Racewalking on steroids

So apparently an Olympic racewalker got busted for doing banned substances. As if racewalking weren't embarassing enough.

so once again, being a scientist must be the easiest job ever. Like this study, which found that young men are not good at reading women.

Really?! Wow! Thanks, science! No one knew that before!

I have noted this kind of thing previously.

Exterminating Government Employees

So this is a sign at my work. I guess I won't be working there for much longer.

so sometimes it seems like such an easy job to be a scientist. For example, this study: "Next plague likeliest to emerge from poor tropical countries."

No way! You mean the next plague won't come from Geneva or Connecticut or the Yukon Territory? What a shocking development.

so it's Valentine's Day. Time for the annual "Valentine's Day is stupid" post. To me, it's a dumb attempt by restaurants and crap salesmen to have people buy crap they wouldn't otherwise buy (chocolates, bears, etc) and buy overpriced meals to tell somebody you love them. Because nothing says love more than forced and expected purchases. And then they try to guilt you in to doing it, if you don't, you don't love that person.

Maybe I'm a grouch, but I'd rather be told that somebody loves me randomly, not on some day when people are supposed to do it. To me it's just another day, but with more balloons on the Metro.

so this has been all over the news - CNN, the Post, DCist, etc. It snowed in Virginia and a kid at Lake Braddock Secondary School called a school administrator at home after not reaching him at his office to ask why they didn't cancel school. The administrator's wife called the kid back and left him a really nasty message. It's ridiculous. Maybe the kid shouldn't have called, but 1. If you work for the school system you should be smart enough not to list your number, and 2. Don't call the kid back! What's wrong with this woman?

UPDATE: I also found that the lady is listed on the staff page for another Fairfax County school, Eagle View Elementary. That makes it even worse, that she works for the school system and makes this kind of call to students. She's listed as Candi Tistadt, not Candy Tistadt as it is in the articles, but it's got to be the same lady.

so Vladimir Putin is Time's Man of the Year. Are you kidding me?

But you know what, I think they just did it to get press. I'm not going to link to it. It's such a stupid pick, a dictator who squelches dissent, has journalists and political opponents killed, puts a lackey in power, etc etc, there's no way it could be a serious pick. But if they chose Al Gore or Ban Ki-Moon or somebody, would they get as much reaction? No.

Then again, check out their 1938 pick. (Apparently the covers floating around with him on them are fake, as he wasn't on the cover that year.)

so this video has been super popular at work ever since Appalachian State beat Michigan in football. It's ridiculous and terrible.



You can just tell it was created by some committee of dumb administrators, and lo and behold, it was. The school newspaper reports on the video, saying it was made for a state tour by, you guessed it, a committee. It was on VH1 and elsewhere, and got even more hits after the big win.

A university spokesman is trying to distance the school from the video, saying the video was created for a tour through the state by the university, and that "somebody probably picked the video up from the Internet when it was linked to the Appalachian Family Caravan Web site and is now using it for purposes other than for what it was created." The spokesman thinks "the video will not directly hurt the way Appalachian is viewed and hopes people who know the university understand the video was taken out of context."

Good luck with that, considering how much we've been laughing at it, and one alum said "I sincerely hope this is some kind of joke video. If not, ASU will never again see a dime of my money."

For those unfamiliar, ASU is in Boone, NC, and is kind of a hippie school.

so for my 750th post, here's "Chocolate Rain." It's a dumb/weird/bizarrely hypnotizing song that is stuck in my head now. It's even got a Wikipedia article.



I also like the take-off.



And there's this one.

so I just saw that movie "Smokey and the Bandit." It was pretty bad.

It was obviously made to capitalize on the trucker/CB radio thing that was pretty popular for awhile (like CW McCall's "Convoy" song). For the first part of the movie, Burt Reynolds and Sally Field (who is surprisingly good looking) are funny together, and the other guy, Jerry Reed (who also played the bad coach in "Waterboy") was pretty funny. Unfortunately, the rest is corny.

Lots of things happen for no reason at all - a Japanese guy crashes into a car, they're suddenly in the forest, random people show up, it's weird. It's almost like the story parts of the movie were cut out, leaving only double entendres and car chases. And they mentioned Coors beer about 100 times. It had to have been one of the first big time product placement movies. And the music is all about what's happening in the movie, which is also lame.

So anyway, not that people are really clamoring to see this, but if it's On Demand or something, steer clear.

so there's a lot of these videos floating around the YouTubes - "NFL Fantasy File," NFL players doing amazing stuff. However, I think most, if not all, are fake.

For example, this one of Jason Campbell throwing two passes and having them bounce off each other.



For one, the sound of the balls hitting seems fake. Then the bounce doesn't seem real, the physics seems wrong. And the angle of the balls doesn't seem right when they come back in the screen. I'm not buying it.

