Eumaledictio

I’ve posted a few times on sources for free online courses and materials and thought I’d put together a compilation of them in case there are any other people who want to better themselves but don’t have time or $$ to go to a university and get a degree. These are all great sources for more material if you want to better yourself or you just want the upper hand before taking a course. edit: It looks like these types of university sites are getting more popular, and several more states have added courses online for any interested party’s access. I’ll add them at the bottom as I find them if I think they are noteworthy.

MIT put together 1,800 of their courses in an online catalogue that includes books, audio lectures, video lectures, tests, study material, and class overviews. This is an extremely well built resource and is probably the best source out there for finding complete free courses online. They have recently extended their courses to high school classes, also.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/hom…/index.htm

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Pussy Doodles from Tim and Eric Amazing Show Good Job! This show amazes me with its weirdness. Sometimes and I can’t stop laughing, and sometimes it is just stupid.  Pussy Doodles is one of those borderline skits almost up until the end.  The last line in it always gets me, though. “Puuaauasydldl.”  David Cross keeps a straight face, the whole time - I’m not sure how.

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I got a comment the other day that one of my readers hates prescriptive grammarians (referring to me). A prescriptive grammarian is a person who insists on using the proper methods for language instead of just allowing it to be used however any one single person wants. An example of a prescriptive grammarian could be a person who gets riled when someone says, “He ain’t bein’ too good cause he didn’t win you in them’s race.” There are so many productive ways for a language to grow and change, and truly, languages are always changing, but I believe there is a “wrong” way to go about it.

A prescriptive grammarian becomes one because they have become well-educated on something they are passionate about. I’m not a prescriptive grammarian, but I am pretty close to a prescriptive linguist, with etymology being one of my favorite passions. I equate hating prescriptive grammarians to hating the smart kid because they are always showing you up. Hate me because if you say, “I didn’t purposefully knock over my glass,” I’ll be a smartass and ask you if you intentionally did it with apathy.

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And why it will not be evolved away any time soon.

For a long time culture has been debating the vestigial status of the veriform appendix in the human body. There’s a significant new theory about the historical and current purpose of our appendix that seems to be holding water quite well . Well enough in fact that it is gathering supportive physiologists like wildfire. The explanation is almost too simple.

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First off, let me assure you that yeast are a unicellular fungi. They are as vegan as eating a mushroom. I’ve been getting a couple of notes that yeast is not vegan and I just wanted to clarify that yes, it truly is. Honey is not vegan. I know. That is why I have the note at the top of the page. Some beers are vegan, too, but some include fish bladder (like Guiness), so if you are looking to booze it up without possibly eating any bits of animals, making your own booze is the way to go!

Everything you need to make your own cider:

Bare Essentials:

• Juice - any kind will make a cider as long as it has sugars in it, doesn’t have any fancy preservatives in it, and isn’t too acidic.
• Yeast - any kind will ferment the juice, but some are better than others.
• Something to ferment in - this means a glass carboy or a food grade plastic bucket that can be airtight when stoppered - usually 5 gallons is status quo for brewing, but it is up to you.
• Fermentation Lock and Drilled Stopper - These are pretty cheap and you can reuse them practically forever.
• Bottles - (10 bottles for each gallon) pop off top bottles are easiest to rebottle. You can reuse them over and over and over after sanitizing.
• Bottling Crowns - Bottle caps for pop-off top bottles are cheap. A couple of bucks should get you enough for 10 or 15 gallons of cider.
• Capper - I suggest an Emily Capper - they are less than fifteen bucks and easy to use.
• Tubing - you need something to get the cider out of the fermenter and into the bottles, right?

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I’ve been a huge fan of steampunk style stuff for awhile and decided I need a steampunk theme on my cell phone - a cog and spring powered cell phone with a music box ringer (close enough, anyway). I figured all the other steam punk fans would have put together hundreds of awesome themes… but I couldn’t find a single one. So I built my own. This is the setup I used. It is for my phone, so it won’t work for everybody, but I just figured there ought to be at least one of these up on the internet. As far as I know, there are no restrictive licenses on any of the sources I used to make this theme, but if they are yours, let me know and I’ll take them down.  I know it isn’t the most impressive little theme, but maybe it will inspire you.  I think the music box ringtone is my favorite part of it.

