This has been a bountiful week at Chez Pharyngula, and I have received generous gifts from several readers. A full accounting lies below the fold.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This has been a bountiful week at Chez Pharyngula, and I have received generous gifts from several readers. A full accounting lies below the fold.
What to do, what to do…usually I can pull out old photos from a stack of family members on their birthdays. I don’t have a stockpile of childhood photographs of my wife (note to self: next time I’m in Washington, raid the in-laws’ family albums). This means there’s a lack of easy material here.
Hmmm. A-ha—the high school yearbook!
So I took The Minnesota Purity Test, and got a score that says I’m 62.1% Minnesotan. Not bad for a non-native…but then, my mother was born here, and a lot of the test is more a measure of Scandinavian-American heritage. There are a lot of people in the Seattle area who would score well on this.
Smarting from her failure to crack the top 1000 in the science blogger hot-or-not contest, Janet has declared a Nerd-off, in which us geeks, dorks, nerds, and poindexters compete to see who is the King or Queen of the pocket-protector crowd.
I think I should get bonus points for bragging about it a whole year ahead of time.
This conflict could spill over elsewhere, I warn you. Already the fellows at Sadly, No have joined in…even if they aren’t science bloggers, their nerdiness has long been apparent. I bet they were in the A/V club in high school. Actually, most of the big-name bloggers are obviously nerdworthy: come on, Duncan Black has to be a major geek, right?
I also think I should be declared victor for this photo alone. Man, if we open up this competition to photographic documentation, Janet doesn’t stand a chance.
Yeah, got this Nerd Score without even breaking a sweat.
As long as James Kakalios is gloating about his nerdy comic book habit in the comments, I’ll have to document what’s on my desk right now:
It’ll be a warm February in Minnesota before I’m outnerded.
The results of the scienceblogger “hot or not” contest are up, and they’re definitely screwy. What am I doing at #4? What’s the matter with you people?
Just in case my wife happens to check out the internets this afternoon, I’m sure she’ll be interested in seeing the state of her yard.
The plumbing crew came out this morning to repair our broken water main, and apparently to also plant a dead pagan king in a nice barrow outside our bathroom window, and imprint the rest of the lawn with interesting trackways. Oh, well, at least we now have fully restored water pressure.
I must also thank the kind reader who sent us the disaster preparedness and cleanup manuals. They’ll come in handy—as you might guess, there’s now a musty odor rising from our basement, and I don’t think it’s from the moldering dead king. His generosity was only exceeded by Governor Kathleen Blanco, who’s flying up from New Orleans to give us some advice tonight.
At least, I’m in the Wikipedia. Nobody will ever be able to find it, though, because for some reason the author actually spelled my name correctly. I look forward to further additions, however, as the creationist strive to make the entry more complete by documenting my evil and my atrocities.
(No, I don’t go fishing through Wikipedia and the internet looking for instances of my name—I was told about it in email. I’m vain enough to want to avoid having people think I’m that vain.)
All will be relieved to know that the missing Midnight came crawling back late last night, all wet and stinking from his misadventure, and was found mewling pathetically in our garage.
He hasn’t apologized or anything, but is just demanding that we feed him. Typical.
One of the other consequences of our broken water main is that our cat, Midnight, fled the house during the ruckus, and he has not returned. This is a very lazy, timid cat who has been declawed (not by us—we do not approve of such barbarity), so he’s not exactly going to thrive out there. And it’s raining. Midnight always freaked out at getting wet or being exposed to weather. If any Morris people should spot him, let Skatje know. He does have a collar with a tag and his name, address, and phone number.
It’s 1:30AM, and our daughter wakes us up, pounding on the door. We hear a babbling brook, the cheerful sound of a waterfall—wait a moment, we don’t live in a rain forest! We run to the basement to see water rushing over the baseboards, and a lake, already ankle deep. I turn off the main water valve to our house, but it doesn’t stop. We go outside, and there, rising from our lawn, is a huge dome rising up like a grassy pimple, and water gushing at a phenomenal rate from several points on it.
That’s one of those big waist-high garbage cans out there, for scale. My wife tossed it out there in a desperate and futile attempt to bail.
The red glow reflecting from the surface of the lake that is our front lawn isn’t from hellish, apocalyptic fires, although that would have fit our mood—it’s from the three police cars parked outside our house. We’d called the emergency fire/police dispatch when we realized that the water main to our house had broken, and in a small quiet town with nothing much to do, they all show up. We stood around for a while out there in the dark, listening to the happy burble, until a fellow from the city water works showed up to shut it down. It’s a 4 inch pipe, he said. A 4 inch pipe can throw a lot of water.
One of the officers tried to cheer me up. “At least since the break was before the meter, you won’t get charged for the water.”
So…no water for a day or two (I hope we can get it fixed before the weekend), a swimming pool in the basement, unknown major expenses to fix the damn thing, a night of thoroughly disrupted sleep, and a day full of classes tomorrow. I’m going to be cranky for a while.
