He Died With A Felafel In His Hand

He Died With A Felafel In His Hand has been on my top 100 list of films to watch for a while now. Today I finally watched it.

Anybody who has lived in a student dive (all students?) could probably relate to this. The character in this film has lived in 49 student dives by the end of the movie. In the movie we see houses 47 to 49.

Someone told me that this is John Birmingham's autobiography but I'm guessing that this is an exaggerated imagination of his autobiography.

My favorite scene/idea from the film? Teeing up toads and slamming them in to the side of a corrugated iron house with a three wood. Of course I do not enjoy the cruelty to the animals but the ridiculous idea that someone came up with this "sport."

How many of me are there?

Here is an interesting web site called HowManyOfMe.com. It allows you to enter your first and last name to find out how many people share your name in the USA. There are 69 people with my first and last name. There are 89,991 people who have the same first name as me and 230,976 share my last name. And there I was thinking that I was unique.

I thought that I would test out the saying that John Smith is the most popular name in the western world. On entering John Smith I discovered that Smith is indeed the most popular last name but John is the 2nd most popular first name. There are, apparently, 49,535 John Smiths in the USA.

It turns out that James is the most popular first name with 50,214 James Smiths.

The top 5 most popular first names, in order, are: James, John, Robert, Michael, Mary.
The top 5 most popular last names, in order, are: Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, Brown.

Addendum: I've just searched my wife's name which truly is unique. There are zero people with either her first or last name which indicates that she herself does not exist.

Licensed to Drink

I had this conversation with Vern recently and then brought it up again the following evening with my fellow bloggers over a few drinks in Gallagher's Fun House.

What if, when you turn 21, you can apply for a license to drink. A bar/restaurant cannot serve you alcohol unless you produce this license. If you get caught drunk driving then you loose your license to drink and not your license to drive.

My rationale behind this is that it is not the driving that is the problem it is the drinking. By taking away someones driving license you can cause a lot of hardship for the people that depend on that person and not just the person. If that person is a father that needs to ferry the kids around then you may end up with a household with just one driver (the mother) and everyone else dependent on her (including the husband) for rides.

Revoking someones license to drink can also be used in other situations where drinking has been or is currently causing a problem. The courts could revoke that license or the drinker could voluntarily allow the revocation of such license for a period of time.

Just some random thoughts on the matter.

Spelt

So I thought that I was being clever buying a bag of spelt (Triticum spelta) out of curiosity 6 months ago. Today the wife tells me to use it or she'll make me go shopping with her again. I thought that buying the spelt would keep me out of the shopping cart.

My last venture into the exotic grain arena was with quinoa (Chenopodium). Both Inca Red and Blonde Grain. The quinoa was a big hit and I cook it regularly with Amazonian Tilapia (genera Oreochromis, Sarotherodon, and Tilapia) or Alaskan Sockeye Salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka).

After some investigation I discovered that the spelt would best be served with portobello mushrooms (which don't have a Latin name) and so I turned the spelt into an amazing salad with Sierra Shallots, fresh rock crushed sea salt, cracked Missouri peppercorns, dark black Turkish olives, and Virginian midget carrots.

The feast was amazing, but that prose, what bollocks.

Specialty Golf Club Hire

I think that I've come up with a novel new business idea. It's specialty golf club hire. The idea is that you have an inventory of golf clubs and bags that you hire out. These clubs have the appearance of being brand new and almost unused but you have modified them such that they play terribly. Some of the clubs force a hook, some a slice, and the sand wedge catches it in the teeth each time and sends it off the back of the green and into the lake.

Now at this point you may be a bit confused. Why would someone want to hire a set of golf clubs that made them play badly?

Well, you're not hiring them for yourself. You are hiring them for your father/brother/son/old college buddy who is coming in to town for a short visit and wants to catch a game of golf with you. "Don't worry about bringing your clubs," you tell them. "I have a spare set for you" or "I'll get some for you."

4,000 foot bungee jump

I don't know what the highest bungee jump in the world currently is but here is the potential for a 4,000 foot bungee jump if they will let you do it and if anybody is up for it. What sort of speed do you think you'll be travelling at when that elastic band pulls your hips out of their sockets?

The Grand Canyon Skywalk opens on the 28 March 2007. This glass bottomed horseshoe shaped skywalk will extend 70 feet out into the canyon and hover 4,000 feet above it. Don't think that it's fragile though. It has been built to support the weight of 71 Boeing 747's, gale force winds and 8.0 magnitude earthquakes.

View arial image from Google Maps (zoom 1 level out after opening image)

Spies watching me eat.

Yesterday evening (6 Jan 2007) I had the pleasure of eating at China Thai Restaurant (6502 E Tanque Verde Rd, Tucson, AZ 85715 - map). The service was courteous and fast and the menus arrived (as I was expecting) before the food. The following variation of the Thai Green Curry piqued my attention.



I love Thai Green Curry and had thought that I had tried all variations until I saw this one that comes with spies. I had to order it and I did.

I didn't think that there would really be spies in the curry but there bloody were. A couple of them had cameras, one had a camcorder and one even had a pair of binoculars. I beat them to death with the blunt end of a chopstick as soon as they peered out from behind a sweet pea.

One thing I never managed to work out was why they only hid behind the sweet peas and ignored the bell peppers and basil leaves which I thought would have made far better cover from where they could do their devious espionage work.

Am I fat?

While I was typing up that last post I could hear a TV report coming from the other room. It was a female reporter and she was saying: "If your wife or girlfriend asks you if you think she is fat what do you say? Well think again because 65% of women polled said they would like to be told the truth."

Right, if you're a complete sucker you're going to fall for that one. There is only one answer to that question and it has to be replied to with lightening speed.

If you need to do this then practise with the computer. I found some software on the Internet which allows me to type in text and the software will then speak out the text that you type in female voice. Get that software (I can't remember what it's called) and record the sentence "am I fat?" or "do I look fat in this?" and then set your scheduler to randomly play it back at you while you are working on the computer. This way it will catch you by surprise the first few times and you will hesitate and stumble over the answer but after a while you'll be able to do it in your sleep - which you might need to do.

Is mine bigger than yours?

This is what my email folders look like at the moment. The 5 Drafts are emails to companies that I'm annoyed with telling them in graphic detail what they can do with their products or how I will insert them if I ever meet the designer. I have no intention of ever sending these emails so I just use it as a cathartic release and then go back and laugh at them now and then.

My spam box is currently holding over 5,000 spam messages. Is mine bigger than yours? If not, how big is yours?

I am trying to gauge if the spam hitting my email is below or above normal but I don't know what everyone else is receiving.