Why I Love the Geekdad Blog

The Geekdad blog is part of Wired.com. Several geeky dads (and a couple geeky moms) contribute several daily posts to the blog. I currently have 120 of them bookmarked on Bloglines. You read that right - One Hundred And Twenty individual posts bookmarked!

The following little gem gets off to a slow start. They could have cut the first 40 seconds, in my opinion. But I was laughing out loud at a minute & thirty:



Dad or mom, if you tend toward geekiness at all (and if you're a knitter, that's likely), you should check out Geekdad.

A Reader's Meme

Picked this up from another blog I read and thought it might be fun.

Here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

I'm going to add one more note - * those you want to read but haven't. Feel free to grab this and mark your own.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel 2x
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife 2x
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility*
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels*
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune*
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

How Californians See America

More fun from the people who brought us all LOLcats:


more graph humor and song chart memes

As my friend Chris would say...

... here's some information that will make you think less of me.

Or maybe more. Who knows?

62 As a 1930s wife, I am Superior Take the test!

HHHHi, HHHHHHeather. HHHHHHow's it going?

more cat pictures

One of my favorite local radio stations is running a series of commericials for some jobs site. See how well they are working? I can't remember the name of the company! But the commercials are hilarious. They describe basic "types" of people found in every office. The one from the title is "The Bad Breath Close Talker."

In Which I Promote Someone Else's Blog...

... because, yes, there's something in it for me!

trek is running a quick weekend contest. Since I sub to trek casts on via Bloglines, I can win free yarn! (I typo'd it "yearn" at first - how appropriate is that?)

And since I'm posting about it here, I get a second entry. :D

And if one of you heads over to this post and lets trek know you came over from here, I get still another entry. Woot!

Lack of Progress Report

Well, it couldn't really be called a "progress report." Still working on the cuff of the second Tracks sock. It is a bit longer than last week. And that's all!

I Can Tell By Your Accent

Your Linguistic Profile:

50% General American English 20% Upper Midwestern 15% Yankee 5% Dixie 5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I'm in Favor of LOLsects

Edited to add caption because Blogger likes to cut off the edge:

"Praeing mantis needs to prae harder."


more cat pictures

I don't know why this cracked me up, but I laughed for several minutes.

We Have a Winner!

Ok, you're ALL winners to me! But, sadly, I cannot afford organic cotton for all of you. The Random Number Generator decided that the Random Last-Minute Belated Blogiversary/Earth Day Contest prize goes to Becky!

Becky, I sent you an email! Thank you to everyone who played along. The earth thanks you too!

In other news, no FOs last week, but we do have a WIP. Here is the sock I am working on.



The yarn is Knit Picks Essential in Blue Violet Multi. Taking the photo after sundown, which means the color is Not Right. It looks much better in real life.

Basic top-down construction on dpns. I was going to do a pair of plain socks but I got bored by the end of the ribbing and wanted at least a simple pattern to stave off ongoing boredom. It's a simple 9 stitch repeat as follows: ssk, yo, k5, yo, k2tog. Repeat for one round, then do a plain round.

You could probably do this with any number of stitches in your repeat. Just subtract 4 from your repeat number for the yos and decrease stitches, then knit the result as your plain stitches in the middle. Clear as mud? Here's an example with a 12-stitch repeat - ssk, yo, k8, yo, k2tog.

I know a lot of knitbloggers don't like flashing/pooling, but I actually like this. It's enough where it just looks like stripes to me, and I like how it breaks up around the heel/ankle. I am a little nervous about how it's blobbing up on the instep, but hoping it will work out. Trust the yarn.

Yes, I said I was working on 2-at-a-time on one really long circular. I am, but these are not those socks (duh). Trust me, you do NOT want to see those yet.

Validation... I needs it.

98%

Your creative fluency score is: 1637.


Click Here to participate in the "Uses of Objects" study that generated my score above. It's fun! Plus you can win stuff.

Hard to Resist a Good Douglas Adams Reference

see more crazy cat pics

How to Freak Out Your Kids

Found this link for the classic Walk-Through Paper Trick while over at Mason-Dixon Knitting. Who says you can only learn knitting things from knitting blogs? Ann & Kay seem to love the web fun bits as much as I do; they are a great source for this sort of thing.

Anyway, I can't wait to show my kids this trick tomorrow so I can blow their little minds!

What do you mean, "Is that good parenting?" Of course it is!

Knitty Alert!

Spring Knitty is up! (What? You read the articles first?)

And don't forget MagKnits. Check out that cute little dress! I need to find a toddler girl to knit for...

How's Your Geography? (And spelling?)

Here's a fun little quiz I picked up reading Stretch Mark Mama. The problem for me was that I could remember countries like Luxembourg and Leichtenstein, but heck if I could remember how to SPELL them. And you better be able to type fast too. Go for it, and shoot me a comment to let me know how you did.

60

And you might want to memorize this song before you go.



(YouTube video embedded. Link.)

It helped me, except I couldn't spell Kazakhstan! And the quiz didn't like "West Xylophone." Go figure.

"Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica..."

U Know U Luv teh LOLs

and becuz u do...

The Humane Society of the United States is running a LOLseals Photo Caption Contest to promote awareness of protecting seals. They provide a handful of photos of teh cuteness (baby harp seals - you know, the ones people like to club for coats), and you provide the caption.

Make your caption, save the finished product to your Flickr account, and then upload back at the contest site.

You might try for something funnier than this, tho:

Go Ask Alice

Which Alice in Wonderland character are YOU? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Alice You scored Alice! You are kind-hearted and curious and give yourself very good advice, but seldom follow it, which leads you into trouble. You always try to be courteous and polite, but you become cross when people speak in nonsense to you and scold them sharply. Alice 92% Mad Hatter 83% The White Rabbit 83% Cheshire Cat 83% March Hare 75% Carpenter 75% Oyster 67% A Playing Card 67% Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum 67% Queen of Hearts 67% Walrus 67% Caterpillar 58% The Dormouse 50% Flamingo 33%

Fun Web Toy!

Make yours here.

UFOctober Day 10 Report

Well, nothing really new to report. The beginning of the week is usually crazy busy for me, so I don't get much knitting done. But I'm home all day tomorrow, and if I can resist "swatching" the ball o' mess (I frogged the non-toe), maybe I can get some sweater progress going.

But I had to stop in and share this recent comic from HOBOTOPIA, which I thought was great for UFOctober!



(If you don't get it, click here.)

Dis Comix Is Full of Fun

This is "Laugh Out Loud Cats #278" drawn by Apelad at Hobotopia. Apelad claims to be the sole living decendent of Aloysius "Gorilla" Koford, who drew the strip for 17 newspapers during 1912-1913.

You may see note a *slight* resemblence between the captions of these comics and the cats of "I Can Has Cheezburger?" Coincidence? You decide.

LOLCat of teh weeek

P.S. We have the same shark.