The Bawdy Cloister

Lesson in Humility: A Meme

Here's a meme from Circle a Line.  It's obvious I have no Photoshop experience whatsoever.  Be sure to check out CaL's here. She puts me to shame.

CREATE YOUR BAND NAME & ALBUM COVER

To Do This

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Illiterate

I'm really on sabbatical, but couldn't pass up this meme from McPan:

Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Crime and Punishment
Wuthering Heights
Catch-22
The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The Brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
War and Peace
Madame Bovary
A Tale of Two Cities
Jane Eyre
The Name of the Rose
Moby Dick
Emma
The Iliad
Vanity Fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin
Pride and Prejudice
The Historian: A Novel
The Canterbury Tales
The Kite Runner
Great Expectations
Life of Pi
The Time Traveler's Wife
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Atlas Shrugged
Foucault's Pendulum
Dracula
The Grapes of Wrath
Frankenstein
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Mrs. Dalloway
Sense and Sensibility
Middlemarch
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Sound and The Fury
Memoirs of a Geisha
Brave New World
Quicksilver
American Gods
Middlesex
The Poisonwood Bible
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Satanic Verses
Mansfield Park
Gulliver's Travels
The Three Musketeers
The Inferno
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Fountainhead
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
To the Lighthouse
A Clockwork Orange
Robinson Crusoe
Persuasion
The Scarlet Letter
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Once and Future King
Anansi Boys
Atonement
The God of Small Things
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Cryptonomicon
Dubliners
Oryx and Crake
Angela's Ashes
Beloved
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
In Cold Blood
Lady Chatterley's Lover
A Confederacy of Dunces
Les Misérables
The Amber Spyglass
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Watership Down
Beowulf
The Aeneid
A Farewell to Arms
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
Sons and Lovers
Possession
The Book Thief
The History of Tom Jones
The Road
Tender is the Night
The War of the Worlds

No longer just Facebook

For those of you who don't have Facebook, you can now play the Traveler IQ challenge without it.  If you beat my score of 152 though I'll be forced to hate you.

The Web's Original Travel Blog.

Get Your Grain On!

Mrs. T and I were watching the season finale of America's Most Smartest Model last night when a commercial for My Word Coach aired.  Mrs. T's eyes lit up.  English is her second language and she's been in a learning slump the last couple of years.  The Word Coach caught her attention as something easy and fun she could do on the side.  I tucked her reaction into my memory thinking Word Coach might make a nice little Christmas gift.

Then just this morning on National Public Radio I listened to a story about the website FreeRice.com .  It's a free vocabulary building website based on a program designed by a guy to help his son's performance on the SAT.  Turns out it's become hugely popular not just among high school students, but also folks studying English as a second language.  Moreover, with every word you answer correctly, the site donates 20 grains of rice to the UN's World Food Programme.

When I got to work this morning I logged on to check it out.  It's pretty neat, albeit humbling.  The site ranks your vocabulary level on a scale from 1-50.  Your level fluctuates as you hit or miss.  It remembers your highest level reached and your current level.  I played for a few minutes and decided to play until I earned 1,000 grains of rice.  I figured at that point I could share my score with others so we could compare.  It's a lot of fun, only problem now is that I'm back to square one for Mrs. T's Christmas present.

So without further ado, my current vocab level at 1,000 grains of rice was 39 with a highest level of 42.  Play for yourself at FreeRice.com and let me know how you fared.

Where I've Been

There's a reason I haven't posted much recently.  I was down in "The Valley" a couple of weeks ago and swung into the WalMart after work to grab some snacks and browse the DVDs.  Didn't find any DVDs I liked, so I checked out the PC games.  (I was looking for something to pass the time in the hotel because there was nothing on TV that night.)  Ended up buying a copy of Civilization IV... and the next two weeks passed like a blur.  Seriously, I never knew of a game to be so addictive.  According to the stats after my first game, I had played 32 game hours.  And I did that within a week!  What's so bad is that there's never a good stopping point to save the game and walk away from it.  If you get an idea in your head of an action you want to perform, it may take 10 turns to actually complete it.  And when each turn can take 10-20 minutes... well... you're left with no time to do anything else.

Needless to say, I had to hide the game from myself.

Fridge Meme

Here's a meme from Lindsey.  What does YOUR fridge look like? No primping it up before photos please.  Leave a link if you play along:

 

Our fridge is home to our magnet collection.  Back in August of 2004 at the Old Cloister, I posted the guidelines we follow.  For your edification, I bring you once again, The Ten Magnet Commandments:

Definitions:

Event Magnet

Magnet depicting a special event (ex. Exhibition, Sporting event.)

