skater faces

Some anonymous person has collected a gallery of amusing Olympic skaters' faces caught by a very fast exposure. I used Google Image Search to find out more about this set but ended up only finding many more funny Olympic faces.

If you click through the link, you'll see that the men all seem to be performing the same program. At least they were all caught in the same position and aping the same expression. I know nothing about competitive skating so maybe that's to be expected.

I'm struck by the fact that most of the men are wearing outfits with a certain degree of the ridiculous. Few men would wear any of these get-ups off of the ice, so why on the ice? It makes the sport seem somewhat clownish, in my opinion.

My husband has never ice skated, which is not uncommon for an Australian. As a native of Chicago, I learned to ice skate before I can even remember. My brother says he thinks it was before I was even potty trained.

So I'd love to take James to a rink and see how quickly he would pick it up, given he's naturally athletic. There is no outdoor skating here, of course, because it's too warm in Sydney during winter, but there are a few indoor rinks in the area.

I'd love for my son to learn, too, when he's a little older. I think skating is like swimming and riding a bicycle -- they're important to learn, because once you know how, you'll never forget.

the stammering tattoo

I'm having a hard time believing that a tattoo artist could be this much of a dunce. Could you not see you were repeating a word? Did you not plan this out? Show it to someone else to proofread it?

Had he/she not repeated the word, that widow with the lone word in the third line would not have happened. And then there's the inconsistent line spacing -- the space between the first and second line does not match the space between the second and third.

This mess's owner will be reminded of the asinine tattoo artist for the rest of his or her life. And while we're on this: it's too much to call the person who created this horror a tattoo "artist." How about instead we call him or her by the rightful title of "tattoo butcher."

I told you so, redux

In November I wrote a post about how I thought Bitcoin was a risky folly. I received several detailed emails about how "incredibly wrong" I was.

And then, within weeks, the Bitcoin market imploded and their value plummeted. I wrote another post with the headline "I told you so." I received no passionate emails about being wrong that time.

Now yet another shoe has dropped. The world's largest Bitcoin trading site has suddenly shut down after losing some $367 million of account holder's money due to long undetected and ongoing theft.

The site will file bankruptcy, meaning account holders will receive little to nothing of what they put into their accounts. Some people have admitted in news articles that they've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result.

Ouch.

As a result, Bitcoin values have plummeted once again. Some media outlets are now even speculating that Bitcoin's future is in doubt.

That would not surprise me. If the digital currency lasts even two more years I'll be surprised. The lawsuits will last for years thereafter.

I have a new slogan for Bitcoin that they might use in their future marketing: A fool and his imaginary money are soon parted.

explain like I'm five

The Explain Like I'm Five forum on Reddit never ceases to amuse and interest me. I always learn something new when I'm there. The goal is to explain complex concepts and processes in very simple terms, as if you were explaining to a five-year-old child.

When I first started reading the forum several years back, the questions seemed to be simpler and the answers often were done in a way that a small child probably would understand. But with time, both the questions and the answers generally became far more complex, so the "rules" were changed to say that the forum was "not for responses aimed at literal five year olds." Some of the answers now are so lengthy and complex, I don't understand them, and I consider myself a reasonably intelligent adult.

This question, from yesterday, does sound like something a smart child might ask: "why don't wireless signals, like text messages, hit in midair and mess each other up?" And also this one: "why are lions nicknamed 'King of the Jungle', when they are commonly known to live on the plains of Africa?"

Other questions, however, would never be something you'd hear out of a child's mouth, like "what exactly are cortical columns, and more importantly, why are they significant?" or "explain the physics that make speed skating skates faster than ice hockey or figure skating skates." Show me a five-year-old who even knows cortical columns or physics exist.

I think the forum lost some of its special charm when it abandoned the "literal five year old" rule. My husband has nephews, nieces, and cousins who are young, and it can be a challenge to explain things to them without being patronizing or opening a Pandora's box of confusion and questions. But by explaining something to a small child, I often find I understand it better myself, and it's a valuable exercise in self education.

a brief history of the mile-high club

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

ukraine

Sometimes world events turn out like a thriller, with a sudden change in direction that's totally unexpected. The apparent collapse of the sitting government yesterday in Ukraine and sudden revolutionary victory are much more than the protesters ever could have expected, and I imagine it caught most if not all world leaders off guard. Vladimir Putin can't be pleased.

