To celebrate the centennial of Monday Trivia, we’ve got a double-shot of trivia for you. It’s a trivia explosion, I tell ya.
What does the European Union lack, as do (currently) Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Denmark, Egypt, Faroe Islands, Guyana, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Macau, Mauritania, Myanmar, Nepal, Qatar, Seychelles, Sudan, Surinam, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen?
In terms of pure numbers, Texas has the most, followed by Florida, California, Georgia, Ohio, Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia, Illinois, and North Carolina to round out the top ten.
By a different, per-something, measure, Florida is on top, followed by Georgia, Utah, Hawaii, Louisiana, Alabama, Maryland, Ohio, Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona are the top ten.
Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Maine, and Montana have none. Wyoming, Rhode Island, and South Dakota have one.
As some of you may recall, little Lain has hip dysplasia, a condition where her leg sockets did not properly form. Because of this, she has to wear a harness to keep them in place so that they will form properly going forward. It’s a pretty harmless thing, in the overall. She cried like thunder when they put it on, but after that, no issues. Nor is there any concern of long-term problems. She should even crawl on time. All it does is hold her legs out a little bit, which has some convenience because it makes her easier to hold.
So for the most part, we’ve gotten used to it being there and don’t think much of it. We forgot to inform people that we were going down to see during our trip back home. So we kept having to explain it. And we have to explain it to strangers, as well, who are constantly asking about it. We don’t really mind their curiosity. If we saw this thing on a baby, we’d be curious, too. It also helps that it comes up in conversations about how cute she is. It does get just a tad tiresome, though. After a while.
There was one lady, though. We were at the airport and Clancy was changing her in the women’s bathroom. Someone saw the harness, new exactly what it was. “Hip dysplasia?” Clancy confirmed. She said that her daughter’d had it when she was a baby. And now she’s the star of her track team. Now, with the above in mind, we weren’t worried about any permanent harm so long as the harness puts everything in the right place. On an intellectual and medical level, we know that. But it’s still kind of easy to forget. And it was wonderful of that stranger to remind us.
Today I took the baby to the supermarket. As it happens, she was wearing her jammies and I decided not to change her. I figured, if nothing else, it would save explanations about the harness.
As per usual, she got a lot of oohs and ahhs. Then one lady was really taken aback at how her legs just jutted out like they did. She thought that was the cutest thing and brought her entire family over to see the baby with the jutted legs. She said that wow, the baby must have really good leg control to be able to do that. Clancy said at this point she would have corrected the lady, but I chose to let it go. It was at least a sort of different kind of benign gawking.
International:
[I1] Fans of the movie Spaceballs will appreciate this.
[I2] The residential property in the ten most expensive London boroughs is now worth as much as all the housing in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined…”
[I3] According to the Daily Mail, the NHS in the UK is going after your data.
Business:
[B1] An interesting look at the history of race in soft drinks.
[B2] The Obama Administration may be holding up the pipeline, but they have approved substantial offshore drilling leases.
[B3] According to the Canadian Press, Mining companies that are getting visas for foreign employees are rejecting candidates with 30 years of experience.
[B4] I am inclined to criticize employers who expect perfectly qualified employees to roll up on their doorstep, and think that the notion that we have a shortage of skilled workers is built on this mentality. Dominic Giandomenico makes the opposing argument.
[B5] Maybe a solution to global warming is laziness. Richard Heinberg thinks we need to redesign our use of energy. Which, if that’s what we need to do… we’re doomed.
[B6] Some interesting predictions on the future of air travel. One thing that will likely not come to pass is more airlines getting into the oil refinery business.
[B7] Big Coal may be in for some pain ahead, and for once it isn’t because of the Obama Administration.
[B8] A new report says that the Family and Medical Leave law is working. We were certainly glad to have it.
[B9] Automation may not take away jobs, but they will suppress wages. This is one of the things that makes me skeptical of trade restrictions to boost domestic employment and wages. There are very often going to be other options.
Entertainment:
[E1] Atlantic Wire looks at political types who tried to make it in Hollywood and succeeded or failed. The record for Democrats is mixed, but Republicans generally failed. There are remarks each side can make about that.
[E2] If you like Chuck Klosterman or professional basketball, or if you’ve heard of Royce White, I recommend this article.
Law:
[L1] Florida has approved birth certificate with three parents. I still don’t fully understand why, given the lack of rights/responsibilities of the third parent.
[L2] If you just stole an iPhone from someone else, it’s not a particularly good idea to call the cops when someone steals it from you.
[L3] Remember the robber that accepted an offer of pizza for his family instead of robbing the place? Too nice a story to be true, I guess. He was lying.
