Stray Hawkeye

Make a show / podcast that features very, very basic, bare bones recipes. Things like how to make scrambles eggs in the microwave, or how to use a George Foreman grill to make a full meal. Also include some of the more creative / interesting, yet simple, recipes for single serving cooking. Think dorm room and bachelor cooking.  Call the show “Probably Edible”.

I’m presenting these in the order that I found them, not because it makes more sense that way, but because it makes slightly less, and then you can share in the somewhat befuddled but interested discovery process.

I came across this video on Boing Boing:

And it’s sufficiently addictive (catchy song, amusingly random, cute girl, probably all of the above) that I watched it a couple of times.  I eventually decided (a couple of days later with it still stuck in my head) that I was going to figure out where it came from.

So, I eventually figured out that there’s a game called Plants vs Zombies that you can play the first few levels of online for free.  It’s an okay game, a decent time waster, but nothing too spectacular.  But once you play it for a while, the song starts making more and more sense (still not lots, but more at least).

So, even more eventually (at least a week, maybe two, since watching the first video, as I played the game on and off 5 minutes at a time in the evenings until I ran out of free levels) I watched the video on youtube, and in the related video section was this, which sort of made it all come together:

I was thinking of writing a lengthy essay praising ugly college football, but I’ll try to keep it short.

(Side note, “ugly” here being defined as the type of football that results in the “ugly wins” for Iowa this year- defense heavy, forced turnovers, close games (even if they shouldn’t be), 3 yards and a cloud of dust.  Not the “ugly” as in Illinois this year, which just makes you feel bad for them.  I’m referring to the style of play rather than the basic ability level.)

And I don’t just love it because we’ve been winning that way this year (okay, I would probably like it rather than love it if that were not the case).  Even if we had lost against Michigan State, you have to admit, that was a great game. I love ugly football because it puts the focus on the defense.  I love it because it rips apart the hero worship, the quarterback is the only player who matters view that some people have of football, and puts the whole team in the spot light.  It’s a battle of wills, 3 yards and cloud of dust, instead of a two and a half hour game of keep away.  It forces you to remember that it’s a team sport and not just a race for the Heisman.  It forces you to remember those are kids out there and everyone of them is fallible.  That some of them were at their high school proms six months ago. It reminds you that the linemen matter.  A lot.  That a tipped ball can change the game.  That a linebacker getting an extra step is just as important of a part of the game as a receiver running the wrong route (which often turns into “the quarterback making a bad throw”, because he’s the only player on the field, right?).  Because unlike the NFL, where it’s the best of the best of the best, and the play books are interchangeable, in ugly college football, you see the players grow and develop their skills.  You see some of them rise up and some of them falter.  You watch freshmen step up to fill in for an injury. You see a different playbook and strategy every week on both sides of the ball.  Ugly football reminds you of one of the most important aspects of college football, and what makes it a sport worth watching – it’s hugely unpredictable, and every second matters.

And that in many senses, it’s also all so arbitrary.  A couple inches different on any of a huge number of plays, or a penalty called or missed, the ball being a little more slippery from the rain or a running back having a little better grip because he put on different gloves, and Iowa could easily be 4-4 instead of 8-0 so far this season.  Just as many plays the other way, and the 2008 team (9-4) could have had an undefeated season.  And how ridiculous that makes the eternal debate of who’s the best team in college football.  Never mind who’s the best if the championship is played in the rain.  Or in a dome.  Or if they went to play offs and it gave player an extra week to patch up injuries.

It’s ugly, it’s beautiful, it’s a battle of inches and a flip of the coin.  But that’s life.

Go Hawks.

First off, I know I have a hugely juvenile sense of humor, but this is hilarious.

