The joy of socks…

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

…that match your other accessories

Posted in furry friends, photos | 9 Comments

Superstition

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

I laugh in the face of superstition.

I’ll walk under a ladder, step on cracks in the pavement, and I can spill any amount of salt without feeling the need to throw some of it over my shoulder.

But it all goes to pot when it comes to sport.

It’s all because of my upbringing; being a life-long Newcastle United fan has completely messed with my psyche. Historically, the team is pathologically incapable of defending a lead. 2-0 up with eight minutes left? We’ll lose 3-2. 12 points clear at the top of the Premiership? You can put money on us finishing second.

As a result, I’m horribly superstitious when it comes to sport. I don’t have to wear a particular shirt on game day or anything like that, but no-one is allowed to leave the room during play, and there are some things you just don’t say until the final whistle blows. In particular I can never, ever relax during a game, and will never, ever take for granted a lead of any magnitude. To do so would be to jinx it.

“Don’t jinx it!”, I’ll say, if anyone in the room ventures a favourable opinion on the team’s chances of winning.

“Don’t jinx it!”, I’ll say, as my team is five goals ahead with twenty seconds left on the clock.

I know it makes no sense, but I firmly believe that the USA’s goal with 24 seconds left in the final period of the gold medal Olympic hockey game was due to my friend prematurely shouting “let’s go downtown!!!” about 15 seconds earlier.

So the Canucks’ overtime defeat on Saturday was definitely because another friend said, with the Canucks 2-0 up, “winning in regulation time is boring. I wanna see some OT!”

And here’s what went down on Twitter last night:

Sigh. Three different friends. I clearly need to start watching games alone (or at least just with Mr E Man, who knows better by now), with no internet access.

Of course, there’s no possibility at all that it was the team’s fault. No sirree. The refs, yes, because the officiating has been terrible all series (apparently this was not a legitimate high sticking call) and there’s clearly a conspiracy, but the team? No. Couldn’t be. The dreadful penalty kill was totally the fault of the exchange of bits and pixels hundreds of miles away. Yeah.

Posted in silliness, sport | 21 Comments

A better mousetrap? There’s an app for that

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

The first computer game I ever loved was Mousetrap. On rainy days, my sister and I would spend hours playing this game on our Atari computer, and not much less time loading it from a cassette, holding our breath to see if it would once again crash 26 minutes into the 28 minute procedure.

The final level. I never made it quite this far, but man, that music brings back some memories…
It occurred to me last night that someone might have converted this classic game into an iPhone app. Sadly, it was not to be – but I did find this gem instead:
mousetrap
I’ve heard people say that the invention of the touch screen signals the death of the mouse, but I don’t think this is quite what they had in mind.
I’m thinking – on an infraconscious level, of course – that I might just have stumbled upon the most useless app of all time. (I’d love to hear of any challengers to the title, though).
Then again, if you can persuade people to pay 99 cents for a black screen, well, fair play to you.

Posted in silliness, the wonders of technology | Tagged | 6 Comments

Over-thinkers anonymous

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

I over-think EVERYTHING. It drives Mr E Man crazy. I put it down to my scientific training: you have to consider alternative hypotheses! And state the Potential Pitfalls and Alternative Approaches!

But apparently, this kind of rigour is not necessarily appropriate when trying to decide what to do at the weekend.

When Mr E Man told me jokingly (?) to “OMG, GET HELP!!!”, I started to think about what that help might look like….

NB: I originally intended this post to be in the form of a cartoon, but it turns out that I can’t draw. At all. I mean, I can draw stick figures that are almost as good as the ones on xkcd, but I can’t do perspective or anything like that. So please imagine the poster below as part of a cartoon: it’s on a noticeboard in a long corridor of the kind often seen in academic research institutes, and there’s a young student standing in front of it and reading intently with a worried look on their face.

Posted in personal, science, silliness | 18 Comments

Hockey p 0rn

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

During the Olympics, one friend described the amazing Canada-Russia hockey game as “hockey p 0rn”.

Another friend turned around with his eyes and mouth wide open, and proclaimed that “hockey p 0rn would be the best thing EVAH!”

We started to come up with a list of words and phrases that could be used in this exciting new genre, a meme we resurrected on Saturday night during the Canucks’ final regular season game. Once your mind is sufficiently deeply embedded in the gutter, it’s amazing what smut you can pick out of perfectly innocent TV studio and living room commentary…

Here, just in time for the playoffs, is what we’ve come up with so far:

  • “Here comes the slap shot!”
  • “I love four-on-four, it’s nothing but end-to-end action”
  • “He’s slotted it five-hole”
  • “What a powerful wrist shot he has”
  • Two-man advantage
  • “What skillful stick handling!”
  • “I think it’s time to pull the goalie” 

The star would obviously have to be Legwand (who, of course, played at the Gaylord Entertainment Center before it was so sadly and boringly renamed).

    Any more?!

