i have recently had an important revelation about the future.

flying cars are a terrible idea.

i know that they're supposed to represent the awesome inventions that science has in store for us and the triumph of technology and progress...but have you ever really stopped to think about it for a minute?

i did for the first time yesterday, when i was reflecting on how bad lots of people seem to be at driving their normal, non-flying cars. i've started riding my bike just about everywhere recently; i don't really drive much anymore (and when i do it's only a non-flying car) and riding the bus isn't usually much faster than riding my bike. and it costs money. and it doesn't burn calories. and it sometimes involves standing around outside for a long time.

all this time on my bike has given me a lot of chances to interact with drivers. and many of them are awful at driving. it's really helped me to appreciate the car-free parts of the city—i love the greenways and bike paths that make it possible for me to get places without much car traffic.

but it's also made me realize that we are far from ready for flying cars. can you imagine what it would be like? it's bad enough to have to deal with cars in the same plane as you when you're riding a bike—but from now on, when i have a close call with someone i'll remember: at least they didn't have the opportunity to crowd me from above!

science, i own you an apology. i'm sorry for being disappointed in you for all these years for your failure to produce flying cars. i think you really have our best interests at heart. please don't ever make flying cars happen, ever. teleportation devices, on the other hand, are long overdue.

open office has a superior sense of the absurd, or at least a very weird spellcheck matching formula.

while unpacking a box tonight i found a list i started of bizarre open office spellcheck suggestions. at one time in my life i was trying to write papers for school using open office since i didn't have a copy of word. this actually turned out to be rather difficult; classmates couldn't open my attachments, i didn't have powerpoint, formatting was nearly impossible, and there was an exciting "crash for no good reason and don't save any changes" feature.

i hear that open office has gotten a lot more stable and user friendly these days, and i realize that free software has certain tradeoffs and i should be appreciative of what was available to me, but one night i was up really late working hard on a paper and i started to feel like spellcheck was messing with me on purpose.

this was the order in which spellcheck suggested these words. and i feel i should mention that each of these words were completely unrelated to the actual word i'd misspelled (or the term with which the open office dictionary was not acquainted)—like completely unrelated. like none of the same letters, and nothing approaching the same number of letters:

suboptimal (okay, that's a reasonable word at least)
buttermilk (funny because it's random)
electroencephalographic (what?)
parallelepiped (i give up.)

the antidote to those awesome/horrifying big dog/little dog videos

(50X) Autonomously folding a pile of 5 previously-unseen towels


while i know that robotics technology generally boils down to military-related applications, it's kind of cute to see this robot folding laundry.

also, the highest rated comment insults naysayers by quoting murray head's "one night in bangkok," which wikipedia calls "a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek denunciation of the city's moral corruption and comparative glorification of the intellectual purity of chess: e.g., 'the queens we use would not excite you.'" "one night in bangkok" is also notable for being the last show tune to make into the top five most popular american songs. and it is from a musical about a chess match between an american and a soviet chess player. the 80's were really a different time. seriously.


one night in bangkok

support math and science education in a title i middle school with: But Where's the Spleen?

have you ever wished that you could help a new math and science teacher at a middle school in a very challenging area make these subjects more accessible to her students? good news! here's a chance! a good friend of mine has a donors choose project that you can support! check it out:

But Where's the Spleen?

update: the project has been fully funded! yay! she's a great teacher, and i know this will help make her students even more successful.

update update: you can still check out donors choose if you're in the mood to support projects like this!

in which my relationship with the jesus is distilled into two songs.

in related news, grooveshark has caused me to realize that pedro the lion's achilles heel comes closest to summarizing my own personal theology than anything else i've read or heard lately. please enjoy a selection below.

the fleecing:


foregone conclusions:

can we all just agree that grooveshark is totally amazing?

seriously, dudes! i am still not sure how grooveshark works (probably witchcraft and/or magic, like most things on the internons) but what i do know is that you can type a song title or artist or album name into a box and then it will play the song for you. you should probably try it out right now.

well, everyone likes something different, don't they?

"i thought the idea of scour area polygons was really interesting."

a truly excellent movie (nsfw unless you have a dinosaur hookup-positive, marijuana-friendly workplace. [hey, it's 2009; anything is possible.])

this movie made my morning:



The Whitest Kids U' Know "The Dinosaur Rap"

mouse-over text is a magical thing (nsfw)

xkcd is brilliant, but you already knew that. until i recently got a new version of firefox, i could only read the first few words of the mouse-over text, but now i can read it all! which has meant that i've needed to go back to the beginning to read all of the mouse-over text. and oh man, some of it is so funny! observe:

funny, no?

now try looking at this:

while thinking about the fact that the mouse-over text says, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a BITCH ASS FUCK DAMN"

nsfw, but hilarious.

i try to keep c.w.a.j.a.?. family-friendly, and i think i'm generally pretty successful. but this makes me laugh every time, and i also believe it to be true:


(if you can think of it, there's porn of it. no exceptions.) i hope your boss isn't standing behind you right now, or if she or he is, that they also find this funny.

in related news, i've thought about it some and i'm pretty sure that the internet is 75% porn, 20% cat pictures, and 5% everything else.

jätte bra, sverige!

from the christian peacemaker teams winter 2008 newsletter signs of the times (volume 18, number 4, page 14):

Swedes disarm Iraq-bound weapons
CPT Reserve Corps member Martin Smedjeback and three other activists entered two arms plants in Sweden 16 October and disarmed weapons destined for use in Iraq.