The final chapter has yet to be written, and could turn out very badly with the country plunged into civil war. As well, the whole story could be a happy ending. Hopefully it is the latter. It's amazing how some revolutions can be so quick while others, like Syria, just keep bogging down deeper into a worsening quagmire.

All in all, it's rewarding to see ordinary people triumph over a government determined to ignore the public will.

rendering the visible invisible

I can't remember if I blogged about this before, but even if I did, it's a warning worth repeating.

If you're planning on modeling for a nude shoot, do not do what the girl below did. Look closely and what do you see? (You may need to right-click the photo to examine a larger image.)

Yes, you can see the elastic marks on her skin from her low-rise panties. And, you can also see marks higher up, on her waist, caused by a skirt or pants waistband. Those are two quite visible marks that should not be seen at all on a nude model.

Getting rid of the lower panties line is easy: just don't wear underwear the day of your shoot. Same goes for pantyhose and bras.

The skirt/pants mark is a bit more difficult to overcome but not impossible. Given the weather, she could hardly wear something loose fitting. But had she worn a longish jumper that wasn't too snug without anything underneath and a calf-length coat, she would've been warm and mark free.

This may not be her fault. If she's fairly new to modeling, her agent or manager and/or the photographer should have told her this. When you associate with professionals and not clowns, they advise you so you don't end up looking like a doofus. If they're just hustling a buck, you could end up looking like a dunce with visible underwear lines.

golden showers shampoo

The husband did the shopping this week as I continue to recover. He called from the store and asked what scent of soap and shampoo I wanted and then read off some of them for me.

I'm always mystified by scents with names that don't sound like scents. Unless you open the bottle and sniff, you'll have no idea what Summer Jubilee or Bountiful Harvest smells like. Who thinks up names like these?

I couldn't decide between Spring Shower scent and Golden Meadow scent. James said the former had a hint of lilac cut with might have been mint. But how was this supposed to smell like a spring shower, which arguably has no scent because an actual spring shower would smell like water, meaning it smells like nothing.

Golden Meadow sounded evocative, too, but James couldn't identify what that smelled like. How is being golden any more odoriferous than, say, a foggy meadow or a quiet meadow? If you buy both scents and mix them at home, will the end result be Golden Spring Shower or Golden Shower?

I think scents should have basic, no bullshit names. It should be Citrus or Lilac or Bayberry or whatever. None of this Lemon Supreme or Lilac Wonder or Bayberry Dawn nonsense.

marine one claustrophobia

It's a rare privilege for an ordinary person to ride on Air Force One, but it's far rarer on Marine One, the US President's helicopter. I always thought it would be cool to ride in the President's copter, but after seeing the photo below on a news site yesterday, I think I'll take a pass.

I wouldn't call myself claustrophobic. I've ridden in small cars and in small elevators. I've sat in the window seat on planes that were completely full.

But looking inside Marine One, it looks a little too cozy for my taste. I know that helicopters often bank and fly at sharp angles. My husband has ridden in them many times and said they can feel like you're being whipped around on a carnival ride. That's an experience I'm not craving to have, jammed in a too-small compartment with a low ceiling and a dozen other people.

So when the White House calls and offers me a ride in Marine One, I'll just have to decline politely. And if I'm ever elected President, I think I'll retire Marine One and just use The Beast, aka the Presidential limo. Now that is a cool ride.

piles of money

After my recent piece about the temptation of finding more than two million in cash, a reader sent me a link to this post on Imgur showing pictures taken after a raid on Mexican druglord's villa.

I cross searched the images but could not find where they originated, but they look legit, at least to my eyes. The most memorable are the shots of huge money hoards -- literally piles and piles of money.

The unsourced caption claims billions were found in the house. Even if that's not true, the massive amount of loot has to be a substantial sum.

