I Fought the Law

George Orwell Has a Blog

JMV sent me a link to The Orwell Diaries, a site that's posting George Orwell's entries in his diaries exactly seventy years after he wrote them. I consider this to be really cool. At the very least it may save me the trouble of reading Homage to Catalonia, which I was never able to find in college.

The project started this month, and most of the entries so far are pretty short, so you can easily catch up. It's amazing to see the disdain and sarcasm that somehow comes across in his descriptions of the mundane elements of his surroundings. I found the stuff about the snake to be particularly entertaining.

Caption Contest

This photo from a wedding I appeared in earlier this week seems to have a lot of grist for the caption mill. Leave your entries in the comments.

The Olympics are Stupid

If I were an Olympic swimmer and won a gold medal in Olympic swimming, here are a few things I might say when the post-swimming interviewer asked "What was going through your mind during that final lap?"

1. "Chocolate or vanilla? And I'm not referring to ice cream. Baby."
2. "Donkeys. Hundreds and hundreds of donkeys."
3. "I was think how the ending of Crime and Punishment doesn't get the appreciation it deserves."
4. "Not my investment portfolio, that's for sure. Thank you, Paine Webber."
5. "SurehopeIwinthisracesurehopeIwinthisracesurehopeIwinthisrace."
6. "I was trying to figure out whether Hermione really comes back to life at the end of A Winter's Tale or whether she was just in hiding. That's been driving me crazy ever since high school."
7. "Psychotropic chemicals, and a whole lot of them, too."

Vindicated

Dr. M and I made a third effort at Geeks Who Drink this week. After our disappointing first experience and a second salvo in which we got resoundingly clobbered, we took home the gold on Wednesday. And by "gold" I mean "thirty-dollar gift certificate to McCabe's Bistro and Pub." You can see us in all of our gift-certificate-having glory here, though you'll have to get past a possibly not-work-safe photo of a part of a woman's breast to get there.

The host, judging by the blog post, seems to credit our success to a low turnout precipitated by precipitation. However, there were a number of other factors contributing to our triumph. They include, in no particular order:

1. The fact that the answer to "Which goth band...?" happened to be Bauhaus, the only goth band I know of.
2. Dr. M's knowledge of white reggae.
3. My surprising ability to identify porn actors by sight (I -- that's right, "I," not "we" -- got five out of eight on the visual round, a score bested by no one).
4. The fact that we were able to put our rudimentary Spanish skills together and independently derive "Lucha Libre" from its English translation.
5. Magic: The Gathering implausibly showing up as an answer in round seven.
6. Dr. M's recall for state names and my recall for state capitols.
7. The fact that the final round included both a physics question and an astronomy question (though, as the boob picture makes clear, I was not the person most qualified to identify Orion as the constellation that includes Bellatrix, Betelgeuse, and Rigel).
8. Only one member of our team was drinking (cider!) and he didn't win a single free beer.

And, you know, the fact that there were only seven teams playing.

Colorado and Three-Letter Words

My new home state has just added "WTF" to the list of three-letter combinations that are prohibited from appearing on license plates. The list now stands at 261.

Here's and interesting and annoying article about it, which discusses some of the other verboten combinations. In addition to typically offensive words, Colorado also bans animal words from license plates for some reason. I mean, WTF?

I Need to Stop Deleting Comments

As I've mentioned before, this blog, along with perhaps the entirety of Cementhorizon, is under constant assault by Russian spambots who litter the comments sections with nonsensical links to God-knows-what. Every once in a while I'll go in and delete them, and lately I haven't been able to do that without also accidentally deleting legitimate comments.

So, if you've seen your own comments disappear in recent weeks, don't be offended. I'm just an idiot.

I'm going to live with the clutter of unapproved Russian comments in the interest of keeping legitimate comments on the site.

Small Children Riding Sheep: A Day at the Arapahoe County Fair

As part of our ongoing effort to "get out there" and see what's going on in our strange new environs, Dr. M and I swung by the Arapahoe County Fair today. We had previously been to the Los Angeles and Alameda County Fairs, though not this year of course, and we were curious to see how the mile high version would compare.

The first thing we saw once we got past the admissions booth was a whole bunch of sheep:

It turns out that these sheep would later be used as part of one of the most bizarre spectacles either of us had ever witnessed. More on that later. For now, more animals!

Here's a pig lounging adorably in his own filth, blissfully unaware of his delicious destiny:

This next pig, judging by his attitude, had a better idea of what was going on. But still cute:

Here's a cow that was peeking at us from behind some kind of curtain, or at least she was staring at us until we tried to to take her picture:

This bird, I'm sure, could make quite a name for himself in East Palo Alto before being razored to death by another bird:

But this cock wasn't the cock of the roost by any means. No, that honor went to this guy:

It should come as no surprise that I felt compelled to take that picture.

The last animal was saw was this adorable baby goat. Though as we got closer the cuteness diminished and the sinisterness increased:

There were also camels available for riding purposes:

The girl who was next in line when I took this picture was wearing a shirt that said "I [Heart] Nerds." A shot of her on the camel would have made for a much better picture. But I had to hurry and get back to...

The tractor pull!

Now, having done absolutely no research into the subject and having now attended exactly one tractor pull, here's what I was able to piece together as to how the event works. The yellow thing (which is hooked to a much larger tractor not visible in the picture) has a giant piece of metal that drags on the ground (visible in the picture). On top of the yellow thing is that green and black thing that says "MSE" on it. As the small tractor pulls the apparatus, the MSE thing moves along the yellow thing toward the small tractor, steadily increasing the downward force on the metal thing, effectively making it heavier. At some point, the metal thing gets too heavy to move, at which point the small tractor can go no further and the judge comes and measures how far the small tractor got before stopping. Whoever goes the farthest wins. Tractor + driver has to be 1,000 pounds or less. It's all very riveting.

This was an officially sanctioned event, not surprisingly. The announcer (in the red hat) sounded like a Phil Hendrie character:

Of course, it's not all about mechanics. You need to bring your mental game as well. This guy gave his tractor a scary face and a rotating police car light to intimidate the other contestants:

He performed well, but I don't know if he won.

Another competition was "Dock Dogs," in which people competed to see whose dog could jump the farthest into a swimming pool.

We observed this event from precisely the wrong angle, sadly.

But the best competition, by far, was "Mutton Bustin'," which can only be described as a bullriding competition where the bulls have been replaced with sheep and the cowboys have been replaced with little children (contestants had to be six years or younger and weigh sixty pounds or less). This was at once hilarious and tragic, and we ended up getting into a debate as to whether we will allow our children to Bust Mutton when they're old enough (the youngest contestant we saw was three).

This was the first kid we saw. She did very well:

The older kid in the loud outfit was responsible for helping the riders up after they fell off the sheep. Some riders didn't make it that far:

The little flailing limbs. I just can't not laugh.

Once again, the mental game is important. Sometimes you need to overcome the force of gravity and the pressures of your own dignity and cling sideways to a goddamn sheep:

After losing their respective kids (which often involved falling down with the kid still attached), the sheep all congregated at the other side of the arena and calmly awaited their next humiliation:

In the final analysis, this wasn't nearly as big of a production as the other fairs we've been to, but we still had a great time, due mainly to the opportunity to watch small children fall off of sheep. We missed out on the demolition derby, unfortunately. Perhaps next year.

Also, here's a picture Dr. M took of a really pretty cloud formation. Colorado is good at those: