I'm a Winner!

Courtesy of Witchypoo, I have received my first blogger award. Behold the True Blue award!


Witchypoo hasn't been blogging very long at her current locale, and I've been reading her at Psychicgeek almost since the beginning. I discovered her by way of a comment at Schmutzie's (also awesome, by the way) and have been reading ever since.

While I'm plugging Canadian bloggers, I would be remiss not to mention Schmutzie's husband, The Palinode. At one point he named me the resident armadillo expert!

Anyway, Witchypoo was my first blog buddy who wasn't also my buddy in real life. And now, she has given me my first blog award.

I am passing the award on to these bloggers who have been my True Blue friends outside of the computer. I only have a blog because I wanted to be part of your ruthless internet gang. Now y'all get to post the award on y'all's blogs and confer it upon those whom you deem worthy.

Greeneagles
Serenity Springs
Fictionfiend
Lunchstealer
Traivor
Matt (or whatever he's calling himself on MySpace these days)
Sealegs Sophie McPhearson
Tiffany and Jeff, whose blog links won't work right now. Stupid MySpace. I doubt they read my blog anyway. Stupid not blog readers. (Feel free to leave a comment and prove me wrong.)

And most of all The Husband because he's legally required to be True Blue.

Stealing a Meme: Household Tips

Being in a state of career (and thus, income) flux, my interest in clever, handy, and frugal household hints has grown recently, which coincided nicely with Witchypoo's idea for a household hints meme. Even those of us who do not aspire to be the next Suzie or Sammy Homemaker probably have a few ingenious ideas to make running our lives a little simpler, cheaper, or easier.

I'm offering up three tips of my own, and ask you to chip in as well, either in the comments or on your own blog.

1. If you find your kitchen infested with fruit flies, first get rid of the source - that old banana or an innocent-looking houseplant or a neglected potato in the pantry. Then put a little apple cider vinegar in a jar, put on the lid, and poke holes in it. The flies will be attracted to the vinegar and make their way through the holes. Those that don't drown themselves, won't be able to make their way back out through the holes and will be trapped.

2. To save on water, whether you want to reduce your bills, your demand on natural resources, or both, keep buckets in the bathroom and the kitchen. While you're waiting for the tap water to heat up, run the water into the bucket and use it to water plants.

3. This one was The Husband's genius idea. A nine-inch round cake pan, with a little bit of a lip around the edge, will fit over the top of a six-quart saucepan to create a double boiler. We used this makeshift double boiler to make candy for Christmas presents.

Bonus tip: Make your own candy for easy, inexpensive, homemade gifts. For example, peppermint bark is just melted white chocolate with crushed peppermints and a few drops of peppermint oil mixed in. Spread the mixture into a cookie sheet, let it cool, and then break it into pieces.

Bonus bonus tip: When melting chocolate it is very important not to let even one drop of water get into the chocolate or it will turn into a grainy, sticky mess.

Bonus bonus bonus tip: Check out Home Ec 101 for lots of ideas from people way better at this housekeeping stuff than I am.

Now I'm supposed to tag some people.

Greeneagles, because I suspect he's a closet metrosexual and probably has a really good tip for getting Bearnaise sauce stains out of silk or something like that.

Holly because she's managed to keep a child in one piece for more than eleven years running.

Traivor because I bet he's a whiz in the kitchen.

Sealegs Sophie McPhearson (whose blog is evidently set on private) because her house always seems to be clean despite her four furry roommates.

I Challenge You

Just try to watch this video and not laugh.



Babies are weird.

Found at At Your Cervix.

You Know What Would Be Cool?

It would be cool if there were some sort of website or application that would rank your potential "compatibility" with other bloggers by comparing the amount of overlap in each other's BlogRolls.

Does this exist, and if not, when do you plan to invent it?

Something You Can Do For Good

Yesterday's post was a big ol' bummer, so here's a really dorky awesome way to do some good in the world. Click the button below and go play the Free Rice vocabulary quiz. Every question you get correct earns the United Nations World Food Program (excuse me, I mean "Programme") a donation for their global operations.