Second, I’ve heard people from several schools claim that The Hawkeye Victory Polka (the official name of The Beer Song according to the university) originated at their school, and they’ve been playing it forever, and that Iowa must have gotten it from them.  The University of Wyoming, Michigan Tech, and even Wisconsin have claimed it as theirs.  It’s not.  Iowa started it.  I’m not saying that Iowa created the song, it’s traditional and has been around forever.  I’m saying, as best I can tell (and I’ve looked a fair amount), Iowa was the first to use it as a tradition at college sporting events.  Don’t believe me?  Watch this, and wait for about 3:10 in.  I would usually say skip ahead, but with this particular instance it’s worth watching.

1985.  If you can provide video evidence of an earlier use of it in college football, I’ll yield (actually, I’ll just dig until I find an older one of Iowa).

On the more serious side of Iowa Football history – this post on BHGP has a good appreciation of Forest Evashevski, former Iowa coach and the only Iowa coach (crosses finger) so far (uncrosses finger) to win a Rose Bowl, who is currently battling liver cancer.  Worth the quick read.  Here’s a bit more about one of his teams:

Further down in the same post is a link to this interesting article about what happens in the locker room during half time, which is basically summed up by Pat Angerer, “If you need a rah-rah speech at halftime, you’re playing the wrong sport.”  He’s quickly becoming my favorite source of Iowa Football quotes.  I also really like this one from ESPN:

“Our job is to put the fire out,” said linebacker Pat Angerer, who led Iowa with nine tackles, a sack and a pass breakup. “It’s as simple as that. We just said, ‘We’re back out here, we might as well stop them.’”

Might as well, didn’t really have any other plans for tonight anyway.  And what effect has this defensive style had on our opponents so far?  Something like this.

And speaking of our defense, let us now here from Norm Parker’s toes (that will make ever slightly more sense if you note that Norm is currently down to 7 remaining toes).  Also, I think there’s a good chance that if I do have kids, “Parker” might have to be in one of their names somewhere.

I know milk is more the standard, but have you ever tried dunking your Oreos in orange juice?  It’s pretty good.

After my post suggesting Halloween costumes for our local lake creature, and Nessie’s comment on it, Nessie sent me another note:

Hi Kearn,

I forgot to mention, I have a little buddy down here too.  His name’s Sinclair.  When he saw your post about Minne and her website, he couldn’t wait to get up there.  He’s pretty young, and has lots of energy, and kind of wears me out, so I thought it would be good for him to burn off a little energy with an outing, so I let him go ahead.  I gave him some directions to Minneapolis, but my directions might not be the best since I haven’t been there before.  I also gave him your address so he could get a hold of you when he gets there.  Hope you don’t mind.  He’s quite friendly.

Oh, and be sure to have a little extra food on hand.  I packed him a lunch before he left, but I’m sure he’ll work up quite the appetite on the trip.

I’m moving a little slower these days, so I think I’ll just plan to meet up with you at the Iowa Minnesota game if these fins can hold up to that strong Mississippi current.  See you then,

Nessie

Sure enough, tonight I heard a little tapping at my door, and when I opened it, there stood a little tiny, shivering green dinosaur.  I could tell from his tattoos that this must be Sinclair, so I brought him in and got him some hot cocoa, a blanket, and some lawn clippings.  He thanked me, and I asked him how his trip was.

“It was good, and there were all sorts of wonderful things and nice people along the way.”

“How did you manage to get up here so quickly?  It’s a long ways from Florida, I didn’t think I’d see you for at least a few more days yet.”

“Oh, well, I didn’t walk the whole way, I made friends with a sea captain, and he gave me a ride over to New Orleans, and then a barge friend of his gave me a ride up the Mississippi.  It was a really fun ride, he even let me ride up front!”

“Then, once we got up to Minneapolis, I saw a waterfall in the river, and I got scared, so I jumped off the barge and swam over to the shore.”

“As soon as I got out of the river, I saw a little path going up the hill, so I thought I would go up and see if anyone could help me find my way.”

“As luck would have it, as soon as I got to the top of the hill, there was a big guy sitting right there, so I asked him if he knew how to get to Lake of the Isles, but he didn’t say a word.”

So, I asked one of his friends there.

“Thanks Mr Guthrie!”, I shouted, and headed toward the big bubble.