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So everyone is harping about the gas prices and all the goofballs in the media keep telling us we’re better off than other countries in the world where gas is over $6 a gallon. Well those guys are retards. How are these oil companies making money selling their gas to other countries where the gas goes for as low as .12 cents a gallon? Gasoline is so expensive because we buy it from the Saudis and the Saudis jack up their previously bargain prices just for us. They DON’T jack them up as much as the media says, though. When oil barrels go up in price, that price includes tariffs and built in costs for the processing companies that import it. That price is not what the Saudis are asking for straight out of the ground - it is what the oil processors say it costs to turn a barrel of black crude into gasoline, including their salaries, their president’s salary, all of their worker’s salaries, and the cost of their companies over there that work to acquire it and all of those folks’ salaries… in the future (speculation; I’ll get into that in a moment). It is all very misleading if you just listen to the radio or watch the news.

Earlier I mentioned some countries are getting the bargain price of .12 cents a gallon (like in Venezuela). That is in large part because the government subsidizes it. The actual lowest current price I could find from a government that doesn’t subsidize their gasoline costs was $1.29 (about 5,942 Manat). That was in Baku, Azerbaijana - a country that recently stopped subsidizing their gasoline because of theft from neighboring countries.

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I live in America. Specifically, I live in the United States of America. People who live in Canada also live in America. People in Mexico live in America. People in Jamaica live in America. Even people in the Falkan Islands live in America. America is not a specific country. It is also not often considered a continent, any more. America is a set of continents consisting of North America and South America - often referred to as just “the Americas”. I don’t know how so many people can’t seem to comprehend this. Not just rednecks with horribly incomplete educations - teachers and doctors, lawyers and even college professors are guilty of this ignorance. And I’m getting sick of arguing it. This isn’t an opinion or a progressive idea that has just started catching on. It is a solid and well documented fact. To state otherwise is to obnoxiously assert manifest exceptionality. So many people have been so confused by it that it has been added as an alternate entry to a couple of dictionaries, even. But that does not make it true, as any geography professor can tell you.

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Real Country Singers Don’t Wear Makeup

I’m annoyed that a song indicating that an American’s way of life includes rectal penetration with shoes can be #1 on so many charts. The song has always bugged me with the closeminded aggressiveness it encourages, but try listening to the lyrics and taking them literally. There’s a lot of vague threateningish stuff, but it is all a little obscure, like Toby doesn’t want any terrorists to actually understand it. The song basically seems like a load of bluster, to me. Pointless bragging and pounding of chests with very little meaning. It reminds me of a time in high school when one of the druggy/jock guys came up to me and said, “The freaks come out at night.” I was confused, but apparently his friends thought it was just an terrible thing for him to say to me and acted like I was going to get excited and start a fight. I didn’t. I looked at him like he was crazy and walked away wondering what was wrong with the guy. If this song ever does get to terrorist ears, they don’t natively speak English and their interpretation, I’d imagine, would seem something like this:

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Screen savers can be a fun way to personalize your computer, but that is not the original purpose. I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here for a lot of you, since most of my readers are at least savvy enough to use Firefox to browse to this page, but a lot of the younger crowd don’t seem to realize the original purpose of a screensaver. I went on Yahoo! Answers the other day looking for some info on a screensaver I’ve been searching for and found a debate on the origin of screensavers. There were several reasons proposed for it, but each and every reason was wrong.

Screensavers were created to prevent screen burn. Right in the name. Screen SAVER. Old television sets and computer screens were susceptible to phosphor burn-in from the cathode-ray tubes. You probably remember if you are at least as old as me (not terribly old). When the screen was turned off, the characters displayed on the screen day in and day out would still be there as a ghost. Forever. Unless you used a screensaver (sometimes even if you did use a screensaver).

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