Ok, folks, its quiz time

My high-school friend Tom Ciborowski, an amazingly good P.E. who's in the Middle East these days building an artificial island, sent this to a bunch of us:

Today's quiz is on areas:

1. How many Nooks are there in a Bunder?
2. How many Dhurs are there in a Tsubo?
3. How many Carreaus are there in a Rood (not Rod)?
4. How many Cawneys are there in a Stang?

(Yes, there are answers to this. You can get the hard math at www.convertunits.com, but the explanation of what these are is to be found elsewhere.)

Ok, folks, its quiz time

Twitter meets Reality TV....

....or some such conjunction. There's a website that Susan the Wonderchild pointed out to me this morning called FMyLife.com (motto: "My life sucks, but I don't give a f***"). It's kinda like bits of Twitterage about doom, gloom, and boom.

The format is you post a short comment about something you've done or that's happened to you, followed by the initials "FML." As I read these, I keep thinking of Bill Engvall's "Heeeeeere's your sign!" Here are a few examples:

• Today, I gave my 16 year old step daughter and her friends a lecture on respecting other people's privacy. Two hours later, I accidentally walked into her room without knocking. She and her friends were giving each other bikini waxes. Now her friends call me the hypocritical pervert. FML
• Today, I learned that I have carpal tunnel syndrome. I got it from playing too much World of Warcraft. I got a disease in real life by living in a virtual world. FML
• Today, I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted. Under anesthesia I proceeded to tell the dentist my entire sexual and drug history in detail. FML
• Today, not wanting to be known as a lightweight anymore, I started drinking with some guy friends. After one beer I ended up in bed with one of them who kindly put my bra back on for me after, as I was too sloshed. I'm no longer known as lightweight, but instead, the slutty drunk. FML

It's really rather depressing and frequently sad, but there's at least a measure of schadenfreude that this isn't you, at least.

And it's 8:02, so I need to clock in to work! Y'all have a great day. Or better than these people, anyway.

Twitter meets Reality TV....

Kamikaze Cooking: The Perfect Steak

This is amazing. The opening bit before the real segment ("Cooking Is Easy If You're Rich and Famous") is perfect.

Kamikaze Cooking: The Perfect Steak

"Hedtke's Law" and proper attribution

I was off at the STC conference in Atlanta this past week. It was a lovely event and the photos I took can be found at my Flickr website. Two of my all-time favorite people got their Associate Fellow credentials and I got to see any number of other old friends as well.

At the Board meeting on Friday, no less than 4 people pointed out to me that "Hedtke's Law" (identified as such) had become part of Board canon. Hedtke's Law is something I kept saying while I was on the Board when dealing with people who are too 'nice' (the nose should wrinkle when you say it). 'Nice' is ineffectual, unable to do anything, because you're worried that someone, somewhere will be offended. You may be able to put a name and a face to that somebody, but the idea that SOMEBODY will be upset would completely prevent the STC from doing a lot of things in the past that should've been done to the betterment of the members or the Society as a whole. (And fuck that noise, btw.)

I have no patience for people who don't want to get anything done because they're in mortal fear of offending someone, when, in fact, they're there to get something done. When confronted with this ineffectual thinking--of which we had an awful lot at the time--I kept saying this:

"If it doesn't offend somebody, it couldn't possibly interest anybody."

I said it so often that this was dubbed "Hedtke's Law," and it's a very flattering legacy for getting the STC turned in the right direction. (There's a corollary to this, too: If you're the one offended, it's just your bad luck that this time it was you.)

But I really need to set the record straight on one point: I didn't write this. My old friend, Allyn Wolfe, was responsible for saying this some 35 years ago in the pages of Red Garters, a Craft magazine that he edited. (His editorial policy was, similarly, "I shall continue to provoke everyone within my reach!") It's a profoundly great statement and, although I'm getting the credit for saying it, I want it stated for the record that it was Allyn who came up with this in the first place.


For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

"Hedtke's Law" and proper attribution