It seemed sort of quiet, but it must be a wonderful place to have all the huge inside space when it’s so cold out, they must use it for everything thing here.  It must be busy all the time!  I guess I must have caught it on the one quiet day of the year.  So, I kept going, and turned right, like Mr Guthrie told me to.

Then I saw all these giant square rocks sticking up into the sky.

Then I saw a building that I read about on Stray Hawkeye, the headquarters of the Star Tribune.

I had to get my picture with their sign.

But then I wasn’t sure where I was going again, so I decide to ask someone.

“Sorry, I’m terrible with directions,” he said, “Lucy might know though.”

“Thanks Lucy!  And my that’s a pretty colored dress you have on.”

“Thank you Sinclair, and good luck on your trip!”

So, the directions said I’m supposed to follow the train tracks to Nicollet Mall, and then turn left.

I decided to stop for a snack, I was getting awfully hungry from all that walking.

That should hold me over for a little bit.  After a couple blocks, I check for directions again, just to be sure.

So, I started walking down Nicollet Mall. It’s a busy place!

I was getting really cold, especially with no hat, so I decided to go inside for a little bit, and try out the skyways.

Let’s see, just up the escalator here.  Hmm, I might stop for a little snack while I warm up.

I decided I should go back outside, so I could get my bearings again, and right there were some of Minne’s goose people friends!

I decided to go make some friends.

I was just thinking, I could use another snack, and then…

I didn’t see any trays, so I just helped myself.  I got a full tummy.  And you know what I saw next when I started walking again? A playground!!!!

That was awesome.  But, I should probably keep walking.  Bye bye playground!

Okay, over the bridge, through the garden, and then through Kenwood.

So, I rinsed off my feet, and then walked through Kenwood.  Not much interesting there, just lots of big houses.  The people back there must have huge families to need that much space.  Even a lake monster would have a hard time filling some of those houses!  So, I just kept walking.

So I eventually found my way over to the part of the lake where Minnie was supposed to be, but she wasn’t there.

Then I remembered that Nessie had given me your address, so I decided to come visit you before it got too dark out, and see if you knew where Minne went?”

“I’m sorry Sinclair,” I said, “but I don’t know where Minne went.  Actually, I don’ think anyone knows where she went. We’ll need to investigate.  But first, let’s get you ready for bed.  You must be exhausted from your trip, we can work on figuring all this out in the morning.  Now go brush your teeth.”

“Do I have too?”

“Yes Sinclair.  We don’t want you to end up with cavities from all those snacks you had today.”

“Okay.”

---

Where did Minne go?  Will Sinclair ever find her?  Why did he travel so far to see her in the first place?  And what does all of this have to do with Iowa Football?

Find out next time, on another exciting episode of Lake Creatures Of Our Lives!

Like giant flippered boulders through the hourglass, so are the pleosaurs of our lives.

• Cool cake 1 – This piano cake is clever and looks pretty easy to make. (Via Craftzine)
• Cool cake 2 – This Van Gogh cake is quite a bit more advanced, but really cool.  If you click through that one to the cake maker’s (megpi) Flickr portfolio, she has all sort of other cool ones too.  I especially like this peacock cake with accompanying cupcakes, and this UFO one- the cow detail is awesome.
• And, a cute, non-traditional penguin pumpkin for Halloween. (Via Craftzine)

Organize a 5k race.  (Or whatever distance, but preferably something short.)  Have the proceeds from the entry fees / sponsorships benefit a local GLBT advocacy group.  Encourage cross dressing and flamboyant clothing.  Name the event “The Drag Race”.

You could probably even set it up as part of Pride weekend, especially since they tend to close some streets for that anyway for parades.

So, I feel bad pointing out errors in web design publicly, because I completely realize how hard it is to get it right across all browsers, and operating systems, and all their different quirks.  This site admittedly has its bugs from time to time as I mess with it (just fixed one (I think) that’s been bugging me forever with IE where it says “to here” under the date on each post), and I’ve worked on plenty of sites at work that have had far larger issues.  However, for a really, really little spacing issue, that happens to line up just so, this one made me laugh, so I thought in good humor, I’d share it.

