Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

oh, I have exercise-induced asthma too. It's tricky to know if I'm going to need my inhaler or not...

So anyone see the "Jeopardy!" this past week, where the computer Watson beat two human opponents, and quite handily? Everyone here oughta watch it. But anyway, one of the contestants was Ken Jennings (the guy from Salt Lake, in case anyone has forgotten) who made this quip about Watson, and that's really why I bring this whole thing up: "Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human 'Jeopardy!' player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman."

TheAnswerIs42 wrote:Question: does anyone have access to a zip drive? Preferably in the Utah county area? It looks like the LRC/Media Center in the library no longer has the external ones mentioned in the archives. And my husband finally located a zip disk with his mission stuff on it. The drive that created it no longer functions at his parent's house.

42, my family still has an external zip drive, but we're not in Utah County..., still in Utah though so let me know if you're interested, I could probably hook you up if you wanted to drive up here to use it.

Oh, and another note - it's amazing the amount of unread posts you have when you leave the board board for a whole month. I had to focus on surviving teaching for a while.

I got a Ken Jennings trivia game for… my birthday, maybe? I've never really played it. I don't do trivia. But it might be autographed. I forget and am too lazy to go check.

Marduk wrote:So anyone see the "Jeopardy!" this past week, where the computer Watson beat two human opponents, and quite handily? Everyone here oughta watch it. But anyway, one of the contestants was Ken Jennings (the guy from Salt Lake, in case anyone has forgotten) who made this quip about Watson, and that's really why I bring this whole thing up: "Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human 'Jeopardy!' player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman."

Ken's a very witty guy. I loved his Authors@Google interview.

I am … unmotivated. Which is sad, because I had grand plans for the day. But after not getting enough sleep (my own fault, I stayed up late to catch up on blogging. 26 blogs, turns out, takes a lot of time. Esp. when 3 of them are full of videos.) and trying (and I think failing) to make sourdough bread… I don't even have the desire to read my book. But I can't nap (nor am I sure I want to). And I still have a list of things I really want to do. Except I don't want to do them anymore. But I should at least go clean up my bread mess.

Rambling in this forum was my last ditch effort at procrastinating. I guess I'll go start on that list. [sigh]

I feel ya, DL.

Me and my husband were up late making chili for our ward activity tonight, but we both fell asleep in the living room afterwards. So I spent the whole night on the couch with the lights on, and then I woke up at like 6:30 this morning. I feel like junk. Even though I've tried to do some productive things, they've all crashed and burned because my brain keeps thinking naaaaaaaaap.

Today wasn't a waste! As I was cleaning up I found a stack of newspaper ads from the mail and glanced through them and found a washer and dryer on sale. It reminded me that we're probably close to having enough money to buy them. So I did some google searching on the one advertised to see what kind of reviews it got and not only does it have excellent reviews pretty much everywhere, but I also found it on sale even cheaper online with in-store pickup (so no shipping fees). I kind of feel like it was a rushed decision (even though we've been looking at them for months now and almost bought one in November, but ended up buying Yellow a laptop instead), but there's nothing else I really could have done research-wise. And we actually had the money. And … and… I did it!

I'll have my new LG high-efficiency washer and dryer next week!

Wahoo!

I had a weird dream last night. There was a guy (a mix between my old FHE dad and Tim Wayne-Wright from the King's Singers) who was working for Fat Cat from Rescue Rangers. I had to convince the guy I was in love with him in order to stop some nefarious plot. So I, in the dream, ended up engaged to the guy. Then my parents and my brother-in-law's parents to whom I introduced the guy become really skeptical that I'm marrying a guy who knows squat about the LDS faith. I woke up before I could secretly explain to them what was really going on, although I think I was planning on sending my mom a password-protected Word file of a wedding dress picture with a caption explaining the truth and asking her to play along.

Know what one of my pet peeves is? When ingredients in a recipe are not listed in the same order as they are used in the instructions.

Dragon Lady wrote:Know what one of my pet peeves is? When ingredients in a recipe are not listed in the same order as they are used in the instructions.

Seconded.

In other news, I'm starting a unit on research papers with my ninth graders tomorrow. I'm excited. I doubt they will be, but I am.

Heh. Today I'm driving my husband nuts by listening to polka music. Sometimes I like to feel old-timey. It's especially fun to hear when I'm cooking something Italian.

I'm sure she'll get around to posting this eventually, but steen had her baby recently! AND her husband is home! Hooray! Congrats, steen!

This will almost certainly come across as very sexist, but I rarely find female comics funny. I allow for the possibility, but it just seems like none of them are very funny.

Marduk wrote:This will almost certainly come across as very sexist, but I rarely find female comics funny. I allow for the possibility, but it just seems like none of them are very funny.

I'm not sure what female comics you're talking about, but the first thing that popped into my head was Baby Blues, which I find quite comical.

comics as in stand up comics, not the kind in print.

yeah, for some reason women have had a hard time breaking into the stand-up comedy genre. I find my humor more successful when it consists of snarky comments during a lecture, personally.

Marduk wrote:This will almost certainly come across as very sexist

Hah, YES.

I think the reason is that (1) there aren't as many female comics as male, and (2) men defined the genre from the beginning anyway. I have heard funny female comedians (comediennes), but of course I can't remember their names and of course they aren't as famous. I will say that I think Ellen Degeneres is hilarious, and Amanda Bynes, who did comedy when she was younger, is really funny.

Today has been spent (and will continue to be spent) running car errands. First it was to the dealership to replace our passenger mirror (the person who owned it prior decided that putting one of those kid-mirrors that, sure, reflect, but also distort like crazy would be a great idea for a replacement mirror) and get an oil change. And to find out all the other things that are wrong with my car. Then to Jiffy Lube to get two chips in my windshield replaced. Then to Big O Tires to get second estimates on all the other stuff that I found out is wrong with my car.

Then home for lunch.

Next I'll take Yellow's car to get a leak fixed in his exhaust, then go back to Jiffy Lube so that they'll approve his emissions and inspection and finally give us registration since his expired at the end of last month.

Then it'll be time to figure out what to do about my car.

Cars are way too expensive, folks. I think next time we buy a car, we're going to bite the bullet and get a new one.