Another union rule I came across that I like:

If a performer is required to grow a beard or mustache, or to shave his head, the performer shall be paid additional compensation of $35.00.

For the extra grooming costs? Also, there should be some gradation in payment for the size and foolishness of the mustache being grown or the amount of hair being shaved.

Union regulations are funny sometimes:

Any general background actor who is required to and does furnish a police uniform at the request of the Producer shall be paid an allowance of 36.00 per day for the maintenance of such uniform.

Seriously, what are the odds someone owning their own police uniform? And more importantly, what are the odds of it matching anyone else’s police uniform? (I’m under the belief that actual police officers aren’t allowed to use their uniforms in non-police business but I could be wrong about that).

The ‘cold’ water tap traditionally provides cold water. In Washington D.C., during the summer, the cold water that comes from the tap can occasionally be quite warm. Disturbingly warm. Is this because the water sitting in the pipes is warmed by the ambient heat? Why haven’t I ever experienced this phenomenon in other places when it’s hot out? Do some cities actually actively cool the water as it runs through the system?

Cynical-C points to the somewhat unlikely practice of Tinku, where, according to SFGate, “[t]he locals come down from the mountains drunk, dancing and ready to fight.” It gets better:

On its climactic day, May 4 this year, fighters marched down the hill into town — still dancing, still singing — with their eyes peeled for particular rivals, intent on resolving everything from love triangles to land disputes.

While most fights are short-lived, death is not uncommon; one person was killed at a smaller Tinku in Macha in February. But with more foreigners turning up each year, local officials have brought in extra police to reduce the violence, and even broadcast radio announcements asking revelers not to attack street vendors.

The police immediately took control of this year’s festival, forming an improvised ring in the town square and refereeing the fights. A sergeant selected combatants of equal size and age — women, too — and set a few ground rules (”No kicking!”). Fellow fighters cheered each pair on, while journalists and tourists crowded in, holding their cameras high to catch the bare-knuckle action.

The police ended each clash after only a minute or two, after drunken punches had bloodied one or both of the fighters’ faces.

By late afternoon, the increasingly intoxicated crowd repeatedly overran the ring, hoping to revert to Tinku’s traditional free-for-all. But the police drove them back each time, occasionally popping a tear gas grenade to clear the square.

Foreigners seemed both relieved and mildly disappointed to learn that Tinku had been toned down.

Globalization takes the fun out of everything.

A movie I made a while ago:

A D.C. homeless man describes how he dealt with a purse-snatching fellow homeless man in his neighborhood in order to avoid imperial entanglements:

I confronted him and told him I didn’t ever want to see him in my neighborhood again. I started kicking him down M Street. I was chasing him and I’d kick him when I’d get close enough. I was wearing my steel-toe boots. I chased him halfway across the [Key] Bridge. The last I saw he was headed into Virginia. That was weeks ago and I haven’t seen him since.

It turns out that my camera, when set to it’s lowest quality setting and equipped with a not-especially-powerful zoom lens can take rather impressive “spy” type photos from the 26th floor of a building to the land below. I have a good collection of action-packed paddleball shots. Here’s a few to whet your appetite for action-packed paddleball:

I had a lot more of people doing a series of mundane things, but I found these paddleball pictures exciting. Action-packed!

I posted this on Snakes on a Blog a few minutes ago, but I thought it was worth a repost here.

I’m giving a presentation at an upcoming London-based marketing conference (about which I’m terrified, but don’t tell them that) about blog marketing. To go along with my presentation, I’ve cobbled together a little video that compiles a some of the photos, videos and songs that I’ve featured on this site. I’ve put it up on YouTube for anybody’s amusement. Anyone who’s actually supposed to ATTEND the conference, shouldn’t watch the video… it would ruin the surprise. Enjoy:

I had to make this video while offline, so if I didn’t include a good piece of material, it’s probably because I didn’t have it stored on my own personal computer. Sorry about that. If I get a chance, I’ll come back and include links to the sources of the songs and videos… but it can’t happen tonight.

I took this short video a few days ago at the Redland International Orchid Festival in Homestead, Florida:

[youtube tIm_Va-ZKpY]

The arms are moving fast enough enough that they look like they’re slowly traveling backward half of the time.

What is that thing called? It’s not really a weather vane, and it’s not a windmill. Windmillvane?

