Lazy Blogging (again)

Here's a meme, shamelessly stolen from this post at Debi's place. Because I'm too lazy to write one of my typically rambling posts this morning.

1) Go to Wikipedia.
2) In the search box, type your birth month and day but not the year.
3) List three events that happened on your birthday.
4) List two important birthdays and one death.
5) One holiday or observance (if any).

I've blogged about my birthday before, so for even more laziness, some of these answers are recycled.

Events
1356 - English defeat the French at the Battle of Poitiers, because they think they own France.
1778 - The Continental Congress passes the first budget of the United States. And they've been in debt ever since.
1944 - Armistice between Finland and Soviet Union signed (End of the Continuation War). They had their own private war?

There are so many events worth mentioning... Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starting their career together (1900), the US banning Charlie Chaplin's re-entry (1952), their first underground nuclear test (1956), the Wheel of Fortune game show being created (1983). But here are a couple more notable ones:

Special Mention - Events (coolness category)
1970 - The first Glastonbury Festival is held. Mud, music, mud, and non-prescription pharmaceuticals. And mud.

Special Mention - Events (silly category)
1959 - Nikita Khrushchev is barred from visiting Disneyland. That communist bastard.

Birthdays
Well, Ferry Porsche obviously, in 1909, links to the Nazi Party notwithstanding. The second, American Actor Adam West. He's the real Batman, you know.

Other candidates: Jeremy Irons, Lol Creme, Twiggy, and Nile Rodgers.

Death
I think I'll have to go with Orville Redenbacher (1995), humorously described in Wikipedia's list as an "American botanist and businessman".

Observance
There can be only one. Talk Like A Pirate Day, of course. Although I gave serious consideration to the sixth day of the Eleusinian Mysteries, St. Kitts and Nevis Independence Day, and Chilean Armed Forces Day too.

So there you go. September the 19th. Send me presents.

Um

Another find in the patent literature:

11. A method to provocatively test for schizophrenia in a human comprising administering S-(N,N-diethylcarbamoyl)glutathione to the human and correlating the induction of a hallucination in the human with schizophrenia.

Now that seems like a bad idea - diagnosing schizophrenia by causing a potentially schizophrenic patient to have a hallucination. Although I suspect that were this to become standard medical practise, an awful lot of people might show up at their doctors' offices claiming to be schizophrenic.

Nothing, however, beats this classic, entitled "Semen taste-enhancement dietary supplement", US patent #6,485,773, which you can find here. From the summary:

This invention regards a novel and unobvious dietary supplement formulation of relatively specific ratios of fruits, vegetables, and spices that when ingested by the male results in a significant improvement to the taste of the male ejaculate by reducing its generally salty and/or bitter taste while also adding a pleasant flavor that is considered by 98.5% of all customers as very enjoyable.

It goes on to point out that:

No negative effects were experienced by any in the market-test group nor by any of the thousands of customers who have used this product, thus far.

See? There is good science in the patent databases. You just have to dig for it.

Overcast

In the new organizational structure that is life with a teacher-in-training in the family, and the necessity of shuttling around two now very active kids who are too young to be left on their own, I find myself now driving my very own vehicle in the morning to the local commuter train station. Which is a welcome change from the endless parade of buses that I've been accustomed to in recent years.

All this gives me time in the car, to and from, to listen to music and in so doing dig back through my music collection, almost all of which is a) on compact disk, and b) has never been put onto my Minidisc player, let along any kind of iThing. So there's a large back catalogue of music I've been missing out on, and am happily rediscovering.

Albums, for example, like Dead Cities by The Future Sound of London, an indescribably complex electronica mish-mash from the late 1990's, which has some truly incredible pieces on it: from the downbeat grooves of My Kingdom, to the aggressive video-game grooves of We Have Explosive, through the ambient floatiness of Vit Drowning and Through Your Gills I Breathe, to one of my very favourites, quiet and sad and poignantly calm: Everyone in the World Is Doing Something Without Me.




It's the musical equivalent of the far-off rumble of a jet passing in an overcast sky - lonely and bleak and a reminder that there are people all around you, going places, doing things, absorbed in their own lives, completely outside your own.

Quite like myself, isolated away in the green Protege, on my way to and from the station, humming along with the 1990's, oblivious.

Happy Canada Day!

Like the title says - Happy Canada Day to all Canadian readers, ex-patriate or not, or anyone else who's happy to accept the wishes. Eh.