What passenger really cares whether the wind is coming out of the north or south? Maybe once in a hundred thousand flights one of the first class snobs is planning on having his driver take him from the airport directly to the marina where he will be taking his ketch for a sail that afternoon, and, with this handy wind data he can start planning his tacking course. But most of the time, all the first class folks want to do when landing in Madrid is find car hire in Spain at the Hertz desk.

My hypothesis is that the pilots receive a transmission with all the weather data, and rather than consider its utility to their audience, they just read the whole thing out to us verbatim. The practice amuses me every time I fly.

And now you will be unable to ignore it, too.

It’s Leslie Nielsen!

With their eyes aligned, Romney’s mouth is much, much lower than Newt’s, leaving very little chin on one image…

…and a Jay Leno-esque chin on the other.

As I said…they’re just so different!

It was creepy for a while with him gazing around as I went about my now-awkward daily routine. I wore a glove outside to not attract attention. It seemed like a condition I could live with.

And then he began to talk.

He’s a sharp tongued, sarcastic little jerk, I must say, always finding some commentary on what’s going on, criticizing how I tie my shoes or brush my teeth. When he gets really annoying, I punish him by using my left hand exclusively for scratching places you’d rather not put your nose. Strangely, though, he rather likes the ointment I’m using to treat my condition. Perhaps his appreciation of irony is greater than any desire for self preservation. The doctor expects me to be cured in a week or two.

I call him Wilson. He’s not amused. Looks pretty good larger, too.

He’s such a drama queen. View larger.

What I realized when I attempted to initiate a FaceTime call with him this morning was that I was calling his phone number with FaceTime, which is now assigned to the ‘droid. So you can imagine my surprise when he answered and grinned at me. What the heck just happened?

My phone contacted Apple’s main servers asking them to find a device that was registered with his phone number. His iPhone had either been marked with his phone number or knew that phone number belonged to the address book entry corresponding to the owner of the phone, and had registered with Apple’s servers as soon as it had connected to his hotel wifi. Thus my phone was able to find and communicate with his phone. Amazing.

One more thing…

The story Jacob told me from his previous day at work amazed me even more. For whatever reason, he had needed to send a text message to a colleague who had an iPhone. iOS5′s new iMessage messaging service slipped his mind, so he assumed he’d need to use his ‘droid to send the message. He sent it, and his colleague’s phone beeped when it received the message. But then something odd happened. Jacob’s iPhone beeped too! There in his messaging application was a sent message from himself to his colleague, the beginning of an iMessage chat conversation. What happened!?

His colleague’s iPhone received the message and registered a message received from Jacob’s phone number to the iCloud servers. The iCloud servers recognized the number as belonging to Jacob’s iPhone, which was connected only to wifi, and pushed the message down to his phone as if he had sent it from the iPhone. Unbelievable!

I expect to have many more “How did it know to do that??” moments as I continue to use iCloud to synchronize all my iDevices.

How Spaniards Fry Eggs

There are quite a few expat blog posts and YouTube videos about the unique way eggs are fried in Spain. A frying pan is filled with a considerable amount of oil. The egg is cracked into the oil, and then a spatula or spoon is used to splash hot oil over the top of the egg until a white film forms over the egg yolk. Then the egg is removed and served on the plate, maintaining an oozing liquid yolk – great for bread mopping! – when the yolk sack is broken. The egg is never turned.

Like most odd quirks you find living in a foreign land, it’s not necessarily better or worse…just different.

Other Spain Egg Trivia

In Spanish, the term huevo, for egg, is also used as slang for testicles. Clearly the term was not coined by anyone with any knowledge of reproductive biology. Here are a few interesting phrases using the slang:

One time I was at the supermarket checkout and the cashier asked me how much of the stuff on the conveyor belt was mine, and I replied, not thinking about the double meaning, “Hasta los huevos“. We both laughed.

I hope you enjoy the video.

Watching them was mesmerizing. They were flying the entire two hours we were at the beach.

I love discovering new ways that humans can be creative and passionate about something. Of course I knew as soon as I stopped recording that there would be tons of videos on YouTube of synchronized kites, and sure enough, there are.

Cool, huh?

Just over a year ago, in May of 2010, we bought Roomba. We had two recommendations from friends, so we splurged the 300€ and bought a robot to vacuum our floors. Initially it seemed pricy, but it’s some of the best 300€ we’ve ever spent. As my wife said to me soon after we bought it…

I think I like the Roomba. It doesn’t clean as well as I do, but it cleans about as well as you do.

I very quickly learned an important lesson of Roomba ownership: Do not watch it work! It will drive you mad. It will appear to drive right by every little speck that you want it to clean and if you want it to go to a certain part of the room, it will go to the other side. You just have to trust in its algorithms: if you let it run until it thinks it’s done, it will probably have gotten to every last corner of your house. The proper way to use the Roomba, of course, is to turn it on before you leave home. That way you aren’t tempted to watch it work, and it’s also as noisy as any vacuum cleaner. The hardest part about vacuum cleaning now is picking up all the toys that the Roomba can choke on.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to duct tape my video camera to the Roomba to see what kind of “Roomba eye view” video would result. I finally got around to doing it this week, and I must say that I was hoping the result would be more interesting. There’s a lot of stops and spins and very few long stretches as it bounces off all the furniture. The low angle view of our house is pretty neat, though.

