Stray Hawkeye

In driving through the Crosstown Common (where 35W and 62 overlap for about a mile) I had a thought.  If you’re not familiar with the area, as 35W approaches the Commons it narrows to two lanes, and 62 narrows to one lane, and they combine to be 3 lanes for the length of the Commons.  62 merges on to 35W from the left, and then exits off the right.

So, most people on 35W who want to stay on 35W bunch up in the left lane of 35W as they approach the Commons, as that’s the only lane that remains 35W through the Commons.  In doing so, they form a bit of a wall, which is all well and good, except that anyone who is on 62 and would like to remain on 62 has to move from the furthest left lane to the furthest right lane in order to stay on 62.  As you can imagine, fun is had by all and traffic tends to back up in all directions around it.  (They’re currently doing some massive construction to try to fix this, but at the moment, it’s still very much intact this way.)

Now, on most days this is the low light of the commute, by far, especially given the merging skills of the average Minnesotan.  But today it occurred to me while driving through this mess that, really, the highways are just playing a large scale game of Red Rover.  It made me smile the rest of the way home.

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:

The Minnesota State Fair started today.  I don’t claim to be an expert on the fair by any means.  I went for the first time last year, and I will say the various fried whatever on a stick was wonderful.  I’m pretty sure I spent as much on an afternoon / evening of food there as I would have at a fancy restaurant, and I would totally do it again.  The deep fat fried pickles were way better than I expected, and the deep fat fried candy bar on a stick is much better if you let it cool just a little to a more gooey state if you get it fresh right out of the fryer.  Everything else is just sort of a blur of fried wonderfulness.

The other great part of the State Fair is, of course, the people watching.  Last year some co-workers and I took an afternoon off to go, and one of them forwarded us people watching fair bingo cards (pdf).  I have no idea where it came from originally, so I unfortunately can’t credit whoever it was that originally came up with it, just got it as an email forward.  It’s great, terrible, but great.  Not having been to the State Fair before, I mostly thought it was a joke.  Not so.  We forgot to print off cards before we left, but by the end we were pretty sure we were playing for a black out card instead of a simple line, and I think we all would have won pretty easily.

• Tetris brownies.  If you eat enough of them just right, you’ll clear a line in your stomach.
• Someone made an incredibly high resolution version of tetris, proving that not everything is better in high resolution.  Someone else then decided to let it run until they finally lost, and posted the results as it went, here. If you click through that one, I would point out that the other tabs that are open and the text in the search bar in the screen shots are equally interesting to the actual content.
• Good at geography and like Tetris?  Try Statetris.  Okay, now try one that’s not the USA.  Makes you kind of sad for your self doesn’t it?  Or is that just me?

Computer games seem to be getting more complex and harder to play, focusing only on the hardcore gamers. Here’s a game that bucks the trend: You Have To Burn The Rope.  Stick around for the credits after the game.