If the get a word wrong, the questions get easier. If you get three in row correct, you go up a level in difficulty. So far, I tend to top out at about level 43 of 50 , but I've gotten as high as 46. Y'all are super nerdy. Try to beat me, and feed some hungry people while you work out your big brain.

It's a Meme!

I stole this from Redneck Mother who stole it from someone else who stole it from someone else, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

Anyhoo, the idea is to find five phrases for which your blog is the #1 hit on Google. To make it more interesting, I didn't allow phrases in quotation marks. Here are my five in the order in which they please me.

1. giant squirrel lady-parts

2. toilet-trained moron convention

3. chasing chimichangas

4. not-so-HOTT anal action

5. arbitrary gender doodad

This blog is also the #1 hit for Unruly Duckling, but that seemed too easy.

Post yours or a link to them in the comments.

I [Heart] The Internet

Sometimes at work when I'm really bored or stressed, I'll take a little break by doing a Google image search for "puppies" or "kittens" and spend a few minutes blissed out on fuzzy, cute baby animals. (You'll probably want to turn SafeSearch on or your first hit will be a lady with her big ol' boobs painted to look like puppies, which is fine if you're into that kind of thing, but I don't find it very cute.)

Anyway, one of these searches led me to this excellent website, and the answer is, "No, I did not know that Jesus had a puppy. I also didn't know that thing about the rabbit. Thanks for spreading the word, Internet."

Pan-Pacific Bloggiversary

It's my one year bloggiversary today, and to celebrate I'm GOING TO JAPAN!

Well, not really. I mean I'm really going to Japan, just not for my bloggiversary. But, it is my bloggiversary today. Well, sort of. I mean I used to post in a different place under a different name. But, here I've been posting a year. Well, I know it looks like more than that since I put up those old posts. But, really I guess it's at very least my bloggiversary as Unruly Duckling. Really.

P.S. Squeee! I'm going to Japan!

Code Talking

The Husband posted this helpful link in the comments below, but here it is in more easy-to-find format.

Code for importing from TikiWiki to Blogger

Bloggy Blast From the Past

With much help from The Husband and Traivor I have imported old blog posts from my original Virtual-Vortex wiki blog, "Le chat étourdi" and then later "The Dizzy Blog." (At least I think I'm remembering those names correctly.) They're mostly posts about my trips to Paris and the UK, with a few ill-informed opinions and links to silly websites thrown in for good measure.

The original images are missing, and I'm sure plenty of the links are broken, but there they are, preserved until the end of the internet.

A Very Masculine Blog Post

I've been having some fun this morning with this little internet doodad - The Gender Genie.

You paste in a sample of your writing, and it predicts whether you are male or female. When I used blog entries it almost always correctly identified me as female. However, when I used reports or letters I wrote for work, it assumed I was male. That's particularly interesting to me because the organization I work for is 100% staffed by females, and we write for a female audience. However, the more formal style still read as "male."

The algorithm the website uses to make its predictions is based on a scientific study, which you can download from the web page. In calculating the results, use of the word "be", for example, is considered female. Whereas, using the word "is" is male. "Where" is female, but "what" is male. The keywords seemed very arbitrary.

The Gender Genie gives me a segue to make a point I've been intending to bring up. Recently, I had a brief and frustrating debate with a friend of mine about whether or not some particular thing he said was respectful towards women or not. I realized that we were making different assumptions about a key point of our disagreement. He takes for granted that men and women have innate differences, and I do not.

Studies like the one on which the Gender Genie is based seem to support the innate differences position. However, there are also studies that show that from the time we are newborn infants the way that people interact with us and respond to us is based on their perceptions of our gender. Those early interactions with other human beings are what determine how a disorganized infant brain develops. Societal notions of gender begin to program us down to the level of our neurons from the day we are born. Without the existence of gender constructs, who knows how men and women would be the same or different. There are no control groups.