The druglord had guns up the wazoo to protect his money hoard, but I see no evidence in the various pictures of any fire extinguishers. What if the place accidentally caught on fire? Now that would be funny.

that awkward moment

Some industrious unknown person collected and compared the promo materials for a new movie called That Awkward Moment, now playing in some parts of the world under that title, and as Are We Officially Dating? in other portions. It was released under the first title in the US and the latter here in Australia.

I can see why this was done for Aussie audiences. Some American comedic bits play well here but others play flat. The stereotypes that seem to be perpetuated by the lead characters in the movie would probably not resonate here. Hence the shift from a male to a female perspective.

Whatever the approach, of course, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The movie has been pretty much slammed by critics, no matter the title.

what if you found $2.4 million?

I recently re-read Cormac McCarthy's mostly excellent No Country for Old Men, which was later made into a movie. It's a masterfully written book, with the exception of the unsatisfying ending.

The novel opens with a man hunting in the wilderness who happens on the remains of a drug deal gone bad with all the participants dead, except for one near death. On the scene, he also finds $2.4 million. Unable to help the dying man, he takes the money and leaves.

The money is a mighty temptation. But it's also an invitation for all sorts of trouble. I remember thinking about this dilemma when I first read the book, and it struck me again immediately on this second reading.

While I'd love to have $2.4 million tax free, I wouldn't want the terrors it would likely bring, with who knows how many very bad characters after you to get it back.

Once I saw that I couldn't help the dying man, I would split and leave the money behind. When I reached a highway or a town, I'd find a way to alert the authorities anonymously (hopefully on a pay phone still in existence somewhere) and then I would leave.

Goodbye, no looking back. That's it. Yes, I'd always think about the money I left in the wilderness. But at least I'd be alive to think about what I had done.

heroin chic

I was reading something about Philip Seymour Hoffman today that left me with a thought: it's tragic that he died of an overdose, but if he hadn't been plagued by addiction problems most of his adult life, would he still have been as brilliant of an actor?

How separable is an addiction from a gifted artist? Can drugs be excised from the equation or are they an inextricable part of the genius? If Hoffman had never touched heroin, if he had never done any kind of drugs and was sober as the proverbial judge, would he still be the great actor he was?

goosebumps

This video has gone viral in the last few days and is alleged to show 1,000 students spontaneously singing "The Star Spangled Banner" to celebrate the start of the Olympics. That, in fact, is not correct.

The truth is they are students gathered in a Kentucky hotel for a choir competition. But it's a hauntingly lovely rendition of the National Anthem.

I am a homesick ex-pat so things like this reduce me to tears. If you're an American, do give it a listen.

better every day

I've felt better every day since the accident with the discomfort declining at a steady pace. That makes the experience much more tolerable I think.

How horrible it must be for people with illnesses and injuries where the opposite is true, where each passing day is like losing more territory. How difficult and depressing that must be to endure.

I would never want to be a hypochondriac. I never like to feel less than 100 percent, so willingly wanting to be ill or incapacitated is such an alien idea for me.

When I am old and gray, I hope I have some kind of final illness that snuffs me immediately. Dropping dead out of the blue is definitely the way to go.

digitized hardcore

This news item has some details and a short video about the explicit content of Lars von Trier's forthcoming movie Nymphomaniac.

The big-name actors will look like they're having uncensored sex, but the actual fucking part of the image will be digitized from footage shot with no-name actors.

There's something slightly absurd about this notion. It's okay for a big-name actor to appear to have sex but not actually have sex on screen. What does it matter?

I'm also left wondering if the digital mashup will look somehow mismatched, as sometimes happens with CGI. It could be unintentionally funny.

natural tits

You could never look like this with implants, so why bother trying? Why do women think that implants somehow improve their looks when even the best boob job still doesn't look quite natural?

I was thinking this morning that it's a good thing I never had a boob job. My recent injuries would be much worse if I had. A woman hit violently on her implanted breasts could end up with a whole lot of trouble for a very long time.

collapsed lung

My husband James, baby Joey, and I were involved in a pretty serious auto crash on Thursday when James's uncle was driving. Another driver broadsided us when he ran an intersection.

