Always room for beer...

When I was in college, and hanging out with those groups of friends who will make a conscious effort not to contact each other after graduation, I remember a joke popping up.

A science professor is explaining something – I believe it was atomic weight – and in order to show how much material can be packed into a defined amount of space, he pulls out a large glass vase.

First he fills the vase with large, round, smooth river rocks. He packs as many rocks as he can into the space, and then asks his students if he can fit anything else in there. They tell him no.

Then the professor pulls out a bag of gravel and pours it into the vase. While the entire bag cannot be poured in, there is enough space between the stones that most of it makes it in. Then the professor asks once again if the students think anything else can get in there. The no this time is uncertain, but still unanimous.

Then the professor pulls out a bag of sand. Again, the entire bag doesn’t make it in, but enough does to prove that there is still space within the jar. The professor explains that the students should be conscious of the open space within ‘solid’ objects. That some objects can take more than they expect before they reach a full capacity like the vase has now.

One of the students, who wears his baseball cap at odd angles and is seen more often in the downtown bars than in class, suddenly raises his hand. He says loudly and clearly that isn’t true. Astonished that a student who barely made an effort before is suddenly interested enough to test this theory, the professor asks him why.

The student then goes up to the front of the class, pulls a can of beer from his backpack and proceeds to pour the contents into the vase. He manages to get the entire can into the vase.

“No matter how tightly your life is packed,” he says with a smart-alec grin, “there’s always room for beer.”

What can I say? It was funny in college.

The Bollywood Dance Number Game

The latest party game that's sweeping the nation!

All you need is a bunch of goofy friends - preferably Bollywood lovers - a few props... and a catchy-as-hell, long-enough-to-work-everything-in song.

The group who can work out a dance sequence that incorporates all the following Bollywood cliches without looking like they're forcing themselves wins.

1. A harem of good dancers, just pretty enough to accent the gal who is clearly our heroine, but not enough to distract.
2. Everyday objects (lamps, chandeliers, drums) being used as dance props in distracting ways.
3. Long, and sometimes inexplicable, staring sequences between our heroine and the 'camera'.
4. Our heroine plays with her bangles. (... no, not those bangles!)
5. Our heroine must hug a bride, sitting on the sidelines in full wedding garb and henna, who has inexplicably appeared.
6. Our heroine must cuddle the oldest woman in the room.
7. A feisty middle-aged woman must try to steal the spotlight
8. Someone is so moved by the music that they are nearly driven to tears.
9. Deep staring sequence between the heroine and her lost love.
10. Deep staring sequence between the heroine and the man she's not yet met who's destined to be her lost love.
11. An inexplicable cut to an 'expensive location shoot' just for the purposes of the dance number.

Writing with HTML

I'm a bit unlike most writers today. When I publish something online, I want to do the HTML coding myself. It's a byproduct from when I hosted my first web page and every line of text had to be hand-coded.

Time consuming? Of course. But as a gal who still treasures the warm childhood memory of typing in her first DOS commands, HTML coding brings my mind back to the proverbial salad days of my youth.

But it's indefinitely harder to proof a line of code than it is to proof a regular document. You have to see how each line of text fits in the page design. Which occasionally means typing a new line of text when you realize what would fit better. After you spend a few hours getting everything to look right, you have to turn around and reproof it again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've finally gotten my site to look downright professional - clashing social media buttons aside. But I can't help asking myself: if this website was a project, would I feel comfortable turning it into my client?

Once more with feeling...

Since it seems there needs to be something here to adequetely bring my page back from the dead, let me just say that neither Blogger nor my computer seems to like me very much at this particular moment.