Category: Miscellany & Minutiæ - Page 36

My Simpsons family

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Burger King-sponsored “Simpsonize Me” site. Well, I never got that to work, but a colleague recently started using a Groening-style avatar of himself on AIM. (Interestingly enough, the avatar resembles the Simpsons character Dr. Nick Riviera, and this colleague is also named Nick. He does not claim Hollywood Upstairs Medical College as his alma mater however.)

I asked him about it and he mentioned the fact that the Simpsons Movie website has a build-an-avatar feature too, which is what he used to create his. It’s not automatic like the Burger King one is (or at least claims to be), but it works, in Mii Channel fashion.

And so, without further ado, and at risk of Fox siccing its lawyers on me (note I kept the illegible legalese at the bottom of the image below), here is my family, Simpsons style.

Bridge collapse — we’re OK

It’s worldwide news that the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi collapsed this evening. I just want everyone I know who might be checking this to know that my family and I are OK, and we’re not aware of anyone we know having been involved in the collapse.

Surprisingly, in how unsurprising it is, there is already a Wikipedia entry.

Brooks Brothers: what’s up with the sheep?

I’ve only set foot in a Brooks Brothers store once. A $150 dress shirt was all I needed to see. I wouldn’t pay 150 bucks for a dress shirt even if it came with a lifetime guarantee, was 100% stain-repellent, and could magically tailor itself if it ever went out of style.

So, in short, I don’t pay much attention to Brooks Brothers. But as it happens, there’s a new store coming into a building near where I work, and as I was walking by the storefront’s concealed façade today at lunchtime, I noticed something I’d never paid attention to before: the logo. Previously glancing at it only in passing, I assumed it was an anchor or some kind of abstract design or something. But no. It’s a sheep. Suspended in a sling.

Naturally, Wikipedia provides a plausible, and presumably accurate, explanation, but I still think it’s a ridiculous logo. Then again, I also think it’s ridiculous to pay $150 for a shirt, so obviously I’m not their target market. (Though, for what it’s worth, I feel I should note that I’ve heard, but not verified, that their clothing is now made in the same foreign factories, by the same underpaid workers, who produce nearly-identical garments for companies like Gap and Old Navy, which are sold for about 1/5 the price.)

“Justification for Higher Education” (but not a career in education)

An old high school friend just emailed me this image. Back in school, one of our math teachers (who was not terribly passionate about his job, nor well-liked by the students) had this poster on the wall in his classroom. I think it may also have been “enhanced” with blinking red LEDs in the positions of the car taillights. At any rate, as a teenager, I somehow was never struck by the irony of an underpaid, under-appreciated, and professionally underwhelming high school math teacher displaying this poster.

It’s not that I agree with the poster’s sentiments. I think it’s pretty asinine, and certainly not my life’s aspiration anyway. But still. Who in that classroom had a higher education? Enough said.

Then again, maybe he was intending to be ironic. If so, Alanis Morrisette could take a lesson.

OK, I’m a geek, but this was totally cool! (In a geeky way…)

Ever since I read Word Freak, an exposé on the world of competitive Scrabble by Wall Street Journal sports reporter Stefan Fatsis [wow, such a convoluted sentence, simply to avoid having to write “Fatsis’s”], I’ve been obsessed with improving my Scrabble game. (Excuse me, my SCRABBLEÂ® Brand Crossword Game… er… game.)

For a couple of nights, SLP was into it (why does that sound dirty?), but she just couldn’t match my endurance (again… why?). So I had to resort to playing against the computer. I’ve been playing tournament style to boost my (unofficial) rating, playing mostly against the 1220-rated “Veteran” (whom I beat about 2/3 of the time) and the 1400-rated “Smart” (to whom I lose about 2/3 of the time).

Tonight my rating finally topped the 1300 mark (against Smart, no less), and I celebrated by playing one more game against Veteran. And therein came my greatest moment.

Veteran had set up the triple word column on the right edge with LAVE, and my draw that turn included the Q, the Z, and both blanks! I stared at the board for a moment before realizing I had a most unusual play (if it was actually a word). And so it was that I laid down QUIZZER through the E in LAVE, with the Q on the triple word and the (real) Z on the double letter, using the blanks for the U and the other Z, giving me 99 points. If only I’d had an S on my rack, I could have hit the other triple word as well, for a triple-triple-bingo, worth 356 points! (That’s among the highest possible scores for a single word, even though, as a fairly pedestrian word, it doesn’t carry as much cachet among Scrabblers as words like QUIXOTIC or MEZQUITE.)

I still ended up winning the game with several other high-scoring moves, including a ballsy (if anything Scrabble-related is ever even remotely “ballsy”) multi-turn set-up that allowed me to play EXITS on a triple word for 49 points, after having already milked the X for all it was worth. I almost screwed it up though. I had played LURID early on, to which I later added the double XI. Already I was planning EXITS, but I was missing the T. So to try to build it up even more, I played RIDE while waiting for the T, but… d’oh! I really should have just played RID, because I needed that E! Naturally the T landed on my rack in the next turn, but we were getting close to the end of the game, and I didn’t have an E! Without counting, I assumed they were all on the board already, but I got one in my second-to-last draw, and EXITS appeared! On the final turn, I was left with AINRT on my rack, which fit nicely in the same area to turn ER into TRAINER for the victory! 447 may be my highest single game score ever.

Yeah, I’m a geek. But I represent! (Saying that makes me even more of a geek, doesn’t it?)

Wow, looking back at that screenshot, I’m even more impressed with myself (if that’s possible). Tournament play uses a clock, just like chess, with each player limited to 25 minutes total (going over the time limit carries a steep penalty at the end of the game). When I first started playing computer Scrabble a couple months back, I’d usually use up almost all of my 25 minutes, but in this game my clock read 17:34 at the end, meaning I had only used 7 minutes and 26 seconds for the entire game! Of course, as usual, Veteran only used 15 seconds. One time I think the computer only used four seconds for the whole game. I think the computer needs a handicap on the tournament clock: the player gets 25 minutes and the computer gets 25 seconds. Yeah, that sounds fair.

I’ll stop now. If I go on, I may just have to beat myself up.