Nerd music

The Scienceblogs Nerd–off contest should have this for a new theme song: Weird Al’s “White and Nerdy”.

First in my class here at MIT
Drop skills, I’m a champion at D&D
M.C. Escher, that’s my favorite MC
Keep your 40, I’ll just have an Earl Grey tea
My rims never spin, to the contrary
You’ll find that they’re quite stationary
All of my action figures are cherry
Stephen Hawking’s in my library
My MySpace page is all totally pimped out
Got people bangin’ for my top eight spaces
Yo, I know pi to a thousand places
Ain’t got grills but I still wear braces
I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise
I’m a whiz at Minesweeper, I could play for days
Once you see my sweet moves you’re gonna stay amazed
My fingers movin’ so fast they’ll set the place ablaze
There’s no killer app I haven’t run
At Pasqual, well, I’m number one
Do vector calculus just for fun
I ain’t got a gat but I got a soldering gun
“Happy Days” is my favorite theme song
I could sure kick your butt in a game of ping-pong
I’ll ace any trivia quiz you bring on
I’m fluent in Javascript as well as Klingon

(Here are the complete lyrics—it’ll make you weep, dawg.)

Getting ready for Halloween (already?)

Since I saw this meme at Dr Crazy’s place, I thought I’d toss it up here for the commenters to make suggestions.

” If I were designing a Pharyngula Halloween costume, it would consist of…”

It’s actually relevant. I just put out a call at my university for volunteers for Cafe Scientifique, which we will be holding on the last Tuesday of each month…and the October calendar puts that on Halloween. I’m going to be trying to organize a panel session on “Mad Scientists and Monsters” as the topic that day, and ask the panelists to show up in costume. So let’s see what suggestions you might come up with!

Wait—I’m in the same building with a bunch of chemists

I’m having second thoughts about the virtues of proximity to my colleagues of that other discipline after watching this video of people plunking alkali metals into water. Cesium looks…interesting.

Fortunately, my chemistry pals aren’t British, or I might have trouble understanding their comments. What the heck does “the dog’s nuts of the periodic table” mean, anyway?

Minnesota misogynists: vote!

The BIG fair, the Minnesota state fair, is going on right now, and Karina Hill is letting people vote on exactly which repellent Midwestern grease lump on a stick she should eat. Here’s the menu:

  1. Fried cheese puffs
  2. Cajun Season Alligator Sausage on-a-stick
  3. Deep Fried Cheese on a stick
  4. Jerk pork chop drummy
  5. Pancake wrapped around sausage on-a-stick
  6. Uffda Treat
  7. Belgium waffle on-a-stick
  8. Australian Battered Potatoes
  9. Cheese-burger calzones on-a-stick
  10. Wild Rice corndogs
  11. Key Lime Pie on-a-stick
  12. Dogzilla
  13. Egg-roll on-a-stick
  14. Fried-Egg Bagel Sandwich
  15. Pizza on-a-stick
  16. Political pop
  17. Deep-fried twinkies
  18. Chicken-chops
  19. Frozen Coffee on-a-stick
  20. Deep fried cheese curds
  21. Tater-tot hotdish on-a-stick
  22. Spaghetti and Meatball on-a-stick
  23. Deep-fried candy bar on-a-stick
  24. Deep fried oreos
  25. Deep-fried spudsters on-a-stick
  26. Spicy buffalo chicken filled wonton
  27. Blackened Cajun steak on-a-stick
  28. Bug juice
  29. Scotch Meatball on-a-stick
  30. Puff-daddy on-a-stick
  31. Pizza burgers
  32. Ice-cream on-a-stick
  33. Fresh chocolate dipped marshmallows on-a-stick
  34. Wall-Eye on-a-stick
  35. Mac-n-cheese on-a-stick
  36. Batter-dipped deep-fried chocolate chip cookies on-a-stick
  37. Fried ravioli garlic bread

If you’re the kind of wretched humanity-hating bastard who’d inflict any of those things on this poor woman’s digestive tract, circulatory system, kidneys, and brain, go ahead—vote at Minnesota Stories.

Warning: Tater-tot hotdish on-a-stick is disturbingly phallic.

What a werewolf!

I’ve been picking up some old movies on DVD lately to improve my education in the classics: specifically, an old favorite, the Hammer horror films. Yesterday, to take a break from class prep, I watched one I hadn’t seen before, Curse of the Werewolf. It has an interesting plot, a bit more thoughtful and melancholy than your usual monster movie, but what really wakes up the show is the actor in the lead: Oliver Reed.

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Whoa. I swear, I really am a boringly straight guy and wholeheartedly monogamous to boot, but Reed was one scarily, dangerously, manly fellow. He’s intense, tormented, and even when he’s with the woman he loves, he’s haunted. Lance Mannion also thinks highly of him:

To me, Reed always came across as the most dangerous man alive. This made him awfully difficult to cast well. He was too handsome and heroic looking to play your average movie villain, and too goddamn full of barely repressed violence and rage to play an appealing hero. His two best roles were, therefore, Sikes, the villain who could have been a hero, and Athos in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, a hero who’s as callous, bloody-minded, and deadly as any villain, and who in one way goes even farther than Sikes in awfulness—Sikes beats the woman who loves him to death and then is haunted by his conscience; Athos coolly orders the woman he loves executed and then watches without a twinge as she’s rowed out into the middle of a lake, beheaded, and dumped into the water.

Those are better films than Curse of the Werewolf, but I’d have to say that this is also one of his best roles. Lon Chaney Jr is the guy that everyone thinks of when werewolf movies are brought up, but Chaney always looked like the sad ol’ hounddog, beaten down by his condition; Reed is always fierce and brutal and on edge, much more wolf-like. And look at him—he’s both feral and gorgeous.

Fair time!

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This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It’s your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.

(Oh, and don’t eat the food if you want to continue living. It’s like jabbing your aorta with a turkey baster clogged full of pure cholesterol.)

I think we’re planning on having our weekly Drinking Liberally session at the beer garden at the fair, so there’s another reason for coming on Thursday evening.

I’m going to be there just about every day. I volunteered to man booths at various hours for UMM, our local humane society, and the Stevens County DFL. Come on down—the fair is free, parking is free, it is the thing to do in August.