Showing posts with label wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wikipedia. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Where have you gone to, Jimmy Wales?
The internet died today. Well, dead to me anyway.
Wikipedia, yon bastion of free knowledge, shut its virtual doors today. For 24 hours. That may not sound like much to you. But to me, it's eighty-six thousand, four hundred elongated seconds of nothingness. Outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Wikipedia has become my source for all knowledge of all things. Written by people who I like to imagine might have even less of a life than me. (Sure, it's possible there might be an occasional error. But that's why there's Snopes.)
And now? It's gone. I knew something like this was gonna happen after Steve Jobs died!
But even I never realized how deeply this would affect me. That is, until I found myself twenty minutes into an episode of Sesame Street this morning, giving a running commentary on Gmail.
Some excerpts:
"Sarah Jessica Parker is on Sesame Street? I never really think of her as kid-friendly."
"Now there are salt and pepper shakers on there. One of them has a moustache, and just put on a pink skirt! WTF! The volume is down so I'm not sure if they're trying to say it's OK for men to cross-dress, or if they're trying to hint that women may sometimes need to remember to shave their upper lip area. Probably the latter."
"If they're still filming new episodes, why do the kids look like they're wearing the same outfits they wore when I watched in the seventies?"
"They are shoving Elmo down our throats! He's had like six scenes and I haven't seen Big Bird once. Not to mention Grover. Grover always gets the shaft. He must not be in the union."
"I mean, what does Elmo even do? He's not big and dorky. He doesn't have an accent. He doesn't have a male roommate. He's not grumpy. He's just... red."
"Oh, apparently there's another red one. Who knew! I was confusing Elmo part of the time with someone named Murray Monster? My apologies to Elmo nation."
My top five Sesame Street characters:
1. Ernie
2. Grover
3. Cookie Monster (although admittedly he is a bit of a one-trick pony.)
4. The Count
5. Bert
(tie) Guy Smiley
I need help. Look at what I've become after only a few hours with no Wiki. The Earth cannot revolute fast enough for me today. Wikipedia, please come back. SOPA, PIPA, whatever it is, I'm sure we can work this out. Make a personal appeal. I'll donate!
And please hurry. For crying out loud, I just Asked Jeeves!
"Sunny days, sweeping the clouds away. On my way to where the air is sweet..."
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
While visions of lap desks danced in his head...
Every year while Christmas shopping, I usually wind up buying a gift or two for myself. After all, isn't that what the holidays are all about? No? Well, forget I said that. Anyway, I'd done really well this year, not buying myself a single thing. Until last week.
That's when I discovered what is quite possibly the greatest invention since the automatic paper towel dispenser: the lap desk.
Have you heard of these things? Sounds a little like lap dance, but it's much more satisfying. It's like silk underwear for your laptop! Not that I wear or endorse silk underwear, but I imagine it would be a luxurious and quite delightful experience. There's even a place for a beverage! If I could somehow attach a mini-fridge, I'd have it all.
Remarkably, I did manage to leave the laptop for a little while this past weekend, though I'm not quite sure how. I think I must have reached the end of the internet or something. The weekend consisted of caroling, driving around looking at Christmas lights, and that most treasured of holiday tradition -- bowling.
Caroling was a bit of a different adventure this year than last. The main difference being we didn't get the van with the seats in it this year. Instead we took my cousin's company van. He owns a dry cleaning business, and the only thing in the back of the van were two rods for hanging clothes.
So there were seven of us piled on the floor in the back of a van. At least it was carpeted. It had a very nativity-esque feel to it, I thought. If the wise men were traveling today, I feel confident in saying this is how they'd roll.
Saturday night, I managed to get the Darryls together to go bowling. I nearly split my yule log when I saw the rates: $5.25 a game, plus $4 for shoe rentals! Evidently bowling has gone the way of Red Lobster and is now only for the upper class.
