Great White Stripped Snake Lion Wedding

Well, with the flood of suggestions for the BTOTY already, I thought I'd keep encouraging your involvement with a chance to spend my money. For my birthday, I got an ITunes gift card (thanks Suz!) (I think it was Suzanne who gave it to me . . ) and I haven't yet spent it. Last night, Shannon and I were discussing music or something, and Shannon mentioned that she didn't know much about "Butt Rock" (as she calls it) and specifically Bon Jovi. So we spent some time on YouTube finding a few Bon Jovi songs from the 80's that she has heard, but didn't know were his, as well as some songs that she claims to have never heard, like "Blaze of Glory". (How can you not know that one!) I then went through other 80's rock/metal songs, as we've done in the past, and found Shannon to be seriously lacking in her education on the subject.

"Don't you know 'Every Rose Has It's Thorn'? . . . by Poison?" I'd ask. "'Once Bitten, Twice Shy'?" "'Welcome to the Jungle'?" Time after time the answer was, "No." (I didn't even bother to ask about 'Unskinny Bop'.) So, I've decided that I need to help Shannon out, and I'm considering even blowing my ITunes money on some good 80's rock music, (Shannon knows plenty of 80's pop stuff) because clearly I can't leave this up to Shannon. So, here's your opportunity to suggest the top 80's rock songs that I should own. I guess you can suggest anything 80's. What music have we forgotten about that I am obviously missing in my life?

If you need help getting started, you can check out http://www.bradboard.com/80s.htm for a great big list of 80s songs.

Call For Suggestions

Shannon and I are finally getting around to planning our BTOTY (that's the Big Trip Of The Year for those of you who aren't hip with the jive). This is your big chance to make you suggestion of what we could do with about a 5 day trip and our vast fortunes. Whoever submits the best idea can lord it over all the other people!

Flying Burble Beoble Eater.

If you listen (and you don't even have to listen all that closely) you can hear Blake singing some new lyrics to John Lennon's "Imagine". He sings, each every time it comes up, "Imagine there's no beoble" and "living life in beace". His alphabet only seems to have 25 letters in it. Now, before anyone points out that P's can sound bad when improperly sung, I'll point out that 1) if you want to win AI you shouldn't be singing P's improperly, 2) John Lennon manages to do it just fine, 3) if it wasn't important that people be able to understand the lyrics, John would have just scatted through the whole song.

Now I admit I've been negligent recently, but I've got a few excuses.

1. It was the weekend. Posts always drop over the weekend.
2. We had company, so we were off doing other things.
3. Shannon stole some of my comment by beating me to announcing my triumph over the Square One, and my Adventures in Peanut Butter.
4. The weekend stake meeting was better than expected.

That said, we did go on a hike this weekend. The Watchman Trail was very nice. 2.8 miles or so, round trip and it's not too terribly steep. It goes right from the Zion's Visitor Center, so Shannon and I have now hiked the first 3 or 4 trails in Zion, slowly working our way towards the back. The trail has a few potential drop offs, but unless you are a particular klutz, there's no real danger. If we're lucky, Shannon will soon post some pictures, and sometime in late May Sabrina will get around to posting on her blog.

4 guys, 3 girls

A few months ago, when American Idol started this season, it was pretty obvious that the girls were much better than the guys. Painfully obvious the first 2 weeks of the voting. I commented that the final 12 ought to be 8 or 9 girls and 3 or 4 guys. But last night I noticed that somehow we (the people) had voted 4 guys into the top 7 and only 3 girls. Fortunately, the next two to go have got to be Chris and Phil. (It's just got to be them, right?)

42

I did watch Hitch Hikers Guide recently, but that's not what this is about. About a week ago MLB celebrated the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first game. In his honor, many players were wearing the number 42 (which has been retired for all of MLB). But the real point I want to make is this: if there are games in which every single player of both teams is wearing the same number, and everything goes alright, isn't that proof that numbers on baseball jerseys are pretty worthless?

Types of Singing

For weeks Shannon and I have been complaining that Chris R. (of American Idol) sings with a pinched, nasal tone. He was once again called on it last night when it was particularly bad. It was then that he informed the world that "Nasal is a type of singing."

Nasal is a type of singing.

