What is it about this story that makes everyone cringe simultaneously? And yet, the fascination continues:
Rain Price was initially horrified when he looked outside the school bus window passing his house and saw his dad, Dale, donning a scarecrow costume and waving goodbye. It was the first day of his sophomore year–and terribly embarrassing. On the second day, his dad showed up sporting a San Diego Chargers helmet and jersey. Day three came along and his dad was dressed as Anakin Skywalker.
At first the costumes were simple and modest, but they progressively became crazy…Batgirl, Chiquita Banana, Little Mermaid. Over the course of the year, he dressed up as every Wizard of Oz Character.
Luckily, Rain has a sense of humor and realized that his dad was just having fun, and friends found Rain’s father hilarious.
Frankly, if the teenager is okay with it, the rest of us have the get the hell over it.
So there’s this great article in the SF Gate today about Evan Dorney, a whiz kid in Danville:
The large white board Evan O’Dorney keeps in his living room to track his to-do list includes a reminder to “submit linear algebra paper.”
The task requires Evan to put the finishing touches and a postage stamp on an article for an international academic journal describing his solution to a previously unsolved theoretical math problem. Equally prominent on his to-do list is another task: driver’s education.
“I still don’t know how to drive,” said the 17-year-old.
The kid can do everything—solving unsolvable algebra equations, the Scripps spelling bee, homeschooling by college professors—and he sounds like a nice guy.
Then I read the comments and I thought, I have GOT to stop reading comments. Because the stupid naysayers are all, Well, SURE, this kid is smarter than I’ll ever be and has already done more than I’ll ever do…but he hasn’t gotten laid yet!
Like getting laid has ever done anything for those commenters.
And frankly, that’s just their word on the matter, you know what I’m saying?
(I’d just like to point out there’s absolutely nothing in the article about whether or not Evan dates, so that point is moot, frankly. And you know what? He’s SEVENTEEN. Last time it wasn’t a crime to be busy doing other things.)
Rock on, Utah high school students:
High school students in northern Utah have completed a 6,400-square-foot replica of Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” out of breakfast cereal.
Sky View High School teacher Doyle Geddes led more than 150 students on the project, which used two tons of colorful Malt-O-Meal spread across the gymnasium floor.
I think we have to ask: Why wouldn’t you re-create a work of art in cereal? Connecting art to students using everyday materials! I love this.
Ever wonder how restaurants plan on which food to have on a particular day and how much of it they’re going to need?
Boy howdy, some restaurants went ahead and tossed that planning out:
A restaurant has opened that encourages diners to bring in produce from their home gardens, which the chefs then make into dishes to put on the menu.
…It’s very now too. The food is simple, fresh, rich and comforting. The menu — as dictated by Kim’s regular trips to the farmers market and whatever foraged produce comes in on any given day — is constantly in flux, and a popular dish can run out long before dinner service or brunch is over.
The chef takes food that people are growing and just bring in and give to him.
Foragers are repaid with a barter system — Kim offers gift certificates or just feeds them a meal or dessert. “Most of the time, people don’t want money, they just don’t want to throw the food away,” said Kim.
I am agog.
On the other hand: apparently he makes it work. Which is cool: no wasted food! Make do with what you have, and when it’s done, it’s done.
I can’t see this working on a large scale, but I’m glad someone thought to try it out.
Brian Feldman would like to protest the ridiculousness of gay couples not being able to marry. And he’s going to protest it by getting married himself. To anybody.
As a pre-Valentine’s Day commentary, acclaimed conceptual artist Brian Feldman (and one of the 20 Coolest People in Orlando according to aXis Magazine) will marry any woman (must be a U.S. citizen with no legal liabilities) who shows up to the Orange County Courthouse Marriage License Office in Downtown Orlando on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 3pm. This may result in the marrying of a woman he doesn’t know, has never met and for all intents and purposes does not love.
YES – you read that correctly – Brian Feldman will join in matrimony with a total stranger, and that stranger could be YOU!
Is this entire project a mockery of marriage? Not at all! It’s completely within the legal rights of Brian and any other heterosexual couple with $123.50 (plus $6 for a standard marriage certificate). Sound absurd? Not nearly absurd as denying the equal right to marry for same-sex couples who truly care about each other; who’ve been in committed, productive and, most importantly, loving relationships for upwards of 20+ years. That, to Brian, and millions of Americans who believe in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, is truly absurd – to say nothing of a civil injustice.
Now that’s taking a stand!
I would love to be a performance artist like this. Honestly. That’s having a point of view and rocking it, with no safety net.
Well, this is one way to deal with corporate shakeups, I guess: leave your job, buy an RV, and start traveling.
The guy walks away from a middle-management job at Hewlett-Packard, moves his wife and two kids out of their Almaden Valley home, loads them into a 37-foot RV and hits the road. The plan? Well, on the road you have time to figure out little details like that.