It recorded fifty minutes of bouncing under chairs, the view from behind the toilet, and lots and lots of footage of our floor molding. I couldn’t watch more than about four minutes of it, so I cut it off at the five minute mark and uploaded it.

It was an experiment that I wanted to try, and I’m glad I did, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.

How many people are there whose first name and last name mean the same thing in different languages?

Although his full first name is Lionel, Spanish speakers call him by his nickname, Leo, with Spanish pronunciation, “LAY-oh”, so perhaps no one has picked up on this phenomenon yet. Thus, I felt it important to place this gem on the internet for all to say, “Huh…that’s very slightly interesting…”

You’re welcome.

Curious as to what the heck this thing was invading my domestic domain, I did a little research. The stories are actually pretty interesting, albeit laden with post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious reasoning that our species is so prone to. First of all the cat is called Maneki Neko, and my favorite of the stories goes like this:

A long time ago, during the Edo period (17th Century) of Japan, there was a poverty stricken priest, who was the keeper of a run down Temple in the Western part of Tokyo. The kind priest shared what little food he had with his pet cat and companion Tama, whom he cared for despite his poverty. Life was very difficult for the priest. The cold winds whistled through the Temple and chilled his old bones, rain poured in through the dilapidated roof, and he ached with hunger and exhaustion, yet he always remained dedicated to his duties, and grateful for what little he had.

On one particularly dreary day, the cold was cutting through his damp clothing like a million tiny knives. He went to make himself some tea, in hopes to warm himself, when he was crushed to see that he had no tea to make. His good nature turned to utter despair and sadness, and he slumped down in a corner and began to weep.

Concerned, his beloved companion Tama went toward the man to see if he could possibly comfort him. The priest exclaimed in frustration “Oh Tama! I am so very poor, and yet still I keep you! Could you not one day, do something for this Temple? Do something for me?”. His head fell into his hands and he wept quietly until he went to sleep.

Tama was puzzled, and decided to go to the outside of the temple for a while. He sat in front of the door and began cleaning himself, as cats do, licking his paws and rubbing them on his face.

Just then a very wealthy and powerful man was passing by the Temple as the gentle rain grew stronger and a violent thunder and lighting storm erupted. Large droplets of icy rain poured down and pelted him as he took refuge by a large tree. “This place will provide adequate shelter until the storm subsides” he thought. At that moment, he noticed a cat in the doorway of the old temple, cleaning his face with his paw, gesturing as though he were extending an invitation. This gesture puzzled him so, that he just had to have a closer look at this cat, who seemed to be beckoning him forth.

Cold and wet the man quickly approached the cat and entered the building. Moments later, the tree he had been using as shelter was struck by lightning and caught fire. The tree broke with a loud crash and flaming pieces of it’s shattered trunk fell precisely where the wealthy man had been standing.

The man was extremely grateful to the cat, for having saved his life. He was immediately compelled to find the owner of the cat and reward him. He entered the Temple, looking to find Tama‘s owner, and found he old priest, living in such deplorable conditions. He soon befriended the priest and showered him with gifts. The wealthy man used his influence to bring many wealthy people to the Temple, and it soon became very prosperous.

The cat had not only saved a life, but also relieved the priest of the burden of his poverty. When he died, the cat was honored by being buried in a special cemetery, and a statue was made in his likeness, reflecting the beckoning, raised paw that had brought so much good fortune and prosperity to his owner. As word of the events spread, people began placing figures of cats with raised paws in their homes, shops and temples, believing it would bring the same kind of prosperity into their own lives, that Tama had brought to the Priest.

Cool story, huh? Not entirely unlike our western oral stories than end in, “And that’s why we believe X!”

The other interesting thing about the Maneki Neko is that the gesture is a cultural difference between the East and the West. In the East, an arm movement like that of the cat, with palm down, is actually a beckoning “come hither” gesture, whereas in the West, that’s a “go thither” gesture. As a result, some Maneki Nekos manufactured for the West actually flip the paw around…which seems like a bad idea, as that makes it resemble another insulting western gesture, but the Chinese manufacturers probably don’t know that.

In the end, the damn thing is somewhat growing on me…at least to the point where I don’t actively want to throw it into the dumpster. We have it sitting on our bookcase next to my golf trophies. The other day it caught my eye, reflecting off of my pewter golf trophy mug, and it dawned on me that it would make a great cinemagraph subject, especially with the reflection.

May this animated gif bring you prosperity…or at least relief in the knowledge that your house is free of perpetual golden cat gestures.

Pretty cool, huh? Did you figure it out?

Details that are crucial for the effect to work:

1. The frosted nature of the bottle, with just the window bit being clear. If the rest of the bottle were opaque, there would be very little light to see the image.
2. The lines between the window panes to give a parallax effect.
3. It has to be a clear liquid.
4. And the photo on the back of the label on the back of the bottle, of course.

Personally, I’m dying to know if the liquid is actually water, because water in a glass bottle refracts a lot. I also wonder if the actual image on the back label is distorted in anyway to counteract the refraction.

Pretty cool, huh?