Go play in traffic

The photo above is Mother Goose, literally!

We can only guess why Ma and Pa Goose would decide to nest right on the edge of the lakewall. Watch that first step kids!

She has five eggs, big eggs. She has to sit on the eggs about 30 days.

Papa Goose stays about 100 feet away, but comes is a flurry if she calls.

Rooty ignores her completely.

You thought we wasted time other Mondays, hah!

It's called, Rubber Faces. Click photo or HERE.
Pick the celebrity of your choice and then use your mouse to draw lines on the photo.
Draw short lines until you get the idea!
Waste More Time, Earn Less, Become a Burden on Society!

[If you get a CGI Error, wait a few minutes and try again.]

A fair measure of immortality

Some of you might recall my former sadomasochistic personal trainer Gunther, or Adolf, or Vilhelm, or whatever his name was. I did not keep him around for long!

I came across his picture yesterday, and it wasn't on America's Most Wanted as I would have expected. I was on one of the social networking sites and there he was, picture and all, as someone's "friend" -- clearly not anyone who has ever met him personally.

Even in the vastness of the web, you are likely to occasionally happen across someone that you know, just based on the laws of probability. [I once ran into someone that I knew from Missouri on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, what are the odds of something like that?]

One two occasions, while surfing the web, I have happened across naked pictures of people that I know. One was of a guy in St. Louis, in his apartment, in a hallway, being crazy and naked. It was a photo clearly posted by an ex-girlfriend as revenge (he had many of those, both naked pictures of himself and ex-girlfriends seeking revenge). I changed the photo from X to PG using Photoshop and sent it to him by email. His entire reply was "Yikes!" He never mentioned it again, and never have I.

The second photo was of someone who used to work for me. In the photo, he was standing on the roof of a building naked to the world, and seemingly very proud of it! He is a whitewater enthusiast and the photo was one of a series from a river trip that were posted to a photo site. He is not someone whom I have kept in contact with, but my guess is that alcohol or drugs or both played some part in the photo being taken.

As far as I know, both pictures are still out there, living a life of their own someplace or places in cyberspace. I did not save copies. But it's fun to think that years, decades, perhaps even centuries from now people will come across those photos and still be saying "Gosh, I thought it would be bigger."

One steps forward, two steps back!

I bought a new computer.

This means I have Vista, the new Windows operating system.

Except that Microsoft has renamed some things, I don't see any big differences from XP.

Except, and I'm really steamed about this, they changes Solitaire into this neon thing, and they got rid of the "waterfall" of cards when you win! I've been pouting about it for two days!

Our Monday morning waste of time -- a jigsaw puzzle

jimoty

Here's an absolutely, unquestionable, complete waste of time -- create your own media-savvy nickname courtesy USA Today.

Some famous examples:

Brad Pitt + Angelina Jolie = Brangelina.

Tom Cruise + Katie Holmes = TomKat.

Jake Gyllenhaal + Reese Witherspoon = Gyllenspoon.

Ben Affleck +Jennifer Lopez = Bennifer.

Vince Vaughn + Jennifer Aniston = Vinnifer.

Britney Spears + Kevin Federline = Spederline.

Went to Missouri today, Z to D to T to TT.

TT is essentially one big long hill until you get to the Missouri River bluff, then it pretty much just plunges down the bluff. Oh, they can call it a hill but it's a bluff. It's the edge of how far the Ice Age glaciers got, with the key word being edge. Missouri then came along and built a road over the edge.

Yes, Z to D to T to TT -- only in MO.

Barcode Reality

Look at the really neat swimming suit (above) that arrived via FEDEX today! I thought that I would splurge a little and order one from polo.com.

What? Doesn't look like a swimming suit to you? It must be, that's what the label (below) on the plastic bag says it is!

The Heroes and the Healthy on the Home front

Is it just me or does it seem like the British got that captured/released navy crew from Central Casting.

The picture below is just more of them fun-loving Russian soldiers jumping into a frozen lake, this time for "Health Day." You would think that an army that allegedly hires out its recruits as male prostitutes would be concerned about shrinkage.

It's not Easter til it's Easter

Few things could be as confused, or as disputed for two centuries, as the date of Easter.

