Whoa

It's just a little bit weird when you see a guy you once made out with many, many years ago get interviewed on The Daily Show.

I suppose this was inevitable

When you spend every match constantly picking the wedge out of your ass, you're bound to injure it:

Nadal said after the match he nearly didn't play because an MRI scan Saturday showed a strained buttock muscle.

New York Magazine is trying to kill me

I don't usually post stuff like this, but I'm sorry, I am powerless.

You don't loan your chainsaw

Words of wisdom:

He said the lender of the chainsaw wants to remain anonymous. "It's one of those things he did that he and I agreed, years later, you don't do," Banks said. "You don't loan your chainsaw."

Honestly, though, I think the greatest mystery in this whole Clark Rockefeller story is not who he really is (probably the German exchange student) or whether he killed those people in California (obviously he did, regardless of whether they can ever actually prove it), but how on earth he fooled a senior partner at McKinsey, a woman with degrees from Stanford and Harvard, into marrying him. It took her more than 12 years to figure out he was maybe not who he said he was! I mean, it's one thing to maybe not realize someone is a con artist if you're just an acquaintance, but she was married to the guy. That's pretty amazing.

Fools and their money

As if the mere existence of the social networking phenomenon weren't bad enough, apparently, people now pay actual money for graphic "gifts" they can send each other:

Joni Gleason of Haverhill spends about $100 a year on gifts for her pet-loving friends. But the gifts can't be held or wrapped. They can't even be seen unless her friends are online.

As a member of Dogster.com, Gleason, 62, sends fellow dog owners virtual candles and angel wings when their pets get sick or die. When Gleason feels playful, she sends virtual squirrels or, one of Dogster's newer gift options, a can of Spam.

Thanks to people like Gleason, social-networking websites, most of which are free to join, are estimated to be making millions of dollars a year from virtual gifts, small icons that can be purchased and sent between members.

The 750,000 members of Dogster.com and Catster.com can buy gifts for 25 cents to $5. Most gifts cost $1 on Facebook.com, which has more than 80 million active members who use the site to create profiles of themselves, communicate with friends, and post messages about their lives. Since Facebook launched the gift option in February 2007, more than 27 million gifts have been given. On Dogster and Catster, members bought 1.5 million gifts in past 12 months.

Seriously, if I didn't know better, I'd think this was an article from the Onion.

Yay, baseball!

As great as it was to see the Red Sox get their World Series rings yesterday, I think the coolest picture from the day has to be this picture of the hawk (or one of its friends - apparently there are three) that made the news the other day for attacking a girl at Fenway*. Seriously, how cool is that? It's got a freakin' rat in it's mouth!



*Confidential to the Boston Globe - the fact that the hawk attacked a girl named Alexa Rodriguez is not irony. Irony would have been if it had attacked a girl named Manuela Ramirez. God.

Uncommon

Only one of the last names from my five* grandparents even cracks the list of the top 5000 most common in the US, and even that one isn't in the top 1000. Makes some sense, I guess, given that my ethnic group is only something like 3% of the population, but it's still a little surprising how uncommon the names in my family are.

Although, actually, given this:

Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person.

It sort of looks like a top 5000 list is going to be pretty limited, since there are so many names.

*Four by birth, one by adoption.

Who would Jesus stalk?

Seriously, what?

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has placed a Stoneham priest on leave after the 46-year-old was arrested in New York City last week on charges of stalking talk-show host Conan O'Brien.

This sounds more like it should be a skit from his show, rather than something actually real.

You guys, Danica McKellar is kind of awesome

'Wonder Years' actress: 'Smart is cool':

McKellar, who played Winnie on the 1990s television show "The Wonder Years," is coming out with a book, "Math Doesn't Suck," to encourage girls to get into math.

"When girls see the antics of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, they think that being fun and glamorous also means being dumb and irresponsible," the 32-year-old McKellar told Newsweek for editions to hit newsstands Monday.

"But I want to show them that being smart is cool," she said. "Being good at math is cool. And not only that, it can help them get what they want out of life."

Easiest trivia question ever, if you think about it

What famous person, when staying at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, special orders bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread with mayonnaise, with Doritos on the side?

Answer here, via Gawker.

No mention of a beverage, but my money's on chocolate milk or apple juice in a sippy cup.

Science proves what I've always known

Older siblings are the smartest!

Never mind the actual evidence that my youngest brother read algebra books for fun as a child, or writes his own computer games, or placed in national and international math competitions. Never mind that he takes double the normal course load at one of the toughest colleges in the country, doesn't go to class, and still has a perfect GPA. None of that matters! Science clearly proves that I am smarter!

Things you didn't know about Chris Berman

Not only does he have an inexplicable ability to pick up leather-clad ladies, he also, apparently, has won a Nobel Prize:

Also receiving honorary degrees were Brown medical school founding dean Stanley Aronson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power, and three Brown alums: sportscaster Chris Berman, actress Kate Burton and Craig Mello, who shared the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.

