Found Treasures VIII: Singular: Louse

This is a second found treasure that takes a playful stab at my high school English teacher, Mr. Yates.[1] It didn't start out that way, though. At first it was just an exercise in mocking some of the unusual plurals that exist in the English language [2]—though sometimes the fake singulars/plurals I came up with weren't particularly clever themselves. I brought it all back in in the last paragraph, but then it got away from me and ended on a rather abrupt digression from the previously established pattern. It's fun but not important enough to fix up.

Funny Faces

For my maternal grandmother's 80th birthday, we (all of her descendents) wrote down our favorite memory of her [1], which was then bound into a book and given to her. At the same time, we also downloaded the PrankMirror app on our iPads and took funny/bizarre pictures of ourselves (which she then had to identify). Some of ours were too hilarious not to share with a broader audience. Let me know which ones are your favorites!

Graphical Web Page Representation

Today I stumbled onto this website: http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/. It runs an applet (so you must have Java installed) that analyzes the html code of any website you submit (must start with http://) and creates a representative graphical output. The result is pretty neat. Below I'll show you some of the maps I've created using this website.

Movie Review: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 and Part 2 (RiffTrax)

Breaking Dawn [1] was 756 pages long (hardcover) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [2] was 759 pages long (hardcover). Both were made into two movies, each. The Hobbit wasn't even half as long as either, clocking in at a mere 310 pages long. I imagine that when the producers of Breaking Dawn, Part 1 and Part 2 and the producers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 and Part 2 found out that Peter Jackson was making The Hobbit into three movies, they all facepalmed.[3] As it was, two movies was a lot of Breaking Dawn to take. So let's all be glad that The Hobbit wasn't around to put dangerous ideas into their heads.

Lilli Turns Two!

A week ago yesterday Lilli turned two years old. While I was at work, Lilli helped Leann make the cupcakes for her birthday. Well, maybe she just helped lick the frosting off the beater… I came home half an hour early just for the occaision. When I walked through the front door I saw that the apartment had been transformed during my absence. There was yellow crêpe paper strung all over the kitchen—including streamers attached to the blades of the ceiling fan (which is actually pretty cool when you turn it on). Lilli was running around with two punch balloons (Leann prefers these because they're less likely to pop). And there was a big pile of presents in the living room. For dinner we ate her favorite food: beef pot pies.[1]

Horsey Ride

I've been waiting for a long time to post this video because I expected to accumulate more. It's me pretending to be a horse with Lilli riding on my back. She also likes to crawl around with me pretending to be kitties or bears. But the weeks are stretching out and we still don't have videos of the kitties or bears. So here's the horsey video.

Supercali…What?!!

As I've previously mentioned [1], Lilli is pretty good at imitating new words that we teach her. One time, while filming her, I asked her to say "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." Of course, she was unable to:

But then I decided it would be fun to get her to say the syllables separately, on different occasions, and then crop all the videos and stitch them together. She's so cute in each of the videos that I wasn't satisfied to only upload the finished product. So you get to watch the uncut videos for each syllable, first.

Sledding

We've taken Lilli sledding twice now. The first time was before we left Utah. We met up with some of my buddies from high school to say goodbye before our move [1], and went to John Adams Park in Brigham City. The park is mostly a depression and there were spots to sled all the way around the bowl. Lilli and I were feeling fearless, but Leann needed to be reassured. So we started out near the bottom of the hill and once Leann was soothed, we worked our way up to the top of the hill.

Found Treasures VII: Custodial Photographs

For several years as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University (BYU), I worked as a custodian in the evenings. I spend most of my time taking care of the Auxiliary Services Maintenance Building (AXMB), but sometimes I was assigned instead to the Auxiliary Services Laundry Building (AXLB), the University Press Building (UPB), or the Student Auxiliary Services Building (SASB).[1] Now, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, cleaning toilets, etc., while necessary isn't very mentally stimulating. So I sometimes came up with crazy ideas to occupy my mind. And sometimes I even followed through with some of those crazy ideas. Like…

Agent of Chaos

One of Lillian's favorite things to do is take something that is neat and orderly and destroy it. This makes it difficult to fold the laundry [1] or make towers out of her blocks.[2] If she sees a pile of papers and/or magazines on the coffee table [3], she thrusts them all to the floor (and will even start tearing them apart).[4] And she likes to help unload the dishwasher (but she doesn't care about putting anything away). We've even resorted to creating things that are appropriate for her to destroy, like filling an old tissue box with shreds of paper so she can pull them all out and scatter them. But every once in a while she still has a bonanza.

