the good old days

This is one of the most fun home movies I have ever seen. Creative, clever, innovative (extremely innovative!), and obviously oh-so-much fun to make… and no modern digital effects

The tune might get stuck in your head, though.

Via Retro Thing

In honor of National Animal Shelter Appreciation week:

Consider adopting one of these monsters. Or, y’know, a cat, if you can’t sing as well as Dom DeLouise.

Falling in the “I wish I made this up” category…

image from the Stanford School of Medicine

Next year, I’m paying for grad school by participating in a program which puts graduate students in science or engineering (like me) in middle school classrooms every week, to do demonstrations which help translate often vague scientific concepts into a form that kids can understand. So I’ve been scouting around for ideas of how to present science in ways that are both fun and educational.

Here’s an example… Let’s look at the concept that “The Universe is Regular and Predictable”. This is very important to science, because it means when we discover something (such as the law of gravity), we know it will always work the same way. Stuff always falls down due to gravity; it doesn’t sometimes float, it doesn’t sometimes fly up to the ceiling, it always goes down at 9.5 meters per second squared. Science WORKS because things are predictable, as long as we can figure out HOW they are predictable.

Now, please watch this little video below, and tell me if it helps you understand that idea.

It’s all so much clearer, isn’t it?

The sad thing is, the Science Cheerleader wants to make science more relevant to public discussion and policy-making choices. That’s a goal I completely support, and something that is desperately needed — but this series of videos, even though they are posted at the Science Cheerleader blog with paragraphs describing the science concept, make science look dumb and desperate in addition to obscure and confusing. It should be able to succeed on its own merits — there are plenty of ways to make science sexy without resorting to cheerleaders. The many, many women in science and engineering are not going to like this, at all. Many (hopefully most) men in science aren’t going to like it. It doesn’t even teach anything about science. So WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY?

Apparently I’ve been driving around for eight years with this bit of insanity in my steering wheel.

If an affected inflator deploys, the increased internal pressure may cause its casing to rupture, possibly sending metal fragments through the cloth airbag cushion material and into vehicle occupants.

With my luck, my first head-on collision will be the day after I learn about the Shrapnel Airbag, while I’m driving to the dealership to have it repaired.

And the Honda site about this says I can’t take it in for repair until I get an official notice in the mail about it. I better not get the same story from the dealership when I show up with my deathtrap and ask nicely for it to be fixed now please.

We wanted to refinance our existing mortgage with Wells Fargo, but despite very polite and helpful customer service reps who assured us a broker would get in touch and sympathized that it was taking so long, nobody from them has gotten in touch with us about refinancing in the five months we’ve been inquiring. (Yesterday we phoned to get the exact payoff balance, and the customer service rep asked if we were interested in refinancing. Buzz politely declined.)

In order to refinance in sometime before 2036, we had gotten in touch with a mortgage broker who was extremely eager to work with us. We got through the initial qualification, were constantly assured we could get the rate we wanted without needing to buy-down points or whatever weird mortgage magic makes house sales work. But we weren’t going to refinance unless we got a good enough change in rates, and Buzz had made that clear. So it was rather odd when Mortgage Lady flipped out when he declined to get the house appraised until rates were what we wanted.

Mortgage Lady: You need to get the appraisal done!
Buzz: We don’t want to do the appraisal until the rates are where we want.
Mortgage Lady: The rates are going down! They’re on the way down right now!
Buzz: Who has to pay for the appraisal if we just never go forward with the loan?
Mortgage Lady: The rates are going down!
Buzz: Umm… who pays or the appraisal, us or your company?
Mortgage Lady: The rates are going down!
[Repeat conversation two or three times.]

She told Buzz to talk to me and see if I agreed with his decision. I laughed and told him to tell her something rude. To his credit, he kept it polite.

Despite that, we still got to the point that we were going to close on the refinance this morning. South Carolina requires attorneys for closings, and so a nice attorney named Jason came to our house, documents in hand. Documents with closing costs thousands more than we’d expected, all bundled into the vague category of “Points Buydown” or something like that. Jason was happy to sit and chat while we tried to reach Mortgage Lady on the phone. Eventually Mortgage Lady called us back, but wouldn’t/couldn’t explain how she’d calculated the closing costs.

Mortgage Lady: I’m not making any money on this.
Buzz: I just want to know where the number came from.
Mortgage Lady: I’m not making any money on this.
Buzz: When you say “you’re not making any money” — no offense, but I don’t care whether it’s you or your employer getting the money.
Mortgage Lady: I’m not making any money on this! It’s a good loan! It’s a good rate!

It may forever remain a mystery just who was going to be making the money, if it wasn’t us and it wasn’t the attorney and it wasn’t Mortgage Lady…

I feel pretty bad for people who either aren’t thorough about reading what’s put in front of them, or are so desperately in need of refinancing that they’ll swallow whatever crap companies like this try to pull.

In the spirit of finding another broker who isn’t quite so… erratic, we’d like to share with the charming 1959 The Road to Better Living. It’s 24 minutes long, but I strongly recommend it…

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One day Five-Year-Old Daughter declared she’d been in a knife fight. She told a long, long story about how when her day camp took a field trip to the “Bounce House” (a place with lots of those huge inflatable slides and bouncy castles and such), one of the counselors took them in a back room and gave them all knives with plastic handles and told them they had to be in a knife fight. She picked a knife with flowers on the handle. It was about fifteen minutes before she admitted it was all made up…

If you like the silliness we produce here — well-edited, and plenty of things vetoed — you might enjoy the silliness that otherwise ends up on the cutting room floor, such as Daughter’s apparent fascination with hand-to-hand combat. Buzz is starting another blog to chronicle some of it.

Y’know, when I’m out of time, I just tell my kids, “No dessert.” That takes a lot less time than even instant Jell-O pudding! (I should market these genius ideas some time…)

Commercial found via Kitchen Retro, with a nice recipe for Strawberry Sparkle…

This is the food pyramid.

This is not.

Seriously, the food pyramid was developed to emphasize that different types of food were appropriate in different amounts. The “classic” Four Food Groups placed grains, fruits and vegetables, dairy, and meat on essentially equal footing, which was ridiculous. In fact, the last of the four can be dispensed with entirely. (OK, by the 1980s, beans were half-heartedly acknowledged as belonging in the “meat/protein” group, but they didn’t get much mention in my elementary school health classes—and none in my parents’.)

The food pyramid fixed that, with the foods we should be eating more of filling out its broad base. Foods we ought to eat less are situated higher up. However, as I discovered on a recent visit to Ed Venture, the current pyramid has slid back to being nothing more than the slightly more nuanced version of 1956’s Four Groups that I head about as a kid. Sure, the “Meat & Beans” wedge is narrower, but that’s a lot less effective than relegating it to the upper tiers. No doubt the Beef Board is very happy.