Numbers --

A few things:

1) My step-dad's mother was telling me about a bizarre method of cooking fish, specifically trout. With a dishwasher! Simply lay the creatures in the racks, and turn on the normal cycle (I guess?), and the hot water and the steam-cycle cooks it up! I wonder about the smells that would linger in the appliance though? Ehhh... I don't know about you, but I'll stick to the frying/baking method. I think the trout would appreciate the culinary dignity.

2) I learned why one side of the coin is called "tails." OK, so "heads" is pretty obvious, but I never really knew why the opposite side was tails. Well, it turns out that it originates from Merry Olde England. Their early coinage featured the monarch's head on one side, and on the other was a depiction of St. George fighting the dragon. Saint George is their patron-saint, and his legend was dear to the English. A prominent feature of this coin picture was the dragon's tail. So, "tails" refers to dragon ones! I kind of wish we still had dragon tails on our coins.

3) I've gotten to play Drew's Nintendo Wii some these last few weeks -- OH MAN! It is incredible! Everything is so fun to play with the Wii Remote and Numchuck (sp?)...all your actions are mimiced by the video characters. I got to play the Wii Sports game (bowling, tennis, golf, boxing) and Legend of Zelda (bomb-diggity). You know how in movies about the future they have people playing (or just exploring) "virtual reality landscapes" like that? With masks and body suits? Well, this is the first step toward that type of thing! This is the first game system where the relationship between buttons/controls and on-screen action is not arbitrary. There is actually a correlation. When the history of virtual reality is traced, the Nintendo Wii will be a milestone. That aside, it's just so fun!

4) The gas companies have finally won. I wonder if they were on to my trick? So, back when I first started driving in 2000, I was always strapped for gas money. Well, a friend of mine showed me a trick to milk the petrol companies. Basically, as you pump, you let go of the pump trigger every half-gallon or so. You know, kind of like a slowed rapid-fire type method. You have no continuous pumping. Well, back in that day, those pumps weren't especially advanced, and whenever you stopped the pump, a decent amount of gasoline would spill forth (kind of like what was left in the hose). So, if you kept doing this stop-start method through your whole pumping session, you could cash in on the free gas accumulated through all of these "stop-starts." By my calculations, you could get up to as much as 2 free gallons for every 15 gallons pumped. This worked especially well at the really old petrol stations. Alas, I have not found a gas station in a long while where I can still use the trick. The stations have advanced too far, and the pumps have progressive cut-off mechanisms to stop gas flow almost immediately. Remember, how you once would pump gas and when you were done a fair amount would spill out onto the ground in the pump's way from your tank to its resting place? This doesn't happen much anymore nowadays, and if it does, it's only a trickle.