Happy New Year and welcome to the new decade!  Wait… you say the decade doesn’t actually start until next year because there was no year zero meaning that the “first” decade ran from years 1 AD through 10 AD?  Well that’s just smashing… and if you’re specifically describing the 201st decade in times AD on the Julian and Gregorian calendars, you’re absolutely right.  Only problem is that this particular type of breakdown (ie: decades in relation to an origination date that is the beginning of the common era) is useful and/or relevant approximately… never.

Heck, we’re substantially more likely to talk about our own personal decades even though those often not only fail to correspond to ten year periods beginning in a year ending in 1, but also don’t happen to fall on the first/last day of the year. Even more often, we identify decades by a year’s digit in the tens place… the 70’s, the 80’s, the 90’s, etc.  We also say that summer runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day, despite the astronomical dates being a few weeks later (not to mention the meteorological dates in fact corresponding to the beginnings and ends of months).   Would you want to show up to a Memorial Day BBQ and tell everyone that they still had just over a fortnight until they could really celebrate summer’s arrival?  I didn’t think so.

So yeah, it’s not wrong to say that “the decade” doesn’t start until next year… it’s just that if you want to make that claim you’re talking about a particular ten year period that is only relevant to a limited number of people … and it doesn’t negate the fact that the decade of the aughts has ended.

Sheesh.  Anyway, good riddance to the aughts.  Here’s to hoping the new decade (“the teens?”)  will be better!

Just wanted to post a few updates on items I had previously mentioned…

• After surviving another bout with forms, I served my jury duty last week.  As instructed, I showed up at the courthouse at 10:30 AM and found the line to sign in… a line that was at least 75 people long when I arrived.  In fact, there were probably over 100 people ahead of me in the check-in line, but I could only see 75 from where I was standing (and yes, I did count them all).  After I signed in, I sat around for a few hours before having my name called to be a potential juror.  Only thing was that they called my name as the courthouse broke for lunch at 1 PM.  When I returned from lunch at the appointed time (2:10), myself and the other potential jurors were met with… nothing… for another half hour or so.  When the court personnel finally called for us, we were told… that we weren’t needed and we could go home.  So basically, I went to the court, did a bureaucratic shuffle, waited around a bunch, then went home.  And now, I’m done with jury duty for two years.
• A couple weeks ago, I also mentioned the upcoming Monopoly City Streets game.  Since then, the game launched to a mess of technical difficulties and incompetent administration.  From day one, it was clear that the Hasbro people weren’t prepared to launch and that the game was basically in pre-beta form.  Since then, the hardware has been upgraded to handle the traffic, the rules of how to play the game have been fleshed out a bit and the game has been reset.  Unfortunately, Hasbro still seems to have no idea what they’re doing.  Gameplay updates have made the game pretty much entirely unappealing and – last I checked – there was still no real mechanism for preventing multi abuse.  Simply put, I can’t recommend Monopoly City Streets anymore… it looks more like a waste of time than anything.
• Finally, I haven’t given any updates on the filming of The Real World lately.  Mostly, that’s because there’s nothing really to update.  They’re still in the house across the street, but whatever drama may or may not be going on hasn’t spilled out into the streets… at least not that I’ve seen.  I still see people walking by and pointing out the house now and then, but there aren’t substantial gawkers, stalkers or groupies around.  Pretty mundane stuff, really.

Although I’ve always been a gaming enthusiast, I’ve never been a big fan of Monopoly.  The game takes an awful long time and there’s just too much chance involved.  However, I did sit up and take notice when I heard about Monopoly City Streets, a live worldwide game of Monopoly City that allows players all over the world to buy, develop and sell real world streets.  The game, a collaboration between Hasbro and Google Maps, launches tomorrow and is slated to run for four months.

Early reviews of the game from Wired and The Guardian have been lukewarm at best, but both agree with the sentiment that it’s kind of cool to own a chunk of your neighborhood.  And who knows?  Perhaps with a larger playerbase, the game becomes more interesting?

I’m going to sign up as soon as streets become available to purchase.  My only question now is where to start?  After all, I’ve had plenty of my own neighborhoods.  Do I pick up a high-profile street like DC’s Connecticut Avenue or San Francisco’s Haight and Ashbury?  Do I go for a locally prominent street like Pittsburgh’s Fifth or Forbes Avenues?  Or do I just try and buy up an entire small town, like Syracuse?  It appears that each street can only have one owner worldwide, so that first pick is going to be a big investment!

What street would you want to own?  If you sign up, lemme know in the comments!

When I was in Junior High, my cousin told me all about how comets or meteors could fall to Earth and wipe out the planet.  For a year or so I actually spent a nontrivial amount of time actually worrying about this… as if there were anything that I could do about it!  To this day, it’s the first thing that I think of that could disrupt seemingly inevitable events.

