Author Archives: Court

About Court

This is Courtney Vallentyne's blog.

Saint Bernards in the mist

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If you listen to this video carefully with headphones on, you can actually hear the happy/terrifying sound of 42 Saint Bernards panting and drooling in unison.  You can hear the steady slap of drool on the leaves from 40 slobbery mouths, it’s rather soothing, like a rainforest.  This is from a breeder in BC, and these dogs are beautiful.  Possibly not as beautiful as Lloyd, but I am biased.  Several things come to mind while watching this.  First, breeding Saint Bernards must be a losing proposition since every available dollar would by necessity be going towards buying dog food for this herd.  Wow.  Secondly, remind me to NEVER take a walk through those woods without my rubber boots on.  🙂

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgIz1Add98s

While living with even one St Bernard has at times tested the limits of my love for dogs, this is simply awe-inspiring.  42 Saint Bernards.  I can barely keep Lloyd this clean and he lives indoors.  Amazing.

Buzzing Death Robots

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The guys that work soo hard on stuff like this today are the engineers of tomorrow’s armageddon.  Seriously.  Did you have to work quite so hard on the menacing re-formation bit when flying through a window?  I mean seriously, just add some scenery and a grimy, frightened rebel fighter crouching under the window clutching his gun and you have the sizzler reel for a really good science fiction movie.  Why do we need this?  Will we all even live long enough to regret this?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4

Yes, it’s still unspeakably cool.

via Techcrunch

Mundane Ramblings Retrospective – 2003

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On January 7th, 2012, this blog turned 9 years old.  I thought I would do a little retro round up for the next little while to go back and bring forward some of the older content just for fun.

In the beginning the blog was on Blogger.com, mainly because I had no inclination to learn real HTML at the time, and the family website was too hard to update by hand.  A peek at what the blog looked like back then can be found on the Internet Wayback Machine here.

There is a real conversation in the first 6 or 8 months or so between some folks here, not necessarily staying true to the intent of a web log, but it was fun.  If you go back that far now, due to the platform switch from Blogger to Movable Type, (which was the thing to do among discerning geeks at the time), most of the posts look like they were written by me.  It’s very confusing actually, so don’t go back that far.  Instead look here for some of the more memorable posts of the first year:

Duck Meets Rink

Just realized that Ali ran a 50-min 10K back in 2003 with 15% body fat!  Holy crap.  Well done, I realize now that’s a very decent time, and way faster than I am at the moment.

Nikki responds to my trash-talk about being able to drink more than her.

Quinn has toe surgery (the first time)

One of the first news-related snarky posts by me in something like the tone that would soon become commonplace on the blog.

The basement reno is pretty well documented, at least in text.  The inspection post is the most amusing one of the bunch.

Herring farts.  Yes, a whole post about that.

One of many funny rants from Ali, who was a regular poster back in the day!

Nikki’s (and the blog’s) last post of the year.

So there you go, a year’s worth of retrospective.  That was fun, going back through the old stuff, and I might even do a summary for 2004.  That’s what has-beens do, they release a greatest hits album to generate interest again.  I got eight more years to go through, let’s see if we all can make it through eight more posts like this one.

Anyway, without getting too maudlin (I am turning 40 this year and I would rather NOT dwell on that, thank you) reading stuff from 9 years ago makes me realize how really lucky I am.  The friends and family I have are second to none.  You guys are amazing, amazing folks.  Nikki, you are my absolute best friend, and this little tour through memory lane makes me realize for the nine-hundredth time that you are the MOST important thing in my life.  Lord knows I have messed some things up (we will no doubt get to those blog posts later on), but marrying my best friend was the best decision I have ever made.  Wow.

So, with that, I will get back to work and still be thinking of you all.

Moron’s Harrowing Ordeal

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A Texan woman got her car stuck in some mud in Idaho, and despite the fact that she was COMPLETELY UNINJURED and perfectly fine, proceeded to spend the next week in the car.  She “survived” by eating peanut butter M&Ms.  She would probably still be there, except the water in the pond she was stuck near started to rise, so she finally got out and walked (walked!) over to a nearby house to get help.

The only explanation she offered for this absolutely stupefying act of brainlessness was that she had “always been told not to leave her vehicle if she became stranded”.  Wow.  Just wow.  The best part is that this little gal who was just doing what she was told is 61 YEARS OLD.  In 61 years she never came up with anything better than “stay with the car” even if the nearest house is within walking distance for a 61 year old moron.

Cripes.  How did she make it to 61 years old?

Read it for yourself.  Wow.

Relative Risk

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A pretty decent article today on OttawaCitizen.com about the relative risks we take all the time, and how some are perceived to be horribly dangerous, while others are perfectly fine.

The article correctly plays risks against each other that make very little sense when taken together. Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) is an enormous sport (albeit one that makes very little sense to me) that is gaining more and more mainstream credibility, while at the same time being really really dangerous to it’s participants, who get injured more or less every time they actually take part in the sport.  Take that into contrast with the illegality of marijuana, which as mind altering substances go is almost incredibly safe (essentially impossible to die from ingesting in humans: likely eating about 1500 pounds of the stuff at once ), and safer by far than almost anything found in a medicine, or liquor cabinet (for instance two aspirin is the generally accepted dose, but 40 aspirins will kill 50% of adults).  Strangely enough, apparently eating ten raw potatoes can cause a toxic reaction in some people.  Do you have your potatoe license?  I don’t.

Similarly the article quotes a British researcher on the topic of banning steroids:

 “I would prefer my child take anabolic steroids and growth hormone than play rugby,” a British scientist who studies doping told the Financial Times. “I  don’t know of any cases of quadriplegia caused by growth hormone.”

It puts things into a new perspective, actually.

Read on:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/smoking+dope/6045068/story.html

 

Well alright alright…

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If you have ever seen Dazed and Confused you will instantly recognize what’s going on in this video.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94b3gMZGorc

Matthew McConaughey (who inexplicably also stays the same damn age somehow until this very day) reprises the role he played in the movie, hilariously.  What’s more is this song is pretty darn good, and the video is really well done.  Way cool and lots of fun.

It hardly seems fair that Mr. McConaughey manages to remain exactly the same as he looked 19 years ago, although perhaps much richer and more famouser.

Saw this on Buzzfeed…