The brilliance that is the internet reaches new heights with ihatedimes.com. This guy wants you to send him all of your dimes so he can continue his battle to rid the world of dimes. You can even donate them by paypal. Why don’t I think of things like this?
The comic Adam@Home has been running a series of “Things We’d Like to See” this week. Author Brian Bassett has hit on a couple of things that I’d certainly like to see pertaining to rules of the road:
![[Beck - Guero]](http://www.realmofthewombat.com/images/discos/guero.jpg "[Beck - Guero]")
I realized something amazing about this album last week. The inhabitants of 610 Latimer Hall, with their varied musical tastes, have all at one time or another chosen Beck’s Guero for their selection in our music rotation. Usually we’re complaining behind each other’s backs about how this album is awful or how we’ve heard this artist 58 times in the last week. But Guero is the first album that has transcended mere tolerance and achieved universal acceptance and satisfaction. God bless that Beck.
Do you see where it says “Game #1” in the center there? That means we’re going to the A’s home opener. If they go with a five-man rotation to start the season, we’ll see Rich Harden. If they skip Blanton or Meyer, we’ll see one of the rookies (likely Haren).
To prepare you for the coming season of Oakland Athletics baseball, read the following:
I listened to NPR for a little while this morning and they had a conversation with someone from a British heritage committee in London. They’re planning a series of medieval style tournaments with archery, jousting, and the like. This will be the first time these competitions occur in 500 years. After the interview, the musical interlude was a song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin!He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp,
Or to have his eyes gouged out and his elbows broken,
To have his kneecaps split and his body burned away
And his limbs all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Robin!
I found it hilarious that NPR chose to interview this guy from London, then mock him with this satirical tune.
In other news, the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament ended today.
It used to be that people would forget the address for the ol’ Realm of the Wombat. So they would google it. The problem was that it wouldn’t come up. Not on the first page. Or the second page. Not at all. With the new address, you’d think I’d be number one. Nope. But I’m fourth, so it’s an improvement. If you put it in quotes, I’m still #4, but the three links ahead of me refer to the Realm, so that’s good. I’m out there people, contributing to the internets in a big way.
The man who invented the intermittent feature for car windshield wipers died last week. Robert Kearns died of brain cancer at the age of 77. He fought the auto industry for years to get credit for the invention and eventually succeeded.
Why is Robert Kearns a hero? Because I hate the sound of wipers across a not-quite-wet-enough windshield. And for creating a device to deal with this unbearable noise, Robert Burns is a hero.
Read the full story: Yahoo! News
I like my birthday because people are nice to me and buy me nice things. For example, my family sent me a box with a stuffed lion, Kraft cheese & macaroni, Extra spearmint gum, and cocoa. Andy got me a Cal sweatshirt to wear virtually everyday, Odie bought me a copy of his favorite book Cannery Row, and a bunch of my friends bought me dinner. And Melissa took me shopping and was very patient with me when I became frustrated with clothes. She acquired these shoes for me. They’re Vans.
![[New shoes]](http://www.realmofthewombat.com/images/vans05.jpg)
I don’t know how it is at your workplace, but in Latimer Hall at Berkeley, we have a thing called “lazy undergrads.†They like to do things like take the elevator from the first floor to the second, or the second floor to the first. My favorite is when they’re on the second floor, call the elevator, then realize it’s going to take too long, so they walk down the stairs, causing me to stop at 2 for nothing. But at least they learned about the use of stairs. Even worse, this week one of our elevators was out of service. Add this to the normal flow of grad lazy faculty and staff, and it becomes almost unbearable for the grad student needing to go down seven floors before he misses his NMR time. The experienced grad student will, of course, adapt to his surroundings and take advantage of alternate means of transportation, e.g. the freight elevator around the corner, elevators in the adjacent Tan Hall, or (gasp!) the stairs. Fortunately, the “normal” elevator was put back in service two days early, so our hero can revert to his usual strategy of using the Latimer elevators and complaining about lazy undergrads and lamenting the lack of an escalator for the staff that work on the fourth floor.