UPDATE: see, i'm not crazy. Dan Steinberg from the Post thinks it's fake and interviewed Jason Campbell, who didn't give him a straight answer. Signs point to fake city USA.

so this movie looks absolutely terrible

so I've heard a fair amount about this guy Patrick Wolf. People mention him on their Myspaces and Facebooks and blogs and whatnot. I listened to a couple songs and they didn't do anything for me, kind of boring. But then I saw his picture and decided I'd never listen to him. Look at this clown.

This guy's the definition of "tries too hard." "Hey, I'll get ridiculous poofy hair and sit on a carousel. That will be witty and clever. Then I will get a tattoo of a unicorn (?!?!) above my skinny boob." Every picture is like "I am so sad and vulnerable, :(" It's just lame. And anyway, his name is Patrick Wolf. Dumb.

so I think saying "with apologies to" is really dumb. I see it when people make puns or take-offs on quotations (and sometimes titles or photographs). To me, it seems really pointless, other than trying to seem smart because you know some famous person's quote or book or what have you. I really doubt the famous person will actually find your apology, and in the unlikely event they did, I doubt they'd care.

This is what inspired it, a random Facebook photo, but I've seen it all over the place. If you can't see it, it's a photo of three women, and the caption is "Three Women (apologies to Robert Altman)."

so I had an "Office Space" moment at work today. About a week ago, they sent around a mass email telling everybody to change their voicemail greetings. There's this long script which everybody has to follow, and which they (whoever "they" are) actually check it, and now we all had to change it again. They decided to change one of the phone numbers, so everybody in the agency has to change their outgoing voicemails. Which is certainly not stupid or a huge waste of time. (That is sarcasm.)

The script is long and took me about five times to get it right the first time. Here it is:

Hello, this is (------ Your Name ------), (------ Your Title ------) with the Office of the ( ----- name of the place where I work -----).

I’m not able to take your call right now, but if you’ll leave me a message, I will return your call within 24 hours or the next business day.

For immediate assistance, please call (202) _________ to reach our Project Coordinator.

Thanks for calling.

The "thanks for calling" part is on the second page of the Word document they sent out and I forgot to say it. No big deal, who cares, right? No, I got an email saying I have to fix it or we'll get in trouble.

That's got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We'll get in trouble for me leaving off "thank you" on a two paragraph voicemail greeting? It's up there with the guy in "Office Space" whose job is to pass documents from one guy to another. I can't believe it's someone's job to do this. What a humongous waste of time (not to mention money, since I'm getting paid to change my voicemail greeting so many times and someone else is writing these greetings and then making us change them.)

How about "Hi, this is Andrew Wiseman, leave me a message" beep? Is that so wrong?

so my friend sent this to me the other day, it's a new version of that game where you put the states on the map. It's got satellite imagery instead of just a blank map, but I have a bone to pick with it - it's got a really fucked up projection. By that I mean it distorts a lot of the states, making it a lot harder to place them.

For example, on the map Oregon (pictured above) is squished east to west, as are California and Washington. The map makes California look pretty small and weirdly curvy. Compare that to this map from the University of Texas, where all the states have their same shape and size. Oregon looks twice as long east-west as on the game.

It looks like on the game they're centered somewhere in the eastern part of the country, maybe over Kentucky or something. I can't even figure out what it is, it's so messed up. So the moral of the story - don't feel bad if you mess up this game.

so I was browsing around on Wikipedia and discovered this: it's Rivers Cuomo from Weezer's first band. He's in the back middle. Nice hair.

Apparently it was a "progressive metal" band called Avant Garde, complete with stupid 80s metal logo. Rivers went by Peter Kitts, which Wikipedia says was his dad's last name, and also sounds like Peter Criss from Kiss.

so I was goofing around on Wikipedia reading about French government. I noticed that Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy is from the UMP party, which in English translates to "Union for a Popular Movement." What a stupid name for a political party. How generic can you get? It's a union that is in favor of a popular movement. Uh, a popular movement to do what? Why not just name it "Party that is Political" or "Party Whose Goal is to Win Elections"? Honestly.

so i just read this study. i think they discovered NO SHIT!

so the other day on C-SPAN, the House was debating about giving Washington, DC a vote in Congress - currently, it has none. Texas Republican Louie Gohmert made the argument that DC doesn't need a voting member, because all of the 435 members represent the District.

He said "I would submit to you that Washington, D.C. is also the only city in the entire country that every Senator and every Member of Congress has a vested interest in seeing that it works properly, that water works, sewer works, and no other city in America has that."

Wow! This is ludicrous, so the staff DCist.com (me included) were furious and ran a post saying that since he made this claim, he is thus the person we should call when we have any problem with the city - trash not being picked up, loud people late at night, etc etc. He's been bombarbed with calls, and I urge everybody else to do the same thing. I have a big bag of leaves that's been in front of my house for months, for example. I should call my new congressman and see what he can do.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune also wrote about the shenanigans.

Here's the DCist post, the comments are hilarious
(C-SPAN misidentified him at first, it's really Gohmert)

And Gohmert's phone : 202-225-3035

And Gohmert's page