The Life Experience ~ Winter '11

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice:

• Clarence “Ducky” Nash not only voiced Donald Duck in English; he also did the voice on all the dubbed shorts Disney made so that the voice would remain consistently unintelligible across all languages.
• Before she became a TV cook show hostess, Julia Child INVENTED SHARK REPELLENT.
• Shakira sings very differently in English than she does in Spanish—to an amazing degree. In English, she sounds like so many other Madonna clones; in Spanish she’s got that rich and confident voice. I’d never listened to one of her songs’ English and Spanish versions back-to-back before, but it’s amazing how different it is.
• Drawing something that looks like text without being legible is called “Greeking”—the written equivalent of “rhubarb.”
• Generally speaking, the human brain can only really count up to 4 at a glance. Numbers beyond that slow us down.
• Cookie Monster’s name in Hindu Hindi is Biscuit Badsha.
• BONUS EDIT WITH NEW LEARNED THING: Hindi is the language; Hindu is the religion.  I never was really sure of the difference in the terms.  Thanks, sriti !
• It’s incredibly convenient to have a portable musical instrument to carry around and practice when you’ve got a few minutes, instead of having something too huge to lug around.
• There is an explanation for my complete inability to ever adhere to the crazy raw food diet so many of our library patrons seem to be interested in starting up: Oral Allergy Syndrome. (I’m sure those raw food books would assure me that I wouldn’t have this syndrome if I just ate enough raw food to detox, but fuck ’em.)
• You can get hives ON YOUR GOD DAMN EYEBALL.
• There are a few drawbacks to nuclear power. [/understatement]
• Mushrooms grow fast.
• Calendars generally follow three main types: lunar, solar, and lunisolar.  A great deal of work goes into keeping calendars on track, especially the lunisolar ones.  Some calendars also have a really complex way to make the weekdays dependent on the date and even more complex astrological positions.
• The term for the shaved head, or part of the head, of a monk is tonsure.
• It is possible for me to find stars in the sky if I concentrate!
• Also, Betelgeuse really does look orange.
• The effectiveness of toilet paper follows a bell curve along its price range. Too cheap and it’s painful and thin; too expensive and it’s so pumped with lotions, layers, and moisturizers that it forgets its function as, well, toilet paper, and winds up just waving at your butt as it goes by.
• There are Geno fans on the internet. I should have known.
• Pizza sauce is a lot simpler than I thought, but crust is still a bit tough to work out.

Comments

I love these Wrap-Up posts.

[lycheetwist.livejournal.com]

Hey, have you posted pictures of your mushrooms and I missed them? I'd like to see how they're going. I don't know anything about your spores and buttons, either. I've seen pictures of Oyster mushrooms grow, and, man, they do grow fast.

These posts are always something I look forward to, especially now since you've graduated from school.

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Rhubarb?

[asqmh.livejournal.com]

The Buttwipe Bell Curve is absolutely correct.

Also, OAS is the reason I can't eat cats. Not even raw cats. >_>

[sriti.livejournal.com]

Okay couple of comments:
a) I never knew there was such a thing as a shark repellent! What a helpful thing to have!
b) Its 'hindi', not 'hindu', the former is the language, whereas the latter is the religious sect (like muslim), and lastly,
c)I always love to spot these two red stars in the sky. I can't tell you exactly where they are (I don't know the names of the stars at all!) but one is right beside the middle of these three lined stars. Ever see them?

[beccastareyes]

I've had friends with oral allergies. It's a shame, since there's so many veggies around Ithaca when there's not snow on the ground. OTOH, most of them time I couldn't have a raw food diet because my CSA gives me so much leafy veggies that if you don't cook them or blanch them for later cooking, then it's just very expensive compost. As is, on the weeks we get lettuce, I'll usually have 'ginormous salad' for at least one meal.

(That and most of the greens taste too strong raw -- I just discovered while I don't care for raw arugula, it's not bad cooked.)

[piccolo-pirate.livejournal.com]

I discovered OAS last fall. For all the years before that, I just assumed everyone got weird itchy bumps on their lips when they ate apples. Go figure.

If you have a local Trader Joe's, they make delightful toilet paper that's cheap, partially recycled, and falls in just the right place on the bell curve. :)

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Batman owes Julia child big time.

*is baffled**

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

Toilet paper in the US contains lotions and moisturisers?

I mean, what? Why? What's wrong with plain ol' paper?

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

I love your "learned since" entries. They're exciting and fun and just all-around cool. Plus I usually learn something. *makes note about Shakira*

I've got an oral allergy to mangoes, walnuts, and kiwi. All of which I love, mango especially, so this make me sad.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

I have OAS to a bajillion things, such that pretty much every time I eat I get horrifically congested, and I have a nasty allergy to raw spinach which ensures that never again will I know the delights of a raw spinach salad with hard boiled eggs, mandarin oranges, and warm bacon dressing. *sobs*

Also I appear to be lactose-intolerant or something along those lines, which profoundly sucks but gives me a good excuse to give to my doctor when he complains that I don't drink enough (read: *any*) milk.

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

My sister's got OAD and she's finding new things she's allergic to (or things she's newly allergic to) all the time. It started with certain fruits. Then it was pretty much any uncooked fruit. Then perhaps some vegetables. Now, she's found that even using fresh/raw garlic and onions in food and not cooking them enough gives her problems (she does not have problems with the powder forms, or the pre-minced stuff. Yet.). So my sister either has to cook the daylights out of everything or just eat processed foods.

My mom is allergic to corn and corn-derived products and products made with the use of corn-derived products and possibly meats from animals fed a high percentage of corn. Pretty much any processed food, even the 'natural' or 'organic' stuff, uses corn in the food itself or in its production. So my mom is pretty down to making her own food for anything she would eat, and a lot of the time that ends up being raw foods.

As you can probably see, family dinners are quite an affair to fix.


I learned the 'counting at a glance' thing from an SAT test I took years ago! It was in the reading section of the test, and I found it so interesting I kinda took way more time on it than I needed to. :D;


And eyeball hives are quite possibly the worst thing ever. So I've heard.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Amen on the TP bell curve thing. I can't stand the high end stuff, but the mid-range is great.

Generally speaking, the human brain can only really count up to 4 at a glance. Numbers beyond that slow us down.

I heard it was more like 5-6 for most people. I know for me, it's 5. The highest I've ever heard of was an Idiot Savant who could count up to 30 at a glance.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

I do inventory as a job and I've learned to count up to 8 at a glance. It's done by grouping: if I see six items together, rather than recognising six separate items, I see two groups of three, which I've trained my muscle memory to interpret as a six. Depending on how well organised the items are, I can count groups of up to twelve (two sets of two sets of three), but that takes a bit longer and is harder to work into a counting rhythm.

[kittikattie.livejournal.com]

Generally speaking, the human brain can only really count up to 4 at a glance. Numbers beyond that slow us down.

...we're a bunch of rabbits? [/Watership Down ref]

[shadesofmauve]

Interesting timing -- I didn't know about the general applicability of counting-4-at-a-glance, but it JUST came up in conversation with my neighbor. he has five dogs, and says #5 was what pushed it from maneagable to a hassle, because he can't do a head-count at a glance.