I am going to practice on you.

My favorite research nurse gave me some expired blood draw kits. Who wants to come over this weekend???

Maybe I will buy a chicken, or a pig. For practicing. We could eat it later.

his name is "Grimace"

also, if you stick a meat patty in HR Pufnstuf's mouth, he becomes Mayor McCheese - and they were designed by the same person, who also did the Kool Aid man.

Fire at Yahoo

So a laptop exploded outside of a conference room that I was in and started a fire. I guess everyone on the floor went running, but inside the room we didn't hear it and it wasn't until someone trying to put it out with a fire extinguisher. I couldn't see the fire but it was hard to breathe from all the smoke so it was pretty scary for a minute.

The thing that disturbs me most and I can't believe I'm saying this publically is that I kind of elbowed a slower moving old lady out of the way trying to get to the exit. There was a lot of commotion and it's not like I knocked her over or anything, but there it is. I guess I'm not gonna be the guy who goes running in to a burning building to save strangers.

The other scary thing is that Yahoo doesn't seem to have working smoke detectors. Someone actually had to pull the fire alarm and the office was filled with smoke already.

It's already in the news an hour later: http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/20/dell-battery-explodes-at-yahoo-hq-hundreds-evacuat/

badass shark hunters

Burritophile

http://www.burritophile.com/

Burrito ranking website

man rejects penis transplant

this just screamed 832capp blog:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1874818,00.html

Chinese surgeons have performed the world's first penis transplant on a man whose organ was damaged beyond repair in an accident this year. The surgical team claims the operation was a success. After 10 days, tests revealed the organ had a rich blood supply and the man was able to urinate normally.

Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis two weeks later. "Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off," Dr Hu said. An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.

20,000 passwords

Wow this guy got 20,000 semi-random myspace passwords, from stupid people who feel victim to a phishing scam. I've always wondered what people put for their passwords, now I know: http://cyber-knowledge.net/blog/2006/09/16/analyzing-20000-myspace-passwords/.

Slate

Slate is by far my favorite source of news these days. They are also the only news source I know of that is really experimenting with their medium.

In this artice: http://www.slate.com/id/2149508/ a writer criticizes a 9/11 photo and asks for the people in the photo to wite in. The next day one person does, and then a second person (they are able to verify identities with photographs), and they publish both letters in an article: http://www.slate.com/id/2149578/. Then the photographer writes in, which they also publish as an article: http://www.slate.com/id/2149675/.

How cool is that? I love all these newspapers and magazines whining about how Google/Craigslist/Internet is putting them out of business. Maybe they should actually do something interesting with the new medium and they could be relevant again.

Banned Books

Google has an interesting blog post listing a bunch of banned books over the years: http://books.google.com/googlebooks/banned/. I can't believe how many of these books I read and liked. I'm not a huge fan of old books in general, but the books I've read on that list are some of my favorites. What's the connection? Why do they choose to ban my favorite Hemmingway novel, The Sun Also Rises, or my favorite Tony Morrison novel, Song of Solomon. Pretty much all the books on this list that I've read: To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Brave New World, etc. really stand out as the best among books I was forced to read in school. (Except for Their Eyes are Watching God -- that book sucks). Why is all the stuff I hated like Shakespeare, some of the really bad Hemmingway, Melville, Jane Austin, that "Stranger in a Strange Land"...

I really can't figure out how they chose these books to ban. I mean why do you ban The Sun Also Rises as opposed to any other Hemmingway book? They're all a little sexist, a little racist, a little homophobic, etc. But I don't know. Is there something these books have in common that made me like them and the censors hate them? I can't figure out the pattern.

An homage to hobos...

In honor of Luke and Mollie's large family interest in hobos, check out a list of hobo signs that they leave for each other (that's the hobos, not Luke and Mollie):

Hobo Signs 1
Hobo Signs 2
Hobo Signs 3

Also, for Luke, this might just have to be our next movie night:

Emperor of the North Pole

:(

a lady doctor on the phone just yelled that i am incompetent and reflect badly on my institution as a whole.

??

!!!

Cemetery's flags found in squirrel nest Thu Sep 7, 10:05 AM ET

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. - Groundskeepers at Forest Hill Cemetery thought it was kids who were stealing dozens of American flags. That is, until one found a giant squirrel's nest.

"I was mowing, looked up out into the distance, and something caught my eye," said Dave Ender, a groundskeeper employed by the Eau Claire Parks and Recreation Department.

He drove his riding lawnmower to a nearby street intersection and looked up a tree.
"Low and behold, I found the missing flags," Ender said.

They were ripped and serving as the foundation of a giant squirrel nest.

"I never seen anything like that before," he said.
"Those little rascals, they're just amazing," he said.

Luke and I at Bumbershoot

Bumbershoot., originally uploaded by ckeech.

So Lukas and I went to Seattle for the long weekend to go to a very fun music/art/everything festival called Bumbershoot. We are lame and did not bring a camera to take photos, but, thanks to Ye Olde Web 2.0 I found this one on Flickr...not only is it of the festival, it is of us. Sitting and waiting for New Pornographers to start. Good Times...well, this moment really depicts a pretty hot, rather boring time, but Good Times overall.

One of the funnest parts was going to see the Blue Scholars (the wonderful hip-hop group we mainly came to Seattle for) at a huge Mainstage show with about 20,000 people and then going to a small club afterwards and seeing the same guys perform, along with lots of other extremely talented friends of theirs, for about 40 people. Of course, most of the 20,000 peeps out at the Mainstage were there waiting for Kanye West, who came on after the Scholars. But still, the hometown group rocked the crowd just as hard as Mr. West - even managing to get a sea of people in a stadium two-stepping in sync.

Also - if you have never seen Jamie Lidell live (I hadn't even heard of him before Bumbershoot myself) and you get the chance, DO IT. My God, that man can work a stage. He came on in a full trench coat and ascot-like thing and proceeded to strip down to a gold-sequined tuxedo jacket with full tails while crooning the most soulful songs I've ever heard out of a white boy and pumping hot beats from all kinds of machines. Good man.

Institute for the Future of Braniff

1975 commercial - Braniff Airways - The Supersonic Future

hobo

this morning on my way to work a homeless man was wandering through the bike lane with A POUCH MADE OUT OF BANDANNA TIED TO A STICK. that is so old school.

also, and i am not kidding about this, at the intersection where i park my bike, a daddy heroin addict was schooling a boy heroin addict in how to shoot up. he was all, get out some cotton, then...

damn.