What did Bede know, and when did he know it?

Aerin never misses a chance to remind me I'm a nerd.  I admit, the evidence is relatively strong.  I have an engineering degree and know how to use the vi editor.  My preferred mode of humor is the pun.  And I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid.  OK, and in college.  Yeah, even after I got out of college, had a job, and was married.  But by then it was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Anyway, my love of D & D fueled also my love of Anglo Saxon history.  I think I own more books about the time of Alfred the Great than any other topic except perhaps writing.  So imagine my excitement to read this article about a new archaeological discovery of a mass Viking grave.  How cool!

You don't need to read the article.  You can just get the summary from the sidebar, which I've copied verbatim over there, below on the right.

• 51 bodies were unearthed near the site
  of the 2012 London Olympics
• On Friday, scientists announce the men
  were Vikings from the Dark Ages
• The men, who were beheaded, were found
  near the Olympic sailing venue

But I think the scientists are chasing the wrong questions. It's all well and good to try to figure out where the Vikings came from using iodine or isotopes or dialysis or whatever it is they use. And to examine in tiny detail all the wounds they received, like some sick S&M history voyeur.

What I really want to know is, why were they executed near the Olympic sailing venue?  Why not near, say, the Olympic velodrome?  Or the Olympic fencing venue?  Science may never reveal the answer to this mystery.

A day in Facebook Ads

I, like most people who've spent more than six minutes on the internet, have been trained to ignore anything that shows up in the far right column of a web page.  It's only ads any more.  But recently I've been intrigued by the ads that Facebook is choosing for me.  So I captured a sampling of ads that Facebook gave me today.

This is the one that got me started.  Apparently, it's telling me that if I am a father and make very little money, I can have hot, overly-made-up chicks smiling at me in provocative ways.  Presumably, this is what a scholarship will do for me.  But wait, this appears to be a correspondence or online degree.  This is the internet.  I don't need to take online classes to find hot, overly-made-up chicks smiling at me in provocative ways on the internet.  In fact, it's almost difficult to avoid that kind of thing.  (Be careful what links you click, folks.)

Aaaah!  Now they're telling me I can become the Unabomber if only I sign up for their online scholarship thing.  Is this dude a dad?  I can pretty much guarantee he doesn't bring home more than $45 grand, unless it's in the sack that he filled in the bank vault with his ski mask on.

Yeah, now that's more like it.  Forget scholarships.  Who needs school when you can have pecs and delts like that guy?  And all I have to do is drink whatever he's got in the bottle.  And I can be a UFC champion.  That's definitely worth a click.

This one definitely got my attention because I am certain that Wells Fargo did not make, buy, or approve this ad.  I'm guessing, though I'm not sure, that if you click this it will take you to the scholarships for dads site.  This one makes me a little queasy because it implies that I and my coworkers aren't already educated.  I do, however, like the gratuitous hyphen in re-imbursement.  This is a school I want to attend.  One that puts random punctuation where it's not needed, to clarify something that does not need clarification.

At least the Author's Guide is free.  At least it openly refers to self publishing and doesn't do those underhanded vanity publisher tricks, at least not at the start.  But really, does anyone believe that if you self publish your poetry, you will "get discovered by traditional publishers"?  That's like saying, "join Twitter and you'll get discovered by traditional publishers!"  I really hate products that prey on people's dreams with no actual hope of fulfilling them.

This one just has me befuddled.  There's an "average Team USA mom"?  At first I thought this was an ad for custom sports apparel.  Then I thought it was an ad for... um, something Olympic.  Then I saw it as a P&G ad.  More like a WTF ad.  What are they trying to sell me here?  Pringles?  Does P&G make Pringles?  Oh, I guess so.  I'll put this one down to a cute but ultimately stupid attempt at Olympics related nerd humor.  Moms, nerd humor, and Olympics--trying to hit a trifecta but coming in just outside of medal contention.

There were other ads, too, but these came up most often (apart from the Facebook feature ads).  I don't have any particular point in this blog post except to say that, yeah, now that I've paid attention, I fully understand how easy it was to train myself to ignore that right column on web sites.

Winter Olympics: guns, bikinis, and really cool sunglasses

I was shocked--shocked, I tell you!--last night when my younger son declared that the Biathlon was the least exciting winter Olympics sport to watch.  Considering that my two boys have more airsoft weaponry than most third world countries have actual guns, this declaration woke me up.  (I had fallen asleep, you see, because "ice dancing" was on the TV.)

I figured that anything involving shooting would keep my boys rapt.  Skiing and shooting.  Skating and shooting.  Hot dog eating and shooting.  Lawnmowing and shooting.  What could be more exciting, apart from maybe watching someone strap on skis and fling himself sixty feet skyward in a windmill tornado tumbling exhibition?  (OK, possibly if the skier were in fact doing this jump behind the biathlon shooting targets.)

So my boys eschewed the manliest of winter sports, the one involving the gun.  (By the way, I think women's biathlon should be moved to the summer games, and moved to the beach. It'd be like women's beach volleyball, only with bullets instead of a ball.  Girls, guns, and bikinis.  The IOC is missing a major ratings opportunity here.  But I digress.)

It got me thinking about other Olympic sports, though.

Curling.  OK, I kind of like it in the way I like ping pong and lawn bowling.  All three are well designed for the integration of beer.  But that whole broom thing... kinda girly, doncha think?  I mean, manly men don't do competitive sweeping.  When have you seen a Swiffer ad with a man doing the housework?  All they need is to add a guy at the end to pick up the stone, rinse it off, and put it in a dishwasher.  Emasculation complete.

Ice dancing.  Do we even need to go there?  This is the rhythmic gymnastics of winter.  This is figure skating for men who can't jump, and for women who are too big and fat to be thrown in the air like a high school cheerleader.  They should change this sport to incorporate some of the rules of the dance marathons of the 1930s.  Have all the couples on the ice at the same time.  Instead of sitting off in safety writing down random scores, judges would have to be on the ice, too, and tap the dancers on the shoulder when they've been eliminated.  And it would be a 12 hour marathon; if after 12 hours, more than one couple was still dancing, the judges could award style points to declare the winner.

Doubles luge.  WTF?  I mean, seriously?

I actually do enjoy watching some of the sports, if I've got nothing better to do like pick lint out of my navel or draw lines on the whiskey bottle to make sure the 10 year old isn't mooching.  Somehow I missed the US vs Canada hockey game, which is probably the one thing I would have sat down to watch in its entirety.  The downhill ski races are a bit like NASCAR in that there's almost certainly going to be a spectacular wipeout at some point, and that's OK because NBC in prime time tape delay won't show any actual serious injuries.  Cross country skiing is unfortunately like long distance running--truly an athletic competition, but fundamentally awful television.  I can allow figure skating because there's a manliness to tossing a petite girl into the air while zooming around on miniature swords strapped to your feet.  And speed skating--the one activity in all of humanity where a woman benefits from having enormous thighs.  Plus, as my son who is bored by the biathlon said, they get to wear really cool sunglasses.

So I guess the winter Olympics isn't all bad.  It's got guns, spectacular wipeouts, and really cool sunglasses.  The only thing it's missing is bikinis.