Some Blog Site

Transcript:
Late-show host: Ladies and gentlemen … Miss Jepsen!
Carly Rae Jepsen: “Miss Jepsen” sounds too formal.
Late-show host: Can I call you Maybe?

I thought the comic could use another panel, but I decided to give the options here instead. What should Carly Rae Jepsen’s response be?

• No, but you can call me a taxi.
• Sure, just don’t call me late for dinner.
• I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.
• Good night Gracie.

Any other good lines?

Some of you may be thinking “Hey, we already had a round of vacation photos from 2012!”

You are correct, but we took another vacation so now you must endure another set of photos and recap.

I suppose you don’t have to, since you are free to browse to another blog instead of reading this one.

Day 1: Going UP

We drove to the Western Hemisphere’s longest suspension bridge:

Then we drove across it:

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A Letter to the Couple Who was Watching Us from a Window

And that’s how our Tuesday on vacation started. It was supposed to be a fun day – playing miniature golf, eating lunch at a restaurant, and visiting a museum.
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Our two vacations this year have taken us to two of the Great Lakes. With the water levels down slightly, I got to thinking “what if they weren’t so great anymore? What would they be called?”

So I present to you the Good Lakes.

First, a refresher on the names of the Great Lakes:
Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario.

Now, the names of the lakes if they are downgraded to Good Lakes:
Average, Michigan State, Eagle, Westo, and Manitoba.

Average should make sense to anyone.
Michigan State will make sense to those who know what the Big Ten is.
Eagle should make sense to those who know a little bit about Eastern Michigan University.
Westo won’t make sense to anyone. Really, off the top of your head, could you come up with something that would rank below an Erie? I had to look this one up. I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that the Westo tribe is what the Erie tribe became after they got kicked out of the Lake Erie region by the Iroquois.
Manitoba should make sense to us northerners. And if you’re from Manitoba, rest assured that I based the ranking on geographical area and population, not on the quality of the people in the province.

I did not go to the next step of naming the Bad Lakes. Of course, the first one would be Lake Inferior. I’ll let you, dear reader, figure out the names of the other lakes.

Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Usually the debate centers around do only golds count or do all medals count. The seemingly official method is to count by golds, but there are some other ways.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: Grenada won the 2012 Olympic games

The only category which Grenada did not win was normalization by athlete count. In other words, Grenada was very efficient as a country but not so efficient as an Olympic delegation.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2012 Olympics Results page.

In our recent travels, we passed by some state parks. Just outside one of the state parks, some enterprising homeowner was selling wood. The sign on his front yard looked like this:

CAMP
FIRE
WOOD

I think they took the easy way out.

If you were to write the word(s) to indicate wood for a fire for a camp, how would you arrange those words?

Campfire wood ? Sounds like the name of a forest…
Camp firewood ? Sounds like a happy place for children…

Such a dilemma – how to make a compound word out of three words. Which word draws the short straw?

Here’s my answer:
Wood for a fire is firewood.
Fire for a camp is a campfire.
Wood for a fire for a camp is campfirewood.

Why limit a compound word to only two words?

The movie 8 Mile, starring Eminem, is a bit outdated now. It played well in the US, putting some part of Detroit on the map, so to speak, for Americans who might not be familiar with the area otherwise.

It has taken 10 years, but there is now an international version of the movie. Most people outside the USA know Detroit only for the auto show, or maybe gunshots. But now Eminem’s movie has been released in an international format:

It is available in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Japanese. And, to make all those viewers feel more included, all the measurements have been converted to metric (kilometers and such).

For example, instead of “Everybody from the 313”, now it is “Everybody from the 503.6”. I’m sure that makes it much easier for Europeans to understand.