This weekend I found a truly entertaining and enlightening read: The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose on the Gutenberg Project. Some nice excerpts:

BASKET-MAKING. The good old trade of basket-making;
copulation, or making feet for children’s stockings.

BED-MAKER. Women employed at Cambridge to attend
on the Students, sweep his room, &c. They will put their
hands to any thing, and are generally blest with a pretty
family of daughters: who unmake the beds, as fast as they
are made by their mothers.

DUTCH FEAST. Where the entertainer gets drunk before
his guest.

HOPPER-ARSED. Having large projecting buttocks: from
their resemblance to a small basket, called a hopper or
hoppet, worn by husbandmen for containing seed corn,
when they sow the land.

MARRIAGE MUSIC. The squalling and crying of children.

OYSTER. A gob of thick phlegm, spit by a consumptive
man; in law Latin, UNUM VIRIDUM GOBBUM

RUM DOXY. A fine wench. CANT.

SHITING THROUGH THE TEETH. Vomiting. Hark ye,
friend, have you got a padlock on your arse, that you shite
through your teeth? Vulgar address to one vomiting.

Read up and enjoy!

The Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus lost power today at 12:22 for a bit less than a minute. Apparently PG&E reported an “event” in South San Jose and our power was affected.

So, in any case, the generator works, and all of our desktops have been reboot-tested. :) The generator is really loud.

Well, it turns out, sometimes I just have to be a follower instead of a leader. :)

Jeremy Zawodny recently mentioned that he really liked the Weber Baby Q grill, and I looked around a bit at that point. I really like the concept of the Baby Q, being really portable and quite a good grill.

It got almost completely 100% positive reviews on Amazon, and everyone seems to love it. It’s only $130 ($127.95 on Amazon, $129.99 at Sears) so I figured what the heck, I should get one. We happened to go by a Sears, so I picked one up yesterday. I’ll have to say, people were right, it’s really nice.

I’m looking forward to many trips this summer to “picnic” with a portable grill. :) I still need to pick up the adapter hose and a 20lb tank to go with mine, but I think one of the stronger points of this grill is that you can use either the big tank, or the super-portable 1lb tanks.

Christy and Greg have been performing a very interesting social experiment in deviant behaviour: What would someone do if you just took something from their shopping cart?

This fascinates me, as I’m always up for a good-natured social experiment. When I was in high school, I tried one of my own: I did not shave for about three weeks. During the latter half of the three weeks, I looked completely homeless and ragged. I made mental notes about the differences in the way teachers and students acted towards me, using my “old self” as a baseline. The reality was, regardless of what people say, and how much they think they don’t pre-judge people, they do.

Everyone acted completely different around me, not being nice to me, being very short with me, not wanting to be seen with me, etc. Fascinating. Oh well, back to the story at hand: Read all about Christy and Greg’s findings.