One and a half fake teeth

Dogs are from Mars, Cats are from Venus

Out at a bar tonight, some guy was talking about being allergic to cats and having it be a point of contention with his girlfriend.  I've had the same experience of moving in with a girlfriend with cats and suffering the brunt of it, letting the cats continue to sleep in the bed until breathing became difficult, locking them out of the bedroom and experiencing their nightly protests, realizing over time that even the living room couch was dangerous to the allergic, and so on.  None of that is particularly interesting (but there must be articles and/or books written about dog people attracting cat people, and vice versa, as a sort of complement to the whole venus-and-mars thing).   But here's the thing: the guy's girfriend's name?  Allegra.  I am not making this up.

Karaoke Short

This weekend I saw parts of a karaoke video for that horrible Garth Brooks song "I Got Friends in Low Places".  It featured standard-height karaoke actors cavorting with dwarves.  I am not making this up.

Mourning Meditation

Papal press is all the rage these days, and if there's one thing I've learned from it, it's that there's a real, high-ranking official of the Catholic church who is actually named Cardinal Sin, and nobody ever tipped me off to that before.  Tragic.

Ballard Blew Its New Age Nodes

Today I learned that, sometime around the turn of the 21st century, Seattle became the first city on earth to sponsor (via an arts commission) the mapping out of the city's ley-lines, which are axes of energy that new age dowsers (those folks with wishbone-shaped divining rods, more evocatively dubbed "water witches") draw to find sacred, "healing" spots about the earth. I'd always rationalized my affection for the district of Ballard in other ways, but now I get it: there are no new age nodes in or near this district.

Congratulations, Ballard!

Plague of Locusts, Odd Socks, ...

I love how, um, "the other Englishes" can sound sometimes. Dan recently reminded me of a flight we shared on a work trip to London, during which (as a first-time international traveler) I was wildly amused by the stewardess' periodic pleas for "rubbish". Recently I found that a British website contributor had attempted to explain the tendency of socks to go M.I.A. by way of this question:

"Why are we plagued by odd socks?"

The Plague of Odd Socks is a whole flash movie pitch in the space of 5 words.

Anyway, here's her explanation. Does it live up to the peculiarity of the question? Well, yes:

Analysis by Robert Matthews, at Aston University, Birmingham, showed that if you lose six socks from a total of 10 pairs, you are most likely to be left with only two complete pairs among the 14 socks still in your drawer. You are 100 times less likely to have the best possible outcome of seven complete pairs.

Those must be Imperial "maths".

Coaster scrawl found at the Temple Bar

"Eloquence is sweetbread for suicide."