In Chicago for some technical training...I might be around online, but here's a good chance to clear out some of the backlog...
Sidebar people...feel free to fill in the lack of witty wry observational and situational humor by making some dang sidebars already!
UPDATE: So it turns out my hotel in the City of Broad Shoulders (a suburb thereof; the Suburb of Narrow Hips, perhaps) has WiFi in every room, so I'm pretty connected.
Anyone have any suggestions for the must-sees of Chicago? I realize everything I know about what to see comes from the movie the Blues Brothers (i.e. the Picasso statue..I think my fondess for white T-shirts with B+W photos on 'em came from a shirt I had of that) and the controversy about the Bean in Milennium Park.
Finally, I realize it's less "witty wry observational and situational humor" that I look for in the sidebar and more anecdotes, pointless or pointed...
- Science and Technology on Why are humans nearly hairless? And why do some wish to become more so?
- A FAQ about Bollywood movies, including Why Don't They KISS already? Not that I watch much Bollywood, but it's good to know.
- "The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur." --A.N. Whitehead
- Stop Motion Studies--not-quite-still-lifes from the Tokyo subway.
- "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." --Donald Norman, from How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure...an engineer's view of pomo literary criticism.
- Don't know if there's anything like this here...shazam is a UK service that can identify the name and artist of any 30 seconds currently playing on the UK radio, as heard over your mobile phone. Cool idea.
- "stick your finger in the hole / now you have a tootsie roll" -- One of First Grade's greatest hits, a little practical joke, you'd try to get a friend to insert their finger into your curled pointer finger and thumb, and then inform them it was actually a toilet...ha!
- "Mueller Hall"...this was an interesting meta-injoke when I sang with Tufts a cappella group sQ. We were really bad at coming up with skits back in the day...one idea we had was a skit making fun of the genre of a cappella skits...one of our gripes was long rambling stories that ended with a stupid joke only people who went to the school would get, so in the background of multipart skit would be a guy telling a long rambling story, and when the focus went back to him he'd wrap up with "well you could have been in MUELLER HALL!" So "Mueller Hall" became a meta-injoke from meta-skit. And now you know.
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