Recently in Fun and Games Category

Hark! A Vagrant: Hipsters ruin everything, part 1

Geoffrey Chaucer cracketh me uppe:

Ich wente up to bedde and sadlie closid my eyes, while Philippa burned our beste candles readinge of teenage sparklie vampyres. She was already on to the next oon, Compline....

In this fyne book of sparklie vampyres, Bella Cygne moveth from Essex to Yorkshyre to lyve with her fathir, who ys a sheriff and escheator.... Ther is considerablie moore sexual tensioun than in Piers Plowman.

Yt is reallie very good. Ich did reade al of Vespers, right through to Compline and ich have just startid Matins. This ys absolutelie the beste teenage sparklie vampyre love storye ich haue evir reade.

but he's cute.

Making Babies: A Very Different Look at Natural Family Planning

But another reason for NFP's allegedly high success rate is that couples who use it are prepared to welcome children and so don't blame NFP for unexpected pregnancies. Four of my own five children came the NFP way -- that is, totally unexpectedly -- and that's a good thing, because without them bouncing in as surprises, excuses to delay (the sort of excuses one might hear from a recruit in parachute training) might have gone on for a very long time. As it is, in a mere matter of ten years, my wife and I assembled a complete basketball team. And if menopause doesn't strike my wife soon, who knows what sort of team we might assemble.
Rather than bite one's nails to the quick at the prospect of baby number ten -- which, if one marries in one's early 20s and practices NFP, is a definite possibility -- we should encourage the attitude of the more the merrier, which is a far more attractive case to make than all the goo-goo language about how NFP helps couples "communicate" and about the joy of charting temperatures and discharges and plotting one's conjugal acts as a captain might chart a course for his ship.

What I really want to know is how the powers that be in charge of the apocalypse bother to make the players so politically correct. Not the movie makers, you know, the fates, like in Angel or Charmed...

The world is destroyed and the people who are left are a smart white guy, a little black girl, a universal Indian like lady, a black rapper, an old woman and various generic white criminal types.

Well duh Mom, you always need a rapper. Sheesh.

1. I never know how to get started on my list of Seven Quick Takes.

2. After I finish my Seven Quick Takes, I am going to bake cupcakes using a Wacky Cake recipe. I've been asked to make a birthday cake for a little girl whose baby sister is allergic to eggs, so I'm going to try out the recipe today and have the kids and grownups test them out when Hambet and I go off to a play date later today.

3. I reorganized the books yesterday -- something I've been wanting to do since around June 2006 -- and dedicated a shelf to the books I haven't read yet. I also discovered that we have three world atlases. How did this happen?

4. For Lent this year I tried to give up recreational use of the Internet (with the exception of Facebook and JUST A COUPLE of blogs.) The exceptions kept growing and then about halfway through Lent I was ranting about the Notre Dame situation on IM to a friend, who said, "you should put this on your blog!"

That stopped me in my tracks -- I'd never told her about my Sekrit Identity -- so I tried to be clever and asked, "Now, what makes you think I have a blog?"

"Oh, I thought you did; everyone else has one. Well, you should start one!"

5. I started reading The Hobbit to Hambet the other night. He LOVES it.

6. I like the artwork on Jen's copy of Prayer Primer much better than the artwork on my copy.

7. My rhubarb is starting to come up. Maybe I'll actually be able to harvest some this year!

It can slice a steel pan in half! (Smock, don't go trying this at home now....)

The Barack Obama action figure includes stepstool, American flag, two neckties, and wristwatch. Teleprompter and kendo equipment sold separately.

Although, truth be told, I kind of wonder about St. Michael. He seems all business to me.

Please check out LOLSaints!

In the past couple of days, I stumbled on some pretty depressing internet tools. I am not sure if it more depressing that they simply exist, or that they are advertised like normal, run of the mill stuff.

