Scrabulous is Doomed!

No, I don’t actually have any inside news on the legal troubles the creators are facing, but Scrabulous is currently my favorite game… and therefore it is doomed. If you are my favorite anything, watch out because chances are you are being hunted down by Anton Chigurh.

Let’s examine the evidence:

• Favorite TV Show: The Wire. Now down to the final two episodes of its five glorious seasons, after having unceremoniously taken out my favorite character (have I mentioned that this is the greatest TV show of all time?)

• Favorite Music Website: NPR’s Discover Songs. After being instrumental in launching my personal music renaissance of the past year… my company blocked their music streams on Valentines Day. Thanks for that. I am of course retaliating by streaming far more music off of KEXPlorer.com… but it’s just not the same.
  
  
• Favorite Bar: Dr. Dremos. While we did manage to hang on to a piece of it, the search continues for a hang out to rival Dremo's. Nothing comes close to its combination of, convenience, crowds without being crowded, the cross-section of citizenry, readily available parlor games, and uncanny knack for creating memories...

• Favorite Blog: Seeking John Galt. After just over a year of wonderfully witty and insightful posts, my favorite blogger has gone to ground (and even taken many of my favorite posts with her, including one in which I am proud to have played a supporting role—resurrected by the magic of Google Cache). I’m convinced she has signed a major publishing deal and her contract precludes her from blogging any longer, but I will miss reading her work nonetheless.

I suppose all of the time freed up by the demise of some of my favorite pastimes means I’ll have that much more time to dedicate to Scrabulous… at least until it too inevitably falls prey to my curse.

And a random grab-bag of Notes to Jon (beware the lecture notes):

• How ever I rank the animated and live action shorts next year, be sure to bet on my fourth ranked pick in your Oscar pool (my 4^th —of 5—picks won each category). Had I nailed those two categories I’d have come home the winner… despite going with my heart and taking Juno for Best Picture.

• From the 9^th annual Roger Revelle Lecture by Dr. Freilich:

• Satellites beat boats for collecting ocean data

• Warmer ocean surfaces lead to less efficient upwelling of the nutrient-rich water below and that results in lower “Net Primary Productivity”… which I think meant less photosynthesizing critters absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hmmm. The warmer it gets the less CO2 the oceans will absorb… and the less CO2 the oceans absorb the warmer it will get. That sounds like a bad thing.

• Satellites thousands of kilometers above the ocean can now calculate surface wind speed and direction by measuring the thumbnail-sized ripples on the water caused by local surface wind.

• The white-chocolate-with-Heath-bar-chunk desserts were amazing

• And from Rocky Kolb's Dark Matter lecture at the Carnegie Institution:

• Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 95% of the mass of the universe

• One of his better jokes in response to the big-bang-is-just-a-theory folks (who are often related to the evolution-is-just-a-theory folks) who insist we consider all possibilities… is that “gravity is just a theory too. So the next time you come to the edge of a cliff… by all means, consider all possibilities”.

• In the battle for which form scientists believe all this Dark Matter is stored in (between MACHOs and WIMPs), WIMPs are winning and the race is on to discover them (just like the Higgs-Bosun particle)… however, due to federal science funding cuts it’ll likely be some Frenchman who discovers them.

• “The Unbearable Lightness of Nothing”. Even if you create a vacuum and cool it to absolute zero, the Quantum Uncertainty Principle says that at any time a particle and its anti-particle can appear, exist for a brief moment, and then annihilate. “Nothing” is hard to come by.

• Finally, I discovered that the $10 ticket deal to shows by The Shakespeare Threatre Company really just requires a phone call at 10am on a Tuesday (I assumed you’d really have to go in person to have a decent shot at one of the 20 pairs of tickets). We got our choice of several nights and Darren and I, purchasing separately, ended up with 4 adjacent seats. (See how cleverly I buried this nugget under all of those lecture notes)