How is it that bugs can fly in the rain without getting dragged to the ground and just generally smushed? At the very least, I would think that being hit by a raindrop would reduce the functionality of their wings.

Almost time to go.

At dinner tonight I was pondering when the first foreign restaurant (a French restaurant in England, an Italian restaurant in France?) might have been created. A quick jaunt over to Wikipedia revealed the following tidbit:

The first restaurant in the form that became standard (customers sitting down with individual portions at individual tables, selecting food from menus, during fixed opening hours) was the Grand Taverne de Londres (”the Great Tavern of London”), founded in Paris in 1782 by a man named Antoine Beauvilliers, a leading culinary writer and gastronomic authority…

I’ve been searching online and I can’t figure out if “the Great Tavern of London” in Paris served French food or British food. If it served British food, it would be rather remarkable that the first ever modern-style restaurant served foreign food (and British foreign food no less!).

Also, am I the only one that’s surprised to see that the first modern restaurant was introduced to Europe (there’s unverifiable stories of extraordinarily old Chinese restaurants) in the late 18th century?

The Internet offers no advice to those seeking the optimal Guess Who? strategy. Or, really, any stategy at all. This is a great disappointment for me.

UPDATE: Troeltsch correctly points out that the Wikipedia page for Guess Who? has a brief strategy write-up:

Although generally treated as a simple children’s guessing game, playing can involve relatively complicated statistical scenarios. For example, the situation is often encountered wherein Player A (whose turn it is) has four possibilities left and Player B has only two possibilities left. Thus Player B will definitely guess correctly on the next turn. Player A is therefore confronted with the possibility of choosing a question which will eliminate either two choices for sure or a question which will possibly eliminate three choices (and thus allow for a certain guess) or only one choice (thus forcing a guess the next turn with only a 1 in 3 chance of hitting it for a rebuttal). In this situation many players will choose the seemingly safe choice of eliminating two choices for sure, thus assuring a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly for a rebuttal on the next turn. However, statistically attempting to eliminate three choices is better. If the player tries to eliminate three choices, there is a 25% chance of winning outright, 25% chance of tying that turn (with Player B correctly guessing for a rebuttal), 16.67% chance of tying the next turn (with a correct rebuttal guess from Player A) and 33.33% chance of losing. This is clearly better than the other option of a 50% chance of tying and 50% chance of losing.

… but I still await the arrival of an optimal gameplay strategy.

Today was the second annual Georgetown University Law Center 1L Mustache Competition. I took pictures. Here are three:

I also took pictures of last year’s event.

The IMDB trivia page for A Few Good Men had an interesting tidbit which I hadn’t heard before:

Ed O’Neill shot scenes for the movie as a marine giving courtroom testimony. These scenes were cut from the movie, however, when test audiences began to laugh when he came on screen. This laughter was influenced due to his being involved in one of the highest rated sitcoms at the time, “Married… with Children”, in which he played a slovenly unloving patriarch of a lower middle class family.

Slovenly? Tough. Anyway, I hadn’t heard this story before, so I went online and found a few pictures from the deleted scenes of Al Bundy starring in A Few Good Men:

And, I even found one picture where Ed O’Neil got a little bit of help from a Married With Children castmate!

For an unrelated piece of oddness, here’s a video of the big scene from the film done using the Half-Life game engine.

There’s a seemingly stable homeless population that congregates by Union Station in DC. There’s generally one or two of them sitting along a wall that runs next to the sidewalk. I guess I never noticed before, but there’s a series of Sharpie-produced scrawls along the top of the wall. These are cellphone-quality pictures, so it’s not really that impressive, but I really liked the focus on math… as if someone were doing his homelesswork.

As you’ve already probably figured out, clicking on a thumbnail will bring you to a separate photo gallery.

Is this really something people do?

[youtube FuhqG8b94jA]

Who knew?

It takes a long time to get pictures online and organized. For the time being, I have 10 galleries up and functional (though some still need album pictures). I have a lot more forthcoming.

I’ve tentatively decided to start using this webpage again.  RumorsDaily has had many iterations, and I’m considering trying this one as a boring, pedestrian, traditional, uninspired blog.  It’s exciting.   I’ve started the long, slow process of getting it back into some sort of usable shape.  Site layout and content will be in flux for the next few weeks as I get everything uploaded, updated and otherwise settled.