Beige Alert!

Those of you who play ukulele might like the recent "Baby Blues" cartoons about the subject:
I want a ukulele
Do you have any experience?

Via sposter, the most awesome Christmas medley you can image.

I'd like to point everyone to this article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about the underground sand miners of Wisconsin, "Wisconsin's diamonds: 'Frac sand'."

It turns out sand is sometimes mined. Not scooped up in a pit, but mined underground. This is special sand, round and hard, and used as frac proppant, pumped into oil and gas wells to hold open fractures produced to increase flow. I do love this quotation:

Working in a sand mine does give employees an appreciation of something most people take for granted. When Stauffer visited Cancun, Mexico, recently with his family, he was probably the only person on the beach closely examining the sand squishing between his toes.

"That sand is definitely more angular. It's got more straight and sharp edges than the sand here," Stauffer said.

Manly men need manly competitions to rank their manliness. See Dylan'sMan-O-Meter Challenge for a chemist's version.

I could probably exaggerate the wonderfulness of the Gizmodo Hard Drive Dying Dance music competition, but it would be hard. Hitachi, to help people with dying hard disk drives diagnose their problems, has recordings of the noises made by dying hard drives available. Gizmodo challenged people to turn these sounds into music. And people did. Go listen. The Odeo pages have a flash thingie to play them, but also provide a link to a normal MP3 that gets almost hidden by the AdBlock tab if you have AdBlock running on Firefox---so look closely.

You just can’t make this stuff up: Tossed matches ignited fatal fire, police say.

“A woman who died in an early-morning house fire Sunday sparked the blaze while flicking lighted matches at her sleeping boyfriend in an attempt to wake him up.”

What?

“She had become upset because she wanted to talk to him and he refused get out of bed, so what she started doing was lighting matches, flicking them at him as he lay in bed,” Moore said.

The matches quickly ignited the mattress, which the man then attempted to drag out a door of the home, Moore said.

As he struggled with the mattress, he inadvertently set other parts of the residence on fire, Moore said.

“He was able to pull the mattress to an exit door, and once he was outside, she never came out of the burning residence,” Moore said.

Boggle

The good news, such as it is, is that even without working smoke detectors this was the only fatality among the six people in the house at the time of the fire.

This is another example of something that you don’t have to actually try in order to determine that it is probably a bad idea.

If you are reading this but missed the link in vixyish‘s LJ, you must see The Grammarian’s Five Daughters. Es und story überbien! Go y le es sofort! (Says the language-abuser in his best Europanto, bringing squeals of delight and groans of pain, plus general befuddlement, to his readers.)

From Foma*, via Uncertain Principles, it’s National Just Read More Novels Month, or NaJuReMoNoMo.

Those people who are interested in Harry Potter slash fanfic (you know who you are) will surely want to see this chat transcript from qcjeph.