Guess and Check

Last Friday’s Yankees/Rangers game was an unmanageable five hours and twelve minutes long.

Still a great game though.

I went hiking this morning up Pinnacle Mountain. I brought my camera so there are some photos in this album.

It was pretty nice up there.

So Lance Armstrong can be pretty funny sometimes.

The juanpelotacafe twitter feed (for the Juan Pelota Cafe in Austin) tweeted at Lance thusly:

His reply was:

Why, that’s just hilarious!

I saw this recently and found it quite funny:

Someone likes to straighten the sauce packets at Taco Bell.

Each layer was rotated ninety degrees to preserve the neatness.

I recently came across this Calvin and Hobbes:

I recognized the fourth panel from its being on my parents’ refrigerator for as long as I can remember. I’m almost certain it’s still there to this day.

I wonder now if it has been there since its initial publication on July 31st, 1987.

I’ve always heavily favored film reviews from Roger Ebert. In fact, I can’t name any other film critic off the top of my head.

The guy just really knows his stuff. And he just loves movies.

The recent Esquire piece on him and his followup are must-reads for any fan of his.

So I noticed that my 2009 AR1000 tax form lines 53 and 54 have smilies.

No joke.

(click for large)

It’s clearer on their downloadable PDF form (as opposed to my screenshot of my TurboTax version here).

Today I’m going to be talking about the ABC television program Castle, starring favorite Nathan Fillion. No spoilers will follow, since I haven’t watched the show yet. (I’ve been aware of it since he mentioned it in an interview a while back when he said his mom had a Google Alert for the show (Hi Mrs. Fillion!), and it’s been on my to-watch list.)

While glancing at the show’s Wikipedia entry last night, I noticed the title card for the show. It immediately struck me as odd for a number of reasons.

Two landmarks are easily identifiable, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. So first, I think “Okay, Empire State Building, this is a view of the Manhattan skyline from the Brooklyn side of the bridge.” However, that doesn’t work because a picture taken from around Empire Fulton Ferry State Park (which is where it would likely need to be taken from to get that angle of the bridge) wouldn’t have the Empire State Building in the background, since that’s way up at 5th Avenue and West 34th Street. It would also have all of the tall downtown buildings in the background, which it doesn’t.

CC-by-2.0 photo by morrissey

At this point, I also notice that the East River is wrong, as we can see the reflection of the first bridge pillar in the water, but if we were really on the Brooklyn side that pillar closest to us is on land, so we couldn’t see a reflection. So if that pillar closest to us is reflected in the water, the image of the bridge must be from the Manhattan side.

CC-by-nc-sa-2.0 photo by FromTheNorth

The Brooklyn skyline from that area doesn’t look like the one in the title card either, and I still haven’t figured out where that’s from.

So basically, what we have is 1) an image of the south side of the Brooklyn Bridge taken from the Manhattan side of the East River with a skyline in the background that doesn’t jive with the actual background of that area and 2) the Empire State Building plopped in.

What I can say though, after all this research, is that they fixed issue 2 in the second season’s title card.

That’s progress. Though I do wonder what precipitated the change.

I finally got around to reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

Great book, of course, but now I want baseball season to start already.

I think it’s bad that I find it hilarious to learn that these particular apparent gangbanger/skinhead/redneck/excessively-tattooed dudes drink things like Peppermint Lattes and Caramel Macchiatos.

On this week’s 30 Rock, the Borders worker in the window holds up Liz’s book to show her the “if your man is over thirty and still wears a nametag to work, that’s a dealbreaker!” line before the camera pans to reveal that he’s apparently over thirty and wearing a nametag.

In the brief moment he holds the book up, we can see a bit of the rest of the text on the page. From what I could make out, here’s what it said (lowercase use reported faithfully as used on screen):

he has a job that he’s passionate about the chances that he will stalk you when you break up lessen. A busy man doesn’t have the time or patience to try and figure out that the password to your email is awesomesexylady09.

The flip side is that if you do date a guy with a good job he can hire a professional to stalk you [continues off screen]

Other career deal breakers include

governor
comedy writer
charlie sheen
break dancer
repo man
drug mule
las vegas anything
[list continues off screen]

Clearly the comedy writers on the show make these kind of jokes just for me, as no one else has apparently reported it yet. Or (and this is probably more likely) other people noticed but just didn’t feel the need to report it.

I recently finished The Time Traveler’s Wife, and while it was a good book, I didn’t really like the way the author (Audrey Niffenegger) did the time travel bits.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I don’t like the idea that you can’t change things in your past or future. I’m much more on board with the Star Trek way(s) of doing things, and how in any of those ways interacting with and changing the past/future can happen.

Though I did like her use of alternating first-person perspectives that are also at times unreliable narrators.

I made this for Kasey’s birthday. It’s the frame that makes it work.

(This one is a straight Subversive Cross Stitch.)

I guess when you drive a ~$130,000 Aston Martin Vantage, you don’t have to get it exactly between the white lines.

Note that this is the second one I’ve seen recently.

I shot the moon today. Tiger Woods wasn’t happy.

Photos from my trip to Dallas and Monday’s Yankees/Rangers game are in an album. It was a great trip.

Today we’ve got some chocolate cupcakes made with Cupcake Project’s recipe for the cake and just a general confectioners’ sugar/butter/vanilla extract/salt/milk combination for the vanilla icing.

Amblyopia (aka lazy eye) came up as a topic of conversation yesterday, and I was able to input that the eye-patch treatment of amblyopia is one of the most rewarding in medicine. This is because without medication or surgery or hospitalization a child can be given eyesight in an eye which otherwise might have no sight.

Where did I learn this? From this Peanuts comic:

Thank you Charles Schulz, Linus van Pelt, and Sally Brown.

My quick trip to Kansas City went well, select pictures are in an album.