I was reading about the new Lyndale Tap House on Because Emily Says So, and it sounds absolutely delicious.  So, I clicked through to their website to see where exactly it is, so I can go some time.  And, on my particular computer, with my OS and web browser, and, in particular, whatever fonts I happen to have installed on my machine, the home page looks like this:

It looks fine in IE on Windows (the title is notably more narrow), in Firefox on Windows it’s wider but still okay, but in Firefox on Linux, well, I’m not sure that’s the image they’re going for, though sort of a nice overlay effect none the less.  And I really like the cow in the bottom corner.

I… I… I don’t know what to excerpt.  Usually when I go to a site or a blog post or whatever and I find something I like, I grab a little quote or a picture or whatever to excerpt here, to show you how cool it is and prove that it’s worth clicking over to.  But,… what do I do when it’s all awesome?  When there’s just plain too much awesome to find a best one to excerpt?  I… I don’t know…

Now would probably be a reasonable time to explain what I’m talking about.

I read Swiss Miss, and a while ago I came across this post, and bookmarked it because I really liked it.  And then today, I clicked through to the site for the artist/designer that made it (Jennifer Daniel).  And… it’s all awesome, in so many ways.  So, let me try this again, maybe a bullet pointed list of why it’s all so awesome:

• There are visual puns, and playing with expected shapes, and just general cleverness without the sort of annoying “Look at me, I’m clever” kind of feel that sometimes gets.
• Almost everything on the page makes you look twice and then think.
• So I’m saying it both looks cool and makes you think, without being full of itself.  Which is painfully rare.
• It’s all really simple (or perhaps a better word is clean).
• Each one has it’s own little style that is cohesive to itself, and each one is a little different from each other one so they don’t get hackneyed, but they still all have this same sort of clean, witty, cool style to them, so they all sort of go together.
• There’s a joke all the way at the bottom, and a tiny bug that crawls around on the left hand side of the page, and even the URL and page title are funny.

The only downsides I can find:

• I’m baffled by the left navigation, so I’m not real sure how to find more awesome.
• It would seem some of it gets archived / taken down over time (I think I remember seeing a few other ones there a while ago) which means some of the awesome is hiding / gone away.

So, what I’m really saying here is, go look around, it’s worth the five or ten minutes.

Bonus:

So, I emailed Jennifer while I was writing this post, and she was nice enough to send me an alternate version (with a few extras) of one of my favorites (thanks Jennifer!!), so that’s going to be the excerpt.  And thus, in a maybe kind of sort of Stray Hawkeye exclusive, I present a case study in awesomeness:

A short list of forms of awesomeness embodied in this:

• It takes a second to figure out what it’s about.
• It covers what would generally be viewed as a vulgar theme in a clean, straight forward manner and in a style that you would expect in a science poster on the wall of a high school classroom, which adds to the humor.
• The color complements the theme.
• I tend to think of myself as being quite up on vulgar slang, and there are a few in there I hadn’t heard before, including:
• Bottom row, third from the right.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at the Minnesota Twins baseball team the same way again, especially since next season they’re leaving the Metrodome and going topless.

I got a flyer in the mail today about the upcoming Minneapolis elections.  Apparently, we’ll be using ranked choice voting:

I know people tend to have pretty strong feelings one way or the other about ranked choice voting, though I have to admit I’m not really well informed enough on the issue and how it affects things to really have a strong opinion.  However, in reading over the flyer, I did find the candidates and their party affiliations interesting, let’s zoom in on that a bit:

I like it.  Though a little odd that a couple of the parties fielded multiple candidates for the same race.  Someone dropped the ball on strategy there, or there’s some rebels in the party.

On a vaguely related note, does anyone remember the Giant Sloth Party (named for the full sized (huge) giant sloth in the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History) that used to run for positions in the University of Iowa student government?  Are they still around?

