The Friday Five on Saturday night:

1. What was your biggest accomplishment this year? I finished my bachelor's of science at Georgia Tech.

2. What was your biggest disappointment? Things have been pretty good, I can't think of anything worth mentioning.

3. What do you hope the new year brings? Lots of acceptances from graduate schools.

4. Will you be making any New Year's resolutions? If yes, what will they be? Yes, I take every opportunity to make and keep resolutions (lent, birthday, new years, whenever). My big one is I'm going to try to eat healthier (not to lose weight, but to eat well).

5. What are your plans for New Year's Eve? I refuse to celebrate this holiday, as I always have hopeful expectations for whatever party I'm going to, but I always end up half-asleep and unamused by midnight. I will "celebrate" by having a nice evening at home (maybe watching my new DVDs) and going to bed when I'm sleepy.

Two jokes my friends have told me this weekend:

What do you get when you combine a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian church member?

Someone who rings your doorbell, but doesn't know why.



How does a Mississippi farmer find a sheep in tall grass?

Very satisfying. (I know, ewwww)

(Jokes courtesy of my two alleged ex-girlfriends - Erin and Ali)

Wow, minus one for UGA in the grad school selection campaign: Fraternity brothers kill, eat raccoon.

"The men had spotted the raccoon behaving erratically outside the Phi Kappa Psi house at the University of Georgia on December 12. One hit it with construction pylon and shot it with a pellet gun in the fraternity's parking lot, Athens-Clarke County Animal Control officials said. Another skinned the raccoon, and a third cooked and ate some of its meat."

Runner up for the stupid criminal award?

Thief mistakenly hops into cop car

I don't know if it counts as stupidity as much as very bad luck.


Wait a minute, I just found a better nominee. This criminal was released from jail and just four days later returned in a stolen car, using his revoked-for-life license to pick up his belongings. He went right back into jail.

I read a lot of Reader's Digest when I'm home. Aside: Did you know I once got a funny published in Reader's Digest? It's not funny if you don't know about gardening, but I got $100 for it, so it's all good even if none of my friends get it. If you can find it on this girl's quote page you can see it. ANYWAY, here's a funny Humor in Uniform joke:

"Dead ahead, through the pitch black night, the captain sees a light on a collision course with his ship. He sends a signal: 'Change your course ten degrees east.'
'Change yours ten degrees west,' comes the reply.
The captain responds, 'I'm a United States Navy captain! Change your course, sir.'
'I'm a seaman second class,' the next message reads. 'Change your course, sir.'
The captain is furious. 'I'm a battleship! I'm not changing course!'
'I'm a lighthouse. Your call.'

CNN has an article from Business 2.0 listing the 10 technologies to watch in 2004. One of the coolest technologies is the Gecko tape:

"Lizards climb walls using the mechanical adhesive force of millions of tiny hairs on their feet. A synthetic version of those microscopic hairs allows gecko tape, developed at England's University of Manchester, to stick to almost any surface without glue. Applications include gloves that allow a person to climb a glass wall, the ability to move computer chips in a vacuum, and new bandages."

Oh, and if OLEDs really equal affordable flat-panel monitors... I'm so there. Technology is a crazy-amazing thing (when it isn't used for evil- muahahaha).

Because overpopulation is causing diseases to spread rapidly through the deer population here in Alabama, the state allowed archers to go crazy in the state parks to reduce the population (which for practical purposes makes sense, but ethically, I have issues with us deciding when other species populations are too big, but human population... oh-no, never too big). So why are Texas A&M researchers being applauded for cloning a deer? I could find a way to make kudzu spread faster... that wouldn't make me very popular here in the south.

A little bow with a big Napoleon complex.


(sorry, at home I can't ftp to my usual site, so I have to skirt geocities limitations and just link images... and put them in a crappy gif form).

I can't think of any conspiracy theories I really ascribe to. But this new theory that there's something fishy about the capture of Saddam would be just too delicious if it were true. I think they are putting such strong spins on stories from Iraq (e.g., Lynch) that they are bordering on total fiction. Does that count as a conspiracy theory?

Oh, and this is scary to my liberal-leaning sensibilities. Fictional accounts straight to the gullible public!!! oh my.

(Links courtesy of Metafilter)

(if I'm single in a few days it's cause 3XK was fatally sickened by this uber-liberal post).

I've been reading The Ethicist at the New York Times for a while, as one of my profs kept mentioning it, and it sounded interesting. For a while I thought he just told everyone that what they did was ethical. Finally, this week he told someone they were unethical for submitting bogus receipts so they could tip their maids and skirt a misogynistic company policy.

"Your action may well be less unethical than your department's policy, and it is no doubt less unethical than much done by the late Idi Amin, but the ability to name a bigger villain than yourself does not justify your own misdeeds. So perhaps you should argue the point and petition your company to amend this policy, but you should not file fake receipts or eat the flesh of your political rivals."


(BTW, you need to register with the Times to read The Ethicist... but it's free)