The simultaneous actions at BAE Systems and Saab plants disabled antitank grenade launchers, parts for Howitzer 77 and Archer artillery systems and other armaments used in the illegal war and occupation of Iraq. After disabling the weapons, the activists alerted police of their presence inside the supposedly high-security areas.

"When your government supports an illegal war and sells arms to dictatorships, it's time for ordinary citizens like us to take action," said supporter Annika Spalde.

christian peacemaker teams, whose motto is "Getting in the Way," asks, "What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" during the season in which christians observe the birth of christ, it seems like a particularly reasonable question.

spam never sleeps.

i used to pay a lot more attention to my spam than i do now, because i found the titles (and sometimes even the emails themselves) so amusing. (i still like these two in particular.)

the gmail spam filter is pretty solid, though, so i haven't seen much of it lately. (although once and awhile i notice that i have 1000 message in my spam folder. awesome.) in the last month or so, though, some spammy spam has been sneaking into my inbox. a lot of it has been in hebrew, so whether or not it has amusing content i cannot tell you. there was one the other day entitled: "ASSISTANCE" and inside it said, "ASSISTANCE" and there was a word document about which i am very curious but which i am not planning to open because compy is grumpy enough already without being asked for ASSISTANCE by strangers.

we're downsizing!

it recently occurred to me that since the super slow load time of c.w.a.j.a.?. kind of bummed me out, it might also bother others. and it further occurred to me that since i'm the only one who could actually do something about it, i should.

so, c.w.a.j.a.?. has now slimmed down to 50 posts on the front page, instead of 100. (this has the additional advantage of getting the really slow loading [but hilarious!] "grandkids in the movies" clip off the front page sooner. because sheesh hulu, is your server powered by hamsters on treadmills or something?)

and now you know.

my goodness, where do i sign up?

from the most bizarre banner ad i've ever seen (it was for old spice):

"come experience what it would be like to make various two things happen online!"

can we all just agree that the velvet teen is absolutely fantastic?

i have liked them for a long time, but recently i've been listening to a tape that has mates of state (surely you remember them) and the velvet teen on it and it is amazing.

if my tape recorder had fast forward or rewind, i would definitely fast forward or rewind to the velvet teen part. but since it doesn't, i've figured out right about where i need to play the tape until on the opposite side in order to arrive at the velvet teen part.

my favorite favorite favorite velvet teen song is milo 7. i have scoured the intertubes to try to find you a movie of it, but i have been unsuccessful. (there are some nice clips of milo and otis out there, though, so it's not a total loss.)

so. i would recommend to a friend milo 7, and also the album upon which it appears, "great beast february & comasynthesis," which is also known as "plus, minus, equals," and also the velvet teen in general. i hope you like them.

i wonder if that's stickier than regular glucose?

from the ingredients of the "all natural soda premium ginseng ginger ale plus antioxidants: certified with antioxidant vitamins c & e plus vitamin a from beta-carotene no artificial colors or flavors no preservatives no caffeine" that i found in the refrigerator tonight and decided to try:

"filtered carbonated water, gluecose-fructose syrup, brewed chinese ginseng, natural ginger flavor, citric acid, ascorbic acid, vitamin e and beta carotene."

can we all just agree that children's interpretations of the bible can be hilarious?

i know we've already established that three year olds know a lot about science, specifically natural history, but tonight the five year old turned to me while he was brushing his teeth and earnestly explained,

"one time when people were blind, jesus put dirt into their pants, and he peed in it."

he wasn't joking around at all. he was totally serious. i guess that's what two days of vacation bible school will get you these days.

dan savage may be moving in on jesse danger's scientific fact dispensing, but jesse danger can give relationship advice too!

"if you dont fall in love within the first week - sarah - it's not worth it
move on"

take that, scientific fact stealer!

my blog report on "I Punched a Flower in the Face"

my blog report on "I Punched a Flower in the Face"
by sarah.

"I Punched a Flower in the Face" is written by jesse danger, who i believe (at the risk of sounding like a high school yearbook) to be one of the funniest friends i have ever had. ever. in my entire life. he also gives good advice and, although he is generally polite to strangers (being minnesotan and all, doncha know,) he will definitely give off an imma-cut-you vibe to people if they push you around at a rock and roll show. trust me on this one.

"I Punched a Flower in the Face" tends to have short posts, and jesse danger seems to specialize in observations about life in the city. also scientific facts. definitely check out the scientific facts. they're scienterrific!

(read more blog reports)

can we all just agree that dan savage is almost as good of a scientist as jesse danger?

in his most recent column, dan savage answers a letter from someone who's heartbroken over an ex-girlfriend. as he usually does, dan gives the poor guy some good advice [time will fix you right up; see other people], which includes:

Did you know that every ounce of another woman's saliva that you swallow, TOH, shaves a week off the healing process? It's a true and totally scientific fact. I distinctly remember reading it in the Science section of the New York Times this morning.

this is impressive science, naturally, but i still think jesse danger's got him beat when it comes to the science.