Saw Weird Al Yankovic over the weekend and although I’m just a semi-casual fan of his, I was blown away. Very very good show. A music and comedy multimedia extravaganza. Fo shizzle. The guy must’ve changed costumes at least a dozen times.
The title of this post is a song he co wrote with Michael Stipe of REM.
Here are the lyrics:
We all have cell phones.
So, c’mon, Let’s get real.
Please check out this News Boycott blog which is lambasting the news media organizations for repeatedly airing the Virginia Tech mass murderer’s photos and videos. It has a petition to sign asking NBC news to stop it and apologize for their reckless behavior.
Take a look at this commercial. Takeru Kobayashi, the world’s #1 ranked competitive eater, buys a drink at a convenience store. Also buying a drink is Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, the world’s #3.
Hilarity ensues.
Symbolist painter Odilon Redon
This charcoal is Guardian Spirit of the Waters (1878) and can be found at the The Art Institute of Chicago
FROM CHAOS COMES ORDER.
Private prisons have become the new growth industry. You will construct and run an efficient rehabilitation facility with nothing but money on your mind. There’s no escaping under your watchful eye as you oversee every detail of prison life.
• Manage prisoner sentences from time off for good behavior
to rehabilitation training.
• Hire and control your prison staff.
• Set up and run prison industries.
• Influence prisoner morale by creating inmate activities,
breaking up fights and handling gang problems.
• Establish your facility’s reputation as the ultimate correctional institution.
Let’s disregard the fact that three way ties HAVE happened before on Jeopardy! (Think, everybody bets the farm and misses FJ, and they all go home losers.) This was simply the first three way tie of winners.
This quote caught my eye:
AP article
The show contacted a mathematician who calculated the odds of such a three-way tie happening – one in 25 million.
Hmmmm. I wonder how he came up with those odds? A frequentist maximum likelihood approach would go something like this: Observed ties for first place / Total Number of Episodes.
1 / 4000 or so? The ML odds would then be 1 in 4000.
1 in 25 million ? Then (1-1/25000000)^4000 gives 99.98% chance it won’t happen after 4000 independent trials.
Jeopardy is clearly non-random and the people aren’t dice thrown in the air. Ties happen a lot and it’s definitely not a 1 in 25 million chance.
We could devise models of average contestant behavior, look at frequency of two way ties, etc. but that would be way beyond the scope of this blog post.
This guy, Greg Kennedy, is an IJ, innovative juggler:
Juggling without gravity – Click Here for more great videos and pictures!
Some random blogs I’ve been perusing:
The Dark Lodger opines about the Senegalese Chimp Emerging Market for High Tech Industry
Seve Jobs of Apple has announced the new 40gb istick to be released to the chimp market next week. Not be outdone in the news, MicroSoft has released a statement that win-stick 2.0 has a security update and all older win-sticks versions must be rebooted prior to “power jabbing.” Wii has also announced a verson of the wireless wii-stick. The barkless version is still in beta testing due to unintentional release.
Notes From the Megamachine has been resurrected at WordPress (formerly at Blogger) Will the technate be constructed in the 07? Tune in to find out!
. No Michelangelo? For shame!
Be sure to check out his STOOPID HAT ROUNDUP. YEAH, BABY! Micky Free is not a girl, aight?!
And last, but not adsensely least:
reports on the NFL combine and NFL draft
Rokk on have a great Ides of March!
For Part 1 of Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, go here.
Nevada can be an interesting place for the naive. When Kyle’s parents visited, they drove around and did the touristy things. Upon passing a sign for the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Kyle’s mom exclaimed “Oh, how cute! They raise bunnies!”
“Uhhh, no mom. That’s a brothel.”
I would like to note that we did not visit any brothels, so the peanut gallery can STFU now.
On Thursday, Kyle and I went in to Reno to run some errands. We ended up being comped the buffet at the Peppermill, which is the gayest casino(and by extension the gayest building interior) I’ve ever seen. You’re greeted by purple and rainbow carpets once you get into the parking lot lobby. Further in, there’s neon purple and rainbow everywhere. It’s a better epilepsy inducer than Pokemon ever was.
The buffet itself was interesting mostly for its variety- sections for carveries, salads, Mexican, Asian, and dessert. The prime rib was nothing to write home about(why do people insist on cooking prime rib to medium well? Blasphemy.), and the salads were okay, but the thing that blew my mind was the wonton soup. The wontons themselves weren’t bad- actual pork, green onion, etc. However, the soup was otherwise identical to the chicken noodle soup over in the next tureen, sans noodles.
The dessert section was interesting in that a lot of desserts _looked_ good but really weren’t. The only thing that was actually good were the visually unimpressive chocolate chip cookies. I got this little circular cheesecake thing which tasted pretty bad. So I told Kyle that hey, maybe I could make it look like I ate more of it by breaking it up into pieces. This did not have the intended effect, as the cheesecake somehow expanded in volume when I left a wreckage of cheesecake smear all over my plates. Oh well.
Unfortunately, it is still pretty cold(comparatively) around here. Otherwise, Kyle and I would go golfing. This has the potential to be a real disaster, as neither of us have ever golfed before. I’ve hit some balls and been to a driving range, but Kyle hasn’t even swung a club before. The plan was to go see if we can get maybe 6 holes in within the time it usually takes people to get 18. And not to flip the golf cart.
For Part 3 of Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, click here.
So, a few days ago, I flew out to Nevada to meet up with my old roommate Kyle. Kyle, the guy who got me into professional gambling(though he insists it was the other way around, which eventually points the finger back at Roger), found a casino with really exploitable video poker and slots. So exploitable that he was willing to pay me to fly out and play on his money for a percentage of the take.
My first thought upon landing in Reno was “dude, this place is fucked up.” It was probably the presence of the slots zombies within 30 feet of the gate. We then drove through more of downtown Reno before getting out on the freeways to get to his house in Sparks.. Prostitution is legal outside the city limits in Nevada. This appears to have had a deterimental effect on the quality of the actual street talent inside. You see these 50-year old women attempting to hide their wrinkles with enough makeup to put an ice skater to shame, wearing tight clothing which makes it painfully obvious that whatever perked 30 years ago just don’t got it anymore. It was funny in the same way that watching a locomotive crash into a gasoline refinery is funny.
There’s a “promotion creep” phenomenon along the lines of the software industry’s “feature creep”. First there was video poker. Then someone comes up with Bonus Poker. I mean, bonus! That’s gotta be better, right? So of course, we end up with Double Bonus Poker and Super Aces. But wait! We can get even better! We can have Double Double Bonus Poker! So now the machines we can play include Super Double Double Bonus, Triple Double Bonus Plus, and Super Aces Bonus. It’s worse than shaving razor promotions. They may as well come up with Super Triple Double Bonus NOW WITH FREE WHORES Poker.
Finally, there are the local patrons. There has to be some way to remake this into a modern-day Bret Harte/Nathanael West story, something between The Outcasts of Poker Flat and The Day of the Locust, about the kind of man who comes to northern Nevada to die. There was this humongous fat guy in one of the Nugget restaurants yesterday, and we overheard him having a conversation with his dinnermate. The dude was eating this triple-decker bacon chili cheeseburger. He also ordered it with two little tubs of mayonnaise and ranch dressing. After dumping those on his burger, he asked for more so he could dip the burger and the fries. All this while telling his friend about the angioplasty that he had last month. Hot damn, people don’t learn too fast in this town. Kyle and I have started to refer to him as Angioplasty Man.
More later. There’s an astoundingly gay neon-lighted casino to hit.
For Part 2 of Wretched Hives of Scum and Villainy, click here.