I’ve been wanting to catalog the junk that’s been a hazard on my different drives (to my brother’s, to work) but hadn’t got around to it.
This morning there was a commercial-size air conditioning duct in the middle of the off-ramp from the 202.
The Haiku
Some spam at my work
tricked some teachers who clicked on
this crazy logo:
If you enter bad data, you will be fed to the lions/flogged.
Chocolate candies
Limited Edition brand
Red 40, cornstarch
This is from the site freedom1.org as well as air1.com’s concert and events page.. They will be updating it with each event.
I pass it on to my readers as my duty to report all things awesome:
Join worship leader Jeremy Poehls for a night of energetic praise and passionate worship.
Featuring songs from Hillsong United, David Crowder Band, Chris Tomlin and Tim Hughes
Sunday, November 4th at 7PM
Admission is free
Faith Church of the Valley
2125 E Chandler Blvd
Chandler, AZ 85225
Need more info?
contact@freedom1.org
Mareen Devall would
laugh in 1600s France
of her wacky kids
First, lots of fun everyone with some cool predictions. Alison, you are the man (in a sense).
But the big shout-out goes to the University of Kansas and Mahwah, NJ (among others) for keeping up with our thread tonight.
Actually, I had quite a bit of fun thinking about the friends I was connected to while enjoying a TV show. Devin, you may the time zone advantage, but I have my own: dad time. My daughter has to be in bed by 9pm and Heroes comes on at 8pm. So, depending on when she sleeps, that’s when we get to start what we’ve recorded on our magical VCR.
A new category has been unlocked:
Heroes!
Now you can search for all your Heroes info.
The Haiku
Not quite dramatic
Not quite flowing wind chimes but
Predict next Monday?
I’m not saying the show’s cliche yet. I could read a Star Wars novel and tell you that either someone will struggle with the dark side of the Force or a pilot will be brash. So welcome to archetype-palooza!
Booyor:
Nathan is the hooded man. And Alejandro will angst for Mya and maybe they’ll get separated again. And Peter will struggle with opening the box. And some paintings.
My Wife:
Nathan is the hooded man. And blood. There will be blood.
Bethany:
Someone’s going to catch on fire and, uh, not die. And maybe jump off a building.
(Folks, she doesn’t watch the show. But she is a genius.)
Teddi:
Someone will go back in time and meet the cause of all the problems.
Peter:
Jesus, duh.
Alison, what say you? Is the stolen car Claire’s?
It’s interesting that we’ve got a virus similar to the Phalanx virus that plagued the X-Men.
As well as some new types of Ads. I got tired of the “Find Santa Monica Lawyers Cheap” ads from Google. So I tried some video in the sidebar. That looked nasty, especially since the ‘short films’ ad category was graphic and the ‘video game’ category consisted of a shirtless man vlogging how he gets harassed by Halo 3 noobs. I settled with TV Guide (vs. BBQ TV (blech…not a barbecue) or US Soccer (because if Beckham can’t do junk, I won’t have much more luck)).
Hopefully the look is pleasing. I will continue to streamline and simplify because, frankly, who looked at the calendar widget anyway?
The Haiku:
Yes, Peter-sensei
You can mock the libratorr
Who now lacks fall break
I didn’t want to resort to captchas (those annoying words scrambled like a color-blindness screening (sorry, Mike. That and your geographic tongue.)) when trying to catch spambots, but I also do not like spam (in a train or on a plane).
I have a new math challenge! Now with crazy font colors!
I seriously thought people weren’t reading the bloggh anymore. Very silent commenters. Nope. Just blocked by a PHP error. But now we have a new author on staff! Peter the registered fan of all things kitschtech/lolcats. Devin, wanna add to the madness? (For all of the non-Diamondbacks info.)
I’m testing out some anti-spam stuff. You may see some strange comments that frighten you.
This is probably old news, but it’s news to me. Thanks to Mr. Robinson (and his co-workers) for pointing it out to me.
