Category Archives: News

A Monument to Laziness

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I can wallow in laziness as well as the next man, naturally.  I mean it took me a decade to even begin to build a deck on my house. A DECADE.  Or more accurately, a DECKADE (which is approximately 11 years, and 6 months and counting because the deck ain’t done….  but I digress).  But this story is a monument to laziness:  Someone left a hatch open on a church tower and some birds flew in and crapped on the floor.  Oh wait, they left the thing open sometime IN THE 1980s. For anyone following along at home, that’s 30 years or so that they just couldn’t be bothered to shut the darn thing.  Now that’s laziness.  A testament to laziness.  An Old Testament to Laziness(tm)  ( I wrote this post just for that joke, right there).  Wait, isn’t one of the deadly sins being lazy?  I’m not the most churchinated person around, but that’s not exactly walking the walk folks.

Needless to say, birds did what birds do, and do they did, to the tune of about 2 tons of bird crap inside the tower.  Hard to imagine they didn’t notice this before now, really.  I mean how do you miss 30 cm of bird shit on the floor?  Those are some seriously distracted people.  Did they finally clue in when they started hitting their heads on the doorways?

Ok, I’m done.  Back to being lazy in my own way.

2 Tons of Crap in a Church, which is a low number by most people’s estimation

Badass Russian Grandma vs Wild Hungry Wolf

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I have a papercut on the tip of my pinky finger.  It makes typing slightly unpleasant, each keystroke in the top left area of the keyboard hurts a tiny bit.

Whiny-assed bitching like that is about all I have to really worry about in my coddled cozy first world life.  Unlike this 56 year old Russian Grandmother, who was tending her herd of sheep and cows (which is still a thing in, oh, EVERYWHERE but North America let’s say) when a wolf attacked her herd.  A wild, horrible wolf the size of the Mini Cooper I parked my minivan next to this morning and admired as I walked to work with my travel mug full of coffee (aw fiddlesticks, it’s almost too cold to be enjoyable now).

So anyway, this woman was tending the animals that are rather singularly important to her livelihood and survival on this planet, when a tremendously scary predator decided to eat one of her calves.  Not today, comrade.  She managed to save the calf the wolf tried to eat, only to have the wolf attack her for her trouble.  It bit her hand and wouldn’t let go, despite her efforts to pry it’s enormous terrible mouth open.  I don’t know about you, but my wolf-attack-defence repertoire is pretty thin after 1) shriek like a girl and 2) wet pants.  Not this lady.

Mrs Maksudova explained she wanted to throttle the wolf to death but was  forced to reach for her axe when she could not prise the animal’s jaws open.

‘So I just left my hand, and the wolf was just clawing into it, pulling on  it, pulling away like this,’ she said.

‘And then I took the axe and hit him on the head.’

Nope, her SECOND go-do is to grab her axe.  Honestly.  Her FIRST instinct was to choke the wolf to death with her BARE HANDS.  Stupid wolf, bringing a million years of cold-blooded evolution-honed killing to a bare handed fight with a grandmother.  Yep, her bare hands are her most deadly, reliable weapon, followed by her steel axe.  My bare hand hurt a lot pressing down on some keys just to tell you this.

Jebus, but remind me again to never ever cross a Russian grandmother.

Go read the article, but mostly watch the video of this remarkable, dangerous lady.

Hootsuite Privacy Fail

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This morning my phone was acting a bit strangely, I couldn’t delete some messages from Hootsuite for some reason.  I opened up the laptop to see what was really in my inbox and it seems that they messed up large today.  Hundreds and hundreds of messages sent with their subscriber addresses in the clear for all to see in the To: line.  A mistake, obviously but the added bit is the message is a reminder that “your 60 day trial is expiring” and to sign up soon.  Methinks that most of these people won’t be signing up anytime soon.

Myself included.

800 messages and counting……

Fat Math

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As I mentioned recently, knowing the math behind something doesn’t necessarily mean that your behaviour will change.  Still, this article is a really neat look at how some smart nerds created a mathematic model to predict weight gain based on some general inputs.  They further modeled the root cause of why obesity is such a crushing problem today.  They concluded that the main reason isn’t a sudden lack of activity in the last 30 years, but rather the relatively sudden overabundance of food, most of it bad for you. 

In the 1950s, when I was growing up, people rarely ate out. Today, Americans dine out — with these large restaurant portions and oil-saturated foods — about five times a week.

Right. Society has changed a lot. With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food.

People think that the epidemic has to be caused by genetics or that physical activity has gone down. Yet levels of physical activity have not really changed in the past 30 years. As for the genetic argument, yes, there are people who are genetically disposed to obesity, but if they live in societies where there isn’t a lot of food, they don’t get obese. For them, and for us, it’s supply that’s the issue.

For my money, you never ignore the math nerds, sure there are problems with modeling, but man it’s compelling stuff overall.  They link to a super cool java Body Weight Simulator that is fun to play with too.  For me the most interesting bit of the article was this:

…the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one.