Wow. He continued to say that if he's been singing nasally all this time, he must be doing it on purpose, right? Did we ever think about that? (Because if you're doing it on purpose it somehow must be good?) My response is simply this: I admit that nasal is a type of singing. As it turns out, off key is a type of singing, too. (Just ask Blake last night.) A head of the beat is a type of singing (Chris Sligh). Voice cracking is a type of singing (Phil one week ago). 'Hamburgers for breakfast' is a type of singing. (You'll have to ask Simon about that one.) But, unfortunately for Chris, "types of singing" and "good types of singing" are not the same thing.

And the obligatory Sanjaya comment: Last night, it wasn't just that he was boring me while he sang, he actually looked like he was boring himself.

Class of 2006/7

I don't know what it is with the mail that I get these days, but here's the gem I got from the BYU physics department:

Congratulations on your upcoming graduation!

It continues by reminding me to be in the garden court by 7:30 for pictures, and is complete with the paper I have to give back to them indicating how many people will be coming to the reception with me. So if anyone wants some free food, you're all invited!

Of course, about 2 years ago (when I hadn't graduated) I got an invitation in the mail (mailed to Wymount) for a Physics Alumni something-or-other. Apparently they think I'm moving back in time. I'll probably go home and find that my diploma has self-destructed.

Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman

I finished this book (for the second time, but I own it now) the other day. Richard Feynman got a physics BS from MIT, Ph.D. from Princeton, worked on The Bomb at Los Alamos, taught at Cornell and CalTech and won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and gave perhaps the most famous physics talk ever, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" about nanotechnology.

This book is about as little of that stuff as possible. It turns out that Dick Feynman was an amazing man who liked to pull pranks, make jokes, and this is the story of all that stuff. Mostly, Feynman was unable to look at something and not want to know how it works, why it works and how to make it better. He taught himself to crack safes in Los Alamos, competed in a samba competition during Carnival in Rio, took commissions for art work, and played the drums for a San Francisco ballet.

The book is basically a collection of all of these stories, and is rather like sitting down in his company and listening to his many adventures. It's non-technical, and rather than being a book about physics, is a book about a physicist. Shannon is reading it now, so maybe you'll want to wait to hear what she thinks.

Random Bits

You know you're moving up in life when you get to sit right next to Mark Eubank in sacrament meeting.

I like St. George radio traffic reports. Today they alerted us to some cops on patrol out by Ivins.

Having finished off the bag of malt-o-meal imitation Captain Crunch, I can now begin to heal from my bout of Cap'n Crunch Mouth.

Nothing quite as amusing as watching 14 grown men try to participate in a baby blessing. Good thing some of them had long arms.

Processing Good Experiences

Shannon and I went to a meeting for Mas and Pas yesterday. We were told it would be a 45 minute meeting. Let me summarize what was covered for you:

• The trek will be a really good experience
• It will be hard
• The difficulties will make it a good experience
• We need to process what happens
• The experiences will be made better by processing them
• Even though it will be hard, it will be a good experience
• This is going to be a really good experience for the youth
• The trek will be a really good experience

You might think I'm joking with that list, but really, it greatly under emphasizes their key point, which was: "the trek will be a really good experience". An hour and forty minutes later, we left the meeting. We're looking forward to the next one.

(Oh, "processing" was the buzz word of the day. It means "talk about what has happened". The purpose is to get the kids to think about the terrible things we're going to make them do and apply them to their lives and stuff like that. But clearly "We need to process what we're going through" is much better than saying "We need to talk about what we're going through" or even "we need to discuss what we're going through". No, this is a far better, because we're "processing".)

all these clouds are so familiar

Every time I have to work late, I bring the mp3 player and listen to as much music as I can. (Until my ears refuse to spend any more time with the headphones on.) The funny thing is that each time this happens, I come home with a new Guster song that I'm listening to over and over again. This week's selection is "Lightning Rod". Next week it will probably be something else. But it's pretty consistent that out of the 400 songs at the touch of my fingers, I get hooked on a Guster song, but it's always a different one. The more I listen, the further I am from actually having a favorite.

