Daily Archives: 4/11/2005

Poison Your Kids with Fast Food and Stupidity!

Dinosaur PlacematsApparently a fast food chain in Tennessee has decided to use material from Kent Hovind (aka Doctor Dino) to adorn the placemats they hand out to kids in an attempt to “educate” them about dinosaurs. It’s a pity really, because Dr. Dino doesn’t actually know anything about dinosaurs. Or rather, virtually everything he does know would seem to be wrong. Try checking out the front the front and the back.

Scientist’s have theorized that the T-rex could probably breathe fire.

If you could get near him, you could very easily pull off the arm of the T-Rex, He would die because he would bleed to death.

I think the stupidity is significantly enhanced by the ransom-note typography as well.

On the pope’s funeral…

Estimates are varied, but it seems clear that over a million people saw the pope’s body before he was finally buried over the weekend. Keeping with the spirit of brainwagon, let’s not dwell on the greater impact this man’s life had on the world, but rather just concentrate on the trivial aspects.

Assume that each person in line is standing 18″ from the person in front of them (that’s a pretty tight line, but let’s work with that. One million people standing in such a line works out to 284 miles. If we assume a reasonable walking pace of three miles per hour, then we have people walking past the pope 24 hours a day for nearly four days. Yes, I know, they weren’t single file, but sheesh. It’s still an amazing turnout.

Spammers wear an IE hat…

I must admit, I’ve been a teeny bit perplexed by one of my website statistics: the majority of my traffic appears to still be using Internet Explorer. I would like to think that brainwagon readers are a bit more discerning, and would shift to using Firefox or Mozilla, both much better choices. But over at the Jer zone, they seemed to have uncovered something interesting: referer spammers (which sadly, still account for the vast majority of my traffic) invariably choose to masquerade as Internet Explorer. When you take that into account, Mozilla, Firefox and Safari jump WAY up in the popularity counts.

Thanks to Dan for pointing this out.

Learn Chinese Characters

Thanks to Susan for telling me about zhongwen.com, really cool site for learning chinese characters. I’m not sure how long this particular brain worm will last, but until it does fades, I’ll have a nice online reference for my exploration of Chinese characters.

If you know zero Chinese (like me), you can still use this site to find characters by using stroke count (the number of strokes in a character). For instance, I saw this character on the menu for my local Chinese restaurant.

From a Chinese Menu

Neat, huh?

A’s v. Blue Jays

With any luck, I’ll be podcasting, blogging, and posting photos from the A’s home opener later tonight.

Update: It’s looking good. I have three separate devices charging their lithium ion batteries as I write this.