Can someone tell me who's bright idea it was to have a frickin' fire drill just as I was about to go to the cafeteria for lunch?!? Oh, well, I used the "stand outside and wait for the all clear" time to get into my car and drive over to McDonald's, instead.

How do subs collide? They have sonar, no?

They also have anti-sonar technology. It seems to have worked brilliantly on both subs. There are only something like 170 nukes out there and the British and French have maybe 10 between them, so it's like when the only two cars on the road in Ohio ran into each other. Embarrassing is the word.

Does he not have school today? Curse our no-holiday-having school division!

President's Day is the beginning of Midwinter Break in Emmett's school district, aka "Ski Week."

I am now wondering what it says about where I grew up that we just called it "February vacation."

Jesse, I think the answer to that is that cowgirls don't ski.

ION, some jerk sideswiped my car last night. Left a big gash along the side and knocked the driver's side mirror right off. Did not leave a note.

Scrappy's car defiler has to answer to my GLARE OF DEATH!!!!

Grrrr...stupid-ass car-swipers.

We should send this guy to your crime scene.

You may be surprised to realize that I did not go to elementary school with many of your cow-folk.

Magenta Ain't A Colour

If the eye receives light of more than one wavelength, the colour generated in the brain is formed from the sum of the input responses on the retina. For example, if red light and green light enter the eye at the same time, the resulting colour produced in the brain is yellow, the colour halfway between red and green in the spectrum.

So what does the brain do when our eyes detect wavelengths from both ends of the light spectrum at once (i.e. red and violet light)? Generally speaking, it has two options for interpreting the input data:

a) Sum the input responses to produce a colour halfway between red and violet in the spectrum (which would in this case produce green – not a very representative colour of a red and violet mix)

b) Invent a new colour halfway between red and violet

Magenta is the evidence that the brain takes option b – it has apparently constructed a colour to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a colour does not exist in the light spectrum. Magenta has no wavelength attributed to it, unlike all the other spectrum colours.

When did men stop wearing hats? '50s? '60s?

Early to mid-sixties.

Nate's mainlining some sort of X-Box game and Abby's devouring the Marvel Encyclopedia we dug up out of a box yesterday.

She asked me in all seriousness if she could be a cartoonist.

I replied, "Why not?"

When did men stop wearing hats? '50s? '60s?

Before then, a man was supposed to take off his hat when talking to a woman, right?

Sixties, pretty much. I think I heard that Kennedy was the last president to wear a hat on his way to inauguration, though he took it off during the actual ceremony.

And yes. Doff your hat when greeting a woman, take it off for a longer conversation. Also, take off the hat when going indoors. (When I was stage managing Brighton Beach Memoirs, we had such hat trouble with the male actors. The stage was set up on three levels -- house upstairs, house downstairs, and porch/street -- and people frequently walked into or out of the house. There was a coat/hat rack right inside the door, and each male character had a hat that he had to put on every time he went outside and take off every time he went inside, and none of them could ever remember it. Then we got into lighting problems when we realized that the baseball cap that the teenage boy character wore would cast a shadow on his face with the lighting, so he had to not only remember to put on the hat, but to put it on way on the back of his head.)