Irony is the Shackles of Youth

Penguin Bloopers

If liking this is wrong, I don't want to be right. One of my friends basically described it as "I believe I can fly. I believe... OH GOD NO I CAN'T."

Test Your Vocab

From the site: "Most Native English adult speakers who have taken the test fall in the range 20,000–35,000 word."

My score? 36,000.

Although like most vocab lists with obscure words (like GRE vocab lists) after awhile, I begin to wonder if they are actually listing words or stringing together various letters together just to fuck with you.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor's Hammer.

More proof that Coulson was pretty bad ass.

Since I have today off (Columbus Day is a Federal holiday, strangely enough), I figured I'd post a article to inspire Halloween tales. It deals with vampires in America during the late 1800s, strangely enough.

The Great New England Vampire Panic.

I thought it interesting that this vampire hunt (and one that also occurred in the Chicago area both dealt with tuberculosis (called consumption at the time). Consumption was a very, very common disease during the Victorian era. So much so that there is a lot of speculation that the Victorian ideal beauty (thin, frail, fainting, pale, with shortness of breath to produce the infamous heaving bosom) is based on the symptoms of tuberculosis. The Smithsonian article even mentions that one of the characters that becomes a vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula (published 1897) wastes away like a victim of tuberculosis.

My last two unrelated google searches:

Can you freeze sperm at home for future use?

Is there such a thing as dried corn syrup?

The answers are:

No, you need to use liquid nitrogen and have proper storage equipment in order to keep the sperm from being damaged.

Yes, corn syrup can be dried into a crystalline solid.

And I then wonder why no one will play against me at Trivial Pursuit.

There is nothing I can say that will add to the WTF-ery nature has achieved.

I am humbled.

I should probably not laugh as hard as I do watching this.

Grandmas watch Kardashian sex tape

The editing is awful, but the old ladies are hilarious.

Tim Burton's Dark Shadows Trailer

There are no words.

Dear Google,

You know what bothers me more than anything? When I am given the semblance of a "choice" that is no choice at all. For example, do not given me the "option" of updating all my Google docs to the new format and then tell me in a few months, you are going to update them anyway. That is neither an option nor a choice. Why not just do it. That way I can spend my time fixing all the formatting you are fucking up instead of previewing how you will fuck up my formatting, but knowing I won't really be able to stop you from doing so.

No love,
Tsaiko

Not that I'm really working on anything people will want to read. Just this fantasy novel set in a world loosely based on Victorian England, and oh so proper letters and etiquette. At least this story isn't like the other one set in this world, which is in a wordy, frou frou writing style that takes me forever to get into. But it's ridiculous and fun and the story is evolving into something interesting. Not that there is anyone on the internet I hate enough to inflict it upon. :D

Man, the spammers on LJ are getting really creative. I think I've deleted out maybe 2 dozen spam comments in the past couple of weeks. Most of them contain URLs (which I wouldn't click if you paid me), but a couple don't and make it pass the filter. They are usually still easy to spot though because it looks like someone wrote a ad in French, used Babelfish to translate it into Russian, then Spanish, then Japanese, and finally English. Talk about gibberish. I have noticed that they seem to be concentrated in posts that link to Youtube or the SomethingAwful forums (which is not many of my posts).

Anyone else seeing an uptick in spam? My favorite line so far has been "Let's continue entertainment together!"

I keep losing and finding this website, so maybe if I put it here I won't have to keep searching on it. For those times when you're having a discussion with your girlfriend and realize you don't know whether sugar beets were around in Roman times (they weren't, though chard and red beets were):

http://www.foodtimeline.org/

The discussion leading up to this was "What naturally sweet foods were available to ancient Romans?" The answer is: not many. Honey was the big one, and possibly beets though they weren't in wide use and sugar beets as we know them had not been developed. Sugar from sugar cane was available, but it was expensive since it was made in China/India and seen as a medicine and not as food. That's why it was common for lead to be added to wine, since lead acetate is sweet. And this was done even though the Romans knew lead was poisonous.

There's your food history lesson of the day.

EDIT: Edited because lead was added to wine, not win. Obviously lead added to anything being consumed is the very opposite of win.

THERE IS A MY LITTLE PONY DOLL MAKER.

http://dolldivine.com/pony.html

Which I, of course, must share with my friend's list. Just like tygati did to hers.