A coworker sent me this brilliant headline from the Washington Post:
Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo
I’m trying to think of a way to work any other Star Wars character into a sentence, but I’m stumped. If you can beat this headline, post your best in the comment section below!
I’ve always been a bit wary of revealing too much information about myself online. Given some past incidents with (admittedly indeterminate) potential for danger to my person, it’s been clear that there is no anonymity online. That said, I’ve taken some solace in the fact that my name is common. So common, in fact, that I don’t even mind stating online that I live in Minneapolis, because last time I checked, there were a column and a half of Scott Andersons in the Minneapolis phone book, and I’m not even one of them!
But I’ve always kind of had this idea that I’m “the” Scott Anderson of the Internet. I figured that I’m so immersed in this stuff and have been for so long (having created my first website in 1994), and I’ve encountered so few other Scott Andersons online that I must, therefore, have the greatest online presence of any of the world’s (approximately) hundred megabazillion Scott Andersons.
A quick Google search taught me how wrong I was.
It’s not just that there are a lot of other Scott Andersons online; they all seem like they’re more me than me: musicians, writers, photographers, all manner of creative activities. And I (the real Scott Anderson) didn’t even show up until page 5 of the results!
So now it’s clear to me that I need to become a little less anonymous! Either I need to plaster my name all over everything I do, or I need a less common name. Given my inherent laziness, I’m inclined to go with the latter. I wonder if Griddlecake K. Catafalque is taken.
At least it would have been a lot easier to move back to campus each September if I had this. Of course, none of the stuff is included here. But it’s still a cool idea. Spotted on Gizmodo.
There was a time in my life (I happened to be 13) when I was a huge baseball fan. I had the giant baseball card collection to prove it. I even chewed the nasty gum a few times.
My enthusiasm was richly rewarded in 1987 when my hometown Minnesota Twins won their first World Series. Life was good.
But eventually I moved on. My brief, albeit intense, interest in baseball (and pro sports in general) faded in high school, and although I still enjoy going to a game once in a while, it’s just too expensive and too corporate, and I’m too cynical, to sustain that kind of passionate enthusiasm. So when it was announced that Johann Santana was traded to the Mets, I barely even raised an eyebrow.
It wasn’t until I read Nick Coleman’s column on the matter that it really hit me what this means, especially in the context of the Twins’ controversial new stadium:
[W]hen you’re a kid, your town’s team manipulates your immature emotions in order to get you to tug on daddy’s sleeve and beg him to buy a pair of $50 tickets and a souvenir jersey so Dad can go to his grave knowing that his boy will remember him through misty eyes and support the next billion-dollar stadium proposal when the stadium opening in 2010 needs to be replaced a few years later.
He’s right. And he goes on to show just how trivial a slice of the pie, given the ludicrous sums of money floating around in the world of professional sports, Santana’s salary really is. It’s the stars like Santana and Torii Hunter that make a team like the Twins worth going to see. Which is where the money comes from in the first place.
I meant to post about this a few weeks ago, but I just never got around to it. Then today when I discovered (never mind how or why, exactly) that Google does not have one single page in its index containing the phrase “ludicrously large bar of soap” I simply knew that I must finally make a post concerning the ludicrously large bar of soap.
For, you see, there is presently in the shower at my house a ludicrously large bar of soap. My wife received it as a Christmas present from her mom. Her mom is great with gifts, and she loves to go all-out. This year that meant finding an incomprehensibly, ludicrously large bar of soap.
Your average “large” bar of bath soap, you see, is somewhere in the realm of 4.5 ounces. This “Egyptian Cotton Moisturizing Bath Bar,” however, is a whopping 12 ounces. But knowing that it’s slightly less than three times the mass of an ordinary bar of soap does little to convey just how ludicrously large it really is. In its dimensions, it is roughly the equivalent of six ordinary bars of soap, stacked three in a row, two deep. The first time I attempted to use it I dropped it and the colossal thud was enough to raise the ire of the neighbors’ dogs. Woe to the poor fool who drops it on their foot!
But it is a very nice bar of soap. It has a pleasantly subtle, gender-neutral aroma, and it produces a wonderful creamy lather that is more than adequate for my daily cleansing needs. Plus, I don’t think I’ll need to buy another bar of soap until my kids are in college.
I hoped to locate an image of this wondrous bar of soap online, and surprisingly enough someone is apparently selling them on eBay. But this photo alone cannot possibly do justice to the magnificent size of the thing. In fact, even holding it in the wrapper, it’s hard to imagine how ludicrously large it will actually look once you take it out.
In order to better convey the relative size of this bar of soap to other, more familiar objects, I have prepared the following handy visual aid:
Addendum, 2 minutes later: Just to see how frighteningly omniscient Google really is, I went there immediately after posting this, and once again searched for the phrase “ludicrously large bar of soap.” And yes, it was already there. It even said “2 minutes ago” in the search results.