[L4] Paging Ryan Noonan: A man who took his wife’s name was accused of fraud. It does seem to me that there ought to be documentation for both men and women to change their names, but if you’re going to give one a pass, so should you with the other.
Technology:
[T1] LibreOffice 4.0 is out! I’m still waiting to see what OpenOffice does with the code they got from IBM before I go all-in with Libre (except Access, which I just can’t quit).
[T2] Dick Tracy watches are truly an idea whose time has come and kudos to Apple if they’re on top of it. There are “smartwatches” that talk to smartphones, and smartphones that go on your wrist, but there’s still work to do to get it right.
[T3] Bitcasa touts infinite online storage. They have my attention.
[T4] Maybe this is why Google wants us to use something other than passwords. (Seriously, an interesting article on James Fallows’s wife’s email being hacked.
[T5] I disagree with Michael Calabrese. What is bring proposed here is actually much better than government-sponsored WiFi everywhere.
[T6] I am coming around on the idea of Ubuntu smartphones, which are supposed to be coming in October. I’m not sure I will get one, but I’m a little worried that after I throw in my lot with Android, Ubuntu will get it right.
[T7] In other smartphone news, it’ll be interesting to see how the Kindle Phone does. Jose Gonzales calls it a sure thing, but I’m not so sure. The Kindle Fire succeeded in part because it was a tertiary device. It’s different to hand one’s phone over to Amazon. But it could well work out, especially if they subsidize the crap out of it.
Delsie wasn’t my first girlfriend or my first… first, but she was my first many-other-things. She was something of a crystal-waver and incense queen and believed that she was reincarnated from some queen of Atlantis. She wasn’t stupid, but she was often quite silly. I really wanted to buy in to her little world, but I honestly couldn’t. But she was a sweet girl. Loyal to a fault, extremely resiliant, and a loving smile that could light up a room.
She was a sweet girl that got on my nerves endlessly. I could never place my finger on what it was about she and I that didn’t work, but it became pretty apparent pretty early on that only one of us had that assessment of our relationship or lack thereof. She was pretty fixated on the relationship as my eye was on the lack thereof.
I hesitate to say that Buck was a friend, though that’s a convenient stance to take. Buck was what we used to call a kikker. A kikker is someone that likes to dress up in a big hat and wear a big buckle and talk with an accent but wouldn’t know the first thing about milking a cow, much less riding a bull. He had a few stock phrases that became his mantra, but it was more reminiscent of that nerd we all know in some way or another that spends half his time making reference to some obscure anime. Except that Buck used country songs and had a much lighter selection. But Buck seemed to be a good guy as well. Obnoxious, but harmless.
Delsie and I had run our course after about three or four months. The annoyance factor was already outweighing the not-even-friends-but-still-with-benefits thing that we had and was about to outweigh my desire not to hurt anyone’s feelings. The notion that I was even capable of hurting anyone’s feelings was an alien concept to me at the time, and not a concept I was particularly enamored with. That’s about where I was when I got wind that Buck was kinda sorta interested in Delsie.
I don’t know if it was out of benevolence or simple exhaustion, but even though I could have dragged out the not-even-friends-but-still-with-benefits thing a little longer, I enthusiastically helped facilitate their coupling. I pinged her on her thoughts of him. I put the thought in her head that he was single and may make a good boyfriend. I reported back to him that she sounded somewhat interested and that he should ask her out.
She was annoying but good hearted. He was obnoxious but also good hearted. It sounded like a match made in friggin’ heaven. I was always a little amused how much they discounted my involvement in their coupling. She often approached their relationship as a repudiation of my coldheartedness. The implicit question was always “Aren’t you sorry now?” Even Buck got into it, explicitly talking about how I really screwed up my relationship with her. They weren’t ugly about it by any means, but their framing of the relationship contained a very different picture than the one I saw.
He moved in after a scant three months. A little under two years later, he moved out. Three months later, they broke up entirely. Considering how happy they had seemed, it was all rather mysterious. She announced that she never wanted to see him again and he said that even though he was heartbroken over it, he would honor her wishes.
It wasn’t until a year after that when I got the full scoop. Apparently, every night one of two things would happen. Either she would be “in the mood” and they would have sex, or she would not be in the mood and it would happen anyway, in a more forceful manner.
For the most part, Delsie was a free spirit, sexually. Very uninhibited. That she and I didn’t actually make it to home plate was purely through diligence on my part and a moral conscience that wasn’t completely out to lunch. She never struck me as the type to say “no” very much as long as she was comfortable. The more insistent he became, the less comfortable she was. She had lost all interest in him sexually after a year or so of living together.
