Years ago I had a bad movie viewing experience I can't actually recall at Har Mar Theater in Roseville. As an experiment in how rumors spread and as mild revenge I decided that every time someone mentioned the Har Mar Theater I was going to let them know that once a rat ran across my foot while I was watching a movie there. It's not true, but I figured it was a story that people would pass on to friends.

This weekend was full of discoveries involving ivy and stucco and removing the former from the later. Summarizing them we have:

1. Don't. Keep them away from one another. If you have a stucco home and your neighbor plants ivy secretly poison it.
2. If there is ivy on your stucco, just leave it there. Removing it is not worth the pain.
3. If you do remove the ivy, remove it completely. If you pull it off and plan on getting the residual debris later, you're going to find it's dried to a state where it can no longer be pulled off in strands like it can be when green.
4. If you've let residual ivy dry to the point where it's brittle, plan on a day full of power washers, long handled brushes, and ladders. Try to drink a lot. Expect to repaint.

A little googling shows I'm the first person to (publically) coin the phrase pocket pair palsy to describe the adrenaline powered tremors poker players get when they've got a good hand. Dibs.

Comments

I would argue that palsy is not the best condition to compare this to. While involuntary movement is occasionally the result of palsy, paralysis is more common and likely. Some definitions of palsy do not even include tremor-like movements.

When getting or giving directions I always prefer a map to written directions. Maps are great because they don't become useless if you make a wrong turn. With a good map you can always find where on it you are and can always build a new route to your destination.

Unfortunately, one can't always produce a map on the spot -- especially a good map. In those cases you have to fall back on written directions. I've given and received plenty of directions, some good, but mostly bad. I'm thinking a list of guidelines to use when vetting directions could help.

I was just digging through some old files, and I came across my first web pages. They were hand written HTML done in late 1995. Among the worst of them design-wise was my 'Adopt a Vegetarian' page. It was a joke started in October 1995 wherein non-vegetarians would "adopt" vegetarians and agree to eat twice as much meat, so as to balance the vegetarian out.

The Adopt a Vegetarian website was up before most of the world had even heard of the web, and certainly before folks learned not to take anything on-line too seriously. The volume of vitriolic hate mail I got was amazing. I wish I'd have saved them. The site existed during the period when the mainstream press was writing a lot of "gee whiz, look at this crazy website" articles. I ended up getting written about in a few different publications including Der Spiegel (wikipedia), which I've got clipped and stored somewhere.

The w3c, the nominal leader of web standards, has a recommendation against using click here or here as the text for links on web pages. In addition to the good reasons they provide, there's google to consider. Google assigns page rank to web sites based on, among a great many other things, the text used in links to that page. When you link to https://ry4an.org/ with ry4an as the link text I get more closely associated with the term ry4an in google's rankings. However, when you link to a page using generic link text, such as here or click here you're not really helping anyone to find anything any easier.

I eat pretzels like Darwin would have. It's a constant survival of the fittest competition. I select two pretzels, eat whichever is most flawed, select another, re-test, and just keep going from there. At the end I've got the best pretzel of the whole bag left, which I then eat.

Admittedly it's not an actual test of the pretzels' fitness to survive -- the pretzels with inferior qualities aren't dying off due to failure to feed themselves and attract mates. Really it's just their ability to conform to my invented notion of the master pretzel, but if you go around saying you eat pretzels like Hitler people back away slowly.

On Tuesday some friends and I were talking about how we immaturely approached alcohol back in the dorms, and I was thinking it would be fun to take out a full (or half) page ad in the student paper, The Minnesota Daily, like this:

WE LIVED IN THE DORMS. WE DRANK.

WE COULDN'T HOLD OUR LIQUOR.

Thank you, Resident Hall Facilities Staff, for your

service above and beyond the call of duty. We're sorry.

It's not much of a creation, but I recently made a T-shirt that says, "I BUY LIQUOR FOR MINORS" in nice white on black lettering. I've worn it out a few times including to the Minnesota State Fair, mostly just to gauge responses to the sentiment. It seems the average parent furrows their brow, the average teenager looks intrigued, and the average bartender will still sell me two beers. I didn't actually have a single youth ask me to buy liquor for them, and all the people who actually told me they liked the shirt were in their 20s or 30s. Completely not the responses I expected.

Back when I started at the University of Minnesota in 1995 the course registration system was terminal/telnet based. Students would register using a clumsy mainframe-style form interface. When a class a student wanted was full or required unsatisfied prerequisites, the student come supplicant would go to the department to beg for a "magic number" which, when input into the on-line registration system, would allow him or her admission into the course.