On the McDonald’s Japan site, Max found a rather unusual little Flash movie: shoulder and back exercises to stay healthy while consuming chiizubaagaa setto, I guess. (That’s cheeseburger set, the equivalent of a cheeseburger Extra Value Meal.) I thought they looked like the bust exercises from Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, but I have been told I am a perv for thinking so. Hmph. Anyway, it’s cute but strange. Enjoy.

When Ruth Moline decided she wanted Sidney Culbert’s hand forever, she said the three magic words, the phrase that would make her man’s heart flutter, then soar:

“Teach me Esperanto.”

And with that, Sidney was hers.

Sidney Culbert, who died two weeks ago aged 90, seems to have been a fascinating man. There aren’t many 14 year-olds like this, for example:

A standout student at Stadium High School who was disdainful of sports, he regularly organized the neighborhood children into performing Shakespeare plays. “He was putting on ‘Titus Andronicus’ at 14,” said nephew John Terrien, 53, of Tacoma.

“And he made damn sure people knew their lines.”

Max vents his spleen is a new blog, with posts about language and the travails of running an online business. Looks like a good read. (Full disclosure: Max is a friend of mine. But it looks like a good read anyway. You will want to read the ongoing tales of C. Trust me on this.)

In a MeFi post today about Ray Davies, staggernation mentioned this wonderful conversation between Elliott Smith and Ray Davies from the May/June issue of Filter Magazine. At the time, Elliott seemed excited about getting his album finished and touring. It was spring and there was a lot of hope in the air. I guess that changed by autumn.

I suppose this is one of those things that everyone is linking to, or everyone saw last week before I did, or whatever. But, darn, it’s cool. Color Match Remix is a page with sliders you can adjust to get color combinations for web or other use. Very very neat.

A Florida parent is so offended by his daughter’s school mascot, a devil, that he is offering to pay all costs connected with replacing it with something more innocuous. The father insists that it’s an issue of the separation of church and state — that a devil is the equivalent of a cross as a school mascot. I read this with interest since my company has a devil in its logo. It certainly isn’t meant to be offensive; it was just a good way to depict an impish troublemaker.

I’ve added another style to the blog. To see it, just click in “Green Boxes” in the menu. This one’s kind of springlike, which is odd for November. It also is dark on light as opposed to my usual light on dark. I have some other styles in mind, too. I’ll just keep adding more — now that I’ve made the jump to a completely CSS based page, changes are easy.

Now that I’ve wasted time on this, time to get back to actual work!

The Ford C. Frick Award is presented annually by the National Baseball Hall of Fame to a broadcaster for major contributions to the game of baseball. Now this year, for the first time, fans can vote on which broadcasters deserve to be on the final ballot for the award. Voting is open throughout December, and you can vote once a day. Vote early, vote often, vote Dave Niehaus. And if you vote for Ron Fairly, I will come over to your house and beat you with a stick.

The Seattle P-I has a story today listing the top 10 speed traps in the state, all in Western Washington. I’ve only been pulled over once on the freeway, but it was at one of these spots. And I have seen State Patrol cars hiding at milepost 174 on I-5, several times. I drove back and forth from Olympia a couple times a week for a year, though, and never ran into trouble at milepost 110.

While searching for information about my problems remembering faces (my students are pretty familiar with that), I found information about prosopagnosia, or face blindness. If you have this condition, you are unable to easily recognize or remember faces — the face-recognition center of the brain doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. I wrote up a MetaFilter post on the topic, with a bunch of links to prosopagnosia sites, and they are well worth checking out. One of the sites even allows you to take online tests to assess your face recognition ability. Whether I have full-fledged face blindness, I don’t know, but I do seem to have some amount of it. I have trouble recognizing most people “out of context.”