This weekend I went to a local Middle Eastern food market and got some stuff.
I also made a couple of videos about the experience.
Links to the things I was talking about: Fava Beans; The Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song [video] (from Iolanthe; with Mixed Pickles); and Peter Piper.
More links: hummus, tahini, baba ghanoush, imam bayeldi, paneer, dolma
Great new vid from the folks at Eepybird.com! (CHT: GreenAutoBlog)
Amazing new automotive fuel source . . . Diet Coke + Mentos! (Technically, Coke Zero, but, y'know.)
Behold . . . Experiment #321!
Impressive as always!
(And I had the same thought about a next destination as the guys in the video did, though I don't guess we'll get to see that one.)
Mind you, Experiment #321 is definitely awesome win, but it's no Experiment #214, which was truly epic win.
In case your memory needs refreshing, let's take a pause that refreshes.
Up from the archives . . .
You see? Totally epic! Experiment #214 is not only cutting-edge science, it also has amazing healing properties. It's the kind of thing that you want to keep bookmarked so that any time you're feeling down or hurt, you can watch it and remember how much there is to celebrate in the world.
CHT: Patrick Coffin.
SCIENTISTS TURN T-SHIRTS INTO BODY ARMOR.
IT'S TRUE!!!
QUOTES:
Researchers at the University of South Carolina, collaborating with others from China and Switzerland, drastically increased the toughness of a T-shirt by combining the carbon in the shirt’s cotton with boron – the third hardest material on earth. The result is a lightweight shirt reinforced with boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks.
The scientists started with plain, white T-shirts that were cut into thin strips and dipped into a boron solution. The strips were later removed from the solution and heated in an oven. The heat changes the cotton fibers into carbon fibers, which react with the boron solution and produce boron carbide.
The result is a fabric that’s lightweight but tougher and stiffer than the original T-shirt, yet flexible enough that it can be bent, said Li, who led the group from USC. That flexibility is an improvement over the heavy boron-carbide plates used in bulletproof vests and body armor.
. . . I mean, not a week ago this minute or this hour, but a week ago today, I was in the 7.2 earthquake originating in northern Mexico, south of Imperial County, California.
I my area, it was felt with an intensity on the modified Mercalli scale of IV-V. Everybody (indoors and out) felt motion, but things weren't destroyed.
While I've felt small jolts from time to time since moving to California (including while doing Catholic Answers Live–and commenting about it on air!), it brought to mind the previous major earthquake I was in.
That was the Northridge quake, from 1994.
Though I had friends in the L.A. area, like Ken Hensley, were are much, MUCH closer to the epicenter, in my area it was again felt as a IV-V quake. Things shook. Everyone felt it. Not much was destroyed. Parked cars rocked. Sleeping people were awakened.
Including me.
At the time, I was sleeping in the water bed I still had from when I was married. (My wife had chronic sciatica problems, which the bed helped with, and I kept it for a time after she died in 1992 and after my 1993 move to California.)
In January 1994, I woke up rocking from side to side, with the water sloshing around and the car alarms going off in the parking lot of the apartment complex where I lived.
I didn't know about getting under the door frame at the time (a concept I later learned from the Animaniacs–which may not be such a great idea after all, from what I've heard lately).
But the Animaniacs made this song out of it (which I can sing from memory–or at least the version appearing on one of the CDs they made) . . .
Love the rhymes! ("The dirt, the rocks, and all those aftershocks. It's just a planet moving granite several city blocks.)
So Easter Sunday I was lying down, working on my laptop, when all of a sudden the lights flicker and the room starts rocking back and forth.
Realizing it was an earthquake, I hopped up and thought about standing under the door frame–except I've recently heard that that isn't such a great idea after all–and I became quite surprised at how long the quake was taking.
Previous quakes I've been in since moving to California have often just been a single jolt, and they'd never gone on as long as this one. (It ended up being 60-90 seconds long, which is a long time in earthquake terms.)
So I decided to go outside in case things got worse and my house became dangerous to be in.
Lo and behold, a lot of my neighbors had decided to do the same thing!
