The Sounds Inside My Mind

Mike Matthews, embalming professor in the Mortuary Science Program at the University of Minnesota, on alternatives to traditional embalming fluids:

A bottle of scotch works fine. It’s embalmed me several times.

As quoted by Alan Weisman in The World Without Us

Here’s the new license plate I just ordered! What do you think of it?

I got to see the Fiery Furnaces last night at Space Gallery.  What a great show!  I’ve quickly (i.e. in 3 weeks or so) gone from knowing virtually nothing about this band to becoming a big fan.  I still haven’t waded through the album they recorded with their grandmother, but all of their other discs I’ve really enjoyed.  Highlights last night: an audience requested Tropical Ice-Land and a blazingly sped-up take on Asthma Attack.

Chess is now sporty enough to be covered by Sports Illustrated, and all it took to accomplish this feat was Bobby Fischer’s death. There is one other silver lining to this sad event: Searching for Bobby Fischer just got a whole lot easier.

Lastly, this video is how I will honor Mr. Fischer’s final checkmate. Enjoy!

Following the rules set out on The Accordion Guy’s blog, construct a dada album cover.

1. The band’s name comes from the random Wikipedia entry link
2. The album title is constructed from the last four words of the final quote on Quotations.com’s random entries page
3. For the cover art, use the third image on Flickr’s interesting photos page

By using these three links, I have created “Time To Ask Questions” by Roman Legion!

Just overheard in the hallway, an anonymous middle schooler: “We’re having cheeseburgers today?!“

I’ve just confirmed that I’ll be performing my first on-air duties at WMPG this afternoon, from 3 to 5.  Tune in to 91.1 or 104.1 if you’re in the Portland area.  Otherwise, head on over to the WMPG Listen Live page and stream the broadcast over the internet.

I’m going to start a mildly ambitious project this year: document every film I watch and every beer I drink.  I think I have fairly diverse tastes in both categories, and for a brief period in college, I kept a list of all the movies I watched, but this is my first attempt to catalog and analyze my viewing and drinking habits.  I’m hoping it will be insightful, but perhaps all we’ll discover is that I drink too much High Life and PBR.  Either way, I think it will be fun.  The list will be stored on a separate page, linked from the bar above.  I’ll update it as often as warranted. So far, we’re at 3 movies, 1.5 beers.

I’ve had an Amazon gift certificate sitting on my computer desk for well over a month now.  I was waiting until after Christmas to use it, as I didn’t want to buy something that someone was planning on giving me as a gift (and before you say I should have spent it on a gift for someone, I did all of my shopping at independent retailers this year—all local retailers, except for one gift, actually).  I was about to spend it on the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion expansion The Shivering Isles, which costs slightly more than the certificate I have, when I thought to check in with my credit card company to see how close I am to redeeming my award points for another gift certificate.  I was happy to discover I’m less than 50 points away.  With the money I spent on gas over the holidays, I’ve already passed the mark!  All I need to do now is wait until the end of the billing cycle, and another certificate will be sent to me.  That will be $50 I can spend at Amazon.  That almost pays for an entire new video game (the Oblivion disc, since it’s an expansion, is under $30)!  Now the question is, which game should I get?  I’m thinking I will pick-up Mass Effect, a huge sci-fi RPG (I’ve been itching to get into another RPG), but suggestions are welcome.  Check out my video games wish list at Kaboodle, and offer up any advice you have.

In other news, as of this posting, here are my stats for the year: Movies – 2, Beers – .5.  But both of those numbers are about to be increased by 1 each.