Assertions that men are a certain way and women are a certain way are just observations about how people respond to conditioning and pressure to conform to societal norms. These insights can be helpful only insofar as we use them to explore and explode the roles that we are all placed in - men and women - because of our biological sex, roles which constrain us and do not respect our individuality and our humanity.

P.S. According to The Gender Genie, this post was written by a man.

A Universal Problem

From Found Magazine.

You should spend some time clicking through the archives. Everything on the website was discarded or lost and found by someone who submitted it - to-do lists, abandoned photographs, love notes crumpled up and left on the sidewalk. It's surprisingly touching and funny.

Why Public Broadcasting Is Vital

Only they can provide this kind of insightful President's Day programming.

Giving Ugly Animals Their Day in the Sun

If Cute Overload made you roll your eyes so hard you sprained your retinas, you gotta check out Ugly Overload.



Here are a few of my favorites:

The Madagascar ugly-monkey

The ugliest kitten in the universe

Baby bird = ugly

Online Eavesdropping

From Overheard in the Office:

5PM We Ran out of Monkey Wax

Research supervisor on phone: So, question: Monkeys -- apparently one got a rash during the drug trial but no one noticed because she was really hairy. Yeah, really, really hairy. She's a hairy monkey. What do you know about that?

West Point, Pennsylvania

Overheard by: Alison

Amends

First of all, let me apologize to everyone, everywhere. I had nearly 2 bottles of wine on Friday night, and I know good and well I am a loud, obnoxious, opinionated drunk. Every time I drink too much, I spend the whole next day writhing with shame and regret.

So, to try to make it up to everyone who puts up with me and actually continues to invite me to alcohol-related events, I would like to offer to you: Bad News Hughes.

Bad News Hughes is one disgusting, hilarious, mofo. His most recent post about his encounter with a lumpy testicle and the drama that ensued made me laugh so hard snot came out of my nose. In fact, his medical woes generally make for excellent humor.

I think his true genius may lie in his photo essays. The Hughes Family Christmas 2004 is epic. Although his brother's wedding may have topped it. I can't decide if I'm disappointed or unbelievably relieved that my family doesn't approach the degree of drunken redneckery that his clan achieves.

Whenever you need a good laugh at someone else's expense, check him out. Click around in his archives. You'll probably be appalled, but you'll probably be laughing your ass off at the same time.

Give Us Some Credit, Mainstream Media

Compare the cover of the U.S. version of Newsweek to the international versions (Oct. 2, 2006 issues):
























via Rising Hegemon
via Echidne of the Snakes
via feminist blogs
via Molly Saves the Day

Isn't the internet a wonderful place?

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before...

I nearly died from the awesomeness. Make sure you have the sound on. NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

An End to Exile

Yay!! My regular email is back, but I still seem to have lost any emails that were sent to me before 10 pm last night and all my archives back to November 2005. I'm not sure if I'll eventually recover any of it. Evidently the server on which our email was hosted experienced a RAID failure. I understand this is very bad and involved multiple redundant hard drives failing. According to the hosting company there was a .001% chance of this happening.

For the time being The Husband has put our email back on our server at home. However, this may cause some difficulty in my sending email since they'll be going out through a cable modem, which is evidently a spam red flag.

Overall, the whole catastrophic data loss thing hasn't been too traumatic (for me...I think The Husband is a bit traumatized). We have backups of all the photographs we lost. I can't think of any priceless emails I was hanging on to; although, I definitely think that I will be looking for something important eventually and realize it's gone. All of our music and videos were stored here. It could have been so much worse, but we'll definitely be backing up locally a lot more often in the future.

Lost, Adrift, Cut Off From Humanity

My regular email address is down for who knows how long, and it's driving me crazy. This is what the server hosting type place told The Husband: "It is being looked into... it is not an easily rectified problem, but I believe it will be up shortly." I'm sure I'm missing out on all sorts of once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that are just sitting there in my inbox unread.

In the meantime, anyone can contact me at unrulyduckling at hotmail dot com. If you've sent something today you want me to respond to, please resend it to the Hotmail address. In the future I won't be checking that address very often, and I'll just use it for blogular activities. But, for right now, it's all I got.