Honorary Contrarienne

My fitness mentor, Hilary Metzger, celebrates Rhody Fest each year by walking in the 7.5-mile marathon.
This year, she won the coveted "Words Per Mile" trophy, an honor she devised and awarded to herself. I believe the established record is something in the neighborhood of 7,000 words total.

Inspired, I attempted to top my personal best record of most baby carrots miniature Tootsie Rolls consumed on the 4-mile drive home from the grocery store and, of course, beat myself. As usual.

DNA

UPDATE: Apparantly I left out the links when I originally posted. They're added now, and worth following.

Some folks over at MeFi really miss Douglas Adams, whose initials are DNA and who was born in Cambridge the same year ... well, you know the rest.

Anyway, this is the anniversary of one of the Adams accomplishments, his death or the publication of one of the books or somethings and someone found one of his speeches that was, like him, a lot of fun, and this quote popped out. For your entertainment and enrichment.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.