Neither James and Joey had a scratch on them but uncle and I were not so lucky, given we were on the side struck by the other car. Uncle's arm was broken.

In addition to some nasty bruises and soft tissue injury, I ended up with a collapsed lung, not an experience I recommend for anyone. It was rather painful and the shortness of breath was pretty scary.

This is the first chance I've had to blog and it's taken me about a half hour to write this. (The last few days were queued posts held in reserve in case I was unable to post.)

So I will probably be somewhat light in posting for a little while, given that sitting and typing is a bit much for too long.

trek humor

This made me giggle. It also made me wonder how slow memes must have spread before the Internet age.

boobies bird

Australians seem to like keeping birds, at least some of the ones I've met. In the US, I don't recall that I knew anyone who had a pet bird, but I know quite a few here.

I'm not much of a bird person. They're cute and everything, but some of them can be nasty and nearly all of them are a safe bet to shit on you if you hold one. I would never harm them, however, and try to encourage the wild ones to come into our garden.

So this little stunt below is cute but I've been around enough birds to know they can inadvertently claw you. I would not want to end up with my tits scarred for life simply to create a cute gif.

she wet her pants

People have no problem humiliating themselves on YouTube. Here's what happens in this video if you don't want to watch the whole thing: He finds a tarantula-like spider in what appears to be the basement. He freaks out.

He summons his wife/girlfriend who has way over-tweezed her eyebrows. She freaks out. He tries to convince her to get the spider out from under the dryer after it runs there because he's a girly man. While she's looking, he throws a glove on her neck. She freaks out and wets her pants.

The poor spider was undoubtedly more frightened than the two of them put together. If they couldn't handle spiders, why not summon a friend who isn't arachnophobic and he or she will remove the spider for you? At least they didn't harm the poor thing.

I like spiders and find many of them cute. I wouldn't keep one as a pet but I don't freak out when I see them. I think the poor little things undeservedly have a bad reputation.

wedding fails

Some of these aren't funny, but the dog and the bride made me laugh as did the groom with the pants problem.

The worst wedding fail I personally witnessed was a bride throwing up during the reception right at the head table. I was the guest of a guy I dated who was invited and, if I recall correctly, that was the last date we shared.

I didn't break up with him because of the pukey bride but because he had a problem acting like an adult.

am I getting smarter?

I've written before about what a terrible speller I am. In the past few months, however, I'm finding I'm not nearly as bad as I was. I can write entire posts here on the blog as well as other things I'm working on and not make one spelling error in the entire thing.

I still stumble with some words, like the able/ible ones. I know there are little mnemonic devices, like you usually can remove "able" and still have a complete word but rarely when it's "ible." Of course, there are exceptions that drive me crazy. (And, hey, I spelled "mnemonic" correctly without even having to look it up!)

While I usually spell-check all new entries here, I did overlook one recently and was corrected by a reader when I misspelled "atheist."

I notice that my spelling improved once I had my son. Could pregnancy have made me smarter? Or am I just paying more attention and have a better memory now? I'm not reading nor writing any more than I usually do. If anything I'm reading less simply because of the time constraints of a young child.

Whatever the answer, I like not having to look up words so often.

empty mansions

I recently finished a book titled Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune, a fascinating look at a woman who died a few days shy of her 105th birthday in 2011.

She was the youngest child of US Senator and industrialist William A. Clark, one of the richest men in American history but little known today. Huguette herself was worth at least $300 million at her death.

Huguette was unusual, to say the least. She bought a fabulous mutli-million-dollar estate in Connecticut but never lived in it, although she owned it for decades. She also owned an oceanfront property in Santa Barbara, California, worth close to $100 million, yet she never visited the property for decades.

And she owned three massive apartments in an exclusive building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, including an entire floor. These were filled with jewels, priceless paintings, and thousands of dolls and dollhouses.

