The Final List...Stream of Consciousness Style

Here it is...the last installment of the 30 Things in 30 Days. Today, there is no particular theme to the 30 things, other than the fact that there are 30 things.

Here are some things I did yesterday:

1. I walked into Redhill.
2. I got my hair cut.
3. I bought some groceries.
4. Last night, Mich and I watched The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
5. Daniel Day-Lewis is Michelle's favorite actor.

The fact that it stars Daniel Day-Lewis probably tells you all you need to know about the type of movie it was. After the film was over, I commented to Michelle, "Well, like all Daniel Day-Lewis films, that was strangely uplifting and made me feel happy inside." Please note the use of irony here, which is something that I am known for. I then made the following observation, which brings us to item 6.

6. Bill Murray is funnier than Daniel Day-Lewis.

I'll try not to ramble this much between each item, but Dalton and Maggie have the following things that they want to say:

7. Dalton likes Ben Ten.
8. Maggie likes dressing up.

Anyway, today is a beautiful, sunny day and it is also the day of the London-Brighton Bike Ride, and all the bikers are riding out in front of our house. They've been coming by since at least 7:30 this morning, and I've taken a few photos and a video, which will take up the next few items on the list.

9.

10.

11.

In case you can't tell, the kids are squirting the bikers with water guns, which is what is making the bikers yell. This was actually recommended to us by our neighbor, and to be fair, a good number of the bikers actually do like it, as it is cooling them off during their long ride to Brighton.

I tried desperately to get Dalton and Maggie to contribute more to these lists, but neither one of them seemed particularly interested. I guess this isn't terribly surprising, but I will now give an example of some of our conversations during our travels for number 12.

12. Me: "So, did you like that, Dalton?"
Dalton: "Yeah, I guess."
Me: "So what has been your favorite thing about Italy so far?"
Dalton: "Well, I liked feeding the pigeons."
13. Michelle has just informed Dalton that we will take a walk around the lake this afternoon - to which Dalton responded, "Can I get a stick and whack things?" If you were wondering about Dalton's personality, then you probably have a pretty good indicator right there.
14. Dalton clarifies that he "chops plants heads off".
15. We've been allowed to borrow a neighbor's Playstation until we return home. This is quite an interesting development, and right now I'm enjoying the fact that I have a natural capability for video games, which means that I beat Dalton every time we race, much to his chagrin. I figure I better enjoy it while I can.
16. Originally, I came up with several different ideas for these lists, some of which didn't make it because it's actually awfully hard to come up with thirty things in any one particular category. One of the lists that didn't make it was 30 of my favorite books. Among other lists that didn't make it:
17. 30 Differences in the Grocery Stores - such as things you can find here that you can't find in the States (scones, clotted cream, double cream) and things that you can't normally find here (among other things, Jell-O, Oreos, and pancake mix).
18. 30 Headlines from the English Tabloids - this one was nixed after I decided that the headlines don't make any sense without the article to go with it. Not that the headlines really make sense anyway.
19. 30 websites - I guess I actually made a variation of this one, which was my last post, but to be fair, some of those I found for the first time when making that list.
20. Michelle suggests, "30 Places Dalton has placed his bony elbows on my body." I think this is mainly aimed at the fact that Dalton has bony elbows and he likes to lean/lay all over us.
21. Here's a couple of lines from some of my favorite poems:
"Oh, freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee." - Vogon poetry, as quoted by Douglas Adams
22. "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" - Invictus, William Ernest Henley
23. "I stand before you, to sit behind you, to tell you of something I know nothing about." - I don't know who this is by, but I remember it from a childhood poetry book. I think there should be a law that before any public debate between politicians they should have to recite these lines.
24. Another list that didn't make it was 30 Useless Things I Know - which was to contain such delights as: "There's no word that rhymes with orange", and "In the English language, the letter combination 'ough' can be pronounced at least seven different ways - as in bought, cough, dough, slough, enough, plough, and my favorite hiccoughed. Why does everyone think English is so hard?
25. The falsehoods in my first "30 Things" post were #3 (I don't like rutabaga), #5 (I never forgot the rations on a Scouting trip), #9 (I haven't driven a car over 120 miles an hour), #11 (I have never been cow-tipping), #17 (I have been locked out of the hotel room, but never in a towel), #22 (I haven't actually read every Shakespeare play, just most of them), and #26 (I can't dance). The rest are true, except that Roger Rabbit is not rated 'R'. And, perhaps, just maybe, my new sister-in-law trusts me to play the "Catch me when I fall" game?
26. Our washing machine broke this past week. In a general vote by members of our household, this was considered not to be a good thing. This cuts our total functioning appliance count by 33%.
27. Speaking of appliances, we actually still don't know what all the little symbols on the stove mean. Not that it matters, because we (well, I) only use one setting. Quite frankly, I only use 1 temperature setting as well.
28. One of the things that I first found out after coming here which I thought was rather odd was that our cold water is stored in the house. It's actually in a huge styrofoam box up in the attic. This is really strange to me, but it is literally a box about the size of a small jacuzzi full of cold water in the attic. I still don't know why because we certainly didn't have any such thing in our attic in the States.
29. I had to mow the grass yesterday. This is an interesting thing to me, if only for the fact that I have to use an electric mower. Our back garden is approximately 10' x 12', which would take about, oh, five minutes to mow with a gas mower, including the time to take the mower out of storage and put it back. However, electric mowers seem to be predicated on the idea that they don't actually want to harm the grass, and so the mower just makes a loud noise, thus scaring the grass back into the ground, where it belongs. This means that mowing our back garden takes about half an hour. Part of me is convinced that electric mowers were created just to make people feel that mowing their grass is a chore.
And the last thing on the last list is...
30. This one.

