Seriously: “Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose—say, by doing a somersault in chest-deep water—the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve. The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up into the brain, where it continues the damage, ‘basically feeding on the brain cells,’ Beach said.” [via Yahoo/AP]
Erik has his 4-month checkup yesterday. He’s at the 95th percentile for weight, length, and head circumference. In fact, his head is bigger around than my neck!
First, there’s a book for introducing adolescent girls—girly girls, at that—to Dungeons & Dragons. If John Baichtal’s anecdote is any indication, it seems to be able to accomplish it’s mission. Moreover, Wil Wheaton’s teen son seems to have something going with a hot D&D girl at his school.
I recently downloaded pilots for some of this fall’s new tv shows from Amazon Unbox to watch on my TiVo. I’ve used the Amazon service before, so that’s a story for another time. But the shows I watched ran the gamut from the worst to the best of what television offers.
Lawyers bill their time in six-minute (one tenth of an hour) increments. Performance is judged largely on how many hours you bill in a year, and bonuses are tied to reaching some goal for billable hours—that goal is typically a very large fraction of the number of hours a normal person works in a year, sometimes more. In other words, there’s a great deal of pressure on lawyers to maximize their productivity and bill as many hours as possible. So what I saw in the bathroom today shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
I’ve had a sort of blog fatigue recently. I think it’s partly a result of not having anywhere near as much free time to spend on it, but it’s also because of what I had wanted my blog to be. When I first started four years ago, it was largely because I gotten one of the first camera-phones, and I wanted to post pictures from it to the web. I also posted some stuff because I thought maybe some folks would be interested in a chronicle of grad school or something; I didn’t want my blog to just another self-obsessed online journal. Clearly I was deluding myself.
Recently, I was cleaning out some of my old stuff from my parents’ garage and found a lot of my old childhood books. Several of these were important in my late childhood and “tween” years, so I kept them for Erik. One is The Fallen Spaceman, whose protagonist is coincidentally named Erik; I would have saved it anyway because I have very warm memories of that book. The collection also includes my Choose Your Own Adventure books, a find that got me to wondering: have I always been a roleplayer, even before that fateful day when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons? And perhaps more importantly, is my son doomed to be a geek?
