Contralulation’s!

There’s no way I can deliver anything as profound as yesterday’s WriteInMyJournal, so I’m gonna go completely in the opposite direction today.

One of my favorite Food Network shows is Ace of Cakes. The creativity and construction techniques they use appeal to the engineer-wannabe in me and Chef Duff kicks just ass in general. The cakes they create are fantastical, mind blowing, works of art… and will never show up here.

Cake Wrecks (”When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong”) is a showcase for cakes we’ve all seen at one time or another – a cake that looked like the baker was doing some serious drugs at decorating time, one that some poor celebrant would have to smile at and pretend they weren’t horrified when picture time came.

The Cake Writing 201 post had me tearing and trying not to laugh out loud at my desk at work.

Mmmmm… cake.

A glimpse inside a stranger’s mind

You ever see or hear something so neat/fun/profound that you think “I gotta show this to someone”? WriteInMyJournal is one of those things.

The concept is simple: The author asks people he meets to write whatever they want in his journal, a Moleskine notebook, and he shares it in his blog. However, the snapshots you are able to glean from a page or two of each person’s thoughts are as fascinating as they are tantalizing.

Some stories are introspective, some are touching, but you always wish you could find out more.

Unfortunately, the project has only been going on since June 2008 so there’s only enough content to whet your intellectual appetite at this time, but this is one site you’ll want to subscribe to.

“Maverick”

I don’t really know which way elementalgeek readers lean in terms of political identity, but this was too funny to pass on. If you’re a republican, hopefully you have enough of a sense of humor to chuckle a bit (while no one’s looking of course).

http://www.palinaspresident.us/

Click on everything you see. Sometimes you get different results if you click on something more than once.

edit: Make sure you have your sound turned on when you go to the site!

And the word of the day is: “Maverick”

Polls schmolls

I heard a story on NPR the other day that said in the last 4 years the percentage of households that have a fixed landline phone has decreased to less than 85%.

I happen to be part of the wireless phone only demographic, having dumped my landline around 7 years ago. Since I carried a wireless phone all the time anyway, it didn’t make sense to pay for the additional phone that hardly anyone called because they always tried the wireless phone first. Pretty much the only calls that came through on the landline were telemarketers or survey-takers, who I didn’t want to talk to anyway.

In election seasons like the one currently being inflicted on us, you’ll hear the results of an endless number of polls: Candidate A is ahead of Candidate B by X points, Y percent of people favor the rights of cats and dogs to cohabitate, Z percent of the population want the government to take away all of our rights for an illusory sense of security. The list goes on and on.

Here’s the part that makes me wonder: Polls largely rely on responses collected during telephone surveys. Landline telephone surveys.

So now the results of any poll you hear about is the result of collecting “data” from people:

That have a landline telephone
AND are home when the pollster calls
AND are willing to respond to pollsters
who may or may not actually have a clue what the hell they’re talking about

Scary huh?

Fun allotment

Overheard this weekend at the mall: Exasperated mom to rambunctious child, “If this is your fun now, there’s no fun later when you get home!”

The thought stopped me in my tracks – what if that’s true? What if there’s a limited amount of fun, and that once you use it up there’s no more fun? What if you had a blast whooping it up when you were younger? Are you doomed to a life of dullness forever more?

It’s an insidious notion. That child will probably be hoarding his fun for the rest of his life wondering when he’s going to run out. I’m going to go on the assumption we all have different fun allotments (and that the Mom must have used up all of hers early) or that fun is rechargeable (“sustainable fun”) somehow.

No sense letting good fun go to waste.