Got an email from Angela today to let me know that October 14 is National Chocolate Covered Insects Day.
This, of course, brings back memories of the “Exotic Cuisine Night” I celebrated with the Jaycees during the cicada invasion of 2004.
In one favorite photo, Angela is holding a piece of banana-nutcicada bread. The expression on her face, pretty much says it all:
“What’s that crunch? That’s not a walnut.”
Category Archives: Photos
Entries with photographic accompaniment.
The Ig Nobel Prizes
The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize awards ceremony was held at Harvard this past weekend.
Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan (all three from Chicago) received the Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for their work on the “Garment device convertible to one or more facemasks” (U.S. patent # 7255627).
Pictured below is Dr. Bodnar. Standing with her, and modeling the award-winning garment are Nobel laureates Wolfgang Ketterle (left), Orhan Pamuk, and Paul Krugman (right). PHOTO credit: Alexey Eliseev.
Yes. It’s a brassiere which can be converted into a pair of gas masks.
Likewise, the Ig Nobel Economics Prize was awarded to “The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.”
I can’t help but think various US banking executives and central regulators may have been runners up for that one.
Finally, Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México received the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for creating diamonds from Tequila.
A full list of winners (past and present) appears on the web site of the Annals of Improbable Research.
Skirting the Issue
Dave’s been having fun the past few years, telling his daughters all sorts of stories about their various uncles. More recently, he’s posted a story or two on his blog.
I suppose I could respond with a story or two of my own, for example, when he was a foreign exchange student, he returned from New Zealand in January. My then-girlfriend and I went with my parents to meet him at the airport and when Dave got off the plane, he was wearing a skirt. (The girlfriend broke up with me a short time later.) I could go into great length about that, but why? After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
So you see, it turns out that I’m the normal one!
The Eastern Setter
Ol’ Wylie is pretty much the neighborhood rock star. When we go out for our regular after-work walk, the neighborhood kids frequently flock to his side. The kids inevitably want to pet Wylie, and many remark on how soft his hair is. (He uses shampoo with extra-conditioner.)
One of the most frequent questions the kids ask me is what kind of dog Wylie is. They’re never satisfied with “I don’t know” so I’ve tried variations such as “Black” or “He’s a Wylie.” None of those work either. Some Wylie-historians claim that Wylie is an Irish Police Dog from Scotland Yard, but Wylie insists that this is a gross exaggeration and he only ever worked with a small constabulary on the outskirts of Dublin.
So far though, Wylie hasn’t been willing to discuss his origins. Until now.
Earlier this week, Wylie and I were talking about the problem with the kids not accepting any of the standard answers. He admitted that it always bothered him to be putting me on the spot like that, so he’s decided to share his secret with the world:
Wylie is an Eastern Setter.
For those unfamiliar with the particulars of this breed, the Eastern Setter is native to North America with a range covering the mid-Atlantic states, going North into New England and as far West as Indiana.
Here we see the Eastern Setter in his natural environment — setting on the couch.
Likewise, here we see the Eastern Setter in another of his favorite settings — setting on the deck, getting his back skritched by a pretty girl.
And again, the Eastern Setter, setting on the couch, getting his back skritched by two more pretty girls. (It’s truly a dog’s life!)
First Bloom
Back in the spring, I made an attempt at setting up a fountain in the new flower bed. I sank a resin half-barrel partway into the ground and (after a brief delay caused by the realization that untreated, resin will let water seep through) set up a solar powered fountain.
The fountain was pretty cool in concept, but it tended to clog pretty easily. Like three times in a single day. (I quit trying after a couple hours.)
So, plan B. I went to a garden center a couple weeks ago and bought a water lily. Most things in the flower beds aren’t all that interesting until the second or third year, so I wasn’t expecting much. But when I came home on Tuesday so the air conditioner could be repaired, I spotted this bit of beauty.
The flower closed up a few minutes later, so I’m glad I had the phone with me. After this weekend’s rains, there’s now another inch of water in the barrel and the bloom’s stalk hasn’t stretched back to the surface quite yet. But in the meantime, there’s now another bud I hope will bloom sometime this week.
Like I said, most things in the flower beds aren’t all that interesting until the second or third year. So next summer, this should be pretty spectacular!
It's a Dog's Life
Yes, it’s true, The Chicks Dig the Fuzzy Guy. Here’s Wylie with two of his admirers, Courtney and Katie:
Recreation through Re-creation.
(Yeah, I changed the title.)
I was at Shore Leave this weekend and ran across this little guy.
OK, it’s not really R2-D2 (not quite the right colors, much less the actual droid – plus, this one is still under construction), but it’s a pretty good re-creation nonetheless.
I was similarly impressed with this re-creation of Indiana Jones. (And quite surprised upon discovering that I’d managed to capture an image of the whip in mid-crack!)
I’m not really sure what to make of this one. I think he’s some sort of space marine from the Halo video game. There was evidently some sort of speaker system built into it, as everywhere he went, there was music playing (presumably environmental music from the game).
Late for Work
I was late for work last Thursday. To fully appreciate why, you need to understand three important facts about my neighborhood:
- Washington Gas is currently working to replace the gas lines. (I much prefer this to having the neighborhood explode one evening.)
- On Thursday morning, a work crew arrived a little before 8:00 and removed a steel plate they’d installed a few days earlier, leaving a hole and blocking that end of the street.
- I live on a cul de sac.
The view from my front door.
The road was completely blocked with vehicles, equipment, and a hole in the pavement.
Storm Damage
When I came home Friday evening, the first thing I did was to head upstairs to take down the gate so Wylie could come downstairs. For the second time this week, I reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to see Wylie come out of the bathroom, leading me to chuckle at the notion that I’d just missed catching him with a newspaper.
Wylie’s not a big fan of violent weather; distant thunderstorms upset him and when the big storms come into the immediate vicinity, Wylie heads for someplace safe. Usually this means he comes looking for the alpha dog, but when I’m not around, the upstairs bathroom becomes Wylie’s storm cellar.
We’ve had a few big storms lately; this week they’ve included heavy winds and a bit of thunder.
After a little while I happened to glance out into the back yard and noticed that the storm had broken one of the trunks on the crabapple tree. Looking a little closer, I saw a big pine branch laying on the other side of the fence.
I have a couple large pines near my house. A particularly large one is just to the side.
Going out into the back yard, I discovered that in addition to the crabapple tree, two large pieces had broken loose from the pine next to my house. Along with the branch which landed behind the fence, another was laying in the yard. It looks like they were probably the same branch, somehow falling in two places. Judging by the hole it left in the ground, the piece in the yard missed my deck by less than six inches.
After taking Wylie for his late afternoon walk, I got the ladder out of the shed and checked out the back part of the upper roof. Everything looks to be OK, but I’m thinking it’s a good thing I trimmed those branches last weekend!
So it appears that “clean up storm debris” has been added to this weekend’s list of chores.
Endangered Species
The North American letterbox once ranged across the continent in herds so large as to darken the plains from horizon to horizon. These gentle beasts had no fear of humans and would frequently wander into population centers. It was once common to find clusters of letterboxes on street corners in urban areas.
By the beginning of the 21st century, overgrazing and invasion of their habitats by other communication media had resulted in a massive decline of the wild letterbox population. Today the largest populations of North American letterboxes are found in zoos such as the one below.
The letterboxes shown here are part of a herd being kept at a postal center in Rockville where scientists are attempting to repopulate the species through a captive breeding program.