chuggnutt.com

The Mount Rushmore Of... is a new blog that is one of those obvious-in-hindsight ideas I wish I'd thought up, because it satisfies the "Top X List" jones of twitchy web surfers everywhere.

Everyone knows what Mount Rushmore is, right?  Mount Rushmore is a National Memorial featuring the sculptures of the heads of the most influential Presidents of the first 150 years of the United States.  The Mount Rushmore Of takes that same principle and asks the question of who’s head should be carved in stone for other subjects, like:

• Who is on the Mount Rushmore of Baseball?
• Who is on the Mount Rushmore of Punk Rock?
• And so on…

Debate encouraged. Naturally.

Incidentally, Neal Stewart, the mastermind behind it, also writes the highly entertaining Turkey Sandwich Report. Oh yeah, he works in beer, too—a marketer, but I don't hold that against him.

I'm nerdy, no two ways about it: while thinking about the kind of things I would want for Christmas this year, I got to wondering about fictional gadgets and technology that I wouldn't at all mind having. So, as a perfectly goofy/nerdy/idle/self-amusing blog post, I put together a wish list of sci-fi/fantasy gadgets I'd like to get for Christmas (or my birthday).

(Incidentally, I do have an Amazon.com wish list here. It doesn't necessarily match the list I made for my family this year, but I'm just sayin'.)

Lightsaber

Forget laser guns, a lightsaber is the perfect all-in-one weapon. The blade is indestructible, cuts through anything, deflects energy blasts, and acts as a flashlight. Plus, when you're done slicing up Sith Lords, it has a ton of household uses.

Tricorder

The ultimate all-purpose scanning device and handheld computer. As the various Star Trek series show, there's really nothing your tricorder can't tell you—from general weather and environmental conditions to the movements and stats of hidden people to the spin orientation of quarks.

Sonic Screwdriver

Doctor Who's miracle tool. There was almost nothing he couldn't do with that thing... repairing any machine... unlocking any door... cooking meals... getting cash from ATMs...

Time-traveling DeLorean... or TARDIS

Gotta have a time machine.

For vehicular transport, I can't decide between these two. If I went with the DeLorean, I'd have to go with the fusion-powered flying version, but then I'd run into various hijinks related to the existence of magical automobiles in the wrong era. And, of course, the hassle of being able to get the car up to (arbitrarily) 88 miles per hour just to get anywhen. Plus, it doesn't travel spatially—you travel to the same corresponding point in space in the different time period. Could be a problem if there's a building there in the future or something.

But, the thing looks cool.

On the other hand, Doctor Who's TARDIS travels both temporally and spatially, and is bigger on the inside than the outside. Drawbacks? Doesn't seem like you actually have much control over where and when you travel. Plus, it always seems to look like a goofy blue police box. Or, at least the Doctor's did. Perhaps I could get one of my own, an updated, working model.

Babel fish

Yeah, this isn't a gadget per se, but man, being able to understand and communicate in any language without having to fiddle around with something as cumbersome as a Universal Translator...

That's all I can come up with right now. Though I'm sure somebody will point out that since I chose a Babel fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that I should choose, well, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as a must-have gadget. Nah. I figure I'll just load Wikipedia onto my tricorder.

On the radio today, to commemorate Mardi Gras, they were asking the question, "What fatty (get it?) food can you not get enough of?" and taking calls. I thought I'd play along.

(Granted, I really don't each too much junk food these days. Bear with me.)

• Doritos. Love 'em. The original nacho cheese flavor is the best.
• Cheesecake.
• Peanut butter.
• Biscuits and gravy. Has to be the creamy sausage gravy, though.
• Apple fritters. Really good apple fritters, not the crunchy overcooked ones.

What else?

It's time for another edition of the Chuggnutt Zeitgeist, in the spirit of Google and since I did one last year. Interesting stuff, if you're into blogs and stats and such. On to it!

