Happy Birthday Tommy!

Thanks everyone for all the b-day wishes!

Also thanks to NASA, for scheduling a Shuttle launch on my birthday....

Hippo birdies, tommyrot!

Bustle?

In your hedgerow?

Happy birthday tommyrot!

Cat Cora and her wife are both pregnant!

My first reaction is "Awww! How romantic!" and then I remember what having a newborn was like...it was hard enough with ONE hormonally crazed sleep-deprived parent in the house taking care of ONE baby when D was born. Double that and...yikes. Scary!

Happy birthday tommyrot!

After the school's IQ screening it looks like Leif will be recommended for the gifted program. We're still thinking if taking him out of his regular class for one day a week for the program will be better for him than a day in class.

One day a week in another program helped me maintain my sanity during high school. And in my experience, gifted programs tend to encourage creativity that normal classes tend to squash.

I think it's because I'm allergic to them that raw tomatoes taste like metal to me.

You'd think this was a parody, and yet, it's not.

And in my experience, gifted programs tend to encourage creativity that normal classes tend to squash.

We are going to ask about what they actually do in the gifted program. If he ends up in the gifted program his little ego is going to go from giant to epic.

You'd think this was a parody, and yet, it's not.

Um....ooookay.

Scientists Who Were Their Own Guinea Pigs

Scientists have done some really strange things in the name of science - and some really gone the distance: they’ve become their own guinea pigs!

Eleanor Harris of New Scientists has a list of 8 scientists who subjected themselves to their own funny (and gross) experiments. Take, for example, German surgeon August Bier who did this experiment in 1898 while working on spinal anesthesia:

To find out, Bier decided to be anaesthetised himself. But things didn’t go as planned for Bier – or for his hapless assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt.

Hildebrandt was supposed to administer the cocaine but, thanks to a mix-up with the equipment, Bier was left with a hole in his neck from which cerebrospinal fluid began to flow.

Rather than abandon the effort, however, the two men switched places. Once Hildebrandt had been anaesthetized, Bier stabbed, hammered and burned his assistant, pulled out his pubic hairs and – presumably eager to leave no stone unturned in testing the new method’s efficiency – squashed his testicles.

So, now we know when testicular fortitude was invented....

Yay! I mean, shiny! It finally happened!

The Best Serenity Cake You Will Ever See - Geeky Cake of the Week

Rick sculpted this Chocolate-Dream-flavored cake for the birthday of Shayna, a 14-year-old “absolutely obsessed” with Joss Whedon’s Firefly.