Tag: reflections

Dr. Bronner’s may be hippy soap but it’s my favorite soap. I like it for two reasons:

First, it gets my body very clean and leaves me smelling like peppermint, lavendar, or something else pleasant.

Second, it makes me laugh because the bottle is covered with what seems like 5pt ramblings offering advice about love and cleanliness in "God’s Spaceship Earth." You can read an example label here or browse through the complete list.

I ran across this Yiddish Proverb recently: What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.

I think that if you ignore the label’s claim that it can also be used as toothpaste, this is truly a perfect cleaning solution.

As I was scanning through the strongly connected set trust analysis last night. I noticed this UID on key 0x3CDB1972:

 Marina Bykova (A girl) <mbykova@cs.ohiou.edu> 

"A girl," enclosed in parentheses, is a comment and is usually not something one needs to verify when doing a keysigning.

Hypothetically speaking (as I have no reason to believe that Marina Bykova (A girl) is not A girl), I can’t help but wonder: If I met Marina and Marina was not A girl, should I sign the key?

I went to federal court to hear a challenge of part of the Communications Decency Act as part of Nitke v. Ashcroft. One of the lawyers for the government asked Barbara Nitke if photo galleries (the non-online version) were subject to constraints of space and could only show limited number of photos at a given time.

Imagine, for a moment, a physical photo gallery that could transcend the limitations of physical space. I like the idea but it seems a bit far-fetched. Nitke’s answer was, of course, that they were constrained by physical space.

I think someone who needs needs to ask this is very imaginative — a quality I respect. However, I do not think they are as observant as I’d like in my federal attorneys.

Yesterday, I remembered a protein joke I made up a year or so ago:

Two proteins pass each other on the street. The first protein thinks he recognizes the second protein from his school days and asks her if she went to Protein High.

A little confused at first but definitely not from Protein high, the second protein says, "Ah, me? No."

When I write a novel, I am going to include a character who eats flying fish row (飛びこ) because he revels in the idea that he is eliminating hundreds of potential lives with each bite.

I would never like to meet such a person but I think it would make a fanscinating character trait.

Yesterday, I learned new and important definitions for words that I thought I already knew:

wag:

‘Any one ludicrously mischievous; a merry droll’ (J.); a habitual joker. (In early use often combined with sense 1.) Phrase, to play the wag.

slag:

slang. a. A worthless or insignificant person (freq. used as a term of contempt): spec. (a) a coward; (b) a rough or brutal person; (c) any objectionable or contemptible person; (d) a vagrant or a petty criminal; also, such persons collectively; (e) (the most usual sense) a prostitute or promiscuous woman; a slattern.

(I understand that this definition will not be new to most English speakers from the other side of the pond.)

My rhyming poetry with lines ending in ‘ag’ will never be the same again.

If you want to catch someone off guard, I think a good idea would be to show up to meet them soaking wet on a non-rainy day and then interrupt, change the subject, or evade the question if they ask how you got that way.

People tend to think that someone needs to have a good reason to be very wet and become obsessed when they can’t find an obvious one. They’ll rarely guess that their obsession is, in the fact, the reason.

Despite having grown up in the United States, I’ve never managed to learn the rules behind American football. I have always figured I wouldn’t like it very much.

I do however, understand the rules behind the arcade game Pigskin 621AD which I enjoy very much. I’ve heard it’s based on American football.

As far as I know, the things I enjoy most about Pigskin 621AD — the concealed weapons, the skeletons, haystacks and mudslicks on the field, the trolls introduced onto losing team in the final quarter — are all missing from American football. I can’t imagine why anybody would like American football without spears and the trolls.

A number of years ago, a friend and I were brainstorming about the following idea that I still has merit.

Often caricature artists at fairs on the street display pictures of celebrities as proof of their artistic ability. When you pay them to draw a picture of you, they draw a caricature of your head on a tiny body doing some activity you tell them you like.

I want to learn how to draw a single celebrity: Snoop Doggy Dogg for example. Then, I would set up shop on the street as caricature artist and advertise my work with 1-2 well-drawn pictures of Snoop. Every time someone asked me to produce a caricature of them doing a given activity, I would draw a picture of Snoop Doggy Dogg, with something roughly approximating the customer’s hair, engaged in the activity of the customer’s choice. If people objected, I would insist that, "that is just how I draw people — I thought it was clear from the example."

Last week, I went a Japanese ￥100 Store which has opened a branch in New York (except with import cost, it was a lot more like a ￥161 store). It was basically a dollar store in a different currency.

One thing they had for sale for ￥161 was silver stainless steel cylinders to hold ingredients for cooking. Being an outlet store, they had only two types:

• a cylinder with "Sugar" embossed onto the front;
• a cylinder with "Other" embossed onto the front;

I advocated buying the entire stock of "Other" cylinders and keeping all of my house’s food in these. While doing this might introduce some usability and learning curve issues into our kitchen, I think the aesthetic and philosophical qualities introduced would be well worth any inconvenience. The people I live with were less convinced.

This Saturday, I had the "opportunity" to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew. While the process is straightforward, many people seem to be stumped by the problem. Given that I’ve done it several times, I was able to educate my guests in the process of opening the bottle.

My friend Greg thought it would be nice to document the experience and arranged and directed an educational photo-narrative starring myself and Mika. He completed the piece and added titles to tie the whole thing into an educational photo documentary he’s called The Recalcitrant Cork.

For those who just want to learn how to open a bottle sans corkscrew, I’ve quickly written up an addendum in the form of technical notes that some people might find useful.

A few days ago, I talked about titles and business cards.

I think the coolest job title in the world is that the of the military commander of NATO. How cool would it be to have "Supreme Allied Commander" on your resume? The answer: very cool.

I think I will lobby Mark Shuttleworth to my have title at Canonical be Supreme Community Commander.

I’m serious.

I own a gold mobile telephone.

At first, I tried to deny it. I tried to convince myself and others that it was "bronze" or "champagne." The truth triumphed.

Later, I tried to change it. I bought a transparent face and back-plate on ebay. Over a few months, these have cracked and shattered into pieces and my phone has returned to its original color.

Today, I have decided to embrace the fact. I will take proud in my gold telephone and have changed its ringtone to this midi rendition of the theme to Goldfinger to demonstrate my pride to everyone within earshot.

There’s an animal called the "bighorn sheep." In the Museum of Natural History in New York, they have the stuffed remains of the bighorn sheep with the biggest horns on record.

Think of how that ram would have felt if he had known that he was the biggest-horned bighorn sheep. I think that such an achievement must be the source of both confidence and satisfaction on a level that I doubt I will ever experience — and am probably better off without.

I know people who have multiple job titles and multiple sets of business cards to match. They claim that this allows them to fluidly assume different roles when speaking to different people.

The head of the Anglican Church is one of these multi-title jobs. If I had that job, I would want at least two sets of cards. The first would say, "Archbishop of Canterbury" because I think that title commands a lot of respect. The second would say, "Primate of All England," because I think there’s a very different, very interesting, and and potentially very useful, effect that this title could exert as well.