1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

So far, we know for sure that Colorado is leaving the Big 12 for the Pac-10.  If things were to stop with this, the Pac-10 would then have 11 teams, as would the Big 12 (11). However, it would seem a lock that Nebraska will be leaving the Big-12 (now 11) as well. They would be headed to the Big 10, which currently has 11 teams, which with Nebraska would be 12.  So, we would have 12 Big 10 teams, 10 Big 12 teams, and 11 Pac 10 teams.  One would have to assume this would beget renaming the conferences to align with their new number of institutions, to make the Big 10 the Big 12, the Big 12 the Big 10, and the Pac 10 the Pac 11 unless we throw out USC for their recent violations making the Pac 10′s 11 10 again.

However, it doesn’t stop there. There’s more talk that the Big 12 with 10 teams (not to be confused with the Big 10 with 12 teams that had 11 before) could further loose more teams to any mix of the Pac 10 (11), the Big 10 (12), or the SEC (number withheld to protect the innocent). If, from the remaining Big 12′s 10 teams, Texas and Texas A&M were to leave for the Pac 10 (11 carry the two for 13) that would leave the Big 12 with 8 teams, not to be confused with the former Big 8, which became the Big 12 when they added 4 teams (how reasonable), and would make the Pac 10 13, the Big 10 12, and the Big 12 8 (but not, mind you, the Big 8).

With all of this, there is of course speculation that both the Pac 10 now 13 and the Big 10 now 12 (but not the Big 12, or 8) would then want to continue to expand to 16 teams each, further dissolving the Big 12 to the Little One. This would thus make the Pac 10 16 and the Big 10 16 and the Big 12 one, and we could then just rename them all to the Pac 16, the Big 16, and the Big Nothing Plus One (presumably Iowa State on both accounts), removing a lot of confusion.

And, never failing to look long term, one could see a day where the Pac 16 and the Big 16 would want to merge into one super-conference which would of course be known by one of two names.

In the first case, the conference would be known as Every Relevant Football Team – West, which would then compete with Every Relevant Football Team – East, aka the merged SEC/ACC, aka SAC, and thus replacing the BCS with the ERFT playoffs, which the ERFT-West would dominate.  The yearly playoff would thus be nicknamed The Annual SAC Kicking Contest.  The beer commercials at half time would be epic.

In the second case, the merged Pac 16 and Big 16 would choose to combine their names to form the Pig 32, which the still excluded and horribly confused Iowa State would attempt to mate with, producing a new, wildly deformed chimera offspring conference. The new Monster Conference would by genetics consist half of relevant football teams, and half of Iowa State, thus mirroring the current Iowa / Iowa State rivalry, but on a much larger and more horrifying scale. I’m also pretty sure it would be a signal of the end times.

Notre Dame (still independent) would then attempt to engage in a battle (football) with Monster Conference in a final contest of good vs evil (I’ll let you be the judge as to which side is which in a half-pig/half-ISU vs Fainting Irish contest) in order to bring about the Apocalypse as foretold in the book of Revelations.  However, Monster Conference would be confused as to whom “Notre Dame” is, as it would have long since been relegated to little more than a folk tale among devoted Catholics and viewers of NBC, with little recognition in the outside world.  Monster Conference would then assume the challenge from “Notre Dame” was just a prank phone call and hang up, thus avoiding the Apocalypse and making the world immortal.  Logically this would cause my Iowa Hawkeyes to be crowned The World Champions Of All College Football Forever Amen.  This would of course take place at the Rose Bowl.

Hope that clears everything up.

Honestly I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than the current state of things.

WHEE

Awesome.  How could you not smile getting into a car with license plates that say WHEE?

On another note entirely, I checked the Minnesota DOT website to see how much customized plates are, because there still has to be some combination like WHEEE or WHEEEE or WEEEEE still left out there that I could get.  And I was quickly reminded of yet another way Iowa is better than Minnesota (beyond the selling alcohol on Sundays, selling alcohol in gas station and grocery stores, lower taxes, actually thawing / ice melting during the winter, and, of course, being the Hawkeye State).

In Iowa, personalized plates run you an extra $25, it’s an easy one page form, you can get them for a huge variety of causes, you can get them in your school colors, and you can see what they actually look like before ordering them.

In Minnesota, it’s ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS for personalized plates.  And you can use their four page long government form to try to figure out how to apply for them (god help you).  Now granted, if you look long enough, you can get custom plates in Minnesota for your school, though not in your school colors.  They’re right in there with where you get the plates for your Concrete Pumper or your Street Sweeper.

