Bizarre Bubble Bug in Blogger

Every once in a while when I try to leave a comment in Blogger the comment form suddenly acts bizarre and doesn't work. When I press a button, a bubble momentarily appears then disappears asking me if I want to Copy or Paste the mail button to the right. Of course I don't and never would. So it just wastes my time and I lose my typing, as copying it to the clipboard rarely ever works in this situation, but as you can see I was able to do a fast screen capture.

This Old Microwave

To support the glass breakage cleanup after the meteor shattered the 49 acres of windows in Chelyabinsk Russia, I plan to drink a glass of vodka.

My plan is to slowly become more Russian. But Tito's Handmade Vodka is from Austin Texas USA, so Raustin (Ростин)?

A friend responded "Russians understand that anything imported is better than what they have, so that's perfect!"

My response: I wonder if they feel that way about водка and икра.

Same friend responds: "Now, even their rocks are imported."

-----

How you can teLL you have been married too long: When you say something to your spouse and you can teLL by their reaction that they have misunderstood you AND you already know the incorrect interpretation they think they heard. Does this make sense? If not, let me start over ....

-----

Here is a sad story: 

My wife got eXcited when she saw something new growing by one of our pineapple plants. 

I explained to her that it was just a weed.

-----

My wife ate aLL my smaLL Snickers, but she replaced them with a large bag of even SMALLer Snickers. I think it would be possible to make Snickers smaller than this, but they would have to change the name to Snicker.

I think Snickers could eXist in an even smaLLer form factor, but then they would most likely be in vapor form and highly combustible.

Do you know what is in the middle of a Snickers? ---ck---

-----

Today's Question: what can I make out of my dead microwave oven?

My Favorite Lawyer responded:   A step stool ? 

A Washington state friend: A dog house for a tiny dog

From me: A bow tanker

From me: Donate the glass plate to Badger from Vienna, as the glass plate of his microwave oven committed suicide this morning.

I need more ideas, please.

-----

Wolffalos

In a dream: I was in Stinnett TX working outdoors and Cooper was with me. Then he was suddenly gone. I yeLLed for him. He appeared to be playing with other dogs across the street but when several animals came running towards me they were aLL grey wolves which slowly morphed into a buffalo stampede. About this time I said to myself, "This is a dream." and woke up. Where is my coffee?

-----

Valentines Disaster! The chicken took too long to cook, I left the flame on under the veggies and scorched them, and the new style of home baked bread was below average .... I wiLL try harder neXt time!

I can usuaLLy manage to do two things at once, but not three. The problem involved baking two things while stir frying. Now I have a mountain range of dirty dishes.

I did manage to find a Valentines present for the both of us. The cooling racks for bread loaves come in a package of two.

Nyet

So ... the president wants to try AGAIN to reduce our Afghan force, this time by 34,000 in a year. That is roughly less than a hundred people a day, less than one plane full. Um, question, don't we have more than one plane?

-----

I have a question: the Wall Street Journal has a photo of a Chinese performer putting a SINGLE live snake in his mouth and out his nose. WHAT does that have to do with the business world?!?!? Thank you for grossing me out today WSJ.

-----

Yesterday I taught my wife about the sand delivery systems that locomotives use to maintain wheel traction. I had read about them but had never seen them in action until we were waiting at the crossing on Wilson Street and happened to be the vehicle closest to the track.

Link to Wikipedia Article for Sandbox for Locomotives

-----

I learned today that throwing shoes at your opponent is an insult in Arab societies. I wonder if the Pentagon has ever thought about using shoes as a weapon for drone strikes?

As a shoe salesman I have mixed feelings about this practice. I guess if they aren't Vibram FiveFingers shoes that would be okay.

Dirty socks might be considered chemical weapons and banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1929.

-----

My new hobby: Studying Russian Spies, etc.

I have been busy with math projects. I wiLL publish them soon. I also put up some more photos in my blog Finding The Cute of the Universe

Double Your Words, Almost

The FX channel schedule displays a movie about reincarnation on my iPad. In the pop-up window for the movie description they put these words:

   Down to Earth
   Thursday February 7, 2013
   After dying before his time, an aspiring
   comic gets a second shot at life...by being
   reincarnated as a wealthy but un-likeable
   businessman. After dying before his time,
   an aspiring comic gets a second shot at
   life...by being reincarnated as a wealthy

Did I see that right? I took a screen shot save just to be sure. After aLL it is 6:25 AM and I am operating on only a few hours sleep.

I found that veRy hilarious. I had to read it carefuLLy three times, not just twice. After the first pass through I asked myself A) I had already seen this movie, right? AND B) Did they reaLLy repeat the same sentence twice?!?!? ... Yes, they did repeat it, but then I noticed they had fiLLed the tiny pop-up box and truncated the last few words. Of course then I had to check it again to be sure it was eXactly same words and same order, yes, same and same, just incomplete. Then there was the whole process of copying it and formatting it into Blogger, so the amount of laughter got stretched out over a long complicated time frame, so it had a feeling of constrained diluted laughter, no, not laughter, there was no boiling, just hilarity, evaporation. Yes, that's it, comedic evaporation.

