Robots: Achievement of the Decade

NATLBSB

Oh, and you gotta respect the kid who did "Can You Turn a Glass of Water Upside Down Without Spilling? Yes" Looks like it took five minutes to do. Plus you can still see marker stains on his hand! [link]

Gummy Bear in molten potassium chlorate (video)

Quite a violent reaction, with flames and large amounts of carbon dioxide, steam, etc. being released. Apparently there's a lot of energy contained in a Gummi Bear....

So I sent an "I'm going to be out sick" email at around 4:30. Since then, have been procrastinating calling the guy because a) I hate personal contact and b) I'm not reeeeeallly sick, am I, I could probably go in tomorrow after all/no I couldn't/yes I could/don't I deserve a sick day/but I'm not really sick so I'll feel bad/but will I really feel so much better if I go in?/you'll feel more virtuous/more virtuous? will I really?/...no. So I finally called, and he said that he'd already got me covered. Dude, then REPLY TO MY EMAIL.

Jumping back to the Oscars last night. I'm sorry I wasn't on for the play by play! Watched then with DH and we discusses the nuances as it went. Alas, many of my students were not excited about discussing the show today...a majority of them didn't even watch them! (gasp! they may have to fail!) At least most of my Stagecraft class watched the show and we had a lively discussion for about 20 minutes this morning

Trends so far:

Lameass ponytails

Red dresses

Off the shoulder dresses

Oi, anyone want to venture this is the trend Prom will feature for this year?

All I could think about last night when Zellweiger was on stage was: "One day she is going to wake up and be Dianne Weist."

Totally. But similarly to Sophia, I like Dianne Weist because she looks like my friend's mom.

Zellweiger always looks like she's been pounding lemons. Also, is she capable of opening her eyes? It's a bit like a defective cupie doll or a Betty Boop knock off.

Jeez you guys. Some people are just squinty.

I'm going to have to go on record as stating that I like Renee Zellweger, a lot. I'm not keen on her scrunch-faced squintiness (though she's probably gotten hassled about it rather a bit by various industry peeps, so I do kind of like that she's just living with the squinty face and trying to make it work instead of going under the knife to "fix" it), but I've never seen her give a bad performance. She did give a profoundly unlikable one in that film where she was the overachieving daughter of Dying Meryl Streep, but that was more a combination of miscasting + unpleasantly written character than pure badness on her part.

By and large, I just like and admire her: she sings, she dances, she gives good regional accent, she has generally good taste in scripts, the tiny handful of gossip I've ever heard about her has been along the lines of, "Hey, Random Chick ran into her in Random Location and she did some unexpected Random Nice Thing for Random Chick!" I can't bring myself to like the squint, but it's the only thing in her negatives column for me.

Some people are just squinty.

But she's squinty and evil.

To be honest, I also don't like her voice and she's done very little I've liked watching, so the squinty stuff is just shorthand for the disdain.

Ever find exactly the product you want on the web but don't want to buy it because the web site is hideous? Yikes. Which reminds me--what's the name of that office plant that seems to grow in just plain water--a vine that you can just pick a bit off of to start your own offshoot?

I just stole the one from the cube next to me and am thinking of getting it a nice gel home, an upgrade to the Aquafina bottle where it currently lives.