“We sort of jumped into it without thinking about it too much,” says Philip May, 47. He’s on the phone from the Oasis Las Vegas RV Resort, a few miles from the strip. His family as been crisscrossing the country for three-plus years. “I think if I would have thought about it too much I wouldn’t have done it.”
I don’t know if I’d want to do that, but it certainly sounds like a crazy adventure!
There’s something about mass demonstrations of silliness that really make me laugh. Lots of people on public transportation removing their pants cracks me up:
“We’re part of the Pants Liberation Front,” he said. “Pants have been keeping us down too long. I’ve been itching and chafing for 24 years.”
The event, dubbed No Pants 2010, was organized by Improv Everywhere, which started the annual pantless party in 2001 on the New York City subway.
Improv Everywhere has organized dozens of other stunts, such as drawing hundreds of people – via Facebook and other social media – to congregate at a Best Buy store in blue polo shirts and khakis, and to move in slow motion at a Home Depot store, both in New York City.
On Sunday, subway riders in 44 cities around the world stripped off their pants in the name of silliness.
Candace Leong was headed to Berkeley but changed plans when she saw the hairy legs and cheery smiles of her fellow BART riders. While on the train, she spontaneously took off her jeans, stowed them in her bag and joined the unclothed masses headed to San Francisco.
“I was going to go rock climbing but thought I’d do this instead,” she said. “It’s liberating, although it might be a little awkward if you did it alone.”
Not everyone appreciated the humor. Tony Jackson, clad in a shimmering gold suit and tie, was headed to church on BART when he came across the pantless people.
“What the hell? It’s a disgrace,” said the San Francisco church elder, shaking his head. “It’s an abomination.”
That quote from “church elder” in his “shimmering gold suit and tie” cracks me up. What the riders did might be rude (although the article doesn’t mention anyone flashing or otherwise accosting other passengers, although perhaps “not someone you want to see in their underwear this early in the morning” might count). But an abomination? Mr. Jackson needs to let his flag up the flagpole a little: children starving is an abomination. People riding BART without pants is just silly.
With a stunt like this it would be so easy to say only in San Francisco, but of course it wasn’t.
Great story (found through a tweet by Roger Ebert) about “the bra man of Chicago”. Oz de Soleil collects bras for donations to women who need bras:
Oz du Soleil, 44, of Chicago’s Kilbourn Park has hundreds, if not thousands of bras in his basement. Boxes and boxes of them, sorted in their cardboard containers by cup size, each holding every type and style imaginable.
When I first heard about this guy, my reaction was like everyone else:
“Are you kidding me?”
Du Soleil admits he gets the same knee-jerk reaction that I had every time he tells someone about his project.
“Usually they ask if I’m serious,” said du Soleil, who grew up on food stamps while living in Marion Jones Public Housing in North Chicago, Ill.
But then he tells them he’s sent more than 1,400 bras around the world to underprivileged women and girls. As I later found out, a bra is one of the least donated, but most needed items for the homeless, those on welfare or who have been victims of domestic violence.
This is one of my favorite stories of the last year. The man found a need, and despite his embarrassment, he went ahead and did something about it anyhow.
A guy devoted to proper grammar did what anyone might do, but only one of us apparently did: he created an organization and sent out press releases explaining to us the proper way to pronounce the year:
“NAGG has decided to step in and decree that (2010) should officially be pronounced ‘twenty ten,’ and all subsequent years should be pronounced as ‘twenty eleven,’ ‘twenty twelve,’ etc.,” proclaims the association’s news release.
The National Association of Good Grammar – essentially a guy named Tom Torriglia and some friends who also paid attention in English class – say people have been mispronouncing the year for 10 years.
“NAGG is here to put everybody back on the correct path,” Torriglia said by phone from his home in San Francisco. “We lost the battle when we went from 1999 to 2000 – but now we’re hoping to win the war.”
The “20″ should have been pronounced “twenty” all along, he said, pointing out that every year in the 20th century was pronounced “nineteen something.”
” ‘Twenty’ follows ‘nineteen.’ ‘Two thousand’ does not follow ‘nineteen.’ It’s logical.”
I’ve got to start remembering the “send out press releases” part.
Nobel physicist George Smoot doesn’t just do physics; he does other stuff too, like risk finding out he’s not as smart as a fifth grader:
Brushing aside objections from his Lawrence Berkeley lab colleagues, who argued it would not portray the world’s premiere research lab in the right light, he decided to appear in September on the Fox TV game show, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”
He appeared earlier in the year on the CBS sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory,” playing himself as the keynote speaker at a conference attended by the main characters, ultra nerdy scientists. He said he agreed to go on the show because he likes that the scientists are portrayed as heroes.
But “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” was different.
“It was kind of like rebelling,” Smoot said. “It was risky because there was a big chance you wouldn’t answer everything correctly. You are supposed to be this example to new generations, and to have to say you are not smarter than a fifth-grader would be embarrassing.”
How come I never had fun professors like this?
