Unlikely Words » weird

No Apostrophe in “Veterans Day”

aaron cohen — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:39:23 +0000

The fact that there isn't an apostrophe in Veterans Day is fascinating to me, probably because I'm simple. Via the FAQ of the Department of Veterans Affairs (also no apostrophes):

Q. Which is the correct spelling of Veterans Day?
a. "Veterans Day"
b. "Veteran's Day"
c. "Veterans' Day"

A. Veterans Day (choice a, above).
Veterans Day does not include an apostrophe but does include an "s" at the end of "veterans" because it is not a day that "belongs" to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans.

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Lost is Coming Back in 2010

aaron cohen — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:01:51 +0000

And until then, this picture of a naked Hugo/Hurley riding a rainbow unicorn while carrying a flaming sword will have to carry us through.

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Keywords, They are Funny Things

aaron cohen — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:10:38 +0000

I don't know if it's more amazing that someone used "watch movies of boys peeing everywhere and on everything in the house and on ladies" as a keyword to get to UW, that we're 3rd on the page on Google for that search term, OR that it was a returning visitor that used that search term. I'm going with C, Alex, because I wonder how they got here the first time.

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Konami (Contra) Code on ESPN.com RIGHT NOW.

aaron cohen — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 23:24:08 +0000

Update: And just like that it appears that the happy magic is over. All 30 lives have been extinguished.

If you go to ESPN.com and enter in the Konami Code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, b, a enter), you'll get unicorns. Lots of them. This is amazing. It felt good to use the Contra Code again, though I think I got less than 30 unicorns.

A couple years ago you could log into ESPN Insiders by using the first name of a 2 name college as the user name and the second name as the pass word, for instance Login: Boston Password: College. I don't know if that was a feature, a bug, or user error, but it doesn't happen anymore.

Via Twitter

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Naked Wizard Being Tasered At Coachella

aaron cohen — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:29:49 +0000

I'm not going to embed this video, but here's the link to the Naked wizard being tasered at Coachella. I don't think the guy is actually a wizard, though. You make the call. Be forewarned, there's a very naked guy in this video who thinks he is a wizard. ###Possibly related posts:Saratoga Springs Horse Vandalism [...] ### Possibly related posts:

Couldn’t Do This if I Tried

aaron cohen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:56:29 +0000

Matt Lauer somehow hit a deer with his bicycle. ###Possibly related posts:Open Bicycle is Open in Union Sq, Somerville Making Boston More Fun to Bike in Chris Piascik Gallery Opening, Chorus Gallery, June 13 ### Possibly related posts:

Remuneration or Renumeration

aaron cohen — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:26:32 +0000

I never knew remuneration was a word. And remuneration means what I had thought renumeration meant. Renumeration? It means to recount something.

Chocolate Stout Bacon Cake

aaron cohen — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:28:28 +0000

Not only does this cake have chocolate and bacon, but it has beer and, well, cake. (Thanks, Jonathan!) ###Possibly related posts:Chocolate Covered Bacon: Bacolate Forever! One Step Closer to Chocolate Covered Bacon Perfection: Bacolate Truffles Bacon Cheeseburger With Grilled Cheese and Bacon Sandwiches as Buns ### Possibly related posts:

Munchausen in the Workplace

aaron cohen — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 14:25:46 +0000

At first, I thought this article about Munchausen at work was a joke, but as I continued to read, it occurred to me that these people are serious. And by 'these people, I mean GQ/Style, not the people who make up problems to solve them, though, I suppose they are serious, too.

If the 18th-century German cavalry officer Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Munchausen were around today, he'd probably be in a white-collar firm somewhere faking problems so that he could fix them—and he'd have plenty of company...First identified in 2007 by Nathan Bennett, a business-school professor at Georgia Tech, Munchausen at work leads employees to cook up phony office dramas that they themselves can solve to become heroes.

I actually think that this isn't something people are doing. People are usually able to solve problems they create, but not because they're creating the problems on purpose. Maybe I'm not giving people enough credit?

(Via my friend Ben in the picture)

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List of Unusual Deaths

aaron cohen — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:34:29 +0000

It is just what it sounds like. ###Possibly related posts:How Unusual Are These Animal Die-Offs? List of accompaniments to french fries List of Facebook Usernames I Wish I Had Gotten… ### Possibly related posts:

Bacon Mints

aaron cohen — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:28:36 +0000

A friend gave me bacon mints for my birthday. While expected just a bacon flavored candy, I was surprised to find so much more. There's actually some mint in there - smoky, salty mint. Thanks, Will! ###Possibly related posts:Maple Bacon Lollipops Bacon Scented Bacon Print Tuxedo Bacon Cheeseburger With Grilled Cheese and Bacon Sandwiches as [...] ### Possibly related posts:

Kosherland Board Game

aaron cohen — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 14:02:03 +0000

I would have thought this was fake if you told me about it.

Based on the popular CandyLand board game, KosherLand is a first board game for a Jewish child. Travel through KosherTown - pass by Bubby, the Kiddush Ocean, and Matzah Man - but don't listen to the Latke Men Marching Band or you might get stuck in the honey! Be the first to make it to the kosher home, and you win!

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Freaking Out About Freaking Out About The Snow Has Jumped The Shark

aaron cohen — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:44:04 +0000

I'm calling it right now.
To: All you hardy New Englanders making noise about other New Englanders making noise about the snowstorm.