Magazine Offer

The other day, I got a letter in the mail for a magazine subscription (only $12.50 a year!). I share the beginning of that letter with you:

Dear Mr. Clark Blockburger

Sometimes you just have to see what you're missing. That's why we've pictured the last year's issues of AARP The Magazine on the right. It's just one of the benefits of membership in AARP you could be enjoying now that you've turned 50.

Shannon asked me if I'd been hiding anything from her. Mostly, I just want to know if I can get into the movies cheaper!

San Jorge Drivers

Here in San Jorge I often get stuck behind drivers that drive slowly and seem to scream "OLD PERSON DRIVER" with every move. Sometimes you can see the blue hair poking up over the seat, or often, you don't see anyone driving from behind; they're too small and their Cadillacs are too big.

I was behind one such driver the other day on my way to work, moseying along at 32 mph down River Road (speed limit 40). And of course I'm behind her through all the 1 lane part. And to make matters worse, as if to mock me, her plate is "GRANEE". As if there was any doubt.

But then, when I passed her, she wasn't even that old! She looked 60, tops!

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

No, don't actually guess. It's the movie we watched over the weekend. Staring Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, it's a movie about a white girl (played by Katharine Houghton) who brings her fiancee to meet her parents (Hepburn and Tracy). And it turns out he's black. This we knew going into the movie, but we were surprised at every turn by the way things were set up. We had to keep pausing the movie so we could react as we slowly find out that the fiancee (Poiter) is a doctor, 37 (she's only 23), widowed, associate director of the World Health Organization, and they've only know each other for 10 days, and they're planning on going to Geneva (Switzerland) to get married in 2 or 3 weeks. Wow! Instead of being a comedy, fitting in all sorts of little racial jokes everywhere, it's more of a drama with the obvious social commentary built in. It was filled in 1967, so you also get to hear the terms "colored," "negro," and even one N-bomb.

It's really quite a good film, and all the actors are excellent, and I particularly liked Tracy. It turns out that he was so sick during the filming, they were preparing the movie to be made both with and without him. He died 17 days after filming was complete, . Poitier, Hepburn and Tracy are all Oscar winners, and Hepburn's daughter in the film is her niece in real life.

Matt: A Sage (not Google) Reader

At Matt's suggestion, I'm trying out Sage. The early verdict is that it is superior to Google Reader. It does the work for you, but still encourages you to look at the post on the actual site, thus fostering commenting. And it catches updates much faster than Google Reader. I'd tell you how much faster, but Google Reader still isn't picking up things that I know have been there since this morning. On the down side, you can put things in folders to shorten up your list, but if the folder is closed to save you space, you can't see if anything in it has been updated. Silly. The other tricky thing is that clicking on a blog in the Sage window will take you there in your current browser window, which has resulted in me logging out of Gmail a half dozen times unintentionally. Oh, and if you're looking at a site, Sage will find the feeds for you automatically. Good job, Matt.

Summer Time

Well, we made it all the way to April 4th (I think it was) before turning on the AC. It was only for about 10 minutes, and partly just to make sure it is working alright, which it is. But that sure seems like a bad sign.

Oustanding Teaching Assistant Awards

A year ago, or perhaps more, I was named an Outstanding Teaching Assistant for 2006. I won a free years membership to AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) and a year of Physics Today. This was back in March(ish) of last year, when I was a student still. Keep that in mind. It's important.

So, upon Googling me yesterday, Shannon found that the number one site is the AAPT site listing me as one of these outstanding TAs. There's about 125 people listed, and I'm one of them. Just don't look for me under BYU. Because I'm not there. Apparently, I attend a school known as "Sylarus Technologies". Yeah, somehow they got their signals crossed and they think my job is a school. If nothing else, maybe this gives Clair the power to give me an advanced degree or something.

It probably happened because I filled out some survey about what I'm doing now, and someone got my school and my job mixed up. It's funny, because I didn't even get this job until 6 months after I won the award. So if they had done their reporting in a timely fashion, they couldn't have possibly made such a mistake.