At any rate, along with all the weight lifting and muscle building, she’s gotten pretty big on protein shakes and whey powder and the like.  We went on a brief vacation, and one of the first things we did after getting there was stop by a vitamin store to get some whey powder.  This, of course, lead to me making fun of her for the rest of the trip (this is how my family shows affection, we mock each other pretty much all the time).  In particular, it made me think of the South Park episode where Cartman decides he’s going to get totally buff:

So he gets a bunch of “Weight Gain 4000″, and gets, well, he ends up like this (starts about 20 seconds in):

The full episode is here.

So, of course, every time my sister made a protein shake, or asked if it was time for dinner yet, I would reply, “Beefcake. BEEFCAKE!”.  This was also accompanied by the Tim Tebow drinking game – while watch college football at any point in the last season, drink any time the announcers mention Tim Tebow.  Two if he’s not on the field at the time.  Three if neither of the teams playing in the game you’re watching is Florida.  You get trashed, fast.

Anyway, after the trip, my sister’s job was getting her down, so I thought I’d send her a care package.  What did I think of?  Well, I thought I’d get a variety of protein bars so she could try out some different kinds, maybe a few she hadn’t had before:

Titan. Rockin' Roll. Pure Protein. Yep, I picked them for having the most over the top labels and names of the whole rack of bars. Oh, and one chocolate one, because I'm not a total jerk. At least not all the time.

And of course, we can’t show affection without some mocking thrown in, so, while I was at it, I cut a couple of sheets of paper in half and made a few custom labels:

Also a good excuse to play with crayons. I love crayons.

After all, the labels make it easier to put stamps on them…

Pretty sure the post office loves me after this.

So I put her address on the back of the labels like the usual ingredients / nutritional facts label, and went to the post office to get the correct postage for each.  The post lady working weighed each one, and then put elaborate combinations of 5 or 6 stamps on each to get the correct amount, to the penny, for each of the four, including mixing up two the weights and going back and doing them over, until basically the entire back of each of them was covered in stamps.  The people behind me in line totally loved me by time I left.  I then mailed them off, one at a time, over the course of a little over a week.

Pretty sure I should turn this into a side business.

Beefcake.  BEEFCAKE!!!!

He’s on after Letterman.

The really great part of the show is that unlike all the other late night shows where they just read off of cue cards, Craig just has an outline of topics and makes stuff up as he goes.  And it shows.  It’s basically just him rambling by himself (no band, no side kick (okay, he does have a robotic skeleton sidekick, but I don’t know that it really counts) ), and he’s actually funny enough to make it work.  Obviously, it’s hit or miss depending on the night since he’s making it up as he goes, but on the whole it’s one of the only things on television that consistently makes me laugh out loud pretty much every time I watch it.

It’s also kind of nice that being on late, it starts off with the best part and slowly tappers from there.  He does a little 2-3 minute skit to lead of the show, which is usually pretty good and occasionally involves singing hand puppets (that sort of gives you an idea of the tone of the show).  Then there’s the monologue which is hit or miss but also usually pretty good.  We then go to the desk for email/twitters/random guest.  If it’s email or twitter it’s usually good, if it’s random guest, go to bed.  Then we have interview with some kind of sort of celebrity, which is rarely worth staying up for, but occasionally decent.

I not only love his delivery and overall style, as well as making it up as he goes, but I also love that he jumps back and forth between being a show based nearly entirely on poop and fart jokes to making obscure reference to Dali or Kierkegaard.  Seriously.

And really, let’s take a quick run through the list of what else is on for late night talk shows:

• There is (or in this case, was) Conan.  Vaguely entertaining, but doesn’t really make me laugh, and I have a sort of deep rooted hatred for him stemming from a college roommate I had who watched him every night, loudly, even when I had early classes the next day.
• There’s Letterman.  Umm, “Is this anything?” and “Will it float?” are entertaining, but only happen once in a blue moon.  Aside from that it was vaguely funny while Conan and Leno were fighting it out, but on the whole it’s mostly just sound to have on, and Paul Shaffer being a continuous public service announcement for why you shouldn’t spend decades doing drugs.  (Okay, so Craig apparently did lots of drug for a couple decades too, but has since cleaned up.)
• There’s Jimmy Fallon.  And that’s just painful.  Have you ever watched it?  Did you too think that it must have just been an off night, and tried watching part of it again another night, only to find that it was still terrible?  It’s not the it’s offensive, or anything, in fact it would woefully fail the “Is this anything?” test, it’s just that it’s not funny.  At all.  Except to Jimmy Fallon, who laughs at length after every joke.  Unlike the audience.  Seriously, it’s like they wanted to do an experiment where a guy just goes out and bombs, every night.  I actually watch full episode of it once, hoping, praying that there was some great skit that he always saves for the end.  There wasn’t.  I went to bed basically feeling bad for the guy that he does that on national TV every night.
• And there’s Leno.  Sort of okay in small doses, but I get sick of him in a hurry.  It seems like 50% of his comedy is making fun of how dumb other people are, and the other 50% consists of the most hackneyed, formulaic, lowest common denominator humor you can come up with.  This is probably wildly off base, but in a really tangential way, it makes me think a proposed reasoning I heard for why many non-slave owning white southern poor resisted the abolition of slavery so strongly in the first half of the 1800′s.  It’s wasn’t so much because it was economically beneficial to them, but because it gave a social structure where they were officially better than some one.  Admittedly really tangential, but that’s what Leno makes me think of – stupid humor making fun of others for being stupid.  For example, the “Headlines” segment – count how many times he calls the people who write them stupid or idiots.  The entire “Jay Walking” segment in all of it’s edited down to only the most comically wrong answers glory.  Even the monologue, where on a given night he’ll usually preface at least one joke by saying how stupid people are.  It’s one of those things I didn’t really notice for a long time, but once I did, I just couldn’t watch him anymore.
• There’s a smattering of others across other networks, but I don’t have cable.  So, they could be great, or not, I don’t really know.

So, anyway, Craig Ferguson, telling low brow poop jokes in a way that’s funny and not particularly insulting to others, using running gags while still being fairly random, genuinely opinionated, and pulling about an hour of comedy totally out of his ass, weeknights after Dave.

Robot Skeleton Army, march on.

The first is a simple matter of aesthetics, it seems silly to have the second decimal place when denoting our currency but to only use it for a 5 or 0 (which you would be stuck with, because I’m imagining people will continue to want the ability to pay with cash for a while yet, and will get bitter about being screwed out of 4 cents every time they don’t have perfect change).  Having just a 5 or 0 there breaks the whole base ten system, because the second decimal place becomes base 2 modulo 5 (I think, bit of number theory there for you).

The second is taxes.  People fight back (and rightly so) when a single cent sales tax increase is proposed for something they don’t like.  Can you imagine trying to pass a local option sales tax for schools or roads or whatever if instead of a 1 cent increase, you had to make it a 5 cent increase?  (Admittedly I don’t really understand how they calculate sales tax currently, which in Minneapolis is something like 7.775% (thanks new Twins Stadium for that last .015%). )

And aside from all of that, there’s some incredibly successful people out there with a certain, shall we say, affinity for pennies, and I for one don’t want to make some one like this angry:

A side note – a roll of pennies is 50 cents, so $30 in pennies is 60 rolls, a day.  Ow.

Also, I still like my strategy better.

• Nowhere
• Bag Check
• Creepy
• Spinal Tap Amps
• Tornado Hunter

Yes, I know, it’s not only annoying and a little creepy, but it will get stuck in your head until you want to kill yourself by, in an ironic twist, driving to McDonald’s and actually eating a couple of those sandwiches so your heart clogs up with enough grease to sputter to a slimy, sludgy stop.  Clever advertising ploy that is.

Anyway, I have to say that when I first heard the song, it got me thinking.  The lyrics go:

Give me back that Filet-O-Fish.

Give me that fish.

Give me back that Filet-O-Fish.

Give me that fish.

What if it were you hanging up on this wall?

If it were you in that sandwich you wouldn’t be laughing at all.

It’s particularly those last two lines that got me thinking.  What if it were me in that sandwich?  I mentally pictured a rubber-ized cheesy Lazytown version of myself on a plaque, singing that song.  And, being the (sometimes overly) logical person that I am, my next though was of course that the song ceases to make sense.  (Right, because it made so much sense before, but hang with me here.)  It wouldn’t make sense to be singing about wanting a piece of fish back, I would need to sing about wanting an equivalent piece of myself back.  And thus the song started running through my head with the word “fish” replaced by “human”.

Give me back that Filet-O-Human.

Give me that human.

Give me back that Filet-O-Human.

Give me that human.

What if it were you hanging up on this wall?

If it were you in that sandwich you wouldn’t be laughing at all.

Kind of takes it to a whole new level of weird and creepy, doesn’t it?  And now, every time I see one of those commercials on TV, I can’t help but mentally substitute “human” into the song.

Just thought I’d share.