Everyone agreed this was an outrage, especially Wolfgang who was there with his new wife and newly acquired children in tow. So I called the ghetto bowling alley to check rates. It was a good bit cheaper and, not surprisingly, they had plenty of lanes available, so off we went. This place was a tad scary, but with my street cred at an all-time high I figured we'd be OK, and we were.
Finally, for any who might be wondering, I will be hosting my annual Festivus celebration Thursday night. Every year, I keep thinking this is the year I won't do it. After all, how long can one man celebrate a fake holiday from a TV show that went off the air 12 years ago? Well apparently, at least six years in a row.
Maybe this is my ticket into the Guinness Book -- most consecutive years hosting a Festivus party. Then perhaps "Silver Pole" will find its way into Wikipedia, thus ending both of the great quests of my life. Of course, then I'd have to come up with new life goals for myself, and that could take a while.
Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus to one and all. Here's hoping you don't have to fight your father in the feats of strength this year.
"There'll be meatloaf, maybe pizza, at the Festivus meal. After grievances aired, hearts are heavy. Then it's time for Feats of Strength, it's Frank Costanza's big scene. Festivus won't be o'er 'til someone's pinned..."
That's when I discovered what is quite possibly the greatest invention since the automatic paper towel dispenser: the lap desk.
Have you heard of these things? Sounds a little like lap dance, but it's much more satisfying. It's like silk underwear for your laptop! Not that I wear or endorse silk underwear, but I imagine it would be a luxurious and quite delightful experience. There's even a place for a beverage! If I could somehow attach a mini-fridge, I'd have it all.
Remarkably, I did manage to leave the laptop for a little while this past weekend, though I'm not quite sure how. I think I must have reached the end of the internet or something. The weekend consisted of caroling, driving around looking at Christmas lights, and that most treasured of holiday tradition -- bowling.
Caroling was a bit of a different adventure this year than last. The main difference being we didn't get the van with the seats in it this year. Instead we took my cousin's company van. He owns a dry cleaning business, and the only thing in the back of the van were two rods for hanging clothes.
So there were seven of us piled on the floor in the back of a van. At least it was carpeted. It had a very nativity-esque feel to it, I thought. If the wise men were traveling today, I feel confident in saying this is how they'd roll.
Saturday night, I managed to get the Darryls together to go bowling. I nearly split my yule log when I saw the rates: $5.25 a game, plus $4 for shoe rentals! Evidently bowling has gone the way of Red Lobster and is now only for the upper class.
Everyone agreed this was an outrage, especially Wolfgang who was there with his new wife and newly acquired children in tow. So I called the ghetto bowling alley to check rates. It was a good bit cheaper and, not surprisingly, they had plenty of lanes available, so off we went. This place was a tad scary, but with my street cred at an all-time high I figured we'd be OK, and we were.
Finally, for any who might be wondering, I will be hosting my annual Festivus celebration Thursday night. Every year, I keep thinking this is the year I won't do it. After all, how long can one man celebrate a fake holiday from a TV show that went off the air 12 years ago? Well apparently, at least six years in a row.
Maybe this is my ticket into the Guinness Book -- most consecutive years hosting a Festivus party. Then perhaps "Silver Pole" will find its way into Wikipedia, thus ending both of the great quests of my life. Of course, then I'd have to come up with new life goals for myself, and that could take a while.
Merry Christmas and Happy Festivus to one and all. Here's hoping you don't have to fight your father in the feats of strength this year.
"There'll be meatloaf, maybe pizza, at the Festivus meal. After grievances aired, hearts are heavy. Then it's time for Feats of Strength, it's Frank Costanza's big scene. Festivus won't be o'er 'til someone's pinned..."
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Ye olde dog days
Apparently, I mention the dog days of summer in a post every July. Last year, I tied it in to National Blog Something That's In Draft Week, or NaBloSoThaDraWe as you most likely know it. I may still have to do that in the next few days. After all, I'm nothing if not cyclical...