The first was from a site called divorce360.com. Yep, a whole entire site dedicated to all things divorce. What was interesting was what they called the Marriage Calculator, or more to the point, a "divorce calculator". You put in some information such as your education level, how old you were when you got married, how long you have been married and they give you an odd percentage of the people who have gotten divorced in your "group" and a prediction of what percentage of people from your "group" will divorce.

For example, my results:

People with similar backgrounds who are already divorced: 36%

People with similar backgrounds who will be divorced over the next five years: 10%

In general for the five-year divorce prediction rates, those with less than 3 percent are at lower
risk, 3 - 7 percent are of average risk and more than 7 percent are at higher risk.

I have no idea what this summary says about me and my marriage. I would be inclined to ask things like "is your husband a Poopy-Head *?" Honestly though, I don't know what our culture's fascination is with constantly throwing out statistics about what increases divorce rates. I have read so many times that my marriage is doomed, doomed, doomed because we got married young. I would love to see as much attention devoted why marriages succeed, succeed, succeed! No, I am not claiming that there are no such things as conditions that certainly do or do not stack the cards for or against a marriage working, just simply this is plain ole depressing. I can see reaching road blocks in a marriage and easily throwing in the towel simply because "well, I shouldn't have gotten married anyway." It conveys a message of hopelessness rather than one of hope.

Perhaps this sort of info is useful prior to marriage, but once there is a commitment, I am not sure how telling people their chances of failing is of any help.

The second sad shock for the day was the DNA Eye Color Paternity Test. I actually cannot fathom at all what the point of this tool is. I clicked on it because I saw a link on one of my celebrity gossip sites stating "now you know if it's positive or negative, now find out if it's blue, green, or brown". Not an exact quote. I thought "oh fun, like one of those 'child height predictors'. I don't even know why I find this kind of thing fun. It's like "short Dad, short Mom, there's a good chance you will have a short kid." Wow. Really? Amazing!

But the eye color thing intrigued me. My husband and I have plain, not light, not dark, but just average, middle of the road brown eyes. Out of six kids, we managed to produce one with brown eyes like us, one with hazel eyes, one with heterochromia, or in other words one brown eye and 3/4 of another brown eye and 1/4 blue eye, another with hazel eyes, one with deep, chocolate brown eyes, and one blue/green-eyed little girl (yes, yes shamelessly showing off my kids). If you asked me before they were here, I would have guessed they all would have had dark, brown eyes, but God is full of surprises.

So I clicked on the quiz to see what other interesting combos might come up. I missed the point. It wasn't just for fun, it was some sort of paternity-predictor quiz. I am baffled how someone has slept with so many people in one month, they have no concept who the other parent is, and only have a few eye colors to go by, but I guess I don't watch enough Maury.

So here's the quiz:

First you select the "biological mother": "brown"

Then the "child": "blue-green"

Then the "Alleged Father": "brown"

Here are the results:

EYE COLOR ANALYSIS

Eye Color Test Results: Not Excluded

Summary: The Alleged Father is Not Excluded from being the biological father of the child because the eye color of the Alleged Father is consistent with the Child

The eye color chart (located below) highlights the eye colors that are most likely to occur in offspring (children) based on the eye colors that were selected for the parents. The eye colors 'highlighted' in color are most likely to occur. The eye colors indicated in 'gray' are considered to be unlikely.

Blue-green was in the "gray" area. So my husband is considered unlikely to be my daughter's father. Ah, science. Seriosuly, what is the point? Can you imagine if I was someone desperate for the kind of information this thing is supposed to help provide, and all I got was a "maybe, but unlikely"? Sheesh.

*"Poopy Head is an official psychiatric diagnoses. My father is a psychologist so I know smart stuff like this. True story. I highly recommend that if you are dating someone who is diagnosed as a "Poopy Head", you reconsider.

Professor Vader explains Pythagorean Therom.

Hat tip to my brother Ed. He's an engineer. He gets a big kick out of math humor.

(Between you and me, Pythagorean therom was one of the few parts of geometry I had no problem with.)

(translation after the jump)