• Number of blog entries: 244. Last year: 306.
• Approximate total number of words: 39,810. Last year: 45,537
• Average words per blog entry: 163.2. Last year: 148.8
  
  It only looks like I wrote less than last year, but you know what? I was also writing on The Brew Site. I'm doing a Zeitgeist post over there too, but the quick numbers are 222 posts and 38,371 words... which combined, yields 466 posts and 78,181 words. Surpassed!
  
  
• Total visitors: 633,110. This is unfiltered, so it includes bots, spiders, RSS readers, etc. Last year: 242,433
• Average visitors per day: 1,734. Last year: 687
• Total real visitors (approximate): 430,505. This is the actual number, with most of the bots and such filtered out.
• Average real visitors per day: 1,179
  
  This year I made the attempt to show actual visitors to the site, not just the automated stuff out there. To that end I filtered out anything identifying itself as a spider, known RSS feed slurpers/readers, bots, crawlers, and non-browser agents. I didn't get everything out, but this is a pretty decent snapshot. Note this doesn't speak to unique visitors; the stat package I'm using doesn't classify that and I'm not using Sitemeter or anything that supposedly tracks unique visitors. I imagine a good part of the total visitors are repeat visits, so I won't hazard a guess as to how many unique hits are there.
  
  
• The most active month was October, by a long shot, because of the Burger King mask post—people were hammering this post looking for a Burger King Halloween costume. Not surprisingly, this post has also garnered the most comments: 673
• There were three days on which traffic spiked considerably: April 30, with 9,152 visitors; July 20, with 7,575 visitors; and August 18, with 8,915 visitors. Unsurprisingly, those appear to be times when I was FARKed—that is, someone linked to one of my pictures from the FARK forums.
• Ten most popular blog entries:
  1. The Burger King creeps me out: 28,910
  2. Houston's glass public toilet: 9,610
  3. My Burger King mask post is on fire!: 9,511
  4. Goofy Burger King job flyer: 5,234
  5. The Donald Trump/Bend urban legend: 4,879
  6. Leonard Nimoy's Bilbo Baggins: 4,862
  7. Super Wal-Mart: 4,619
  8. Central Oregon's biggest baby?: 3,821
  9. Leeroy Jenkins!: 3,781
  10. Never ending fall: 3,017
• Total number of comments (not counting spam): 1,556
• Most popular searches on this site:
  • burger king: 34
  • burger king mask [variants]: 24
  • i want to buy the burger king mask: 5
  • Beaubien [variants]: 28
  • z21: 27
  • ktvz: 8
  • html2text: 24
  • trump: 10 (plus 3 variants)
  • donald trump: 6
  • donald trump bend: 3
  • donald trump bend oregon rumor: 3
  • (Total Trump related: 25)
  • fantastic 4 cash card [variants]: 14
  • fantastic 4 [variants]: 16
  • bend oregon [variant]: 14
  • bend: 12
  • php: 12
  • blog: 12
  • amazon: 11
  • lovecraft: 10
• Ten most popular search engine searches landing here:
  1. burger king mask: 5,295
  2. boba fett: 3,086
  3. pdb reader: 1,972
  4. free palm ebooks: 1,805
  5. darth maul: 1,534
  6. kermit the frog: 1,376
  7. leeroy jenkins: 1,221
  8. www.amazon.com/burgerking: 1,210
  9. super walmart: 973
  10. palm reader: 877
• Top five search engines:
  1. Google: 72,180
  2. Yahoo: 20,629
  3. MSN: 4,042
  4. AskJeeves: 1,259
  5. AOL Search: 1,061
• Here's the approximate breakdown of browsers and agents, gleaned from the full numbers:
  • Internet Explorer: 61% of all traffic
  • Mozilla/Netscape browsers (Firefox mostly, I think): 23%
  • Opera: 1%
  • RSS readers/agents: 2%
  • Bots/search engine crawlers: 8.2%
  • Other stuff (random bots, feed readers, crawlers, obscure browsers): 4.8%
• Among real visitors, some surprises in country of origin (I'm not listing all country stats here; suffice to say, the U.S. and Canada are the top two):
  • China: 13,221 visitors
  • Malaysia: 1,930
  • Uruguay: 1,371
  • Sweden: 912
  • Saudi Arabia: 899
  • Greece: 524
  • Iran: 450
  I'm surprised I'm that popular in China.