I always figured the phrase "dog days of Summer" had something to do with how dogs mostly just laid around in the shade or under the porch looking for relief from the heat. Thankfully, in these progressive times, we have Wikipedia. Else I may have gone my entire life thinking that and thus never knowing the true origin of "dog days."
According to Wikipedia, it has something to do with Sirius--not that satellite radio people--also known as the Dog Star. In olden times, people would sacrifice a brown dog at the beginning of dog days. Why brown? Well, that's what I'd like to know. Unfortunately, Wikipedia didn't say, which pretty much can be taken to mean no one alive today knows the answer.
On a related note, we had a brown dog when I was growing up. Just wandered up one day, which is how we got most of our pets. I named it Brown Dog--there was sort of a clever descriptiveness to it, I thought. We also had a pet named Whiskas. It was a cat. But I digress.
While sources differ on the exact dates of the dog days, they roughly run from early July through mid-to-late-August in the northern hemisphere on planet Earth. And so, these are they.
Maybe they also could be referred to as the Blog Days of Summer. Because it seems that while physically I've been doing lots, my mind has mostly been lying around under the porch hiding from the sun. Thus resulting in an even greater lack of blog posts than usual.
I figured that I would try and catch you up on all that's been going on in Bonetropolis the past couple of weeks with a series of bullet points. But then I thought maybe that sounded too violent, so I'll just continue in paragraph form.
Last week was the birthday of someone very important to my existence: he who bore me. We commemorated with dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Then Dad regaled us with tales of what it was like when man landed on the moon, which occurred the day before his birthday, coincidentally.
Sunday, they left on a two-week cross country trip to the Grand Canyon. Currently, they are in Flagstaff, Arizona. He called Monday from near Dallas. It was raining. "Don't you have some way of checking the weather radar on the Internet?" As if I know a secret trick no one else knows.
But I suppose it's kinda nice to feel like he still needs me now and then. They grow up so fast.
Speaking of, Nephew Bone has been doing well. He is walking upright with the skill of someone six weeks his elder. He'll be a year old three weeks from today! And I thought time flew before. Oh, and he also swallowed a leaf. Don't ask how we know.
Meanwhile, yours truly has just been doing the usual--work, sleep, running, pondering my eventual retirement from competitive Scrabble, and of course, golf. This past weekend, I came within 18 inches of my first ever hole-in-one. That would have been the single greatest moment in my life--not to be confused with the greatest nine minutes of my life.
So, that's the story from Bonetropolis. The dog days are almost over. Hopefully, my mind will soon crawl out from 'neath the porch of no ideas to once again frolic through effervescent fields of minutiae and skinny dip in streams of hilarity.
"Babies squalled as August crawled past old folks in the shade. The weather vane was stuck, and White Oak Creek would drop, when dog days came around..."
I always figured the phrase "dog days of Summer" had something to do with how dogs mostly just laid around in the shade or under the porch looking for relief from the heat. Thankfully, in these progressive times, we have Wikipedia. Else I may have gone my entire life thinking that and thus never knowing the true origin of "dog days."
According to Wikipedia, it has something to do with Sirius--not that satellite radio people--also known as the Dog Star. In olden times, people would sacrifice a brown dog at the beginning of dog days. Why brown? Well, that's what I'd like to know. Unfortunately, Wikipedia didn't say, which pretty much can be taken to mean no one alive today knows the answer.
On a related note, we had a brown dog when I was growing up. Just wandered up one day, which is how we got most of our pets. I named it Brown Dog--there was sort of a clever descriptiveness to it, I thought. We also had a pet named Whiskas. It was a cat. But I digress.
While sources differ on the exact dates of the dog days, they roughly run from early July through mid-to-late-August in the northern hemisphere on planet Earth. And so, these are they.
Maybe they also could be referred to as the Blog Days of Summer. Because it seems that while physically I've been doing lots, my mind has mostly been lying around under the porch hiding from the sun. Thus resulting in an even greater lack of blog posts than usual.
