Dannon’s yogurt that is filled with “live cultures” that are healthy and good for you. And they’re marketing it like it’s something new and revolutionary.

    Ummmm, okay…

    Except every bit of yogurt I’ve ever bought—regardless of brand—has been full of live cultures that are healthy and good for you. That’s what yogurt is. Seriously, go buy a generic brand of yogurt—it says this on the container. Are people not aware of this?

    Yeah, I know there’s a lot of misinformation out there, but for some reason this one just rubbed me the wrong way.

  • Oregon Lottery Space Invaders!

    Oregon Lottery Space Invaders Scrach-ItI find it rather surreal that the Oregon Lottery is now offering Space Invaders lottery tickets. Seriously. It’s part of their “Travel back” line of Scratch-Its. They look rather complicated though, and cost $3 a pop.

    Now they need to come out with other classic arcade games: Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids…

  • Links

    Just a collection of links to things I like and/or found amusing recently.

  • 2007 Chuggnutt Zeitgeist

    Yes, it’s that introspective time again. Since I’ve done these for the last two years already, I thought it would be interesting to put it all together in a table format to compare years.

      2006 2005 2004
    Number of blog entries: 155 244 306
    Total words written (approximate): 29,894 39,810 45,537
    Average words per entry: 192.9 163.2 148.8
    Total visitors (including all the junk): 1,041,504 633,100 242,433
    Average visitors per day: 2,853 1,734 687
    Total real visitors (approximate): 681,069 430,505 n/a
    Average real visitors per day: 1,865 1,179 n/a
    Most active month:  October, then May October n/a
    Ten most popular blog entries:
      1. The Skittles beard commercial: 8,253
      2. Bill Gates’ house: 2,985
      3. Smoke alarm batteries: 2,922
      4. Jack Bauer Facts: 2,245
      5. Cooking salmon: 2,186
      6. The Lost Ultimate Theory: 2,016
      7. Chuck Norris facts: 1,935
      8. The name game: 1,778
      9. The Dirty Screech: 1,705
      10. Life is what happens when you’re making other plans: 1,390

     

     
      1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
      2. Houston’s glass public toilet: 9,610
      3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
      4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
      5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
      6. Leonard Nimoy’s Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
      7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
      8. Central Oregon’s biggest baby?: 3,821
      9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
      10. Never ending fall: 3,017

     

     

    		  
    Total non-spam comments: 599 1,556  
    Ten most popular searches landing here:
      1. boba fett: 2,851
      2. darth maul: 2,243
      3. burger king mask: 2,158
      4. skittles beard commercial: 1,395
      5. free palm ebooks: 1,389
      6. matrix name generator: 1,045
      7. pdb reader: 993
      8. jedi: 890
      9. never ending fall: 865
      10. biggest baby: 851

     

     
      1. burger king mask: 5,295
      2. boba fett: 3,086
      3. pdb reader: 1,972
      4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
      5. darth maul: 1,534
      6. kermit the frog: 1,376
      7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
      8. www.amazon.com /burgerking: 1,210
      9. super walmart: 973
      10. palm reader: 877

     

     

    		 n/a
    Top five search engines:
      1. Google: 66,133
      2. Yahoo: 19,000
      3. MSN: 4,526
      4. AskJeeves: 1,871
      5. Altavista: 510

     

     
      1. Google: 72,180
      2. Yahoo: 20,629
      3. MSN: 4,042
      4. AskJeeves: 1,259
      5. AOL Search: 1,061

     

     

    		 n/a
    Approximate breakdown of browsers and traffic:
      • Internet Explorer: 61.83%
      • Firefox/Mozilla: 25.06%
      • Opera: 0.76%
      • RSS stuff: 5.21%
      • Other: 7.13%

     

     
      • Internet Explorer: 61%
      • Firefox/Mozilla: 23%
      • Opera: 1%
      • RSS stuff: 2%
      • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
      • Other: 4.8%

     

     

    		 n/a
    Total number of bot hits: 418,028 n/a n/a

     

  • Words written in 2006

    I’m adding up the numbers from my three blogs, and it turns out that between them I wrote approximately 101,192 words among 511 blog entries for 2006. Wow… the previous year the numbers were 78,181 and 466. Another way to look at it: that’s roughly the equivalent of a novel a year.

  • Where is the time going?

    Time has been passing too quickly lately. Seriously. Where has it been going? I keep finding myself surprised to discover that something I thought happened just last year was really three years ago, for instance, or that I’ve been at my current job for four years, and it doesn’t seem nearly that long.

    Part of it is that I get older, the passing of time seems to speed up. My grandmother used to say this all the time, and while (as a kid) I knew the truth of this, I never really knew the truth of it, you know? I’m not sure that’s possible when you’re young; time seemed to pass so slowly then.

    (And yet, here I am now, stuck in the present like always.)

    I don’t mean to imply that I’m depressed about my age, or anything like that. It was more of a fleeting observation that I wanted to write down—without sounding too maudlin. Perhaps I’ll have more to write about this at a later time…