More Weird Kids' Names.

While visiting Fandom Wank and reading about the latest bout of freaking out brought on by the latest entry in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight vampire novel series I came across another source for oddball baby names, the Utah Baby Namer. Former Utah residents Wes Clark and his wife Cari have long been collecting from various sources the distinctive baby names found in that Mormon heavy state. And boy have they found some doozies. One of the worst I've seen in a while is a name given to a girl, VulvaMae. Did her parents not have a clue what vulva are?

As for Meyer's vampire books there seems to be a good ole helping of crack running through them. For example her vampires hide from the Sun not because they'll be burnt to a crisp like the vamps most of us are familiar with. No, it's because they'll sparkle when hit by sunlight. And that's fairly tame given some of the other stuff in the books, which you can wade through this Fandom Wank entry to learn more about.

Crushing All In Man.

In a post a while back I discussed that bugaboo of online poker players(and sometimes real world players) the All In Man. Tonight I once more faced an example of this species. I've been playing a bit the last week on Mansion's poker site after getting a CD ROM in the mail that offered me 15 bucks free. I decided to play in one of their $1.20+.30 Sit and Go tournaments. One of the players turned out to be an All In Man. Again and again he went all in. Sometimes he would lost a good hunk of his stack, only to win it back. I finally got a hand I just couldn't fold, pocket kings. Unlike the example in the previous post this time my overcards held up against his all in with J 4, doubling me up and severely crippling him. He got some of it back, but a few hands later I called his all in with pocket jacks along with another player who went all in with his last 600 chips. All In Man had a measly 4c6c, and was crushed when a third jack came to give me JJJ, while the other all in player caught a straight. Winning that KK hand had put me in the lead, and I held on to it for the rest of the game, winning 7 bucks. It sure was nice to have someone else's poor play fail against my good cards, instead of his rolls of the dice getting paid off as all too often happens.

Well Whadaya Know...

...sometimes shameless whining (or to use a phrase I've used more than once, shameless hit mongering) does get the hit count up. (You'll have to find the actual whining yourself.) Of course I'm hoping the resulting visitors aren't the obsessives who've been drawn to Pharyngula by "Crackergate." It's ironic to see claims that PZ Myers is merely trying to attract attention with his actions over the past few days. After all his blog is one that regularly has posts that result in 200 hundred response threads. He gets plenty of attention already. In fact all the outraged folks are doing is helping to push the visibility of Pharyngula up, and presumably its already high ranking on sites like Technorati as well. Its one of the top 200 at Technorati in any case.

A Saskatoon (Non)Fact.

In some areas of Saskatoon power is provided by mysterious electrical creatures. As can be seen from this warning sticker on one of the boxes containing them these creatures are enraged by their captivity, and if released will attack the nearest possible target.

A "Lady" And The Law.

The Barenaked Ladies are back in the news, but not in a way that they want. Singer Steven Page was arrested last week in upstate New York on drug charges. Police officers investigating an open car door spotted Page and a woman in a nearby appartment with a white substance that a later test proved to be cocaine. Frankly Mr. Page if you were snorting up to prove that you're still hip and edgy as you approach 40 you shouldn't have bothered. No one thought the Barenaked Ladies were hip or edgy in the first place.

The Van.

As a followup to this post here's a shot of the dear old soon to be departed van. This is the good side of the old thing, the driver's side being the side that is beat up, including a lot of rust on the lower edge of the door.

Don't Go To San Diego!

Seriously, dear readers, if you're planning on going to San Diego over the next couple of days, don't. Someone has discovered that the Bible says its going to be destroyed on July 8th. And you just know these guys are right because the Bible is involved, and their website has lots and lots of numbers in all sorts of eye catching colours.

Yeah, right. Ah, numerology. One of the classics of woo, and in some ways even more suited to our era than past eras given that you can buy a calculator for nothing and find even more "significant" number combinations than if you had to do it with pencil and paper. And it's a good bet the weirdo(s) behind this site will just recalculate things when nothing happens Tuesday and produce a new "doomsday date."

Iron-onic Thoughts.

I caught Iron Man this week in the cheap theatre. Good movie. They did a good job updating the character's creation story to fit into the modern era while maintaining the basic shape of it. And the effects were well done, so you didn't spend much time thinking about them, which can be a problem with CGI at times.

If you were at all familiar with the backstory from the comics you could probably guess which way the Stane plotline was going to go. Of course you could have guessed it without that knowledge, as it was telegraphed a lot from early on.

Kudos to the producers for casting Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts. A lot of filmmakers would have gone for whoever the starlet du jour is. Instead they went with an actress in her thirties, which is appropriate for the character. Pepper is supposed to be Tony Stark's long serving assistant and confidant, and he's supposed to have an extended history with her. This is not the kind of thing that would be convincing with a younger actress in the part.

He's only seen briefly, but Stark's bodyguard Happy Hogan is also a character from the comic books. In the original '60s Iron Man stories there's a love triangle between Happy, Pepper, and Tony, with Pepper being attracted to Stark while not realising Happy wanted her. It will be interesting to see if this is dealt with in any way in future Iron Man big screen appearances.

If you saw it I hope you stayed all the way to the end of the credits. No, I'm not going to tell you the cool thing you missed if you didn't.