I figured that I would try and catch you up on all that's been going on in Bonetropolis the past couple of weeks with a series of bullet points. But then I thought maybe that sounded too violent, so I'll just continue in paragraph form.
Last week was the birthday of someone very important to my existence: he who bore me. We commemorated with dinner at a Mexican restaurant. Then Dad regaled us with tales of what it was like when man landed on the moon, which occurred the day before his birthday, coincidentally.
Sunday, they left on a two-week cross country trip to the Grand Canyon. Currently, they are in Flagstaff, Arizona. He called Monday from near Dallas. It was raining. "Don't you have some way of checking the weather radar on the Internet?" As if I know a secret trick no one else knows.
But I suppose it's kinda nice to feel like he still needs me now and then. They grow up so fast.
Speaking of, Nephew Bone has been doing well. He is walking upright with the skill of someone six weeks his elder. He'll be a year old three weeks from today! And I thought time flew before. Oh, and he also swallowed a leaf. Don't ask how we know.
Meanwhile, yours truly has just been doing the usual--work, sleep, running, pondering my eventual retirement from competitive Scrabble, and of course, golf. This past weekend, I came within 18 inches of my first ever hole-in-one. That would have been the single greatest moment in my life--not to be confused with the greatest nine minutes of my life.
So, that's the story from Bonetropolis. The dog days are almost over. Hopefully, my mind will soon crawl out from 'neath the porch of no ideas to once again frolic through effervescent fields of minutiae and skinny dip in streams of hilarity.
"Babies squalled as August crawled past old folks in the shade. The weather vane was stuck, and White Oak Creek would drop, when dog days came around..."
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
A splendid splinter (with apologies to Ted Williams)
I was talking to someone the other day about the weather. (Don't worry, things will start to pick up here in a minute.) They made a remark about how they couldn't believe we were already having summer-like weather.
That really stuck with me, you know. Mainly because I don't talk to that many people.
We have been having gorgeous weather the past few days, but it's not here to stay quite yet. It must have been 80 here yesterday, but the high tomorrow is only supposed to be 48.
So I started thinking. I've never really considered March a winter month. Yet it only gets like 10 days of technical spring. So what is it? Maybe we need a new term for the period between winter and spring.
In my head, I started calling it splinter, obviously combining spring and winter. I thought it pure brilliance, and could already see the Wikipedia entry for it forming in my head:
Splinter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Splinter is a term given to the period of time comprising the end of winter and beginning of spring. Also roughly equivalent to the month of March in the northern hemisphere. It is usually characterized by drastic swings in temperature, and often features days of spring-like weather followed by days of winter weather. The term was first used by Bone, an early 21st Century blogger, whose lifetime goal [citation needed] it was to have his own Wikipedia entry.
For other uses, see Splinter (disambiguation).
My brain continued to percolate, as I thought of words like spummer, autner and the seemingly oxymoronic summall. I was smiling to myself at yet another ingenious idea when it hit me:
There is no L in winter or spring.
It should be sprinter, not splinter. Why did I put an L in there? It's a wonder I even remember to stand on my head every morning and contact the home planet. But of course, sprinter just doesn't have the same zing as splinter. And since I'm inventing the word anyway, I'm going to continue to call it splinter.
I've been having a splendid splinter. Monday, I celebrated National Napping Day with a solid 90 minute siesta. Yesterday I played golf with some guy from Memphis, who asked if he could join us on the 3rd hole. I fought the urge to ask if he'd ever been to Graceland--it seemed kinda cheesy, plus I'm sure he gets that all the time--but it wasn't easy.
To top things off, last night I figured out that my Blackberry has speakerphone. Sixteen months and I'm still learning new things. Sometimes I get the feeling it has a thousand functions and I know how to use like four.
