The Life Experience ~ Summer '14

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Summer Solstice:

• childthursday really exists! AND SHE IS AWESOME


• SO IS HER WIFE


• Piano dissassembly is an undertaking fraught with peril, what with the large number of wires under high tension.


• African wild dogs have gorgeous coats.


• The cilantro wars are a bit one-sided: 90% of people can't taste the particular aldehydes that mimic bleach (read: POISON)


• Fifty Shades of Grey is even more awful than I thought, so that not even a good sporking can make me an antifan.


• The first regular African-American character in a Saturday morning cartoon show was Valerie from Josie and the Pussycats.


• While I love watching horror movies, playing horror games is apparently one degree too close for my fragile amygdala.


• But, as it turns out, I love watching horror game playthroughs by other people.


• It is upsetting when the deserts of Southern Utah have a layer of green over them.


• There is a Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago!


• Even if they have much higher mass, sub-brown dwarf stars are generally roughly the same radius as Jupiter, due to complicated interactions of various pressure factors.


• THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A CANDY BAR STUFFED WITH CAKE MIX


• Astronauts do drop stuff all over the place when they come back from a stint in space. (As somebody said, "NOBODY GIVE HIM A BABY.")


• T-rex's puny arms were still attached to tons of muscle and could probably take you apart pretty easily.


• Amercan police departments have somehow turned into terrifying supervillain organizations.


• Terrifying, racist supervillain organizations.


• It's important to get the correct generic brand of your Fukitol unless you want to enjoy days of simulating life on a pirate ship.


• The Tinker Bell movies actually might have better messages than the books, what with the way Tinker Bell herself is a straight-up mechanical engineer in the movies, rather than a "pots-and-pans-talent fairy" of the books. Dude, she can be girly AND an engineer!


• I apparently do very well teaching toward gifted kids, and less well teaching toward other kids. I tend to forget that not everyone can keep up. STORY OF MY LIFE.


• There are varying categories of anemia depending on how the shortage of hemoglobin comes about--either impaired production, increased destruction, or straight blood loss.


• The water level of the Chicago River is lower than that of Lake Michigan and has to be kept that way with harbor locks, because of some big engineering stunt to reverse the flow of the river back in the day. THE TRIUMPH OF MAN!


• I still love point'n'click games.


• There are tons of extremely interesting methods of alternative construction available if one wants to, say, build a cost-effective eco-friendly hobbit hole at some point.


• The most intriguing of which seems to be earth-sheltered building at the moment.  HMMMM ...