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Hey diddle diddle

Back in February I launched an investigation into the mystery of the missing utensils — namely the spoons and the coveted spork. All of the spoons had mysteriously vanished from the sixth floor kitchen. Due to a complete lack of evidence (and investigative competence), I quit the case in order to found the Church of the Holy Spork.

Well that turned out to be a mistake too, and now that I’ve returned to technical writing, there’s been a new development. The bowl is now missing as well, and the word on the street is that the dish ran away with the spoon.

My first instinct was to bring the cow in for questioning. Unfortunately, during her jump over the moon, she made a slight miscalculation in her trajectory and is trapped in a high orbit around the earth. The Russians are sending a Soyuz spacecraft to recover her, but they fear the worst.

The little dog is my next suspect. Both the cat and the fiddle claim that the dog was there and was crippled with bouts of insane laughter. Sounds suspicious to me.

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Achieving a balanced diet

Last night I accidentally ate something healthy for dinner. Today I’ll have to compensate by eating something absurdly greasy.

There are several grades on my scale of greasiness.

  • Non-greasy. Anything with leaves, I suppose. To be perfectly honest, I’m not very familiar with this category.
  • Greasy. Fried noodles. Fried eggs. Fried green tomatoes.
  • Really greasy. Bacon. Fish and chips. Pizza.
  • Dangerously greasy. All-meat pizza. McDonald’s Hockey Hero Sandwich. Duck.
  • Absurdly greasy. Deep fried pizza. Deep fried duck (with cheese). A deep-fried Hockey Hero Sandwich topped with nacho cheese dip and duck drippings.

So there you go. Do print out this list as a handy reminder when choosing foods at lunch time. And remember: if you eat something healthy, balance it out by eating something equally unhealthy.

!!WARNING!!

Like matter and anti-matter, the greasy and non-greasy foods should never come in direct contact with each other, or the resulting explosion could wipe out all life on the planet.

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Indecisive

I deliberated. I pondered. I weighed the pros and cons. I flipped a coin. I consulted the magic 8-ball. I consulted the plant in the corner of my room (that didn’t help, but I managed to turn a new leaf). I just can’t decide what to do with my website layout.

Should I keep the new white-and-grey layout? Should I try the black layout again? Should I return to the familiar old layout with the bandwidth-consuming graphics?

Help me out here. Please vote in the Cubicle Poll.

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South Park school collapse feared

In the news, parents of children attending South Park Elementary in Victoria, BC, have pulled their children out of school following a seimic assessment (“Parents fear school collapse”). The report indicates that a “moderately-sized” quake could cause the school to collapse.

When asked for comment, one student remarked, “Aw, man! That’s hellacool!”

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What is a blog?

Alright. I’ve been puzzling over this question since I started blogging, and I still don’t have a definitive answer. After seening Eric’s creative definition of “blog”, I thought I’d take a crack at it myself.

The Bloggies define a weblog as “a page with dated entries that has a purpose (in whole or in part) of linking to other sites” and they exclude “personal journals”. That’s a start, alright, but it seems a little narrow for my tastes. By that definition, most blogs that I read aren’t actually “blogs”. Frankly, I wouldn’t read something that has the primary purpose of simply linking to other sites. I can’t imagine a more boring read.

To me, a blog can be any web-based form of creative expression in a format that uses dated entries. It can be commentary, it can be news, it can be a personal journal, and it can even be a cat-worship page with hundreds of high-resolution photos (although I wouldn’t read that either).

We can also define blogging by what it isn’t. As CNN is more than happy to report, blogs are — for the most part — an unreliable source of news. Feeling the pressure from bloggers, traditional media outlets love to trash bloggers on this basis. Even Wired.com isn’t beyond taking a shot, as illustrated by the article “Noted War Blogger Cops to Copying“. No, bloggers do not, in general, verify their sources or even credit their sources as thoroughly as they should, which leads me to believe that reporting the news is not for amateurs. Reporting opinion, on the other hand, is for every blogger and his highly photographed cat. Bloggers excel at expressing their reactions to current events and even mouldy, old non-current events.

What’s more of a mystery to me is why people become so easily addicted to reading and writing blogs. For example, why are you still reading this? Go outside and do something meaningful, for crying out loud! As for myself, I think I’ll lounge on some formed meat for a while.