This new time is scratching me right where I itch. It has really brought me out of my winter hibernation. There just seems to be more... daylight or something. I've been relaxing. Sort of drifting aimlessly. Taking it easy. If I were a radio station, I would be easy listening. If I were a lipstick, I'd be easy, breezy, beautiful Cover Girl. If I were an Eagles song, I'd be... hmm, can't think of one.
To recap, I have just composed an entire post about a non-existent semi-season featuring my very own fake Wikipedia entry while also managing to compare myself to lipstick. I'd call that a full splinter's day.
"I've got seven women on my mind. Four that wanna own me, two that wanna stone me, one says she's a friend of mine..."
That really stuck with me, you know. Mainly because I don't talk to that many people.
We have been having gorgeous weather the past few days, but it's not here to stay quite yet. It must have been 80 here yesterday, but the high tomorrow is only supposed to be 48.
So I started thinking. I've never really considered March a winter month. Yet it only gets like 10 days of technical spring. So what is it? Maybe we need a new term for the period between winter and spring.
In my head, I started calling it splinter, obviously combining spring and winter. I thought it pure brilliance, and could already see the Wikipedia entry for it forming in my head:
Splinter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Splinter is a term given to the period of time comprising the end of winter and beginning of spring. Also roughly equivalent to the month of March in the northern hemisphere. It is usually characterized by drastic swings in temperature, and often features days of spring-like weather followed by days of winter weather. The term was first used by Bone, an early 21st Century blogger, whose lifetime goal [citation needed] it was to have his own Wikipedia entry.
For other uses, see Splinter (disambiguation).
My brain continued to percolate, as I thought of words like spummer, autner and the seemingly oxymoronic summall. I was smiling to myself at yet another ingenious idea when it hit me:
There is no L in winter or spring.
It should be sprinter, not splinter. Why did I put an L in there? It's a wonder I even remember to stand on my head every morning and contact the home planet. But of course, sprinter just doesn't have the same zing as splinter. And since I'm inventing the word anyway, I'm going to continue to call it splinter.
I've been having a splendid splinter. Monday, I celebrated National Napping Day with a solid 90 minute siesta. Yesterday I played golf with some guy from Memphis, who asked if he could join us on the 3rd hole. I fought the urge to ask if he'd ever been to Graceland--it seemed kinda cheesy, plus I'm sure he gets that all the time--but it wasn't easy.
To top things off, last night I figured out that my Blackberry has speakerphone. Sixteen months and I'm still learning new things. Sometimes I get the feeling it has a thousand functions and I know how to use like four.
This new time is scratching me right where I itch. It has really brought me out of my winter hibernation. There just seems to be more... daylight or something. I've been relaxing. Sort of drifting aimlessly. Taking it easy. If I were a radio station, I would be easy listening. If I were a lipstick, I'd be easy, breezy, beautiful Cover Girl. If I were an Eagles song, I'd be... hmm, can't think of one.
To recap, I have just composed an entire post about a non-existent semi-season featuring my very own fake Wikipedia entry while also managing to compare myself to lipstick. I'd call that a full splinter's day.
"I've got seven women on my mind. Four that wanna own me, two that wanna stone me, one says she's a friend of mine..."
Friday, September 21, 2007
I wiki, therefore I am
I love wikipedia. To those who know me well, this comes as no surprise. Sometime during the past year, Wikipedia surpassed SportsCenter, Seinfeld, and John Tesh to become my number one source for information.
Terms spawned by Wikipedia have already become part of our daily vernacular. To wiki means to research or look up a topic on Wikipedia. Past tense, wiki'd. Present participle, wikiing. Plural form, wikies or wiki's.
Then, of course, there are other less known terms still waiting to make their way into common dialect. Terms like wikilicious, which is used to describe a fascinating, surprising, or otherwise extraordinary fact unearthed within the pages of Wikipedia.
Example:
"Did you know that Tom Wopat appeared in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross?"
"Wow! That's wikilicious!."