CNN: Always good for a laugh

I know it's not surprising he'd be driven to drink by all that's going on, but it's nice to see it confirmed by a major news outlet.

Baby polar bear tells baby pandas to suck it

So there's this baby polar bear over in Germany that animal rights activists want to kill or somesuch nonsense (because seriously, what?). All you need to know is that it might possibly be the cutest thing to ever grace the internets.

Silly nostalgia

Today, something possessed me to look at one of my old high school yearbooks, and once I started, I couldn't stop until I'd read through all four years.

Presented now for your reading pleasure are the following quotes, totally verbatim (except for a few egregious grammatical and spelling errors I could not abide), written by my friends. (Technically, these quotes span all four years of high school, but actually, none came from sophomore year, because for some reason, no one signed my sophomore yearbook. I can't remember why, but I like to think it was because I lost all my friends that year, then gained them all back junior year. Or maybe they just didn't issue the yearbooks till after school was over. I don't know.)

Each one is from a different entry and taken completely out of context.

La lune est pleine, oui?

YEAH DUDES! DUDETTES!!! YEAH!

Eat lots of spinach.

I would love to tell you have a nice summer and I'll see you next year but 50 years from now, you won't care.

Thanks for just being around.

That's one of my better skills - just being around.

I don't have your clip right now. Actually, I've lent it to Molly to wear to the prom. She'll give it back soon though. Someday you'll get it back.

And the next year, she wrote:

I still owe you a barrette!

It's pretty amazing that she had enough awareness to remember it a year later, yet not enough to remember to give it back to me in the intervening year.

I'm a sadist so unless you're a masochist, I guess we're not compatible.

I'M FEELING SO HYPER!

The true effect of this can only be appreciated if you imagine it surrounded by all sorts of crazy scribbles. It was no accident that her nickname was Spazz.

Why do I always get middle-aged ladies?

Keep eating!

Ed and I will probably be calling your brother this summer.

Of all the things people wrote, this is the most bafflingly nonsensical. I cannot for the life of me remember, nor can I conceive of any possible scenario, where those two would have any reason to call either one of my brothers. I mean, they were a seventh-grader and a six-year-old at the time, and suddenly I'm feeling like my friends are creepy predators that I need to protect my brothers from, nevermind that they are adults now and it is not actually happening in the present.

You are a nice person to sit in front of.

I hope Avery Ashdown lives in your heart for as long as he will in mine.

I hope I don't get pizza on your yearbook.

As DJO would say, "Do me Wednesday."

Keep on cradling!

And stay off the chowder.

I've only seen you hysterical twice in my life - that time when we put the hairball in the telephone at field hockey camp and the time I put the orange behind my knee at lunch to hide it from Jeremy and you saw it and we both went crazy.

Oh look, let's see if the flower burns!

PULL YOUR PRINT OUT BEFORE YOU PULL THE BLADE BACK!

Have fun at Harvard!

Clearly not a close friend.

...Twister at midnight with half the guys naked...

This occurred during an overnight college visit with this friend, and my mother only found out about it because she is nosy and read my yearbook, and boy, is it ever fun trying to explain to your excessively prudish mother why your friend wrote in your yearbook that you were playing Twister with naked college guys.

But let's get something clear. It was not half the guys. It was one guy (name of Grant, native of Canada, and kind of scary and kind of sad that I still remember that). And he wasn't so much naked as he was wearing a very loose pair of boxers, which, as you might imagine, are not the best attire for playing Twister. But to our innocent, high-school-aged minds, even the slightest glimpse of an actual, real-live penis qualified as "naked."

Your presence only added to that tingling.

"Nervy" is a state of near drunkenness caused by apprehension or giddiness, though considering what a drunkard you are, this is probably a perpetual state for you, right?

Don't forget the important grammar lessons! Or the leather pants!

That's it, kids! I'm off to Mexico on Saturday. See y'all in a week!

This can't be a coincidence

So first we have a Dr. DeCock discussing circumcision. Now we have a Robert Vanderhoof, deer management coordinator (discussing, incidentally, hermaphroditic deer).

Dan Koppen likes Playboy, apparently

So I suppose this is really not so surprising, in light of this (sort of NSFW).

In which I reveal a slight lack of maturity

Sure, it's great and all that they showed that circumcision can dramatically lower HIV transmission, but it was kind of hard to stop snickering and take it seriously after they quoted a man named Dr. Kevin DeCock.

The store was probably out of Duke stickers at the time

Seen on the back window of a car today: A Raiders decal, a Lakers decal, and a Yankees decal. Not present, but implied, was the one reading "I am a complete douchebag."

A sign that you might be spending too much time reading Deadspin*

When you're reading a political blog, and they mention New Mexico, and you think, why are they talking about Marcus Vick on a political blog?

*Hypothetically, anyway. Not sure it's actually possible.