According to Wikipedia, some of the objects dropped on New Year's Eve:

• A pine cone
• An orange
• a conch shell, a pirate wench and a red high-heel shoe
• a beach ball
• a wooden duck
• a mossbunker fish
• a live opossum
• a pickle
• a cow
• a carp
• a Lebanon bologna

Um.

Happy double-oh-seven!

Poll #894532
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 1

Tree or Chree?

We've all heard about Seasonelle, the birth control pill that causes women to have only four periods per year. An even newer pill (which should come to the market soon), called Anya, will take periods away entirely. Both of these pills are taken daily and normal period cycles resume once they're no longer used.

This brings up a whole buncha questions. If it didn't, I'd be on Seasonelle already. I've been able to find some pretty decent information, which I'm laying out here systematically, for the sake of simplicity and sanity :)

( Read more... )

A journalist writes about a never-carried-out school shooting and what happens to letters addressed to "Santa, North Pole."

(The Guardian)

Those of you familiar with my Google obsession will not be surprised to know that I use their personalized homepage for nearly everything I do online. My homepage displays the weather, the next five events on my Google Calendar (including events from the public Columbia academic calendar), and feeds from my favorite news sites that give me pop-up summaries when clicked on.

My favorite news widget is a Google-made widget that taps into my (quite cool) Google Reader account. In one small scrollable area I get all the recent headlines from every site I like with an rss feed; with a click I can choose to see articles from only a single site (like LiveJournal) or from a preferred group of sites. Check the "read" box the corresponding article disappears.

LiveJournal didn't used to give rss feeds; I discovered today that they've changed. Awesome. So now I can get up to date on my friends' (public) entries without having to go allllllllll the way over to liveJournal itself. On top of which: The Google Reader site now has a notifier for OS X. That means my toolbar on the top of my desktop now has three tiny pictures on it; one tells me if I have new mail, one gives me a drop-down view of my calendar, and the last one tells me if any of my friends pages have been updated.

How do I love thee, O Google? To count the ways would be like counting stars. ;)

Millions of dominoes!

REWARD!!!! REWARD REWARD REWARD!!!!

I thought that would catch your attention :)

I'm offering a reward to any person (or if more one person, the first person) who successfully answers the following challenge. You can choose any of the following:

• A credit of ten gourmet hot chocolates at MAX cafe (with your name)
• A huge homemade hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps and foamed milk
• $30
• A kiss

The challenge is this. I got a Spanish-language message left on my answering machine back home in California; it appears to be from my host brother Alexander from Paraguay. My parents recorded it into their computer for me (did you know you could do that with Word?) and sent it to me via email. In the message he gives his email address. I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. I've tried sending notes to quite a few possibilities, but annoying email robots have returned them all to me. So I have posted the message here:

(the link)

For the reward you need to figure out a FUNCTIONAL EMAIL ADDRESS that SUCCESSFULLY CONTACTS my host brother in Paraguay, Alexander (nicknamed Gigo) Diaz.

( more details )

Oh! Or if you are a Berkeley person you can substitute a cafe of your choice (I recommend the Chocolate Cafe just over the border into Oakland :), or if you're from elsewhere, and all are welcome, make substitutions accordingly...