Gar, why am I still awake?

I guess this time I can blame it on jet lag. I'm still adjusting after a fun-filled vacation in (an admittedly rainy) San Diego. Chargers game, disc golf, climbing, running, bowling, basketball, chilling, Lord of the Rings, the Ali G movie, Matrix Reloaded (finally), Mexican food, chain restaurants, pizza, video games, Legos, chess (haha, Paresh!), Scrabble (damn you, Eric!), poker, shopping, friends, babies, wives. Who knew San Diego could be such fun?

Fun with match.com data

After Martin noticed this article about dating preferences in Yahoo!'s most popular articles, I browsed my way over to match.com's PR site, which informs us that "Although only 43% of singles said they are confident they will start off 2004 with a romantic midnight kiss (with men being more confident of this than women), singles are united in their desire to be kissed gently..." The research area is also pretty interesting.

(On semi-related notes, check out this interesting use of the Amazon API to measure subject popularity and the Times articles linked from the recently updated Metabuzz.)

Why don't they teach you anything this useful in DARE?

Who knew that too much sugar with your liqour makes you sick?

"The sugar load is very problematic because it is very hard for the liver to metabolize a lot of sugar and alcohol at the same time," he said. "Of course, people are drinking more, with all these terror alerts going around. So I tell my patients to be pre-emptive. Drink a lot of water and take a Tylenol before you go out."

Whither Thinkquest?

So, I was looking through the Thinkquest site since my brother was thinking of participating, and I'm left wondering what happened to the poor thing. It's now run by Oracle, the big scholarship prizes are gone, and the whole thing seems to have a little more corporate feel to it than it used to.

On the other hand, it is nice to see that the library is well groomed, with nice descriptions of each entry. And it is good that the thing is still going on. I need to go back and clean out the vulgar comments put into the discussion boards we had in our entires. Teachers keep writing to complain that they can't link to the sites because of all of the crap people have written into them....I wish I had though to build more robust maintenance tools into it, but I always underestimate the number of stupid and immature people on the Internet.

I also took a look at the most recent grand prize winner, which actually has some fun little applets on it. The quiz says I'm 61% left brained and 57% visual.

Hehe, cute

just click

(and, from Sarah, this is even worse)

Amazon to the rescue

I swear I keep finding more interesting things on Amazon's guides and lists every time I look. This time, when Googling ideas for present ideas for an 11-year-old girl (who Suzie paired me with through Operation Santa), I found this and this. Fascinating. Maybe someday Amazon will just pick presents out automatically. I'd pay for that. ;-)

Random culture consumption update

I finally finished American Pastoral. It's a bit on the depressing side. Certainly makes one not want to have kids. (And it is nice to know I wasn't alone in thinking that certain parts dragged. ) I do love Roth, though. He's just so...right. Now to mentally answer the questions in this discussion guide....

Also saw the Matrix in IMAX at the Aquarium. It was better than I'd been lead to believe, although I imagine it would have made more sense if I had bothered to see Reloaded. The IMAXness was fun but not as mind-blowing as I'd hoped...the screen is big and ultra-clear and the sound is good.

Last weekend, saw Last Samurai, which was not as good as the reviews said, though entertaining.

I really need LoTR to come out...it's time for a quality movie.