I have just now noticed that Helen Q. ReadySteadyGo!-pants, the co-founder of my embroidery club and quite possibly the smartest person with whom I have ever shared french toast, has tagged me to continue a “6 unimportant things about you” blog-meme-a-mabob. Her response is delightful (also her blog is my pretty much my favorite ever).

here’re my 6 useless me-facts:

1) I can entertain myself for hours and hours by adding my own 3rd person backing vocals to songs sung in the 1st person, on the radio.

For example:

Meatloaf: I would do anything for love…
Me in a high falsetto: he would do anything for love…
Meatloaf: but I won’t do that…
Me, again: oh no he won’t!

ad nauseum.

(’hifi’ by artist chris silas neal)

2) I will go to great lengths to remove the white umbilical-cord-looking thing (called “chalazae“, see #4 & 13 in diagram below) from eggs before I bake with them. If I remove too much of the clean egg white in the process, I will crack another egg and replace the removed amount so that I don’t destroy the recipe. I know it’s harmless and tasteless and that technically its a sign of the eggs freshness, but it is not my fault that it is also the Grossest Thing Ever.

3) I have a small collection of celebrity hand-turkeys.

• Frank Black (from the pixies) - collected by me at an album signing at a barnes and noble.
• John Entwistle (bassist of The Who) - collected by my crosscountry-roadtrip-#1 friend, christian.
• Question Mark (of ? and the Mysterians) - collected for me at this year’s ponderosa stomp by my dear friend nick.

4) As a child, I thought the small chicken pox scar in the center of my forehead was where my unicorn-horn used to be.

5) I sometimes participate in harmless fibbery, en masse. Here are a sampling of untruths I have helped spread:

• The pasta-serving-spoon/fork-thing is technically called a “Supple Gaga”.
• The speed limit on Minnesota highways is relative and determined by momentum - the higher the mass of your vehicle, the slower you are allowed to drive. Hence motorcycles can go 100 mph while 18-wheelers must go 35.
• Regis Philbin invented the choco-taco.
• I have a silent ‘3′ in the middle of my name: “mere3dith”.

6) Ever since 9/11, I have a cnn.com-compulsion. I was in college at the time and we did not have a television in our campus-apartment. So to get the most updated info about the attacks, I clicked the browser refresh button on cnn.com over and over. And now, out of a sort of ptsd-meets-ocd habit, I still check cnn.com randomly and often. This explains why I am often the first to hear about important breaking cnn.com-worthy headlines, for instance on today’s homepage: “don’t adjust monitor: puppy IS green“.

I am supposed to get 6 others to do the same, like an evil chain letter, but how about some of you post your 6-unimportant-things in the comments? or not, either way.

Just because it’s icky outside, doesn’t mean you can’t shoot people.

From Alex Wooley Design: “This unique, funnel shaped umbrella harnesses the flow of rainwater down into its handle, a water pistol. The user can fire at will, maintaining a constant flow of water as long as rain continues to fall.”

Genius.

this is actually fun-umbrella-design post #2 on NSTGD, here’s the first.

And because I love you, and I love the Hollies, and because the Hollies love umbrellas, and because if a = b and b = c then c = a, here is their song “Bus Stop“.

via designboom.

so I found this super-neat and mathtational online freelance-hourly-rate-calculator (via swissmiss).

It asks you to enter in all of your yearly costs, both personal and business, your desired work/vacation schedule and how much of a profit you’d like to make, and then let’s you know what you would need to charge per hour to make that happen.

MY IMAGINARY LIFE SCENARIO: Freelance Trampoline-Tester

BUSINESS COSTS/YEAR:

How much is your annual Office Rent? $48,000: for a warehouse in queens with 26ft ceiling (for maximum bounce-capacity).

How much do you spend annually on Travel? $5,000: a few business trips to trampoline expo’s I imagine.

How much do you spend each year on Software? $0: pshah.

How much do you spend each year on Communications? $1200: internet + cell phone + handsfree ear piece, so I can conference call mid-air.

How much does your annual Insurance cost? $10,000: totally making this up, but I imagine trampoline-testing might require ample insurance…

How much do you need to spend on Legal Fees? $0: nothing says “oooh, great idea! no really.” like deciding to represent yourself.

How much do you need to spend on Accountancy Fees? blablabla boring question, next.

How much will your Office Supplies cost annually? $2350 = $350 (several pairs of skid-resistant jumping socks) + $2000 (knee pads/helmet/mouthguard/parachute), because Safety First.

How much will you be spending on Advertising and Promotions? $22,500 (for 5 sky-writing campaigns at $4,500 per flight).

PERSONAL COSTS/YEAR:

How much is your annual Rent / Mortgage payments? $16,000 = $10,000 to build my treehouse (I found a tree house construction company in philly) + $6000/year (a guess on what someone might charge me to rent their backyard tree in NYC at $500/month)

What is your annual budget for Daily Expenses? $20,000 = since it is probable that I will not have electricity in my tree house, and since fire+trees=no-good, I will be dining exclusively on food thats require no refrigeration and no cooking, and takeout. so let’s say $10,000 on food + $10,000 for other-important-life-stuffs, like ships-in-bottles and the like.