Yeah, Greg Grunberg! Detective Parkman will be in it, as well as Jessica Lewis from ‘She’s the Man’ (which is still my favorite rendition of Twelfth Night). Blake Lively and Lizzy Caplan from ‘Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants’ (haven’t seen it, nor will I) as well as the guy from Black Donnellys (is that show still on?)
But the big star? Odette Yustman. Yep, Kindergarten Cop star. And need I remind you of her role in the Lifetime original movie ‘Caught on Tape: Reckless Behavior‘. (I actually didn’t make up that name for the show. Yeah, Lifetime!)
Let’s hear it for Parkman! He’ll be able to read the thoughts of the sea monster.
Filed under inlawfilms.com/recipes
Once again, in the tradition of the Hermits, I found a recipe lying around the house and I thought I should share. This time I cleaned out the garage and this mysterious paper was crumpled up under some folders.
Tonight we serve up a Boushh family favorite: Citric Thermal Detonators!
I don’t know if this is a part of my wife’s Master Apprentice repertoire, if this was a recipe from school (based on the location), or if this placed surreptitiously for my demise.
It combines my favorite things:
This is ideal for cooking in the wild, whether you’re too lazy to wash dishes or you time is of the essence to nab some Rebel scum.
Either way, portable cake!
Materials Needed:
1. Cut the top off of your citrus about 1/3 from the top, making a lid (a la jack of lanterns)
2. Leaving the citric chunk attached to the lid, set aside the lid and hollow out the rest of the detonator
3. Fill the detonator casing/orange with liquid batter (if you’re tired, throwing this Batter Bomb now will produce comedic mayhem but no cake)
4. Re-lid the orange
5. Wrap the orange in a 6″ x 6″ square of foil (quadrilaterals depend upon lemon or grapefruit variants)
6. Place wrapped detonator on hot coals/over the fire
7. 10-15 minutes later, a cake will form inside the orange (if you held the foil-covered orange this whole time, know that you are a better man than I. Enjoy your pastry, my friend. Enjoy your pastry.)
The orange left in the lid will flavor the cake, so heads up with that when choosing cake batter/citric shell.
I’ve been thinking that my urls are crazy. My mom always types ‘booyer.com‘ and my brother always AltaVistas the site.
I figured that our film company was probably not going to have a blog if we didn’t have one since July ’05, so here are the shortcuts:
inlawfilms.com/blog
inlawfilms.com/yalit
inlawfilms.com/lit
inlawfilms.com/teaching
I’m going to be speaking at a librarian convention and I wanted to have a decent URL to refer to for book reviews without a conflict of interest (and a conflict of ‘Booyor’).
The Haiku:
Tough choices to make
In the book and in real life
But you’ll be better
A local book company asked me to blog for them. Here’s my first entry:
Harmless, a book that is anything but, raises some eyebrows. Do you buy it for your child? Do you put it on the shelf as a librarian? Can it be used in the classroom?
As an 8th grade Language Arts teacher I saw many heart-wrenching situations that my students wound up in, many situations that I think we as educators don’t always catch or know how to deal with. I grew up in a pretty stable environment, a fact I am thankful for, but a stable environment is not always par for the course.
What I love about Harmless is that it is told from three girls’ perspectives. Students can relate to Anna. Emma, or Mariah and their very different home environments. Because the narrator switches each chapter, there isn’t a true emphasis on one character over another. It also demonstrates to young adult readers that open communication with honesty is key to any relationship, as you are sometimes wishing one girl would just come clean to the other people to avoid confusion.
Anna and Emma have known each other since third grade. They have always been a support system for each other. When they get to high school, Mariah joins the circle. Lasting friendships are challenged as Mariah starts dating an older boy. Mariah wants to go to a party but needs Emma and Anna to come with her. Anna and Emma lie to their parents, using the excuse of going to the movies to get out of the house. Mariah is troubled that her family doesn’t ask where she’s going. When one of the girls’ moms shows up unexpectedly at the movies and doesn’t find the group, she frantically texts and calls her daughter.