-----

Bigfoot

Bigfoot in South Dakota? How come I have NEVER heard of this before ... what a load of crap! Animal Planet channel is getting stupidly desperate for programming material. There are enough people with rifles that somebody could have & would have shot one by now. I think I wiLL start looking for Medium Foot.

Then I thought about the massive number of animals that have become eXtinct through the actions of humans.

Message from my aunt in South Dakota: Big Foote was Indian Chief, My address road named after him, killed at Wounded Knee.

Message to my Aunt: I had remembered your road name & the sign's wrong speLLing at the Interstate 90 exit, but there are people chasing a Bigfoot creature in South Dakota and elsewhere of course. I have seen some of the humans from the teleBision shows "Moonshiners" and "Duck Dynasty", and they could veRy easiLLy seem Bigfoot-ish from a distance, and that distance would not have to be that great.

-----

I am watching someone walk towards the entrance of the cardiologist office but then had to pause to finish their cigarette.

Then she threw the remains on the ground, nasty.

In Seconds Place

The online cartoon xkcd is one of my favorite things. It is published three times per week on M-W-F. One episode, number 1047, gave approximations for physical events. One of the items mentioned was the number of seconds in a year. It has a fairly exact value of

60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 365.25 days per year = 31557600 seconds per year

The approximate value given on http://m.xkcd.com/1047/ for the number of seconds in a year was 75^4 = 31640625

31640625 is 0.263% higher than 31557600

Today I was playing with differences of factorials on my TI-89 and found a closer approximation.

317! ÷ 314! = 31554200 which is 0.0108% lower than 31557600

Update: After reading Rob's comments I decided to see how long the 0.0108% of a year was in hours, and eXpress that value as a factorial division.

31557600 - 31554200 = 3400 seconds

One hour equals 60 x 60 = 3600 seconds per hour

So 16! ÷ 13! = 3360 which leaves 40 seconds

40! ÷ 39! = 40

But that last step is just cheating to get to an eXact number, because

X! ÷ (X-1)! = X

So one year equals (317! ÷ 314!) + (16! ÷ 13!) + (40! ÷ 39!) seconds

But then I noticed that 17! ÷ 14! = 4080 which is fairly close to 3400, and keeps the equation pretty with translational symmetry, the repeating of the 17 and 14's.

So calculating an approximate pretty value 317! ÷ 314! + 17! ÷ 14! = 31558280 which is 0.0022% larger than a real year

Pretty is important!!!

How To Properly Celebrate Ground Hog Day

Ground Hog Day is February 2nd.

Ground hog meat is sausage. So one way to celebrate is by eating sausage.

Mmmm ... sausage

Another way to think about ground plus hog is to remember what form of ground (The Earth) that hogs like best. And it is ... just add water ... Mud!!! There are so many things you can do with mud such as making mud pies and imitating pigs by roLLing around in mud. But there are a few delicious desserts that have the word mud in them as weLL.

If you are like me and tend to completely forget about yesterday being Groundhog Day, you could celebrate by watching the Bill Murray movie over and over until you have it memorized, or insanity or divorce happens. Another sneaky way to celebrate Ground Hog Day is by waiting until September 21st, which is Bill Murray's birthday.

Another feature of Groundhog Day is the ability of the animal to predict the near future weather with some shadow nonsense. I decided to try directly talking to a hog but I couldn't understand them. They are s'pposed to be rather intelligent. So I decided to try something else. I cooked sausage in a pan and then shook it to see if the pieces would reveal a message. The secret to doing this properly is to aLLow plenty of eXtra skillet space. A pan with bumps on the bottom probably helps.

The words that appeared were "ROB BANK"

I thought this was a bit strange, especiaLLy the part about using the B twice. But then I reasoned that the sausage was being efficient and entropy being what it isn't in this story. I figured the message could be interpretted a couple of ways. One, I have a friend named Rob and maybe the sausage was teLLing me to give Rob eveRything I have in my bank account. But then I remembered that it isn't a bank, but a credit union. So then I thought maybe the sausage is teLLing me to rob a different bank, a real bank. But I decided to shake the pan of sausage again and this time it gave me a dollar symbol inversed. I thought, wow, inverse, veRy creative sausage. So I went to the bank after eating my mystical message meat.

I approached the bank teLLer and politely gave her a piece of paper with this message:

"Please give me aLL your money. I was cooking sausage this morning and it spoke to me and told me to rob a bank."

This particular bank is where my wife set up our commercial account, so the people know me quite weLL. I go there often enough that a few of the teLLers even have our checking account number partiaLLy memorized. The teLLer reads my slip of paper and cracks up laughing. I wasn't being taken seriously! I even showed her the video of the shaken sausage saying and $ symbol on my iPhone. She laughed some more, soon foLLowed by even moRe teLLers roLLing on the floor laughing holding their abdomens. I felt this was veRy unprofessional. I puLLed out my hand gun and fired three warning shots straight up. But then I realized there was office space above me, and I heard screams both above me and the shocked teLLers in front of me. They slowly got off the floor and gave me some money. I thanked them and told them I was just obeying my (now) inner sausage, sorry for frightening you with the handgun.

But I don't know how much money it was because just as soon as I walked out of the bank I was kiLLed in a hail of police buLLets.

Then in true Bill Murray form I woke up in my bed this morning, and it was and wasn't Feb 3rd.