You ever read up on entomology for the sole reason of being able to have this conversation:
Normal person (NP): Ack! A cockroach! I hate bugs. Nerdy You (Y): Cockroaches aren't bugs? NP: Huh? What are they, then? Y: Blattariae. Bugs are Hemipterae. NP: What's the difference? Y: Bugs like aphids and cicadas have mouthparts adapted to piercing and sucking. Roaches have generalised mouthparts and their first pair pf wings form a hardened protective shield.
The problem is, nerds like you and me expect the conversation to continue like this:
NP: Wow! I am in awe of your learning! I am not worthy!
If half the 'Verse was settled from Asia, where were the Asians in Firefly? Is media casting changing to better reflect global diversity or has progress effectively stalled since the original Star Trek? Does Hollywood need some sort of "affirmative casting" plan?
Andrew Clark (M) Rob Caves Berry Kercheval Justin Lloyd Carlos Pedraza
Sunday 5:30 PM The Happiest Place Off Earth
What might Disney: Mars look like? What can we do if we build an amusement park at L5? And how will the changes in local gravity and atmosphere modify the technological requirements?
Chris Doyle (M) Berry Kercheval Justin Jackson Tim Kirk Mia Molvray
Monday 1:00 PM "Pop Goes the Culture"
"There's no place like home." "I feel like I've fallen down the rabbit hole." Some fantasy and sci-fi classics have permeated popular culture to the point that people get the reference without even knowing the original source material. Is this a good thing or has popular culture finally jumped the shark?
Arabella Benson (M) Tim Crowley Berry Kercheval Kate Morgenstern Martin Young
From a craigslist posting seeking a freelance writer:
"The write candidate will be able to write coherently, be able to perform splel checks on their writing, proof read and accept constructive criticism."
The daughter-unit is now happily living in her own apartment much closer to school. It's 3 miles instead of 40 now.
Saturday and Sunday I made 6 trips from Palo Alto to Daly City. The first was the funniest. We were about to get in the loaded station wagon and I spotted the Airship Ventures Zeppelin overhead. "Cool" we said.
We drove up, unloaded, and came out to head home. There was the Zeppelin, just passing over us.
We drove home along 280 and when we came over the hill just south of Colma where you can see straight down the SFO runways, it was there again, heading south now.
Then when we came over Page Mill to get down into Palo Alto, there it was AGAIN! STILL FOLLOWING US!!
I'm not paranoid, but it seemed like the Zeppelin was stalking me!
(What it was really doing was taking a load of sightseers from their Mountain View base up to San Francisco, around the Golden Gate Bridge and back. But that's not nearly as much fun as Zeppelin Surveillance.)
Meme of the day: Make an album cover. 1) Click on wikipedia's "Random Article", That's your band name. 2) Select "random quotations" on quotationpages.com. The last four or five wirds of the last quote are your album title. 3) Click on “explore the last seven days” on Flickr. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Put it together in Photoshop, Gimp or whatever and post it.
Here's mine, from the fictional Palo Alto band "Dirty Pictures". I sort of like it.
So, I drank the Twitter Kool-Aid™. Anyone who gives a damn can follow me as @berry_k.
It was a bit weird. Within half an hour I was being followed (that's like the Twitter version of being friended) by a goldfish in London (no, really, that's what his profile says) and learned that Stephen Fry was stuck in an elevator.
Grab the book nearest you. Right now. Turn to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal. Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.
Closest eh? I'm at work, and within reach are Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh, I Know a Trick Worth Two of That by "Samuel Holt", and BEATLES: The Complete Scores, but the closest, well. The fifth complete sentence on page 56 is:
They'd come home all "filled with the spirit," an' it was a sure bet we wouldn't be gettin' us no pussy till they came down off their religious high horses.
It's from a story in The Best of the Bubbas of the Apocalypse, edited by Selina Rosen. I happen to have a stack of contributor's copies in my office. My first published story is reprinted in it. Yay me! Too bad page 56 wasn't in my story.