Custom Munchkin Treasure Cards

Last time I introduced you to some door cards I designed for the RPG-spoofing card game, Munchkin.[1] The game is similar to D&D in that you're walking around a dungeon, kicking open doors (e.g. the door cards I designed in my last post) and confronting whatever's inside the next room—monsters, curses, or character cards. But there's another pile of cards—the treasure cards. In most cases you earn treasure cards by defeating monsters. The more powerful the monster(s), the more treasures it's carrying. Treasure cards can be weapons, powerups, enhancers, etc. Here are the ones I designed:

Custom Munchkin Door Cards

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at BYU I was a member of a book club. The president of that book club, my friend Jonathan, discovered the game Munchkin and introduced the rest of us to it. It is a spoof of role-playing games (RPGs), particularly Dungeons and Dragons, and to a lesser extent collectible card games, like Magic: The Gathering. In RPGs a Munchkin is a player that plays competitively, even though RPGs are inherently noncompetitive.[1] Thus the game Munchkin encourages you to play in that fashion—in fact, it's tagline is "Kill the Monsters. Steal the Treasure. Stab Your Buddy." In addition to the original games, there are also several expansion packs. This last Christmas [2] I got the sixth expansion pack, Demented Dungeons. It came with a few blank cards with the implication that I create my own custom cards. So I came up with a few.[3]

Movie Review: New Moon (with RiffTrax)

In 2005 I enrolled in a creative writing class at BYU. I didn't need to take it for credit, I took it because I wanted some motivation to write the many story ideas I have.[1] We had three major writing assignments. The first had to be a short story or a chapter of a novel. The second had to be three poems.[2] For the third we could choose whether to write another short story/chapter or three more poems. The majority of the students in the class (there were only about twenty of us) were girls who were Freshmen or Sophomores and were English majors. I was a bit alarmed that for the first assignment three of them wrote a chapter of a book that dealt with a normal girl in high school who unknowingly started dating a vampire.[3] I didn't know it then, but one year before the novel Twilight had premiered and these impressionable young girls, fresh out of high school, were caught up in the frenzy of it to the point that they were essentially writing knock-offs or fan fiction.[4] That experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that the only way I could bring myself to watch the Twilight movies was with the "spoonful of sugar" that is RiffTrax.[5]

Movie Review: Eclipse (with RiffTrax)

There are a few people in this world that I feel a profound pity for. Among them are the 335 men named Edward Cullen [1], the 360 men named Jacob Black [2], and the 24 women named Bella Swan.[3] That pity is due to their unfortunate and un-sought-for association with the Twilight series of books and films. I cannot bring myself to read the books, but thanks to RiffTrax [4], I can experience the movies buffered from their full effect.

Picnic on the South Fork of the Provo River

This Friday I took Leann and Lillian up Provo Canyon to do some picnicking.[1] At Vivian Park we went up into the mountains, following the South Fork of the Provo River. There are two parks up that way and when I've been up there before I haven't seen very many people, so I thought we'd have the place relatively to ourselves. But both parks were full (and both had weddings being set up). We went to the park farther up (Big Springs Park) and had our picnic anyway—we just had to watch out for flying footballs.

Sun Spots

You might think, from the title of this post, that it has to do with temporary areas of reduced temperature in the photosphere of the sun which are visibly darker than the rest of that celestial body.[1] But there you would be wrong. In the title I am referring to instances where most of the light from the sun is filtered away, leaving only one or two bright spots. The other day Lilli found some of these and was having the darnedest time figuring out what they were. Even more confusing, they would disappear every time she moved in for a closer look.

By Small Things Shall Great Things Pass Away

Like countless children before her, Lillian is discvering that she has a penchant for destruction. I, as an impartial narrator, have been gathering evidence for a month, or so, now. Some of it may shock you, but I give you my word that none of it has been staged or doctored in any way. What you're about to see is footage as raw as it gets. VDIA. As I've been pursuing coverage of these events, I've struggled to find words adequate to describe the horror of the things I've witnessed. In particular, I've had a hard time deciding what word to use to describe Lilli's role in all this.

Boing! Boing!

We generally try to keep Lillian out of the bathroom. There are lots of hazards in there. There are chemicals and medicines in the cabinet under the sink that could poison her or that she could choke on. The toilet, despite being cleaned regularly, is still an infection risk—as is the brush we clean it with. If she gets into the bathtub she could slip and injure herself on the faucet or just hit her head on the bottom. To be sure, there are safe things for her to do in the bathroom—as long as she's supervised. We give her her baths in there, now. She can visit Rillian, the Reptilian Lillian.[1] And a few weeks ago she discovered…

Peekaboo!

There are multiple stages of playing peekaboo with a baby. At first you do the hiding and the baby's job is to giggle. Other names for peekaboo include keek-bo, peep-bo, bo-peep.[1] We never managed to get any good videos of Lillian when we were playing this stage of peekaboo with her—she always stopped to stare at (or even try to grab) the camera. The next stage involves the baby doing the hiding. And this time we've got some videos to showcase.

Little Monkey

Leann is quite fond of baby monkeys [1], particularly the smaller ones and the ones with 'funny headgear', as she puts it. Examples of small monkeys: a baby François' Leaf Monkey (Trachypithecus francoisi; see here), a baby Golden Monkey (Cercopithecus kandti; see here), baby Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia; see here), baby Pygmy Marmosets (Cebuella pygmaea; see here), etc. Examples of monkeys with 'funny headgear': a baby Common Squirrel Monkey (Saimiri sciureus; see here), a Cotton-top Tamarin (Saguinus oedipus; see here), an Emperor Tamarin (Saguinus imperator; see here and a baby here), etc. So when Lilli started acting like a monkey [2], needless to say Leann was thrilled.