Letter Styles

I had recently been wondering about why the letters 'a' and 'g' look different than the way that most people normally write them on paper. The first thing I discovered was that it's a bit annoying to search for phrases with individual letters in them since google often seems to ignore them. However if you click "More search tools" on the left and then select "Verbatim" it becomes a bit easier.

Anyways the way the letters are written seem to have evolved over time (duh) and http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/letters/letters.htm has lots of information about this. The lower case 'a' has the "hook" or "bowl" styles with the bowl also being called the italic style even though many non-italic fonts use this style as well.

'g' has several different shapes, with or without a closed loop (bowl) at the bottom or connecting the bowl on the right or left side of the letter. Apparently the 'g' with the bowl decreases the length of the descender (part that goes below the line) allowing more lines to fit on a page.

If you wanted to go more in depth I'm sure there's lots of information out there about ascenders, descenders, hooks and bowls but I think that's the limit for me.

Pedestrian Fun

Some people like to press the crosswalk button several times just to make sure it goes through. They might think it helps to make the lights change faster or maybe they just do it for fun. Either way it seems like these people get a bit antsy whenever the lights take longer than average to change, especially if they didn't press the button.

I press the button once, maybe twice and then wait. I take the bus most days and there happens to be a pedestrian controlled light near my stop that several people usually go to. If I'm the first one to the crosswalk I'll press the button once and then stand close enough to the button that if someone else wanted to press it they would have to get uncomfortably close to me. I then hope that the light takes a long time to change.

When this works perfectly I can feel their cold stares and I can imagine they think that I'm an idiot who hasn't actually pressed the button. Sometimes people will ask to make sure that I've pressed it and I'll nod. On one occasion someone actually went around and pressed the button even with me in close proximity.

As stupid as this is it brings me a small amount of joy after a long day of classes.

Why does my cat like my headphones?

I'm sitting in my room trying to get some work done on my computer and my cat barges in and starts meowing. After some whining she jumps up on my dresser and makes a beeline towards my earbud headphones that were lying there. She then begins to lick them...

At this point I'm confused. Why is she licking my headphones of all things? The only thing I could think of that was on there was ear wax. After watching for a few more seconds with morbid fascination I had to know if this was common behavior. To the internet!

Apparently it is quite common, as many other people have noticed the same thing. The link I like the best is http://www2.b3ta.com/files/cat-earwax-conundrum.htm (Seriously, read the whole thing it's not that long).

"The principal constituent components of earwax are complex sebaceous fluids and sloughed off dead skin cells. The sebaceous fluids are composed mostly of triglyceride fatty acids, waxes and cholesterol esters."

To cats who don't seem to care about the taste of food that much it sounds like a tasty treat. However the best quote from that page is

"A cat will eat small lumps of plasticine if they're covered in gravy. Try it - it's non-toxic and you can pepper your cat turds with interesting multicoloured lumps." Interesting...

For, err hmm

The other week I decided that I was going to forgo working out in order to rest my sore elbow. For some reason I was thinking about if I told someone this I would say that I for, uh forgoed(?) my workout, or maybe I forwent it? Both of them sounded somewhat wrong or awkward and I don't think I had ever heard someone say the past tense of forgo out loud.

To the internet! It seems that I'm not the only one to wonder about this. Apparently in some places forgoed is used (even though go -> goed doesn't make sense) and in others forwent is more common (also don't get confused with forego and forewent). In the online dictionaries and even this blog spell checker forgoed isn't found and forwent is.

I think the best quote someone had was "Personally, I would work very, very hard to avoid writing either forwent or forewent. I'm not saying either of these is wrong, but I am saying that they are odd, eccentric, alien words." I tend to agree; I skipped my workouts this week.

writinfg wiuth elbvgowsa

It's actually quite fun to write with the elbows. I found that if I pace myself I can actually do a decent job of hitting most of the correct keys.

Normal: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Elbow: abxcdsefdgfhi8jukjlmnnopqrstuvwxyz

Fast Elbow: abxcdxedfgvhbgijhklm noipqrsrtuvcwxtyz\

Chin: dsb cfdde3fgvhjikjnmkl,mnnop;[-qreszxgtjhuv swaxhgyz

Nose: qhde343rty7u9ui9o0opiku0-543w26t2ed76aq
Yikes, depth perception is a bit off when using my nose

Traffic Lights

So I had never seen this before. I was heading home from work waiting to cross the street at a busy pedestrian controlled intersection. The lights will stay green in the direction with more traffic for about two minutes and then the other direction for about 30 seconds so I could tell something was wrong when I noticed the very large backlog of cars and the green light did not appear to want to change in the non-busy direction.

This unfortunately made for a very dangerous and frustrating situation. Cars coming from the non-busy direction see a green light and go to head right through, whereas the other cars stuck at the red light began to get frustrated and tried to make it across the intersection. I also had to make a dash across the intersection to make it to the bus stop, though it was somewhat pointless since the bus would be stopped at the red light when it did finally come.

There were a few close calls but I didn't see any accidents happen and no pedestrians got run over. After a few minutes the lights magically started working again, it was very bizarre. Afterward I thought it would have been a much better story if I had walked into the middle of the intersection and started directing traffic. Instead it's just a Matt story.

Also on the topic of traffic lights a fun thing to do this is press the cross walk button once and then stand very close to the button. It amuses me because of the people that love to press the button over and over or the people that think I'm an idiot and didn't press the button at all. Yes I did, just wait.

Hop skip and a jump

To set the scene; it was evening, somewhat dark. I was wearing dark pants, a dark jacket and dark shoes. So if you didn't look at my face it would be fair to say I was somewhat difficult to see.

Anyhow, I was walking along the sidewalk thinking about nothing and everything and began to cross the street. The street I was crossing was a side street, stop signs but no traffic lights. I did the usual left right check for cars and started across.

All was well until about two-thirds of the way across. Apparently someone was in a bit of a rush and decided to cut the left turn onto the street I was walking across. With it being dark and me staring straight ahead, or maybe the van had been moving quite quickly, I didn't see it coming until the last second.

Very quickly I was able to determine that it was not in fact going to stop and that I better get the hell out of the way. With a hop skip and a jump I leapt to the other side of the sidewalk just barely making it out of the way. It was a little like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR8913v_WCE but not quite as cool.

Safely on the other side I turned around to see the car stopped just past the stop sign (apparently he had seen me too). I gave a little wave, turned around and kept walking. No harm no foul I suppose. It got the blood pumping a little bit and I was a bit more cautious and aware at the subsequent intersections.

Below is an artist's rendition from a bird's eye view:

PS: I wouldn't have told a certain someone if I had broken my leg.