Being inspired by Chris's post about the same, I decided I'd list my favorite/best posts for 2005. These aren't the most popular ones (I'll cover those later), but the ones I personally think are the best.

I'm not ranking them, though, other than in the date in which they appeared.

• Bandage Man
• Globe
• Things about Bend that I miss
• Things about Bend that I like
• Our local Jedi
• My semi-annual TV rant
• Pimp name
• Hard drinkin'
• Bandon cheese woes
• 4 8 15 16 23 42 (my long rambling post on Lost)
• Haunted Bend
• Tarding down literature

Okay, I freely admit I stole the title from Jake. Everyone have a good holiday? Mostly? Good.

There's no denying it, Christmas is for the kids. We had more presents under the tree than ever, I think, almost all for them. And, they're just at that age now where Christmas is a Big Deal, possibly the Biggest Deal of the Whole Year, so it was full frontal X-Mas this year. (Yeah, I chose that phrase deliberately, just to weed out the pervs. I'm watching you.)

So, here's a (mostly boring) list of what I got this year, both for my birthday and Christmas (no particular order):

• Two big fancy bottles of Rogue beer: Imperial Pilsner and Imperial IPA.
• The Confusion and The System of the World (books by Neal Stephenson).
• Clothing: a sweater, a long-sleeved flannel shirt (gotta love the flannel), pajamas.
• A Disney World shot glass mug, etched with my name.
• A new wallet, with a hundred dollar bill in it. I almost didn't find the money, I thought the wallet was nifty enough.
• The board game "Brewopoly."
• Peanuts: the Art of Charles M. Schulz
• A Barnes and Noble gift card
• Money! Some of which I've already used to buy some books and fancy beer
• The annual Christmas ornament with the picture of the kids
• DVDs: The Incredibles and Batman Begins
• The Forty-Niners, a graphic novel
• A reading lamp—a standing lamp with a gooseneck lamp addition
• The Budweiser Brewery from Department 56—a porcelain model building of the original brewery
• And oh yeah, a cat.

After the morning of opening presents and ooh-ing and ahh-ing over new toys and cleaning up and everything, we went out to my parents' house to spend the rest of the day eating and visiting in our traditional Christmas manner. This is actually my favorite part of Christmas, I think, family and friends getting together to celebrate the holiday.

This year we caught up with a family friend we hadn't seen in four years, with an interesting backstory: he's a forensic criminalist based in Ontario, Oregon. That's right, he's a CSI, although, as he put it, without the guns, the drama, or anything like that. He wants to get transferred to Portland because there's not enough homicides in Eastern Oregon... seriously. Mostly it's lab work, identifying meth and other similar drugs.

What's funny is that I was under the impression for years now that he was a forensic psychologist, which is what I'd been telling people. Doesn't that seem more exciting or interesting somehow? I don't know, but I was pretty amused by the thought of him matching wits with the Hannibal Lecters of Eastern Oregon...

Ah, such is Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year!

According to this list from MSNBC/Forbes, seven of the 10 safest places to live in this country are in the Pacific Northwest. Central Oregon didn't make the list, presumably because of the Sisters bulge and our general proximity to volcanoes.

I'm a little surprised to see Medford/Ashland make the list, though; part of the selection criteria was taking account of extreme weather, which they define as "abundant rain or snowfall or days that are below freezing or above 90 degrees Fahrenheit," and Medford is routinely hotter than most parts of the state during the summer—easily over the "extreme" 90 degree mark.

Even more surprising though is Honolulu, Hawaii, as the nation's safest place to live. Who'd'a thunk it?

Via LifeHacker.

I guess this post spins out of watching the TV show "Lost" and a post by Isaac Laquedem a while back. The question is, what three books would you take with you if you were stranded on a desert isle? (Isaac's post considers five books; do that if you can't keep yourself to three.)