Googlewhacking

Michelle honestly didn't want me to post this - but having written it, and having nothing else worthwhile to say, I'm posting it anyway. I apologize in advance.

For those of you not familiar with the concept, a Googlewhack is defined as a web search for two words (using Google) which results in only one hit. The amazing thing is that a googlewhack is actually notoriously difficult to find. There are rules, of course – the search must contain words that are in the dictionary, and they cannot be in quotes. Further, if the single hit turns out to be simply a list of words, the googlewhack is void. Some tips: first, think of one word, preferably a nice obscure one that you haven’t heard since elementary school, like, say, putrescence. Then, think of another word that, for best results, should be either an oxymoron, or totally unrelated, like, say, rhomboid. (rhomboid putrescence = 684 hits). So, here are 30 attempts at googlewhacking, and the results (number of hits). My best is 4, excluding my “word list” googlewhack.

1. serendipitous snorkelling – 34,600. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising, as people may very well consider the discovery of snorkelling itself to be serendipitous.
2. alexandrite xylophone – 604. Okay, a little better than the above, but really, what an odd juxtaposition.
3. juxtaposed marmalade – 10,300. Playing off the above comments. Who would have thought marmalade could be so mixed up?
4. paraffin linguistics – 11,800. Lots of well-educated wax users, apparently.
5. flabbergasting putridity – 289. I suppose this is a good thing. I would probably be worried if there were more flabbergasting putridity around.
6. flabbergasting superciliousness – 200. The word so nice, I had to use it twice. It’s good to know that apparently flabbergasting superciliousness is not found too frequently, or at least not discussed.
7. glib anemone – 900. Alrighty, then. A few more than I expected, but apparently lots of sea animal lovers are tired of glib remarks about their anemones…or something.
8. contortionist potatoes – 105,000. I’m not really surprised by this as potatoes is quite a common word. However, I am surprised that there are so many that are into contortionism.
9. portentous fruitcake – 1,440. Returning to the realm of respectability, at least in terms of the number of hits. I guess fruitcake could be considered portentous.
10. fruitcake portentousness – 422. A small refinement on the above, but apparently a small number of the population truly find fruitcake portentous. I usually only find it so when asked to eat it.
11. ominous salubriousness – 630. When you’re a true health freak, I suppose it could be ominous.
12. salubrious putridity – 493. What? Who would have put these two together? It appears that most of the writings were about removing the putridity to make it more salubrious.
13. ribald obfuscation – 542. Hmm. Just reading the little blurbs under the hits makes me worry about people out there. The second entry reads: “Cheese is not grandiose, and not afraid to be maudlin – there is no obfuscation with cheese.”
14. tumultuous opacity – 6,520. I had no idea that opacity could be so moving.
15. synchronized obliqueness – 1,410. Not even one of the better ones. More people synchronize their obliqueness than might be originally thought.
16. unsubstantiated sonorousness – 202. Obviously, the low level of hits means that most sonorousness is substantiated.
17. abstruse conflagration – 13,600. Whoa!!! Fires are apparently very difficult to understand. I never expected this many hits.
18. cacophonous bulimia – 4. Brilliant! Getting much closer now.
19. cacophonous polysorbate – 1. Technically, this is a word list, but I’ll count it anyway.
20. encephalopod xylophone – 0. (Until now. Once I post this, Google can find it, and if somebody thinks of encephalopod xylophones, then they can have a googlewhack.)
21. algorithmically ululating – 858. Hmm. Big step backwards. Going to go back and play around with cacophonous some more.
22. cacophonous algorithms – 2,670. Maybe not. I had always thought that algorithms were relatively silent anyway.
23. depilatory quadrophenia – 10. Good grief. I’m really reaching now, and yet still haven’t reached the elusive googlewhack.
24. eponymous disestablishmentarianism – 51. Which goes to show that just because you know a lot of long words doesn’t mean that you’ll get a googlewhack.
25. monosyllabically moustachioed – 282. Trying a bit of alliteration now. I’m guessing that a monosyllabic mustache would be small?
26. sibilant querulousness – 591. Actually, this should be a bit higher, I would think. Sometimes querulousness can be very sibilant.
27. feloniously bifurcated – 741.
28. semantically squeegee – 702. Yeah. That’s odd.
29. sycophantically monosyllabic – 336.
30. dog slobber – 455,000. I give up.