    And here’s the money shot: Daniel Sedin’s third goal against Calgary on Saturday. What a fucking beautiful goal! Make sure you watch all the slo-mo replays:

    Not really on topic, but still hilarious, is the term accidentally introduced by a British friend who merged the start-of-game terms “kick off” and “puck drop” into “what time’s puck off?”

    7 pm on Thursday, that’s when it is! Puck off, LA!

    GO CANUCKS GO!

    ————-
    ETA: I just remembered this NHL commercial from a few years ago that seemed appropriate:

    Posted in silliness, sport, videos | 10 Comments

    Hockey pool: and the winner is…

    Posted on April 12, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

    no surprises here:

    taking the lead in Week 6 while I was distracted by mojitos and white sandy beaches, Alyssa has dominated the field ever since! Congratulations, Alyssa, and thanks to everyone who played (and commented!) This was fun, and made all the non-Canucks games much more interesting!

    Oh, and here are the final week’s points. Alyssa topped the table again, despite not having 12 point wonder Sidney Crosby in her team! We never stood a chance, really…

    Alyssa, as stated in the original post, you have won $50 worth of goodies from either Amazon or the NHL online store! Please let me know what you’d like and how we should manage the transfer – if you don’t want to give me your mailing address, you could set up a wish list on Amazon, for example. Or maybe there’s a way for me to email you a gift certificate code or something like that!

    Playoffs start on Thursday! w00t w00t! Go Canucks Go!

    Posted in hockey pool 2009-2010 | 5 Comments

    Canadian Graffiti

    Posted on April 9, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

    I’m a big fan of the bathroom graffiti genre, and found some outstanding examples last night at The Foundation, an uber-hip vegetarian restaurant:

    Good advice: your mother is usually right (unless she’s telling you to listen to Slayer).

    This second one was right underneath a larger, too-faint-to-photograph entry saying “smiling is the 2nd best thing to do with your lips”:

    Awesome.

    The food was fantastic, the beer was good, the service was so-so, and I had an awesome last night with my friend, recalling our past boyfriends and crushes and laughing uproariously. She and her family will be gone by the time I get home from work tonight after a really, really fun visit. I’ll miss them, but it will also be nice to have the house back to ourselves, not have to watch Sesame Street in the mornings, and see more of the cats than a tail rapidly disappearing around a corner or a nose sticking tentatively out from under the sofa.

    Posted in photos, silliness | 9 Comments

    Herb-crusted tuna, with a piquant spam sauce

    Posted on April 6, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

    My institute’s main website displays the full email address of every single person in the building. As a result, our email filters are fighting a losing battle against an endless barrage of spam: mostly advertisements for certain classes of prescription drugs, and PIN phishing messages purportedly from banks.
    This was an interesting exception: (click the image, then “All sizes” for a clearer view: sorry, any other sizes get all distorted when I insert them using either MT4 or Flickr).
    herbal spam
    I’m not sure whether we were a random victim, or targeted specifically as a cancer research institute, but either way I don’t think many of my colleagues will be making a purchase from these people.
    I’ve set up my department’s new website differently; email addresses are displayed as “username [at] domain [dot] ca”. This approach does eliminate spam from the people who compile their mailing lists using automated web mining tools, but unfortunately it doesn’t eliminate other email irritants. I’m listed as the contact person for the website in general, and for certain job postings (we use different contact people on different adverts so we can get a sense of how people are finding us). This means that I attract more than my fair share of the idiocy.
    Our email user name structure is first initial followed by surname, no dots, so I get lots of emails addressed to “Dear Cennis” (hint to job seekers: this is not the best way to highlight your “excellent eye for detail”, or your research skills in general for that matter). But the exchange below was much more original, and definitely the most entertaining spam so far:
    tuna spam
    No reply yet. I’ll keep you posted.
    Seriously though, this is Marketing 101. Google brings up 24,000,000 hits for tuna, another 81,800,000 for recipe, and 121,000 for “tuna recipe”. And you’re targetting the cancer research websites?!
    Ah well, at least it amused my colleagues.

    Posted in quacks, silliness, the wonders of technology | 7 Comments

    Hockey pool, week 25

    Posted on April 6, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

    Penultimate week, and I’m really not expecting any shocks before the end of the season!

    The three of us in the middle seem to be bunching together in these final stages, but I think the final result is pretty clear!

    Posted in hockey pool 2009-2010 | Comments Off on Hockey pool, week 25

    Vancouver’s wildlife is getting wilder!

    Posted on April 1, 2010 by Cath@VWXYNot?

    My usual route to work takes me through a cemetery full of beautiful old trees, and then along urban side-streets which at this time of year are lined with cherry blossoms. I’m used to seeing squirrels, raccoons, coyotes, skunks, and birds on my ride, but the brand new sign I spotted this week seems to suggest that the cemetery maintenance people have been seeing some rather more exotic fauna:
    cemetery
    whereas I’ve been admiring this handsome fella every day for a few years now:
    shark
    Wildlife sightings always make my day, but seeing any of these species while riding to work would really take the biscuit.

    Posted in nature, photos | 9 Comments