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.

If he ends up in the gifted program his little ego is going to go from giant to epic.

This was my problem. I got smacked down nicely when I started high school to find myself no longer in the top three of my class--I was lucky to be in the top ten percent. However, in elementary school, I thought I was hot shit and let my sister know it. She smacked me down by mocking my geekiness and whatever else she could mock.

That's so cool about Cat Cora and her wife! However, I'm now finding my Celebrity Gaydar (or ear for celeb gossip) is waaaay off--I had no clue she was gay, nor did I know about Suzie Orman being gay until earlier this week.

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

Charm City Cakes did one, too. It's on their webpage under "Fun Stuff".

Saw the house again. Need to find out about the roof, there was some very old water stains on the ceiling, one by the gas fireplace and another in the kitchen, which has the tar roof. Still kinda in love with it. The size and layout have spoiled me. While I saw a couple others that were nice enough (and even in Hampden,) nothing has come close to how much I like so much about this place and how I can plan out in my head the order of the things that need to be done and how quickly they'd need addressing.

So. Finding out about the roof.

nothing has come close to how much I like so much about this place and how I can plan out in my head the order of the things that need to be done and how quickly they'd need addressing

That's exactly how we felt about our house. It just felt comfortable and right, even in its fugly repo-ed state.

Yay! My b-day present to myself arrived! (Even though I eschewed the one-day shipping for two day, it still arrived in one day.)

The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America (Hardcover)

That was the case where a local school board was successfully sued after it required the school to teach "Intelligent Design."

Still nervous.

Oh, and I did take pictures. Some are crap, but it helps to remember details. Like the vintage bathroom. And the random 2.5 minutes of video I accidentally took while I walked from the basement to the second floor. Honestly, I should have deliberately done that, because it was actually pretty useful, if VERY random (I didn't know it was on so it was mostly hanging from my wrist.)