That means for over six months, every night they spent together he arguably raped her. And to the extent that it wasn’t rape, it was more resignation than consent, which in some ways makes it worse. She had simply lost the will to fight back. She had lost enough autonomy sexually to become a sexual possession. The thought of all this still sends shivers down my spine.
As does my own culpability. I’m not sure how much my actions contributed to the self-esteem that gets one into a relationship like that, where it takes her a year to walk away from something so obviously wrong. I was always pretty upfront with her about where she and I stood (and more importantly where we didn’t), but I’m not sure my bluntness was anymore helpful than deception would have been.
And, of course, I helped engineer their couplehood. I somehow completely missed the darkness in Buck’s soul. It’s blindingly obvious now, of course, but it almost never occurred to me that this yokel could be as twisted as he was goofy. Twisted and probably without repair.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is that sometimes you really don’t know someone as well as you think you do. And sometimes the things you do to someone can put them in a position to endure much worse than you could imagine ever doing to them.
My wife and I had our Valentine’s activities earlier this week as is our custom. Or so I thought. My wife, the darling that she is, bought me an immersion blender as a present and made the card depicted to the left. Because she knows I enjoy Dr. Who (even though it took me about an entire season’s worth of shows before I really started to enjoy Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor). Now I’ve got to hop to it this weekend to reciprocate!
Last year, for 2010, we sent in to the State of Arapaho our taxes and were due a refund of $314. We were late getting it in due to the federal government inexplicably doing a system update in October that rendered some necessary tax documentation inaccessible. I was informed that, as long as you’re talking refunds, it didn’t matter that you were late. Now, it took the IRS a while and several phone calls to get us our money, but we got it.
As far as Arapaho is concerned, though, they don’t owe us anything. They had a record of the $314, but… simply did not feel obligated to pay it. Was that because we were late? They wouldn’t say. But they did not owe us the money, as far as they were concerned.
Last year, we owed Arapaho money. The $314 did not count towards what we owed Arapaho, because that money apparently went into an ether.
It resurfaced last week. Arapaho finally admitted that they had an outstanding debt to us of $314.
What changed their mind about this? They wanted to make sure – even though same documentation said that we may not have actually received it – that we paid taxes on this “income.”
Leave it to the Truman-Himmelreich household to somehow lose money on a tax refund.
Lain cries. A lot. Clancy and I debate whether or not there is colic involved. The threshold is something like three hours a day three or more days a week. Are you kidding me? Make it four hours five days a week, then maybe it’s close. That’s my position. Clancy’s position is that it seems like her bouts of crying last longer than they do.
Now, fortunately for me, I tend to be very patient with the crying baby (more on this at a later date, perhaps). It doesn’t bother me as much as it seems like it should. But I still don’t like the baby crying, especially if it’s indicative of there being something wrong.
Clancy got a hold of a book about napping and we wondered if maybe that was the reason she was so constantly cranky. The book said that little ones tend to have 90-minute awake cycles, so you try to put her down every ninety minutes for a nap. It seems to have actually helped. But it hasn’t been easy. She is becoming really, really reluctant to nap. Almost like it was before we started this.
The routine is that I take her upstairs and hold her and sing to her. She spends the first part crying. But I sing all the same. It’s certainly easier on the arm than singing while walking her around. And, around the 90-minute mark, she used to rather suddenly get very tired. And she was in a better mood when awake. I was getting some time to do some packing. So it was really working out.
For some reason, though, she is fighting the naps harder now than before. It’s now taking 30-45 minutes a go, sometimes. Which really, really disrupts my day. In some ways more than the crying baby, because the crying baby was kind of a constant.
Anyhow, my brain has increasingly geared towards the 90-minute wake cycle. Even when she’s asleep for the night, I stop after 90 minutes and think “Isn’t there something I need to be doing?”
From most to least: Minnesota, New York, Illinois, Georgia, Mississippi, (Indiana, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,) (Nebraska, Washington,) Oklahoma, (Maryland, North Dakota,) South Carolina, New Mexico, (California, Florida, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia,) Louisiana, (Kentucky, Michigan, Rhode Island,) Connecticut, (Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, South Dakota,) (Missouri, West Virginia,) (Ohio, Tennessee, Wisconsin,) Texas, (Arizona, Oregon, Vermont, Wyoming,) Utah, Hawaii, New Hampshire, (Delaware, Nevada,) Alaska.
To clean your leeks, first trim off the root beard and the top dark green portion of the upper leaves. What you want to keep are those white portions of the stems and the lighter green portions where the stems turn in to the leaves. Do reserve two of the dark upper leaves, but discard the remainder of the fibrous dark green leaves. Continue Reading