It felt like the pavement was sitting on the surface of a giant bowl of Jello pudding that was rapidly wiggling back and forth.
But there was no damage, and so my guess is that when the quake hit my area (El Cajon) it wasfelt like somewhere between a 4 and a 5. Let's say a 4.0 for simplicity purposes,
At the time I had no idea where the epicenter of the quake was, but given its length, I thought it might be quite a distance away and, if so, I thought, "This may be huge."
After it seemed to finish (though I continued to feel things that felt like aftershocks–or after-wiggles, one of which was very strong and went on for a few seconds), I went back indoors and . . .
. . . started talking about it on Facebook (from which it automatically got picked up by my Twitter feed).
I mean, it's the 21st century, now, right? That's what you're supposed to do.
I also posted photos and updates and I learned more.
Turned out that the epicenter was south of the border town Calexico, in northern Mexico, south of Imperial County.
And it was a 7.2, which makes it actually a bigger quake than the one that struck Haiti.
And since the earthquake scale is base-10 logarithmic, that means that if the quake had a force of 4.0 here in El Cajon, it was more than a thousand times stronger at the epicenter.see combox
Someone commented on one of my Facebook posts with a link to the following cartoon, which I got a real kick out of.
UPDATE: I am informed that some installments of this comic involve problematic material. Caveat lector.
Here's an interesting little home-made device.
Mind you, it's nowhere near as cool as a gasoline-powered alarm clock, but it'll do nicely.
An English man made it with a camera he got off eBay, a weather balloon, a GPS tracker, some fiberglass insulation, and–yes–duct tape.
ABC News reports:
He buys weather balloons from a supplier in the United States. . . . He uses an off-the-shelf GPS locator, which gets signals from U.S. satellites, so he can track the balloon on Google maps. He bought a Canon pocket digital camera (a model discontinued in 2008) and attached a circuit board so that it would take pictures every five minutes.
The balloon rises, carried randomly by the wind, until it bursts. The camera then parachutes to the ground in its housing. Harrison put his phone number and a printed label on the outside: "Harmless Scientific Experiment."
BTW, the picture is one of his. Yorkshire from 20 miles up.
Regular readers know that one of my commitments for Lent is to blog something every day (except Sundays). Well, last week I wasn't able to do that because . . . I forgot.
I had company over, and by the time the evening ended it was getting late, and I realized the next morning that blogging had slipped my mind.
Since Lenten resolutions of this sort are free-will commitments and don't bind under pain of sin, I could just say, "Oh, well," and move on.
But I thought I'd make it up anyway by doing a double-post today.
Herewith are some videos that you might find amusing. I like the lighthearted way that Dave Carroll treats the issue. The lightheartedness is even more on display in Songs 2 and 3.
The whole affair also gave his career a nice boost–a way of taking lemons and making lemonade.
Basically, here's what happened: United Airlines baggage handlers recklessly damaged his $3,500 Taylor guitar and then the company refused to pay for repairs. After exhausting his options with United, he told them he would write three songs and put them on YouTube. Reportedly, he was told, "Good luck with that one, pal."
The first has eight million views, one million of which happened in the first week of release. He was quickly contacted by United with an offer of compensation in hopes of his pulling the video. Reportedly, he replied, "Good luck with that one, pal."
He did say that he wasn't interested in compensation any longer and suggested that they donate the money to the charity of their choosing. They did. It went to the Thelonious Monk Jazz School.
So what's the Catholic Answers connection to this?
It turns out that Catholic Answers is housed in the same business complex in El Cajon, California as Taylor Guitars. Some of the guys from work play basketball at lunch with the guys from Taylor, so we're neighbors, and neighborly.
That made the videos a topic of discussion at work when Song 3 was released recently.
I'm not sure what stereotypical Mariachi singers, stereotypical Germans, and stereotypical hillbillies have to do with anything, but . . . enjoy!
A WORD FROM TAYLOR GUITARS (video)
Okay, I’ve been writing all day on deadline, and it’s late Saturday night, but in fulfillment of my resolution to blog at least something every day in Lent (except Sundays), I hereby present the following video from the International Space Station.
As Dr. Erhardt would say . . . Enjoy!