I’m not sure if this was the seed that planted the idea or if it were just another stop along the road, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve had a bizarre and macabre fascination with cataclysm and human civilization-threatening events.  I don’t even know what it is about it that intrigues me so much.  Maybe it’s the scale of the thing?  Maybe it’s the knowledge that nobody will ever tell the tale of what happened… because we’ll all be gone by then.

In any case, I couldn’t help but take an interest today when Slate published a “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” quiz that presents a user with 144 preselected factors from which one can select up to five causes of the end of the USA.  Responses are mapped on two axes:  whether the source is manmade or natural and whether the events relate to heavy or trivial death tolls.  Finally, a classification is given for your ideas about the USA’s demise.

I couldn’t help myself but to play twice.  The five catastrophes that I first chose were:  supervolcano, ocean acidification, geographical sorting, alien invasion and (of course) asteroid.  These choices trend towards “nature’s fault” and “everybody dies.”  My second five were:  information war, electromagnetic pulse, antibiotic resistance, synthesized supervirus and internal guerilla warfare.  Again, we’re firmly in “everybody dies” territory, but this time it’s overwhelmingly man’s fault.  Happy thoughts!

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing, a classic Internet meme, courtesy of Joel and Alex Veitch and rathergood.com:

Here’s irony for you:

Last night, I’m watching an old episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In the episode, the gang lampoons a guy who becomes “famous” for dancing in front of an assortment of backgrounds on public access television (clip here). Now silly ol’ me thought this was just a commentary on how easily that celebrity can be created, utilizing some ridiculous dancing guy example.

But this morning (and without any reference to the show), I found that they actually had someone very specific in mind: Matt Harding.  Here’s the latest in the series of videos that has made Matt famous around the world.  He dances in front of some scenery… and it’s awesome:

I couldn’t help but look at this snazzy analog/digital hybrid clock and laugh a bit. You see, it’s not the unusual method of displaying time that caught my attention, but rather the actual time being displayed here. Next time you come across analog timepieces in a magazine or while browsing a store, check out the time that they’re set to. More often than not, it’s 10:10.

There’s an urban legend that this relates back to Abe Lincoln or JFK’s time of death, but in reality, the choice is much more practical than that. Pointing the clock hands at 2 and 10 serves two marketing purposes: it frames the manufacturer’s name/logo (often placed below the 12) and it makes the hands form a happy little “smiley face.”

The irony here, of course, is that there is no logo on the clock front and there’s no hour hand to form the other half of the “smile.” Nevertheless, Pinto chose to make a nod to the 10:10 tradition, so I’m giving them some props.

Last week, renowned author Michael Crichton lost his battle with cancer.  Crichton, of course, is best known for Jurassic Park.  In one of those coincidences that has to make you scratch your head, it was on that same day that researchers in Japan announced the successful cloning of mice that had been frozen in permafrost for 16 years.  This breakthrough raises hopes that a frozen and now extinct woolly mammoth may one day be cloned an introduced into a real-life Pleistocene Park.  Maybe someone should run the film by these guys, eh?

Transformation Complete!

I’ve never been a big fan of Halloween. The whole dressing up aspect just never appealed to me in any real way. Most of my costumes were pretty lame last second ideas that I came up with based on the resources I had at hand the night before. Needless to say, I didn’t have a costume this year… at least not for myself. While some people costume their dog or cat, I wanted to take things a step further: I made a “costume” for the elevator in my apartment building.

When I moved into my building, I noticed that the elevator was manufactured by and labeled as a “Collins Elevator.” One thought about this led to another, and the inevitable conclusion quickly became clear: for Halloween, I needed to turn this into a Phil Collins Elevator.

So I pulled some appropriate pictures off the Internet, printed up a few memorable passages from hits like Sussudio and Against All Odds and in the early morning hours of October 31, installed my “costume” in the elevator. Here’s how it all looked.

Sadly, the only feedback I got was rather negative. The one person on the elevator when I rode down later in the morning took an unabashedly negative view of the situation. “I don’t know what this means,” he lamented in a petulant fashion. Even after pointing out the Phil Collins label, he remained humorless and bitter, chalking the whole thing up to the work of “some nutcase” (no, I didn’t take credit). When I got home from work, it was all gone. The lesson here, I think, is that DC’s reputation for being overly serious and lame may be well-deserved!

I just want to take a second here to post a shout out to my boy Dan, who’s moving from DC to Chicago today. He’ll be stopping to spend a night in Ohio… and thankfully, he won’t be too close to New Knoxville, home of these superfly dancing preachers (who may be a bit creepy as well)… happy trails!

(link courtesy Life of Justin)