Ever wonder what it would be like if the military started a circus?

A desert camouflage big top.

Navy seals balancing colorful balls on their noses and playing horns.

Perhaps a tiny clown car tank, which seemingly endlessly fires colorful mimes from it’s main gun.

A while ago I went to a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra where they showed an old Charlie Chaplin movie, and played the score to the movie as it went. (Side note- the Minnesota Orchestra is doing it again with another Chaplin movie in early January.  I’d recommend it.  It’s fun.)

It was really cool not only because it was a live performance coupled with a great movie (City Lights is awesome, highly recommended), but because it’s also the way silent movies were originally shown – with a live musician either performing the score along with it (often on just a piano), or completely improving a score for the movie as it played.

I also remember that at some point even longer ago, I saw something on TV about old movies, and I believe one of them was a Charlie Chaplin one as well, where they were saying that it’s a bit hard to restore a definitive version of the movie, because it was originally produced with 4 different scores, any one of which could be played with the film, and each one of which had a very different tone and style, each giving the whole movie a very different feel.

So, here’s my idea for the more cinematic crowd out there. I’d like to see a website called Four Score (intentional pun on Lincoln’s speech) where a film maker produces a modern silent movie, and then releases it to the website. Any user (or possibly a select group of preselected composers, up to you) can then submit a score / sound track for the movie in the form of an mp3 to be played along with the movie. The best four are voted on, and the 4 different versions of the movie are then released on the site. I would tend to imagine this would work best with shorts, maybe in the 5-10 minute range, just so people would be willing to watch the different versions, and so the idea of coming up with a score for them would be at least somewhat within reach of the average user.

So, I tend to come up with a lot of ideas where I think “wow, that would be cool, someone should make/do that”, and then I realize that I don’t have the time / motivation / commitment / talent / upfront capital to do it. So, I’m starting a series of posts of free ideas.  If I’m not going to do them, at least someone can. Or, if nothing else, others can be entertained by the thought of doing them as well.

Given the vastness of humanity, and the Internet in documenting it, it’s possible someone else may have done some of them, and I’m just not aware of it.  In that case I would more than welcome people to point them out in the comments. It’s always nice to see your ideas come to life, even if someone else does it, and even if they came up with it and did it before you even thought of it.

I’ve decided Friday is a good day for posting these ideas, because:

1. It’s the end of the work week and gives people free time to work on them if they like.
2. I like the idea of your mind / ideas being freed at the end of the work week.
3. It gives me structure so I remember when to post them (I have a couple written already).
4. There are no days of the week that start with the letter “i” and I like alliteration.

Something randomly occurred to me, which may well be beyond common sense for most people, but I had never thought about it before.

I was always told you shouldn’t drink really hot things (like hot cocoa or tea) through a straw, because they’d burn your mouth that way. It was one of those things that got ingrained as motherly wisdom, but on first blush, it makes absolutely no sense. How would something passing through a plastic tube make it hotter?

However, while drinking my toasty warm coffee, I noticing myself blowing on it, and two and two came together. Even if you don’t blow on it, the liquid at the bottom of the mug is much better insulated than the liquid at the top of the mug. The stuff at the bottom (assuming it’s not being stirred a bunch), has all of the liquid above it to insulate it from the colder air above it, as well as the mug insulating it on the sides and below. So, it would make sense then that the liquid at the top is cooler, as it’s not as well insulated and it’s transferring heat to the surrounding air. So, when you take a sip off the top, you’re getting coffee that has had some of the heat removed by the air around it, and you are basically taking a slice off the top of the coolest liquid. However, when you use a straw, you’re piping the most well insulated liquid (and therefore hottest part) directly into your mouth.  Thus, burnt tongue.

Amazing how counter-intuitive folk-ish wisdom can make so much sense. Or maybe everyone else figured this out when they were five, and I’m just slow.

Now if someone could explain to me why eating apples, or apple derived products, gives me bloody noses the next day.  Seriously.  Anyone?  Because it’s really annoying and I kind of like apples.