My tentative picks would be:

• Les Miserables. No, not in the original French; I like my massive English paperback edition. I haven't even finished this book, so it would occupy me for a while.
• Either The Stand or Cryptonomicon.
• Probably an anthology of some sort. Something like The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, or maybe The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces.

Of course, if I were practical, I'd choose an all-purpose survival guide, a book on identifying plants (edible and poisonous), that sort of thing.

Or, better yet, go with this book:

So, continuing in my "Things I X about Bend" series:

I don't like...

• ...the traffic; the disproportionate amount of congestion and the bad drivers.
• ...not having a mass transit system.
• ...how the north end of town is a stripmall/boxstore eyesore.
• ...skyrocketing real estate prices.
• ...the roundabouts. Actually, I'm kind of on the fence about them; they're not inherently bad but do we really need so many of them?
• ...overpriced "public" art. Like the "gateway to Bend" thing on the parkway made from rusty scrap metal.

What else?

See also: Things about Bend that I miss, Things about Bend that I like.

That is, these are things that are new in Bend, or are a result of progress, that I like. It's a balance to my Things about Bend that I miss post the other day.

I like...

• ...the Bend Public Library building. I have fond memories of the old building they used to be in, but their newer building is far better.
• ...McMenamins' Old St. Francis School. Can't ever have enough microbreweries, and they've really done excellent work on the site. Plus, they brought back a movie theater to downtown Bend—a theater pub no less (which is what I always thought the Tower Theater should have been turned into)!
• ...The Old Mill District. For the most part. They've developed the area much better than I would have thought.
• ...newer restaurants like Zydeco, Mercury Diner, Merenda's.
• ...Barnes & Noble.
• ...the Les Schwab Amphitheater.

More as I think of these, too.

I miss...

• ...the statue of the of the homeless guy checking his wallet on the corner of Franklin and Wall. People used to decorate it for the Christmas season.
• ...when the Tower Theatre was an actual movie theater.
• ...when J.C. Penney used to be downtown. This is old school, it used to be on the corner of Wall Street and Oregon Avenue, the location of the (not-coincidentally-named) Old Penney's Galleria. We used to buy our shoes there, and it was the only place in town I knew of that had a bomb shelter.
• ...The Juniper Café. Okay, I didn't eat there that often, but it's been in Bend my entire life.
• ...Book & Game. Before Barnes and Noble moved in, it was the coolest bookstore we had in town, out at the Mountain View Mall... I even have some bookmarks from there, still.
• ...hell, the Mountain View Mall itself, during its heydey, when the cinemas was there, and K-Mart, and the Emporium, and the arcade...
• ...Café Paradiso. The original coffee shop, with couches, lounge chairs, chess, a small stage... It was big, too, much bigger and more comfortable than the other places in town currently. Soba Noodles is there now.
• ...the Mexicali Rose. It was the lava rock building on the corner of Franklin and 3rd, where Bella Cucina is now. It was a neat little restaurant (when it was Mexican), even if parking was a little tight and weird. Now, with the awkward signage (like the banner hanging where the actual sign used to be), it just looks... wrong somehow.

More as I think of them.

Yes, this is the post where I detail what I got for Christmas, etc. I'll even throw my birthday gifts in there for good measure.

It was a good Christmas, too. (First Christmas in our new house.) After we got up and opened up presents, I made some giant French toast on my new griddle (got it for Christmas), wearing my new bathrobe (Christmas). I also got two cookbooks, Quicksilver, a fifth of Jagermeister, several bottles of McMenamins beer, a Jack Daniels gift set (whiskey plus playing cards and dice), a Barnes and Noble gift card, The Return of the King DVD, and A Charlie Brown Christmas (the book adapted from the original TV special).

For my birthday two days earlier, I received a Peanuts daily desk calendar, a photo Christmas tree ornament (with the kids' picture in it), an unusual sculpture/pen holder for my desk at work, several bottles of McMenamins beer (this was kind of a boozy holiday, I think) along with an Old St. Francis School pint glass, a gift certificate to Pegasus Books (the local comics shop), a personalized keychain, and cash. Cold, hard cash.

All in all, a nice haul.