Book Review: e: The Story of a Number

e: The Story of a Number
by Eli Maor

In my continuing nerd book series, this was next. (Maybe someday I'll read my number books in order, 0, 1, i, φ, e, π. [1 and i are interchangeable, as they both have a magnitude of 1 in the complex plane!]) Maor starts very well, he is a mathematician and recognizes Petr Beckman's "History of Pi" as an excellent book. But things drift slowly down hill from there. Unlike some of the other famous numbers, e is a relatively new invention, barely predating calculus. In standard mathematical history form the story drifts from one little aside to another, touching upon the history of i, π, music, calculus, and who knows what else. The math content is fairly low, until the 4 or 5 pages spent on partial derivatives that strikes out of the blue, daring you to give up on the book one chapter from the end.

I think the most telling thing I can say about this book, is that it left me with very little new trivia to try to work into conversations. Usually nerd books leave me spewing information about weird things for weeks.

Gina v. India

Well, now I'm upset that Sanjaya is still around. Hailey, too. Until the last two weeks, we've been keeping these two around at the expense of people that I didn't really care about. But the longer this goes on, the more people like Chris and Gina that we're going to eliminate, and the more terrible performing I get to see from Sanjaya. I think a bed-ridden, 80 year-old Tony Bennett could have out performed Sanjaya last night. I got excited for Gina each week because, more than anyone else, she sang music that I would actually listen to. I could enjoy her performance for both the singing and the music, as opposed to many others where I can only enjoy the singing, and Sanjaya and Hailey, where I can't enjoy either.

So how is Sanjaya still around? Could votefortheworst.com really have that much pull, despite my previous doubts? Could India be spending their mornings making international calls? Is America on drugs? Does the crying girl own 1,000 cell phones? We may never know.

AI is having a song writing contest where the populace gets to vote on what song the winner gets to sing. This is a good thing, because the songs the AI people write for the winner are terrible. Even the morning radio people in St. George (who know nothing about music, as their playlists indicate) know that their songs are terrible.

Google Reader

A few weeks ago, discovered Google reader, much to my initial delight. The idea is great. Rather than spending hours each day checking every one's blogs to see if they've updated (which I used to do compulsively about once an hour) Google reader checks the blogs for you, and puts all the new posts on one easy screen that you can read all together. The idea is great, and it's from Google! It's got to be marvelous! Actually, I've been disappointed.

Mostly, it's slow. I don't really know how all these RSS do-dads work, but when I post something on my own blog, it takes the better part of the day before it shows up on Google reader. So when I'm bored, I still check blogs manually anyway. Sometimes I get comments to an entry that show up before the entry itself does. And I only get the comments out of context. But I'm so lazy, I keep using Google reader.

Also, I think my commenting is down, because I don't visit the actual blogs.

The Real Top Story

The real top story from the big basketball game last night, the one thing that I never would have expected, was to see Bill Bilchick there . . . all dressed up. The man who is famous for coaching football games in sweats that he had to borrow from the equipment manager at the last minute was actually looking nice, just to attend a basketball game. The one time you'd think he could go casual. I can't find a picture anywhere on line, but I think he was wearing a suit. Weird.

Basketball

There was reportedly a basketball game last night, covered by hundreds of media type persons. When asked to identify the persons involved in the game, they conferred for a while, and produced the following statement: "The basketball game tonight involved Greg Oden, and 23 other males, aged 18-24 who we were unable to identify."

I've argued that Oden has been over rated for a few months now. I watched the last 3/4 of the game last night. He looked pretty good. Not dominating, but pretty good. But what I really noticed was his final basket of the night. Florida was up 12, IIRC, and there was less than a minute to go, so FL was just looking to force OSU to run a bit of time off the clock and try not to give up a 3 pointer. The ball went in the middle to Oden who turned to the hoop and dunked it. The FL players essentially let him go. The basket pulled OSU to within 10 with 40 seconds to play. And yet Oden, who looked so tired at the end of the game, threw the ball down hard and pretty much did a chin-up on the rim. I was almost expecting him to be posing in front of the cameras after that dunk. Earth to Greg: that was a meaningless dunk. Something just didn't sit right with me and the way he threw it down.

So it turns out that FL can really shoot the ball, and OSU's game plan seemed to be "we hope Oden scores 40".

Nothing like finishing in 2,458,385th place with my bracket picks. :(

Mirna and Shmirna

The number 1 reason these girls are annoying and need to go: they adopt fake accents and broken English when talking to foreigners. And we wonder why the world hates Americans.