The easy part: Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, which his followers believe occurred on the third day after his death by crucifixion some time in the period AD 27 to 33.

The slightly less easy part: Knowing that date of the Resurrection depends upon knowing the date of the Last Supper. From Mathew, Mark, and Luke, the Last Supper is clearly on Thursday (now Holy Thursday), with the Last Supper being the Passover Seder or ritual feast which takes place on the first evening of the Jewish holiday of Passover (15th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar). The Gospel of John can be interpreted to place the Last Supper on 14 Nisan, which would be either a Wednesday evening or a Thursday afternoon (Jewish days begin at dusk 'the day before'). Local customs varied but Christians in the west tended to use 15 Nisan for the date of the Last Supper while Christians in the east used 14 Nisan.

The much less easy part: The early Christians, who were mostly Jewish by birth, tended to celebrate a Christian Passover rather than an "Easter" or Resurrection Day. This Christian Passover was on 14 Nisan, the date of the killing of the Passover or sacrificial lamb (the symbolism of Jesus as Lamb of God was intended). As gentiles took control of the growing faith, and sought to distinguish it from it's Jewish origins, and to incorporate their virulent anti-Jewish prejudices into Christian dogma, the Christian Passover was severed from the Jewish feast. Not surprisingly, what we call "Easter" in English is referred to by a name derived from the Hebrew for Passover (Pascha) in many languages: (partial list)

• Albanian Pashkët
• Danish Påske
• Dutch Pasen or paasfeest
• Esperanto Pasko
• Finnish Pääsiäinen
• French Pâques
• Icelandic Páskar
• Indonesian Paskah
• Irish Cáisc
• Italian Pasqua
• Lower Rhine German Paisken
• Norwegian Påske
• Polish Pascha
• Portuguese Páscoa
• Romanian Paşte
• Russian Пасха (Paskha)
• Scottish Gaelic Casca
• Spanish Pascua
• Swedish Påsk
• Welsh Pasg

The sort of hard part: Since 14 and 15 Nisan would be on different days of the week each year, so would Easter. The Bishop of Rome thought Easter should always be on a Sunday, and excommunicated anyone who disagreed. There was no end to the arguments so the Roman Empirer Constantine convoked the First Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. The Council said, in effect, it's Sunday and only Sunday. This was not a surprise since Constantine was a Mithrasim, for whom Sunday was the holy day of the week. [The Council also prohibed self-castration -- scary that "just say 'No'"should have even been necessary.]

The really hard part: The Council of Nicaea said Easter should be determined using a set of special tables based on the Julian Calendar. The tables were revised many times until they were replaced by entirely new tables when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in 1582. By the 1700's, most of western Europe had adopted the Gregorian Calendar. The Eastern Christian churches, however, still determine the Easter dates using the older Julian Calendar method. The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.

The ecclesiastical rules are:

• Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox;
• this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and
• the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.

resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The Gregorian dates for the ecclesiastical full moon come from the Gregorian tables. Therefore, the civil date of Easter depends upon which tables - Gregorian or pre-Gregorian - are used. The western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christian churches use the Gregorian tables; many eastern (Orthodox) Christian churches use the older tables based on the Julian Calendar. [The formula for calculating Easter using the Gregorian calendar and the ecclesiastical full moons is given below.]

The part you might not like: In the English-speaking world, Resurrection Day is called "Easter" --"Ostern" in German. The usual etymology for "Easter" is that the name is derived from Eostre or Eoster, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, to whom the month of Eosturmonath, corresponding to our April, was dedicated. The explanation is that Eosturmonath began to be regarded as the Pascal Month and, therefore, that the principal feast during Eosturmonath would give it's name to the principal feast in the Pascal Month. Eoster was the goddest of the dawn and her name is also the origin of the word East.

-----------------------------------------------------

From the U.S. Naval Observatory:

Computing the Date of Easter

The rule is that Easter is the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after March 21. The lunar cycles used by the ecclesiastical system are simple to program. The following algorithm will compute the date of Easter in the Gregorian Calendar system.

The algorithm uses the year, y, to give the month, m, and day, d, of Easter. The symbol * means multiply.

