Friday morning random

I'm trying to find funny things or stuff that makes me smile. Yesterday, we got an e-mail - our excellent BlackBoard guru died suddenly the night before in her home. Unexpectedly. One of my colleagues had had an e-mail exchange with her the day before, his last e-mail to her (which he said he hoped she got the chance to read) was thanking her for fixing the problem he had.

Life is really fragile.

Anyway. A couple things that make me smile:

1. German nursing-home residents dress as classic movie stills for a for a promotional calendar. They're all fun, but I especially like the Blues Brothers one. But I also like the Saturday Night Fever one....(The author of the article, in typical Internet Snark fashion, implies the people were forced to do the calendar against their will. I am quite sure that is not true; the idea was probably presented to them as a "are there any volunteers" and they probably had more volunteers than they had spaces in the calendar....)

2. This animated .gif makes me laugh every time I look at it:

(For the non-MLP fans, that's Bulk Biceps there on the right. Wearing what is apparently a Rarity design. The little wings sticking out of the "armhole" made for them just cracks me up.)

3. This weekend is apparently "Love your Local Quilt Shop" day. I might go down to mine on Saturday. Not that there's anything I need, and in fact, I have several quilt ideas stacked up and waiting (with all the fabric obtained for them), but still, I think it's nice to at least go in there. I suppose I could take one of my unquilted tops I want to take in for quilting and sew up its backing tonight, maybe.

4. This comic, from Incidental Comics:

 (It's been really cold here. So maybe pre-heated books would help)


And a couple of other things:

1. The Bieber meltdown is all over the news. (Yes, even the local news, and we have our share of people making bad decisions). I don't know. I was never even remotely a fan (from what of his music I heard, it seemed singularly insipid to me), but the older I get, the sadder it makes me to see a fairly young person - and a young person who arguably has some level of talent and who has fans and all that, self-destruct. There have been too many cases of this lately.  I know in some circles there's a certain schadenfreude about it, but really, it just makes me sad.

2. Apparently I now have arthritis in my right elbow too (the one I DIDN'T break 20 years ago). I suppose it's partly from mousing, and it's probably exacerbated by the fact that it's been very, very dry here, and I've been running a humidifier pretty much constantly, and refilling it gets heavy (I carry the tank to the kitchen sink, fill it, and carry it back out to my living room). I'm sure the fluctuating weather and high pressure we're having (high pressure seems to bother me more than low) doesn't help it. It stinks getting old.

3. This weekend is my 12th blogiversary. I don't have too much new to say about it. One thing I've noticed in the past year is a decline in comments. I don't know if it's that Blogger has made it harder for non-Blogger users (or people without a Google account) to comment, or if people have mostly moved away from blog-reading (my stats don't seem to have gone down much), or if the stuff I write doesn't seem to invite comments, or what. (My Inner Critic is telling me, "It's because you're saying the same dumb things you said six years ago; people are bored with you" but I'm trying to shut her up on that). For what it's worth, I've been blogging longer than the Yarn Harlot but obviously I am more boring and less cool. And I never wrote any books about my knitting experiences. I probably don't have enough of them to make a book. (At one point I toyed with the idea of writing up a series of essays and titling them "Learning to Play the Piano at 40" - centering them all on the theme of learning something new later in life, and what picking up learning music after many years away from it has taught me about both music and learning, and also about how I think it's valuable for educators to do something themselves that involves a learning curve: taking piano lessons has taught me stuff about learning, and it has also reinforced stuff I already knew and believed. But time gets away from me and I doubt I will ever write it.)