Off to see Coraline with Amelia this afternoon! In celebration, a little GIMP work:

She finds it creepy. Mission accomplished. :-)

This is why you’re fat. Is it wrong to drool?

Straight to the Bar with the nice embed: Danny Higginbottom’s highest shallow dive. He dives 30 feet into a foot of water. Looks like an inflatable pool you’d buy at Walmart. With my luck, I’d probably miss the whole thing.

Today’s “oh, crap” moment is brought to you by The Economist: America’s Mortgage Misery Spreads. Yikes.

Game of the day: Sproing Reloaded. Just the right amount of challenge. Nicely done. (via jig)

Announcing the first-ever victory by a parent in the face of the neverending why? A Dialogue With Sarah, Aged 3: In Which it is Shown That if Your Dad is a Chemistry Professor, Asking “Why” Can be Dangerous.

I love how long it takes before he gets to “that’s complicated.”

Siggi’s skyr rocks. You couldn’t ask for better ingredients (PDF). It’s not at all like the oversweetened crap every big commercial manufacturer churns out. Sure, I like oversweetened crap, but this is a much better choice.

Closure is an interesting game based around light. Hint: the little balls are the light sources, and if something isn’t illuminated, it doesn’t exist (including the floor!). (via waxy)

The evolutionary fitness crowd has always made pretty good sense to me, but Martin Berkhan has an interesting and provocative post up at his Leangains blog, Low Carb Talibans. The comments are also good reading, if not always civil.

Okay, I’ll try to lay of the Flash games for awhile, but Jay is Games recently announced their Best of Casual Gameplay 2008 list, and I’ve been enjoying the big ass sword, jazzy soundtrack, and the variety of ways to die in Amorphous+.

I happened to remember the expression, “I’m your huckleberry” out of the blue today. Val Kilmer put the expression back on the map doing his Doc Holliday in Tombstone years ago. It didn’t occur to me then to wonder what it meant, but thanks to Google now I know:

“Huckleberry” was commonly used in the 1800’s in conjunction with “persimmon” as a small unit of measure. “I’m a huckleberry over your persimmon” meant “I’m just a bit better than you.” As a result, “huckleberry” came to denote idiomatically two things. First, it denoted a small unit of measure, a “tad,” as it were, and a person who was a huckleberry could be a small, unimportant person—usually expressed ironically in mock self-depreciation. The second and more common usage came to mean, in the words of the “Dictionary of American Slang: Second Supplemented Edition” (Crowell, 1975):

“A man; specif., the exact kind of man needed for a particular purpose.

What a great expression.

Stephen Fry on Twitter:

However, I love to see your tweets: I love your wit, your kindness, your observation, your occasional mean streaks of bitchiness, remorseless logic and your long memories that pounce on my all too frequent inconsistencies and rashly made promises. I love how Twitter confirms my all too often assaulted belief that most humans are kind, curious, knowledgeable, tolerant and funny. The absurd constraints of the 140 character tweet seem oddly to bring out the best in wit, insight and observation.

I still don’t get Twitter (perhaps not having a cell phone and living in the sticks puts me at a disadvantage?), but Stephen Fry makes me want to keep trying. He’s the consummate Twitterer, it seems to me.