To avoid getting in trouble, the girls conspire to tell their parents that the circle of girls went on a star-gazing walk when Emma was suddenly assaulted. The girls tell this story when they get home; the parents are thankful that the girls are safe, but they don’t stop there. The parents now want justice to be served for whoever attacked Emma, because it may happen again. The situation escalates as the police search for a phantom assailant and a young girl in a neighboring town goes missing.
When reading the story I was reminded of another controversial story, The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Young girls use their newfound power in society but get caught up in the lies. What is the extent of a person’s responsibility and character?
Would I use Harmless as a classroom novel? Probably in an upper-division high school class, but not at the 8th grade level. Not every single student at the 8th grade is ready for the situations, so a passing grade shouldn’t be connected to reading the book. Would I want my daughter to read it? Absolutely. A word of caution: you have to wade through Mariah’s coarse language and some very serious situations to get to the true value.
One very beneficial aspect of the book, though, is that not every consequence comes from a parent. Your parents are human; they won’t always catch you. But choices still have consequences, especially ones that you can’t see in the flurry of the immediate. I’ve had students tell me about how they’ve lied to their parents and the rough situations that they get themselves into. I would love to deal with these issues before the serious choices and consequences kick in instead of after the fact.
If one student is challenged to think twice about lying to their parents, I’m keeping the book on my shelf.
Best sci-fi that I’ve read in a long time. Best last line to a young adult book series that I’ve seen in a while.
I just finished Specials by Scott Westerfield. Now I can jump into Extras, but I definitely had to read the end of the main trilogy.
The Specials are like an MIB squad, built to take on Special Circumstances. Think Matrix agents but with jet alloy for bones and skintenna networks keeping teams in contact. (And a whole bunch of “morphological violations”.) Everyone thinks that they’re a Boogie Man (I’m thinkin’ it might be ‘Bogey’ Man…I picture a zombie shakin’ his groove thang…for brains.) until they show up on your doorstep to take you away.
Now picture Specials fighting each other on hoverboards. Yep. Sold.
Lots of cool takes on life without getting preachy mixed with hard-core plastic surgery violence. Enough nervous-making tricks to keep you bubbly. (Yeah, I hear they’re going to release a future glossary soon.)
The Haiku
Bubble-headed freaks
Mind-wiped to party all night
Ah! Specials are here!
It will all be housed by Minesweeper: The Movie.
New plotlines, anyone? New movie concepts?
He is approached by a group of Christian missionaries who wish to travel to Burma in order to help stop the atrocities being committed. Rambo takes them up the halfway, and then leaves them. Soon after arriving in Burma, they are captured by the army, and most of them are killed. Upon hearing this news, John Rambo enlists the help of a group mercenaries to help rescue them.
Here’s the trailer for Rambo. (Beware. Lots of blood. It is a Rambo trailer.)
He-Man?
I actually was bummed by last Monday’s episode, “Kindred”. I felt like they pulled some “Lost” stereotypical plot devices just to keep us going. Peter doesn’t want to open the box and find if he is a killer, but yet he’s down with Irish gangsters who more than likely have killed…and then killed again.
Or Mohinder’s new lab being in Isaac’s loft…where those ruttin’ paintings still are? Because the all-powerful corporation didn’t remember that the painter-dude could tell the future? And Sylar needs to be back? Why? Yes, the X-Men fight Magneto from time to time, but give me a Sabretooth or Mystique, even if you can’t go Shi’aar on us. The poor actor’s going to be Patrick Stewart/William Shatnerized.
I don’t know whether Alejandro and his sister’s story is supposed to be political or not, but do they always get separated each episode? If they return to each other, then get split up towards the last commercial break, you have my permission to yell cliche. No jumped sharks yet, hopefully.