In the last eight decades of her life, she was almost entirely reclusive. She had all sorts of quirks -- never meeting face-to-face with her many lawyers and only communicating with them through closed doors, devotedly watching the Smurfs on television and paying someone to transcribe every episode, and collecting all sorts of Japanese artifacts although she had never visited Japan.

She spent the last two decades of her life voluntarily living in an ordinary hospital room, notwithstanding that her many doctors declared her perfectly fit to leave and in better shape than many of their far younger patients.

The book's authors -- one of whom is Huguette's cousin -- seem perplexed about why she wanted to live in a dreary hospital room for so long, as did many of the posthumous press reports about her.

I was surprised none of them raised a possible explanation -- maybe she was agoraphobic. Without apparently realizing it, the book produces some hard evidence of this: when Huguette was transferred out of the hospital building to another affiliated hospital blocks away, she wore eyepatches completely blocking out her vision and all light.

Empty Mansions is a fascinating book, and I highly recommend it.

porn bowl

From what I understand about this year's Super Bowl, it was rather one-sided and the Seattle team wiped the floor with the Denver team. As this chart demonstrates, as the end approached, Denver fans sought solace in online porn and, in increasing numbers, turned away from the game, except at the very end.

This is not an isolated trend. Last year, much the same thing happened during the final game of the Stanley Cup.

I'm wondering how widespread of a trend this is in men's daily lives. I can see that if they've had a romantic disappointment, they might turn to porn more often, but what about other aspects of their lives? If some guy has a disappointing day at work or is facing financial problems, is he more likely to find refuge in online porn?

teen queen porn

The Miss Teen Colorado Runner Up has been stripped of her crown after evidence surfaced last week that she has done some porn. This begs the question of how a runner up can receive a crown for not winning, but I digress.

Two thoughts come to mind about this. First, what contestant in her right mind doesn't think a porn past will not be discovered in this digital age? Not only that, but Miss Runner Up apparently did the porn only a few weeks before the pageant in question and it could easily be found still streaming online.

So she can hardly be shocked. The same thing happened last year in the Miss Teen Delaware pageant, when the winner surrendered her crown after contest officials learned of her porn history.

That aside, the second issue is more troubling: the Miss Teen pageant has no rule against porn. Contestants must not be married nor have children, but the rules are silent about on-screen fucking. There is also no "morals" clause. So they toss women out on their asses for violating a non-existent rule? That sounds to me like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

As a public service to readers, to save you a trip to Google, I found a hardcore promo of the erstwhile Miss Teen Colorado Runner Up deepthroating some faceless guy who then pounds her into Wyoming.

borg art

The artwork below -- I guess you'd call it a sculpture -- is a six foot by six foot by six foot intricate lattice cube suspended on nearly invisible wire with a light bulb at its center.

When illuminated it projects identical patterns filling the walls, floor, and ceiling.

The piece was created by a woman artist from Pakistan, raised in Texas, and now teaching in Indiana.

If you right click on the photo below, a larger image will appear.

justin bieber versus lindsay lohan

News about Justin Bieber occasionally crosses my radar. I would rather endure dental surgery without anesthesia than attend one of his concerts, so I certainly am no fan. But the public hysteria about him and watching him make an ass of himself are of mild interest to me.

Lately he appears to be on some kind of Lindsay Lohan trajectory. He's not yet gone full Lohan but he seems well on his way down her path. He's increasingly in the news in an unflattering light, linked to one scandal or another. Just yesterday he was held by federal authorities for several hours after his private jet was searched because it reeked of marijuana.

It's always interesting to observe how celebrities, particularly younger ones, confront a sudden rise to significant fame. Some handle it without any real problems while others just spin out of control in increasingly self destructive ways. Bieber increasingly seems to be on the latter path.

My sense is that Bieber's appeal for his fans rests in his barely pubescent androgynous qualities, a white Michael Jackson of sorts. My gut instinct tells me, however, that Bieber will not have Jackson's staying power.

Jackson was able to reinvent himself several times during his career, but Bieber doesn't strike me as someone who has the self control and fortitude to do that. The latter seems to be too in love with being a celebrity more than anything else, and while Jackson had many flaws, I don't think he had that particular flaw.