Look, people freak out about the weather. They freak out about the snow. They freak out about the cold. They freak out about the hot. They freak out about the rain. They freak out about the lack of rain. It's not just weather either. Any event that is happening to a large group of people is going to cause some percent of that population to freak out. And you know what? Another percent of the population is going to stand on the side of the that group and they're going to ridicule them for freaking out.

This is no loner acceptable behavior. It's over. Right now. This has to end. It's possible you didn't know how many of your acquaintances freaked out about weather and such before Facebook Status Updates and Twitter, but you've seen television news, right? Who do you think the reporter on the side of the road in the parka and mittens was talking to? Who do you think was watching all that stock footage of plows and sanders rolling out of the DPW yard? This is how people are. People like getting worked up about things and getting fired up about them getting fired up isn't going to make them not be fired up next time. Believe it. And you better know I'm serious if I'm using a euphemism that involves sharks. I hate sharks.

From: Me

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Prince Is Against Gay Marriage and He Can Play Basketball

aaron cohen — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:02:03 +0000

Wired has a pretty good run down of the controversy touched off by this article in the New Yorker where Prince apparently comes clean on his anti-gay marriage stance. Then a Prince insider leaked to Perez Hilton that Prince was upset about the article and had been misquoted, which the New Yorker denies, standing behind their story. Weirder still, Prince is a Jehovah's Witness and spends afternoons knocking on doors proselytizing.

Which all comes together quite nicely for me because, I don't know when it happened, but Comedy Central finally posted the Charlie Murphy story from The Chappelle Show where Murphy and his crew get bested by the Revolution. This is gold, even better than the Rick James stuff, and was analyzed incessantly by my friends and me when it first aired. I've missed it so. Unfortunately, there's a part missing at the end where Prince makes everyone pancakes at the end. Pancakes.

Chappelle's Show

Basketball with Prince

Charlie Murphy Clips
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Stories

(Prince story via Sullivan)

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The AaronCohens

aaron cohen — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:01:20 +0000

This tickles me, movie about Aaron Cohens coming soon, for serious. ###Possibly related posts:The World’s First Facebook Film Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook Movie 23 Reasons I Gave When Asked, “Why Are You Growing a Mustache Again?” ### Possibly related posts:

Can Cellphones Make Popcorn Pop?

aaron cohen — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 06:03:37 +0000

No. They can't.

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Do You Know Where Your Turkey Comes From? – The Food Link Round Up

aaron cohen — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:57:18 +0000

Sarah Palin caused an uproar a couple days ago by conducting an interview in front of a farmer slaughtering turkeys. I didn't follow much of it, but my main reaction to it was more on the side of "Really? That was the best place for an interview" aas opposed to "those poor turkeys". Though it lead me to this article by Patrick Martins, director of Slow Food USA. (Speaking of Slow Food...)

When you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, waiting for the main attraction to be brought in on a platter, take a moment to think about where it came from and how it found its way to your table.

So where's my turkey coming from? I wasn't sure my mom would know, but she did. Plainville Farms. I looked through the website and didn't find much of anything except they have a ton of USDA labels about how they treat their animals. So I feel a little better that at least I know. So where's your turkey from?

I had meant to post Michael Pollan's latest (now 5 weeks old) NY Times effort -
An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - and this is as good a post to do it in. We're in full food round up mode now, folks. It was neat how Pollan responded to readers' comments in a different section, that's a good move on the NY Times' part.

And here's an interview with Pollan from The American Conservative where he talks about the idea of food security being something the Right and the Left can work together on. Interesting parts:

You see it in other traditions, too: the Mayans also had grain reserves. Now the amount of grain we have worldwide is a six- or eight-day supply. If there were a major shock to the system, people would go hungry quickly. It was one of the reforms of the Nixon administration to get rid of the grain reserve under enormous pressure from agribusiness and big grain traders who wanted more control over the market and wanted to be able to speculate on grain prices.

and

“Arugula,” we should remember, is a marketing term invented by somebody who thought that this very common green, known by farmers all over the Midwest for many years as “rocket,” needed to be tuned up and given new appeal. It’s a complete marketing creation, and it’s completely ruined a very healthy green—at least from a political point of view.

Here's the NY Times late to the chocolate covered bacon (bacolate) party we covered last year here and here.

Shopsin's from April 2002:

What does happen occasionally is that Kenny gets an idea for a dish and writes on the specials board— yes, there is a specials board—something like Indomalekian Sunrise Stew. (Kenny and his oldest son, Charlie, invented the country of Indomalekia along with its culinary traditions.) A couple of weeks later, someone finally orders Indomalekian Sunrise Stew and Kenny can’t remember what he had in mind when he thought it up. Fortunately, the customer doesn’t know, either, so Kenny just invents it again on the spot.

Here's a 2004 article from Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, on Bush's USDA. There's too much in here to quote, so just read the whole thing.

And of course I would be remiss for not posting the interview that started the post off. An, no, THE epic definition of political blindness, unless of course the GOP base rallies around stuff like this.

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Round Up of a Weird Weekend

aaron cohen — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:30:30 +0000

I've been sick, so maybe this only amuses me, and if so, well, sorry. But this weekend, I came across news that spam was up, spam was down, spam was lucrative (enough), and divine intervention as evidenced by a seemingly unironic collocation of sentences from the AP.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday she would consider serving in the Senate if God gave her the opportunity and Alaskans wanted her to take the job. The state's senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens, fell behind as the count resumed in his re-election bid.

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