Please note the following: This is an integer calculation. All variables are integers and all remainders from division are dropped. For example, 7 divided by 3 is equal to 2 in integer arithmetic.

    c = y / 100
  n = y - 19 * ( y / 19 )
  k = ( c - 17 ) / 25
  i = c - c / 4 - ( c - k ) / 3 + 19 * n + 15
  i = i - 30 * ( i / 30 )
  i = i - ( i / 28 ) * ( 1 - ( i / 28 ) * ( 29 / ( i + 1 ) )
      * ( ( 21 - n ) / 11 ) )
  j = y + y / 4 + i + 2 - c + c / 4
  j = j - 7 * ( j / 7 )
  l = i - j
  m = 3 + ( l + 40 ) / 44
  d = l + 28 - 31 * ( m / 4 )

For example, using the year 2010,
y=2010,
c=2010/100=20,
n=2010 - 19 x (2010/19) = 2010 - 19 x (105) = 15, [see note above regarding integer calculations]
etc. resulting in Easter on April 4, 2010.

It ain't easy being dead

"The General Rules of the Cemetery"

3,267 dead, 24,314 wounded

Pentagon: No Saddam-Al Qaeda Link: Saddam Hussein's government did not cooperate with Al Qaeda prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Defense Department said in a report based on interrogations of the deposed leader and two of his former aides.

Cheney Reasserts al-Qaida-Saddam Link: The same day the declassified report was released, the vice president went on Rush Limbaugh's radio show to repeat his assertion that al Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

Cheney used the claim to bolster his argument that pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq would "play right into the hands of al Qaeda."

Zarqawi was not a member of al Qaeda before the war, however, but "was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group." He didn’t publicly ally himself with al Qaeda until early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

The Sept. 11 Commission's 2004 report also found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network during that period.

At last proof of what I have beeen ssying again, and again, and again...

The Best & Worst Drivers
April 5, 2007
The list from Men's Health Magazine:

Worst Drivers:
100 Columbia, SC
99 St. Louis, MO
98 Greensboro, NC
97 Jackson, MS
96 Cheyenne, WY
...
5 San Francisco, CA
4 Yonkers, NY
3 New York, NY
2 Jersey City, NJ
1 Des Moines, IA

I came out from under my bed for this!

A Pig Spa -- "Soft music, vanilla-flavored shampoo, essential oils -- who doesn't like a scented bath and massage? Miss Minnie is getting it all. The thing that sets Miss Minnie apart from most spa-goers is that she's a pig."

Students Try to Poison Their Teacher -- Two Florida students were arrested on felony charges that they tried to poison their science teacher by pouring a fabric freshener into her soda.

Insurance Company Ordered To Pay $5,000 For Boy's Breast Reduction -- The father of the Hempstead, Long Island teen-ager argued that his son was teased by his peers and he never did anything that required him to wear a tee-shirt or where his breasts could be seen. He even refused to go away to college for fear his dorm-mates would tease him. [Being known as the "boy who had his breasts reduced" should take care of the teasing just fine!]

The time-value of killing Jesse james.

April 3, 1882 - Jesse James (pictured) was shot in the back and killed for a bounty of $5,000.

At 5% compounded quarterly, the reward would be worth $2,491,643.75 today, ignoring taxes.

At 7.5%, the principal today would be $54,048,155.62.

At 8%, $99,782,845.68

12%, $13,109,386,170.96

16%, $1,643,007,907,898.34

True things that sound like April Fools Jokes

Cheerleaders are more likely to suffer serious injuries than players on the field. [The National Collegiate Athletic Association found that 25 percent of the money it spent on insurance claims between 1998 and 2005 went for cheerleading injuries -- only football had a larger percentage -- and there are about eight football players for every cheerleader.]

Conservative Christians are significantly more likely to divorce than atheists. [% who have been divorced: Non-denominational (small conservative Christian groups; independents) 34%; Jews 30%; Baptists 29%; Mainline Protestants 25%; Mormons 24%; Catholics 21%; Lutherans 21%; Atheists 21%; national average 24% (11% currently divorced).]

The Hair Club for Men recently hired a private detective to spy on ex-clients. [The ex-clients were videotaped as they entered a rival "follicle replacement" business.]

I be hiding under my bed on Tuesday

The last couple years I haven't done so well, so I planned ahead...

Gotcha!
Happy April's Fool Day
This year I made the earth move!