Posted on Friday 13 April 2007
- Here’s my completely random thing you should try: typing while Dueling Banjos is playing. I’m serious. It’s quite the experience. You’ll start off typing normal and by the end, it’s like you’ve had your tenth cup of coffee.
- Speaking of caffeine, it was ruled the cause of death for a 19-year-old New Hampshire boy. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s one caffeine OD death and zero marijuana OD deaths that I’ve read about in my lifetime. Making it yet another legal drug that’s more deadly than weed.
- You may have seen our new town made the news recently when a man was found to have
30080 sheep living in his house. Someone at work with much more time than I whipped up the following picture. - I really have no problem with Don Imus being fired for his “nappy headed hoes” comment. I’m all for freedom of speech and businesses to protect their image. And, after all, there’s probably a lot of normal professions, like a public school teacher, where you’d probably get fired for calling a student that. But I still have three reflections on the matter.
- He did pretty much get fired for saying a phrase that labels pay rappers millions to sing (actually the Imus phrase was very benign compared to the representation of women in rap). By definition, it is a double standard.
- Does Al Sharpton just make a career out of accepting apologizes? Seriously, what does this man do that’s of value to society?
- The whole thing kind of reminds me of the Jesse Jackson butt-kissing episode of South Park.
- According to Wikipedia, there are exactly two movies that are banned in the US. Curious? Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story is a negative depiction of the celebrity that has successfully been challenged on copyright grounds. The Profit has successfully been banned by legal challenges from Scientology due to a negative depiction of a cult that closely mirrors their practices. Kind of scary that Tom Cruise’s crew has that much power, eh?
- Yahoo! Mail is expanding to infinite storage. Wild promises that can’t possible be met…didn’t we see that in the tech bubble of the late 90s? Not to be beat, Google is promising infinity plus one storage
. - Most interesting thing I learned all week: the opposite of absolute zero is something called Planck’s Temperature. If you thought absolute zero was hard to imagine, consider 10^32 Kelvins!
- Steve Jobs:
Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.
Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.
“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.
- If you’ve never had a baby, let me just say that the name picking part is really weird. What if the kid doesn’t like it? Does the name mean something positive? Are you influencing their personality with the choice? My main criteria was that we eliminate the top 100 most popular names since Miller is such a common last name. We’re close to making a selection. Stay tuned…
Tags: Our Life
Regards to name selection…can’t wait to hear! Since Miller used to be my last name I will say that I hated having an unsual name when I was young but now I can appreciate it. Don’t know if that helps you…But I always wanted to give my children classic names, I think, b/c my name is so unique. It is a hard choice. Have you found that site that graphs name according to their popularity over the years? Crazy!
1. *Loved* your outtake on the Don Inmus thing. I agree with all your points.
2. Funny, but (despite not being remotely close to having children) I have the same qualms/questions about baby names. It’s a really complicated thing. And sometimes when you see descriptions of names and personalities, they fit. Do you think that’s just coincidental or does the name itself induce those qualities? Just don’t name your girl something like Hildegard, because it results in:
* A lifetime of misspellings
* A lifetime of mispronunciations (H-i-l-d-e, not H-e-i-d-i. Seriously, do those two even sound the same?)
* A lifetime of ridicule
* A lifetime of resenting your mother for willingly choosing a name that is the German equivalent of Ethel, Gertrude, or Beatrice.
And by 300 sheep you mean 80?
Can I just say that I’m glad that you’re eliminating the top 100 names if for no other reason than that a lot of them are really dumb names? Number 7, for example, is very nearly the name of a car company. And not just the name. They threw in the article preceding it for good measure. “What kind of car does Alexis drive? . . . A Lexus.” The creation of names from other words is, I’m afraid, becoming quite the epidemic.
After going through life with a name like “Matt Miller” you kind of have compassion for the fact that it can be a pain to have 2-3 other people with the same name in pretty much any organization you’re a part of
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Don’t know where I got 300 from! I changed it…now it barely seems like a news worthy story after the correction.
Hildegard did not make our short list.
Darn, I guess we’ll have to throw out out Atoyota and Ahonda name selections since Uncle Jared is so daggum picky.
According to this list, not only does Al Sharpton not contribute anything positive to society…he’s somewhat of a cancer to society.
If you need a less common name that starts with a “D”, just let me know.