How much do you intend to save for your Retirement Account? $15,000 (hey, why not?)

How much do you spend each year on Occasional Expenses? $13,500 In this imaginary life, I’ll obviously want to take taxidermy classes (Here they cost $3500) + I will take a month long vacation to the Canary Islands (approx. $10,000).

WORK SCHEDULE

How many days a week do you work on average? 4 days. when you work for yourself you create your own schedule, gosh darn it.

How many days of vacation do you need annually? 30 days. (for the canary islands trip)

How many sick and personal days do you need annually? 20 days (just in case I fall out of the tree house, or get a heart attack from eating only take-out)

How many public and religious holidays? 31 days (though no religious holidays will be observed, I will take an entire month off to celebrate Bastille Day.)

How many hours do you work a day on average? 7 hours (4 hours bouncing, 1 hour lunching, and 2 hours administrating)

Approximately what percentage of hours can you actually bill? 85%

Enter a Dollar amount of Savings/Profit you’d like to make each year Profit is the money above what it costs just to run your business and live, what extra cash do you wish to earn: $1,000,000 (listen here, buster, I’ve been working for non-profits all this time, allow me this one imaginary moment of corporate greed!)

AND FINALLY,

To live this magical life, I would need to charge a mere $1533.18 p/hr. Easy.

my dearest darlingest only-est little brother has just sent me a ridiculously genius submission for the song charts group, that I had to share, even though I don’t typically post about the same thing twice in a row, this is ever-so-very worth the blog-stutter:

… is inversely related to the growth of love.

I created the above addition to the “Song Charts” flickr pool today. Here are some of my favorites from the group:

credit to swissmiss for sharing the link.

(I changed the header a little bit, basically)

On the Neat Scale, I’d say this is closest to the “pretty durn” end of the spectrum -
bach’s first goldberg variation:

madonna’s like a prayer:

folk song “clementine”:

from the website:

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see–literally–the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

from cnn.com article “Full swimming pool stolen”:

Daisy Valdivia is annoyed that someone stole her backyard pool — and baffled at how they did it without leaving behind a splash, drip or trace of the 1,000 gallons of water it contained. Valdivia awoke to find her family’s hip-high, inflatable, 10-foot diameter swimming pool gone from her back yard Wednesday. Valdivia told The Record of Bergen County the theft must have occurred between 1 a.m., when her husband went to bed, and 5 a.m., when she awoke. She’s amazed someone could steal the pool that quickly and just wanted to know “what the heck they did with the water,” she said.

This is, clearly, the greatest crime of all time. I will now solve it in 11 steps.

THE FACTS:

1. The missing swimming pool was 10 ft in diameter and contained 1000 gallons of water at the time it was stolen.

2. This water was not dumped at the site, hence they moved both the pool AND the water.

3. all within a 4 hour period.

4. 1000 gallons= 8330 lbs*

5. The average man can deadlift (a term I have never in all my days on this earth used until this moment) a maximum of between 185 - 235 lbs**.

6. If a team of the strongest men*** decided they needed their very own 1000 gallon swimming pool, it would take, at-the-very-least, 36 of them to lift it, with all the water inside. (8330/235 = 35.45)

7. Forklifts and towtrucks and cranes and robots other such machines that have the lift-capacity to carry 8330 lbs are very noisy and would have left track marks in the yard.

8. Where do you find groups of 36 super-strong men, without swimming pools? What do we know about these men?

A. they are very very quiet.
B. they like to swim.
C. they couldn’t afford to purchase their own swimming pool.

9. Equivalent swimming pools on the Interwebs cost around $80.

10. $80 divided 36 ways = $2.22/each, thus each individual member of the 36 super-strong, yet highly-budgeted, thieves had less than $2.21 to their names.

11. How is this possible? How can you survive with only $2.21? How do you buy food? Pay for your home?

THE ONLY LOGICAL CONCLUSION BASED ON THESE INARGUABLE FACTS:

Clearly, the 36 thieves own and operate (hence their strength) a communal farm that provides the food necessary to survive, and the surplus food covers the property cost alone.. not enough to give them more than $2.21 each to spend on the non-essentials, like, say, a swimming pool.

But, why, you wonder, wouldn’t they dump out the water too? Because water isn’t free when you own land.. Their farm is obviously nowhere near a lake or ocean or river or pond. No water in the pool = no swimming and we all know how important swimming is to these men.

I will send my findings to the police so they can start searching land-locked commune-farms for 36 chlorine-smelling, pruny-fingered farmers.

*Gallons into Pounds: Multiply the specific gravity of the liquid by 8.33* (weight in pounds of 1 gallon of water); then multiply this result by the number of gallons, to obtain the weight in pounds: source.

**According to here.

***I can assume that it is a group of men because according to Science ™, women prefer to swim in the ocean, or any body of water influenced by tides/the moon.

Inspired by http://www.flipflopflyin.com/personalpies/

Pop-culture icons replace more conventional, less hysterical, units of measurement on the Celebrity Weighing Scale. More-than-a-little too Spencer’s Gifts-esque to buy, but I had to share…

After all numbers are so final, aren’t they?