Things to Do Online

So, coming quickly to the end of the lists - here's a list of 30 (more or less) fun things you can do online (with thanks to Lisa, from whom I've done a bit of lifting).



1. See what celebrity you look like (here)
2. Morph yourself into aforesaid celebrity (here)
3. See if you can tell a real smile from a fake one. (BBC Science)
4. Search for your ancestors. (Ancestry)
5. Play Sudoku. (Web Sudoku)
6. Take an IQ test. (Here)
7. Try to get a “Googlewhack”. (Google)
8. Build your own personal travel guide. (DK Travel)
9. Write a blog! (Blogger)
10. Find out who shares your birthday (Biography)
11. See an aerial photograph of your house/neighborhood. (Google Earth)
12. Find out what happened today in history (The History Channel)
13. Test your knowledge of world geography. (Travelpod) or..
14. US geography (Here)
15. Make lots of paper airplanes. (Here)
16. Take the Myers-Briggs personality test. (Here)
17. Solve a mystery (Here)
18. Search for extraterrestrial life (SETI at Home)
19. Help compute pi to the who knows what digit (Here)
20. Read the classics. (Here)
21. Sing to your computer and make it name the tune (Here), and then
22. See if you can name that tune (Here)
23. Test your memory. (Here)
24. Rank the world’s best beers (beeradvocate)
25. Make a map of where you’ve been (Here)
26. Look for us on the Trafalgar Square webcam (Here) – or you can watch other places if you like.
27. You can also watch the underwater webcam (Here)
28. Guess other people's ages (Here)
29. Make your own playlist (Here)
30. Test your typing skills (Here)

Flowers

England has a number of beautiful flowers, several of which I've never seen before. Today's list is thirty pictures of flowers that Michelle and Maggie took in a short walk around Merstham.

Cheese Quiz

This one is more than a little sad, to tell the truth, but having only five lists to go, quite frankly, Michelle and I are running out of things to say. We were discussing what to say next, and Michelle stated that she could put a list of thirty different types of pasta, which is when I remembered the Cheese Quiz. A few years back, there were a couple of DJ's in Alabama that would end their celebrity interviews by asking the interviewee to name as many cheeses as they could think of in ten seconds. While the DJ's have moved on, this list is for you, if you ever happen to face the "Cheese Quiz".

1. Cheddar
2. Monterey Jack
3. Colby
4. Gouda
5. Swiss
6. Brie
7. Pecarino
8. Mozzarella
9. Goat
10. Provolone
11. Camembert
12. Parmesan
13. Feta
14. American
15. Edam
16. Emmentaler
17. Roquefort
18. Gorgonzola
19. Stilton
20. Cottage
21. Limburger
22. Havarti
23. Asiago
24. Ricotta
25. Fontina
26. Mascarpone
27. Romano
28. Jarlsberg
29. Muenster
30. Neufchatel

Hypothetically, at least, listing several cheeses ought to be simple, since France claims to be home to over 1,000 different varieties.

Strike one off the list

As the title implies, yesterday, we were able to do one of the things on our "wish list", when we headed out to Brighton for a day at the beach. Remind me at some point to discuss the differences between American and British beaches. In the meantime, though, your post for today is thirty pictures of Brighton. Enjoy!