One episode in two seasons isn’t bad. But Hiro, you better not let me down.
So, it’s official: Metroid rocks. I loved Twilight Princess, but I definitely am more of a Sci-Fi nerd. Orcs on pigback rock. Walking through a giant expanse of spores and spikes? My dream. One of the funny things about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is that I didn’t expect it to be such a puzzle-based game. And the puzzles aren’t just for puzzles’ sake, for the most part.
The game starts out with Samus having to engage the engines of her ship, open up a comm, and move the thrusters to approach the Galactic Federation ships. I feel like a total bounty hunter.
But how can the suit make you turn into a ball? Still working on the physics of that.
Something that’s funny is that on Bryyo, the second planet, I had to shoot/ignite some fuel gel to free a golem to open a door. Crazy Bryyoans, with their robot door openers. No wonder there was The Great Schism between the Primals and the Scientists. I mean, duh! (I open up new levels of nerdness here.) The game is from Samus’ helmet visor. Move the Wiimote in a certain way and you bring up a scanning overlay. Scan pictures/statues/macrame owls and you gain Lore about the culture. The more Lore, the more stuff you can purchase in the extras section of the game.
I could kill Space Pirates, but I’d rather scan the various flora and fauna before it shoots its phazon corrupted stomach acid at me. The really cool thing is that the creatures look like aliens. We’re talking classic, funky sci-fi aliens and not your Star Trek fare:
Let’s mourn for those run over by snow tires.
You also get to swing from your grapple glove across lava and grinding gears. I think that’s of note.
There’s also a new warning.
Please don’t play this game around your friends or your flower vases/bowling pins. They will be owned.
That guy’s flailing. This is like when I “button mash” on SSX or Dragonball. I like the second picture simply because the two dots by his head look like the classic ‘HIC’ sign next to Sunday funnies drunks.
I sent a lot of messages yesterday to Mike about his soul and how my Mii with an upside-down head would steal it. Then Nintendo sent me three separate messages about menu 3.1. Now Everybody Votes has…I don’t know, USB keyboard support or something. Then I became, as purveyors of NBA Jam know, “on fire” with Wii Play. I hadn’t played the game since I got the console. I now killed 27 tanks, got to level 7 on the body-bending, and returned 100 straight volleys in Ping Pong. I was Forrest Gump and all of the Miis gathered around my table each time I upped the score by 10.
As a result, since the console sends me a message with each record broken, I received three pages of messages today:
I’ve been babysitting for the week on Fall Break. I am excited to finally get some time on my own tomorrow morning to get past Bryyo.
Favorite part of the game so far? Being held in Meta-Ridley’s nasty claw and shooting down his throat until I was released. All while falling many meters down a power shaft at a time. A close second is racing the asteroid to get to the planetary defense cannon, only to be confronted by my arch-nemesis.
Haiku:
On the topic of Metroid
how about a car that will
recommend fast food?
TOKYO (AFP) – Japan’s Nissan Motor Co. on Friday unveiled a new version of its egg-shaped Pivo concept car that can drive sideways and has a small robot to assist with navigation or calm down angry drivers.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Pivo 2 three-seater electric car has wheels that can turn 90 degrees for easy parallel parking.
Like its predecessor, which was unveiled two years ago, the new Pivo has a cabin able to revolve 360 degrees, eliminating the need to reverse.
A round-eyed robot head sitting on the dashboard has cameras that can tell when a driver is getting sleepy.
“You look tired. There’s a coffee shop 500 metres ahead on the left,” it told a driver with drooping eyelids during a recent demonstration.
It can also nod or shake its head, helping to improve the mood of irate or glum drivers.
The car has “by-wire” technologies that use electric signals in the steering and braking.
Unlike the first Pivo, it has no axles. Instead it has four separate electric motors, allowing the wheels to turn further than a conventional car.
The Pivo 2 will be exhibited at the Tokyo Motor Show near the capital from October 27.