Location Magnet

Magnet depicting a specific location (ex. Museum, Park, City.)

State Magnet

Magnet depicting large geographical area (ex. State, Country.)

Commercial Magnet

Magnet advertising a business.

Miscellaneous Magnet

Magnet that does not fall under another definition.

THE TEN MAGNET COMMANDMENTS

1. Magnet must be purchased on site at time of visit.
2. Preference should be given to magnets produced locally.
3. Preference should be given to magnets that are tacky and garish. This Commandment is subordinate to Commandment II.
4. If magnets are unavailable at a location, one may be handmade with materials acquired at the location.
5. A visit requires both Rowdy and Mrs. Theologian. Magnets acquired on a trip taken individually must be segregated from other magnets when displayed.
6. A visit requires a return home. So a trip from the Cloister to Washington, D.C. for 2 days, then 3 days in Baltimore, back to D.C. for 4 days and back to the Cloister is considered 1 visit to Washington and 1 visit to Baltimore.
7. Only one magnet of each type may be purchased per visit. So, for example, if during a visit to Washington, D.C., I make two trips to the Air and Space Museum and one trip to the White House, I could buy 1 D.C. magnet, 1 Museum magnet, 1 White House magnet, and any number or specific event magnets should there be exhibitions at the museum, but limited 1 per exhibition. Even though I visit the Air and Space Museum twice, it is still considered one visit per Commandment II.
8. State magnets require a minimum stay of 24 consecutive hours in the state. That means no Oregon magnet for a 3 hour layover in Portland.
9. Commercial magnets require having been a customer of advertised business at least once.
10. Miscellaneous magnets are exempt from Commandment V. However, miscellaneous magnets are to be segregated from other magnets when displayed.

Guess me Book

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Onward Tickets An entry requirement for many countries is that you have a ticket out of the country.  If you're unsure of what your next move may be, the easiest solution is to buy the cheapest onward ticket you can find to a neighboring country or a ticket from a reliable airline that can later be refunded if you do not use it.

Open Jaw Tickets These are tickets on which you fly out to one place but return from another.  If available, these can save you from backtracking to your arrival point.

Not the most inspiring passages I've ever read, but at least I obeyed rule #5!

Bummed from Anastasia.

Script to the Bone

Here's a little something pulled from McPan's site.  Good luck:

A. Pick 11 of your favorite movies.
B. Then pick one of your favorite quotes from each movie.
C. Post the quotes on your blog.
D. Have commenters guess what the movie is.
E. Either strike out the quote once it has been correctly identified or place the guesser’s user name directly after the quote.
F. Extra points for knowing the actor or character’s name.

1. 

"There's nothing sadder than a sad Japanese man." Orgazmo

2.

"I've never seen a pilgrim who could use a staff the way you did." The Beastmaster

3. 

"Stuck in Greece.  Lowest standard of living in Europe." Time Bandits

4. 

"Once he even tried to ravish me disguised as a cuttlefish." Clash of the Titans

5. 

"Things'll be much better when we get to America, I promise." 
"We're in America.  We've been here a week." Sid & Nancy

6.

"What's the age of consent around here?" 
"Eighteen."
"Good, I'm old enough." The Pirate Movie

7.

"It's the patriotic part."
"Should we stand up?"  The Muppet Movie

8.

"How do you know you're God?" 
"Simple.  When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself." The Ruling Class

9.

"No, no, this is the kind of conversation that two people have when one of them is female." Fierce Creatures

10.

"Is that the latest fashion?"
"No Mom, that's the oldest profession." The World According to Garp

11.

"You tell him, and I will smack you.  I will smack you like a bad, bad donkey, okay!" Muppets from Space

What's a Tail Wind got to do with Airplanes?

You got 14 answers right.
You got 6 answers wrong.

You're a battler. Not much of a one, mind... but getting there.
You will have no trouble getting around, and understanding most things that are said to you. However avoid RSL clubs and old peoples homes, the nuances are lost on you.

Not too shabby for a Texan!  How Australian are you?

Taken from JtH

(Note to all you Aussies:  Thanks for letting your PM come play with W. this week.  They seemed to enjoy themselves.)

Trivial Pursuits

I wanted to thank those of you who have participated in Penance, the Bawdy Cloister's daily trivia challenge.  If you haven't played yet, I'd love to have you on board.

Also with regard to trivia.  I've submitted two quizzes of my own to the FunTrivia site and they were both accepted and placed online.  However, they need to be played 12 times by 12 different players in order to be ranked for difficulty and placed in the general index.  So, if you have 100 seconds to spare, I'd greatly appreciate it if you tried them out.   Here's the link to Quiz #1 and here's Quiz #2.

And good luck...