I wiki most everything. Some days I spend indiscriminate amounts of time wikiing just for fun. Like last week, I wiki'd Jordache, you know, hoping for some sign that they may be coming back in style.
Here is what I learned about Jordache: "The brand is known for its designer jeans that were popular in the late 1970s."
Late seventies? I was wearing Jordache jeans in 1986 like they were going out of style! Which apparently, they were.
I'm not sure from whence my Wikipedia fascination comes. Perhaps it stems from the fact that we never had a complete and current set of encyclopedias when I was growing up. Dad's World Books were the 1959 edition.
Then I remember sometime in the 80's, Winn Dixie began selling encyclopedias. Ah yes, could there be a better plan? There's no place like your local supermarket to get your reference materials from.
You could buy a different volume every week or two. So Mom would buy them when she went grocery shopping. Then one week, she forgot, so we missed a volume. Then another. Long story short, in the end I could do a report on any topic as long as it didn't begin with a D, G, J-K, M, S, or W,X,Y,Z.
On top of that, they weren't World Books. Or even Encyclopedia Brittanicas. They were Funk & Wagnalls. Sounds more like a bad 70's band than an encyclopedia.
Or perhaps my fascination with Wikipedia and seemingly useless information is inherited. After all, I remember Dad spending countless hours every day in the bathroom reading his World Books. So in a way, when I'm wikiing, I'm only carrying on a family tradition.
Here's to Dad, the sanctity of a man's bathroom, and those who spend twenty hours a day editing Wikipedia. Oh, and also to John Tesh. You had a good run, but it's over, man.
Happy wikiing!
"My ergonomic keyboard never leaves me bored. Shopping online for deals on some writable media. I edit Wikipedia..."
Terms spawned by Wikipedia have already become part of our daily vernacular. To wiki means to research or look up a topic on Wikipedia. Past tense, wiki'd. Present participle, wikiing. Plural form, wikies or wiki's.
Then, of course, there are other less known terms still waiting to make their way into common dialect. Terms like wikilicious, which is used to describe a fascinating, surprising, or otherwise extraordinary fact unearthed within the pages of Wikipedia.
Example:
"Did you know that Tom Wopat appeared in the Broadway revival of David Mamet's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross?"
"Wow! That's wikilicious!."
I wiki most everything. Some days I spend indiscriminate amounts of time wikiing just for fun. Like last week, I wiki'd Jordache, you know, hoping for some sign that they may be coming back in style.
Here is what I learned about Jordache: "The brand is known for its designer jeans that were popular in the late 1970s."
Late seventies? I was wearing Jordache jeans in 1986 like they were going out of style! Which apparently, they were.
I'm not sure from whence my Wikipedia fascination comes. Perhaps it stems from the fact that we never had a complete and current set of encyclopedias when I was growing up. Dad's World Books were the 1959 edition.
Then I remember sometime in the 80's, Winn Dixie began selling encyclopedias. Ah yes, could there be a better plan? There's no place like your local supermarket to get your reference materials from.
You could buy a different volume every week or two. So Mom would buy them when she went grocery shopping. Then one week, she forgot, so we missed a volume. Then another. Long story short, in the end I could do a report on any topic as long as it didn't begin with a D, G, J-K, M, S, or W,X,Y,Z.
On top of that, they weren't World Books. Or even Encyclopedia Brittanicas. They were Funk & Wagnalls. Sounds more like a bad 70's band than an encyclopedia.
Or perhaps my fascination with Wikipedia and seemingly useless information is inherited. After all, I remember Dad spending countless hours every day in the bathroom reading his World Books. So in a way, when I'm wikiing, I'm only carrying on a family tradition.
Here's to Dad, the sanctity of a man's bathroom, and those who spend twenty hours a day editing Wikipedia. Oh, and also to John Tesh. You had a good run, but it's over, man.
Happy wikiing!
"My ergonomic keyboard never leaves me bored. Shopping online for deals on some writable media. I edit Wikipedia..."
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