Category Archives: Culture

Fancy Pants Weekend

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Nikki and I had a nice weekend, it’s one of our quarterly parental getaways. We decided a while ago that they were absolutely required for our own sanity since we get little time to ourselves alone. Usually we don’t even go very far, the only requirement is to get out of the house without children for an extended period of time. This time we just went and stayed right downtown at the Minto Suites. It’s very nice and the rates are reasonable, especially once you tell them you are on a weekend pass from the insane asylum. Anyway, it was extremely relaxing, we ate and drank lots of excellent food and are generally recharged and refreshed. One special note was that we ate at Hy’s Steakhouse and had a superb experience. It’s not for everyday dining, but man if you want to treat yourself, that’s one especially good way to do it. The service is second to none.

So there you go, that’s an update for you.

*Update:  Note that we didn’t actually drink any food….  That’s just too hard.

Skill Testing Question

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A Wired article today reminded me of something that has always bothered me:  why do contests have skill testing questions?  Apparently there is a law that requires companies to have a way for people to enter for free, so they always have had a test of some sort for the winner.  That way the game isn’t completely left to chance, but requires skill instead.  Ya right.  It’s not the case in the US, by the way, where you aren’t obliged to do anything to get your prize.
Weird.  But now I know.

Odd Bodies

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The best part about writing this blog is that I don’t often have to make stuff up. RSS is a wonderful source of fodder for this page, and it certainly hasn’t failed me today. I give you the following article on The Register, which is part of a series of “ask a doctor” type of articles.

It describes the strange condition of Gigantomastia, which is Latin for “a visit from the booby fairy”. Apparently it is a very uncommon condition (1 out of every 28,000 to 100,000 pregnancies) for pregnant ladies to wake up to find a sudden and rather permanent, uh augmentation shall we say.

“A 24-year-old woman, pregnant with her second child, had a “massive bilateral breast enlargement” during her 19th week of pregnancy. After the baby was born, it took 6 months of medical treatment for her breasts to reduce back to their normal size.”

Not to make fun of what probably was rather traumatic experience (ok I’m making fun of it a bit), but I recall a scene from Bruce Almighty similar to this….

Anyway, that fun aside, there’s just a gold mine of information up there:

That’s enough for today, methinks.

I’m gonna rent me some Willy

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uh, Nelson, that is.
I caught this link (on Boing Boing I believe), it’s about the ridiculously rich paying top dollar for star recording artists to come and play at private parties. Nice work if you can get it, hundreds of thousands of dollars for less than an hour’s work…

I love the Sammy Hagar quote from the article:

“I mean, we used to make fun of Huey Lewis for doing all these corporate shows, but he would just shrug and say, ‘It’s a good life. Forty-five minutes for a couple hundred thousand’ … but I just hated the idea, doing some big arena show in some little corporate building or something. It felt cheesy to me. But then when Dylan did it, I started thinking, ‘Who am I to be so uppity about this?’ “

Too funny.

Spectator Drugs

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Given that I am a huge asthmatic geek, I never got the whole sports thing like most red-blooded males. I never played them, and so I really never watch them on TV or follow them in any way. I am utterly insulated from them, which makes me a wussy I suppose.  Oh well, it’s too late now since I have already procreated and so have possibly passed on my “sports indifferent” genes.

That’s why I enjoyed this one from Wired today, a bit about how if athletes can take performance enhancing drugs, why can’t the spectators take drugs to enhance the experience of watching sports?

It’s funny stuff, here’s an excerpt:

Temporistil
This drug was designed for watching baseball. Baseball, for those not in the know, is a relatively slow-moving game. If you’re used to something faster-paced, like photographing lunar eclipses, you might find baseball something like watching a porn video where the plumber arrives and actually installs a new water heater before getting down to the good stuff. That’s where Temporistil comes in; it alters your perception of time so that the few seconds where there’s action on the field slow down like an extremely overused special effect, and the rest of the time — when the players are adjusting themselves and taking romantic strolls up to the pitcher’s mound — gets compressed into a few instants. Side effects include dizziness, nausea and falling asleep while waiting for the peanut guy’s toss to reach you.

Amen, brother.