Nomar, our parrot, has a diet that is about 80% comprised of what we call “fruity pebbles.” They are actually a product called Zupreem Avian Maintenance. Anyways, they come in five different flavor/color/shape combos: purple (grape), yellow (banana), orange (orange), green (I have no idea fruit this is supposed to imitate–it looks like a banana–maybe a plantain?), and red (apple? cherry?). As you can tell, I’m basing the fruits on the appearance of the kibbles, since I’ve never eaten them.
Nomar goes through phases where he will refuse to eat certain colors of the kibbles, unless you forget to refill his bowl and he gets really desperate. For the last few months, orange and purple have been out. Yellow and green have both been out and different points before, but red is always in style.
Today, when I opened up his food bowl to refill it, I observed this:
color separated kibbles in Nomar's bowl
So, he apparently has the ability to sort the kibbles by color. Pretty impressive, if I do say so myself.
Sam and I have often joked that there seems to be an ice cream truck in our neighborhood that is maybe peddling wares other than ice cream.
To confirm: an ice cream truck was just circling the block, music going full blast, at 10:45p on a Monday night, and my phone says it’s 44 degrees out there. I’m guessing no little kids are chasing after the truck right now.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Unfortunately, my campaign to raise the asking price for thezimbabwes.org has been a failure. The price has dropped!
Here’s the latest:
Dear jess,
I am contacting you today about the availability of thezimbabwes.com.
I wanted to let you know that the price of www.thezimbabwes.com was reduced to $97.00.
Because you own a similar site, this domain may be of use to you. Most people assume a website is a .com more than any other extension. We want to help you capture more visitors to your present site!
A great feature that we offer is free domain forwarding. This is a great idea! You can forward your new .com domain to your existing site. This way when people find your .com it will automatically forward them to your existing site. This process takes about 2 minutes to complete. You won’t have to set up a new webpage, change your metatags, keywords, or other search engine changes.
Filed under: Just For Fun, spam & its kindred spirits | Tags: domain names, website
screenshot: zimbabwes.com is for sale
Hilarious! I got an email that stated:
“Dear jess,
Domain Sale Notice:
Good news! The domain thezimbabwes.com is now available for purchase. Since you own the domain thezimbabwes.org, we thought you’d be interested in this domain, we are giving you the first chance to acquire it.
We look forward to hearing back from you.”
And then I clicked through to their page, and saw that they are selling it for $397! Hahaha. Since thezimbabwes.com disappeared as an available option the very week that Sam & I were planning our elopement and searching for an available domain, I’m pretty sure that someone bought it just because they thought they could mark it up and sell it back to us. (No one has used the domain since.)
It cracks me up that they think we want to be dot-com that badly. We can totally implement world domination as a dot-org anyways.
Everyone should visit the site soon and see if we can drive them to raise the ridiculous price even further: https://secure.itdomainnames.net/store/order/thezimbabwes.com
Short story: a young cyclist was struck and killed just over a year ago at an intersection in DC. The Department of Public Works recently removed the “ghost bike” memorial that had been established there, without giving the victim’s family time to go by or collect it. Bike advocates are pissed. Here’s some photos and coverage of a very provocative and frankly beautiful response by some of them:
why.i.hate.dc: 22 ghost bikes appear at Connecticut and R.
Nice work, bike advocate/public artists, whoever you are.
The Huffington Post delivered Tom Morris’ little gem ” Twisdom: Twitter Wisdom” to me today.
Just last night, Sam had a work function for dinner, so I was home alone. (Well, not alone, but with the parrot, the dog, and the guinea pig, none of whom are good conversationalists during a health care speech.)
So, I settled into the couch with the TV on and my iPhone in hand. By following twitter, it was like I was getting to watch the speech with ten or twelve other really smart people, and I didn’t actually have to share the couch or even the snacks.
So it was a treat to read someone else’s genuine appreciation for the interaction on twitter this morning.
I picked up this Economist article from a Richard Florida tweet. The point of the article is supposed to be that “going to college really pays!”, which would be a nice back-to-school message to put forth.
But in the back of my head, I was thinking, “$370,000 actually sounds like a small amount of money when you consider the length of a person’s career.” And it turns out the figure is significantly less for women: $229,000 over the course of their careers.
The commenters on the Economist post o a sufficient job at chastising them for unclear statistics, so I don’t need to pile on that. But I’m surprised that the article didn’t compare these extra earnings to the cost of college in the first place. I’ll pick on John Hopkins just because I recalled hearing their 2009-2010 rates for tuition, room, and board this weekend on NPR: this year, students there will pay $53,390 for their education. Even if a student graduates in the expected four year window (which is no longer that common), that amounts to at least $213,560 over four years.
If you were a young woman holding a Hopkins admission letter and you ran the numbers against your whopping $229,000 over the course of your entire career, you’d better find some other reason to want to sign up for those tuition bills.
Filed under: Uncategorized
This is such a great idea for a website that I can’t believe it took me so long to find it:
Even though their database doesn’t include some of the students’ name that used to haunt me when I was teaching at Berkeley (Manthripagada, Ajibola, Tahmasbi), it’s still a pretty useful resource.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The largest hot-air balloon gathering in the world, Chambley, France
Originally uploaded by gbatistini
Normally, I harbor a little disdain for hot air balloons. I’ve never ridden in one, and they seem to symbolize the cheesy way that architectural illustrators create a set of shorthand symbols to include in a rendering of a place to make it look “happy” (and you will never actually see any hot air balloons or charming little old ladies out on a bench when you go visit that place.)
But these photos made me smile in spite of myself.
Filed under: architecture, urban design, urbanism | Tags: dc, history, photography
Looking Into the Past: US Capitol Under Construction, Washington, DC
Originally uploaded by jasonepowell
Flickr user jasonepowell has created a beautiful set of DC photos. He makes the process sound simple: “Images are made by finding old photographs of places, printing them out, and then holding the print up in the modern day location,” but I think we all recognize his skill in finding and framing the image. He even went so far as to create a Flickr group for the technique, but the other submissions pale compared to his.
