Honest Mechanic?

No, it's not an oxymoron, this week I actually met and worked with an honest mechanic. Call in the producers of Dateline for this special!

The short story...my car had been in and out of the shop for the past two weeks. The visit was triggered by a pesky check engine light. In this case the light was on for a reason...one that no matter the proposed solution did not seem to rectify the bigger issue. After days of repairs and hundreds of dollars invested the mechanic called me to say that he was stumped and could not fix my car. He recommended that I pick the car up at the end of the day. I went to the shop at the end of the day to pick up my drivable yet ill vehicle. Jimmy recommended that I contact a Chrysler dealer to work on the beast because he was stumped...he left all of the new parts in the car, asked me to call him when the dealer found a remedy because he would like to know how to fix it and handed me a check totaling the amount that I had spent on the car in the past two weeks. Can you believe it?

My friend Eric says I live a charmed life and must be part Irish because he had never heard of a mechanic willing to issue a refund for that much labor. Good thing I do and I am.

Called to serve...as a bridesmaid?

If you know me very well you know that from time to time it seems as if my part time job is serving as a bridesmaid. Don't get me wrong, I'm honored that many of my friends have asked me to stand with them on their wedding day. However, I'll be the first to admit that the humor of the "always a bridesmaid" reality gets a little old.

So, considering my vast bridesmaid experience, I was amused to read this article on the AP Wire today:

Chicken part of wedding party
by ASSOCIATED PRESS

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - Chicken was a part of the wedding of Terry Morris and Renee Biwer, but it had nothing to do with the menu or the name of a popular dance.

Henrietta, a hen, was a bridesmaid.

"She was a very good girl," maid of honor Paulette Winn said. "She wanted to eat part of the flower she was wearing."

Henrietta is the pet of the groom. About the size of a dove, she fit into the crook of flower girl Jasmyne Morris' arm.

Jasmyne, 8, said holding the hen through the ceremony was boring, but overall "it was fun."

Jasmyne, who is Terry Morris' granddaughter, has known Henrietta all of her life. "You can play with her, and she's a tame chicken," she said.

It was only natural for Henrietta to be in the wedding, Renee Morris said.

"She's a part of the family, and like one of our children," she said. "It is important to include her."

I suppose this brings new meaning to the response that I might be too chicken to be a bridesmaid again.

Air Bassoon Championships

Yes. That's right. The 12th Annual Air Bassoon Championships. 'Nuf said.

Snakes on a Plane

Maybe you saw the previews earlier this year...maybe you wish you had not. Snakes on a Plane appeared to be one of the worst films ever made and yet the marketing seemed to reflect that the producers believed this to be a quality work.

Thankfully, the message of the true wonders of this movie were relayed to the powers that be.

Insert a new marketing campaign and you have the makings of a cult hit. New marketing? What? You mean Samuel Jackson has not called you inviting you to go to the movie? Maybe he needs to call your friends. In a stroke of marketing genius, you can arrange for Sam to call your friends. The mad-lib style viral phenomenon is receiving an amazing number of hits. (Or, I might just have a few friends who think sending this call is hysterical...)

Now that everyone knows how bad the flick really is, the film is going participatory. The sign of an instant classic...up there with Rocky Horror Picture Show. Check out the audience participation script here.

Snakes on a Plane opens on the 18th. If you are lucky, your theater might have a midnight show on the 17th. (Heck, even Amarillo does).

Confession

Ok, I'll admit it. I am a Project Runway junkie. The better question is why aren't you? If you have missed an episode Television Without Pity can fill you in.

Music's inner map revealed, with some help from geometry

It started with a simple question faced by every composer: From one chord, where can a piece of music go next?
To answer it, Dmitri Tymoczko turned not only to music theory, but to multidimensional geometry.
A lover of mathematics as well as music, Tymoczko (pronounced tim-OSS-ko) was able to construct a theoretical space filled with every possible chord, with similar chords near each other. Any piece of music -- from a Chopin piano prelude to Deep Purple's hard-rock anthem ``Smoke on the Water" -- can be represented as a path through this space.
His musical map could have a variety of applications, specialists said. It could be used to help computers compose music, to teach music theory to students, or perhaps even to develop a musical instrument in which a player drags a pointer through musical space. Since it was published last month in Science -- the first music theory paper to run in the journal's 126-year history -- Tymoczko has even heard from a man interested in building a high-tech lava lamp, with lights that move through space as the music does.
But the work's main importance is much broader. It will give scholars a powerful new tool for understanding how Western music functions, as well as how it has developed over time. And the paper also serves as a striking confirmation that the deep connections between music and mathematics -- in an intuition that goes back at least to Pythagoras -- extends to the many dimensions of modern mathematics.

Full Text article

Examples - Deep Purple

Another West Texas Moment...

I would not have believed it unless I saw it with my own two eyes. This afternoon, returning from a lunch meeting, I saw six horses "parked" (and I use the term loosely) in a Dairy Queen parking lot. (I-40 and Washington - not exactly a rural setting). No, there is not a hitching post at this particular establishment. Yet, there the horses stood, each in their own parking stall while their owners were presumably dining at the Dairy Queen. My traveling companion indicated that the horses were hobbled together. Now all we need is some tumbleweed on Polk Street, and a shoot-out at the saloon and the experience would be complete.