Monthly Archives: February 2004

It’s interesting to me to see what sort of things crop up in the access log for search terms. One of the hardier perennials has got to be the Poloris Dental Poultice that I found in my bathroom wall while doing some remodeling. Every two or three months, I get people asking about where to find them. As far as I know, they’re no longer commercially available. In fact, the only listings I’ve found for them, other than this site, have been on sites that sell antiquities and dental ephemera.
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Sometimes I worry that I’m a little bit of a packrat. On the other hand, it’d take a lifetime of work before I got to be as bad as some people.

I think I’m going to go home tonight and start throwing stuff away…

Found a link on DECAFBAD to a site that generates random cinematic names for various Kung Fu strikes and forms… Here’s a random sample from the 500 or so names that it generated for me:

mighty snake punch
(Mmmm…. Snake punch…. Mighty tasty!)

dreaded chopstick neck-snap
(Yep. Sounds pretty dreadful to me…)

dreaded wind maneuver
(Well I’m sorry, sometimes spicy food does that to me.)

screaming rat shield
(I certainly wouldn’t want to hit someone hiding behind some screaming rats.)

impossible cat twist
(I’ve seen that! Usually when one of the wierdos falls off the couch…)

emasculating hawk somersault
(Ow. Just… ow….)

drunken buddha rebuke
(Listen, Buddha, we’re your friends, and we need to talk about your drinking…)

naughty zodiac pose
(Hey now! It’s not that kind of movie!)

I’ve got a bit of a video project in the office right now… I’m digitizing a video from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety called “Otto the Auto – Rachel in Space.” It’s a tape from one of those movies that you used to watch in school. It was always kind of cool to walk into the classroom and see that things were set up to watch a film. All the blinds would be closed and the teacher would thread the film into the strange mirror-box projection system set up in front of the desks, smelling of greasy dust and hot projector bulbs. There’d be a rumbling “BLAAAAT!!” sound from the speaker, the film would start, and the enthusiasm would drain right out of the room as we watched “Living with Leeches” or “Your Friend the Mollusk”.
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I love messing with telemarketers. I have a sort of game I play with them to see what sort of reactions I can provoke.

I get
• one point if the conversation ends because they hung up on me,
• two points if I can make them audibly angry,
• three points if they yell at me,
• four points if they swear and
• five points if they start crying.

So far, nobody has gotten a perfect score by doing all of these, but I have had a few six point calls where they do the first three…
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OK, so this poster comes in with a really cool title:

SUMO Modification of the SC Motif in C/EBP Alpha

And I have no idea what it means. But I’ve got this mental image of some scientist taking two cells, fattening them up and slamming them together at high speed. In South Carolina.

Unfortunately, according to the abstract, it has something to do with Synergy Control and a Small Ubiquitin-like Modifier. Alas.

I don’t go out of my way to watch sports. If there’s a sporting event on a TV in the background, I’ll occasionally glance over at it out of a general interest in what’s going on, so I’ve got a passing acquaintence with sports in a generic sense. Still, Sunday afternoon at the In-Laws, we watched the Superbowl commercials, with the TV muted during the actual game. We missed the halftime show though, so I’ve felt a bit left out of some of the office gossip about Janet and Justin and the “Wardrobe Malfunction.”

On the other hand, I have a theory about it all…
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