Tag: Pie in the Face

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Pi Day Followup

It turns out that I’m far from the only person to use Pi Day as an impetus for a pie in the face, which is actually kind of nice to learn. I mean, I want to be weird, but not ridiculously out there, if you know what I mean. Anyway, here are a few examples of folks who put their faces on the line for mathematically-initiated silliness!

A reporter makes a bet with the quarterback of the Tennessee football team as to how many digits of Pi he can rattle off. He wins.


Two guys offer a demonstration. This is amusing because they start off with that slightly-macho, jaded humor thing common nowadays…and then they start giggling when the pies come into play.


This woman coupled Pi Day with an pieing challenge for ALS, like last year’s Ice Bucket craze. (By the way, ignore her advice on goggles and shower caps. Go big or go home! Don’t be a muggle! You’re not going to look any more dignified if you try dressing up like a deep-sea diver for your pieing. In fact, the Pie Gods will mock you forevermore if you do such a thing!)


Another challenge-type video here. This woman actually made this video last year, but she retweeted it yesterday for Pi Day, which is how I saw it. She is raising awareness for Huntington’s Disease, and what I like about this (besides the pie) is that she uses clips from an episode of the best medical teevee show ever, Scrubs, to describe the disease and its effects.


This fellow invented a mechanical device for pie-throwing. Some logistics need to be worked out, obviously, but the idea is intriguing.


Actually, I’m not sure this has anything to do with Pi Day or not, but it got posted yesterday, so here’s Suzanne Somers getting pied by her Dancing with the Stars dance partner.


Long live Pi, and pie!

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Happy Pi Day!

Yes, today is Pi Day! I don’t usually do much to observe Pi Day, but this year’s is a special edition, since this is the only year in this century when the digits will line up so perfectly.

And how would a goof like me mark the occasion? Well, it would start with this:

And end like this:

Properly celebrating Pi Day with a pie in the face!


Long live Pi, and pie!

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Sunday Burst

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Nifty video footage of the Atlantic Ocean Road in Norway. I’m not sure the video lives up the “OMG this road is an insane trek of DEATH!!!” that the surrounding article portrays, but it’s still a very cool-looking drive. Yes, I’d drive it!

:: Twenty lesser-known travel destinations you should see. I had to look up the first one, a lake in Iceland that the article claims straddles the boundary between Europe and North America. It turns out that this lake is a rift-valley lake, and that valley lies where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates come together. Now you know. (The other nineteen places on the list are also interesting.)

:: I’m sorry, but I read this article and all I can think is, “That poor bastard.” This young man suffered one of the most bizarre and humiliating deaths I’ve ever heard about, and to make matters worse, when he was buried, they put a marker over his grave with the manner of his embarrassing death engraved right on the stone. Wow.

:: If you always felt the prose in cookbooks was a little too nice, and you’ve been looking for something a little more, say, Jersey Turnpike-ish, here’s how to cook a f***ing steak. (Lots of salty language there.)

:: Finally, in this week’s Great Moments In Pie In The Face History, an outfielder from the Houston Astros shows up at the Sports Illustrated headquarters to dispense some kudos-in-pie-form.

More next week!

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A few things

I’m on vacation now, so I won’t be posting until Sunday at the earliest and Monday at the likeliest! Anyhow, a couple of things:

:: Hecklers can ruin comedy shows — but sometimes comedians get the last laugh. (Salty language alert!)

:: Inside Steven Spielberg’s JAWS vault. A look at ephemera from the making of the movie. Awesome!

:: Interesting video about hot sauce and hot sauce labels:




For the record, my favorite hot sauces are Franks, Cholula, and Sriracha with the rooster on the bottle. I have no use for Tabasco. It tastes funny to me.

:: All 32 NFL team helmets imagined as Star Wars-themed. I, for one, would proudly root for the Buffalo Banthas!

::  Interesting article about near-death-experiences and what they tell us about dying. I’m not sure I totally buy into everything here, but I don’t know nearly enough to say one way or the other. I’d like to believe that something endures after death, but…well, there’s only one way to know and no way to report back, thus far.

::  The Baltimore Orioles are pretty cool in that when they do a post-game pie-in-the-face for the game’s hero, they don’t put shaving cream on a towel. A local bakery makes their splatting pies for them, out of real edible stuff. I respect that and partially root for the Orioles on that basis alone! (Although I think I’m rooting for the Royals now, since the Pirates got bounced by the Giants in the wildcard game. Get ’em next year, Buccos!)

::  Finally, speaking of pies in faces, you may recall from when I did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that I expressed hope that a pie-in-the-face challenge would come around next. Well, a bunch of them have been going on, pertaining to a number of ailments: depression and suicide awareness, Huntington’s Disease, Parkinson’s, Childhood cancer, and even cerebral palsy. (Obviously that last would hit too close to home for me.) Well, seeing as how a lot of the good in these “viral” fundraising bits of goofery lies in the idea of “raising awareness”, I was fascinated to see a pie challenge for a syndrome I’d never heard of before: Porphyria. This thing is both nasty and rare, so I decided that’s what I was going to do. Yesterday morning I launched my vacation by taking the Porphyria Pie Challenge.




Pies and a good cause: you can’t go wrong with that. (Yes, I donated as well.)

::  Oh wait! Really finally: check out my Official Author Site, if you haven’t done so already! The ACTUAL TITLE is revealed!

That’s really it. See you all in a few days!

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Sunday Burst of Oddity and All-Around Foolery!

Stuff!

:: I like to think I won’t be too incensed when any of my books gets a bad review or two on the Internet. In fact, I’m planning to read as few reviews as possible…but just in case I need a reminder of how not to respond to a negative review, here’s just such a reminder. The review is the body of the post, and then the author shows up in the comments. And by “shows up”, I mean, he moves in with a couch and everything.

:: If the kids in Stand By Me had thought of this, they would have been home in time for dinner. Just sayin’.

:: I’m loath to admit this, but…I was never a fan of Joan Rivers. I get where her humor came from, but a lot of the time — and especially in the last ten to fifteen years or so — her humor, which always struck me as firmly rooted in anger, stopped being humor at all and just became pure anger. However, I grant that my familiarity with Rivers is mostly a series of snapshots, and for the most part, she only came on my radar when she got noticed for saying something mean, so I concede that my impression of her is less than fair.

However, I must salute her thusly: one time in the 1980s, she had Soupy Sales on her late-night talk show, and she uncorked this fine moment:


More next week!

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Buckets, the Bills, Stadiums, Pies, Sharkheaded girls: Some random opinions on some random stuff

Just a grab-bag of some thoughts on stuff going on….

:: I posted the following on a Facebook exchange debating the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This wasn’t really in response to anything anyone specifically said, but more in response to some more general negativity I’ve seen about it. (As such, it was probably out-of-place on that particular friend’s feed, for which I feel a tad guilty.)

Here’s my thing: fundraising of every kind, everywhere, is more successful when there’s something “fun” involved. It’s why charities have big galas and parties. It’s why churches and small town organization have chicken barbecues. It’s they the Jerry Lewis Telethon isn’t twelve hours of scrolling text with telephone numbers. It’s why people trying to raise money to help individuals with massive medical bills have events with basket raffles and Chinese auctions. It’s why PBS stations air their really popular shows and specials at pledge time. I can’t remember where I read it, but the other day I read an article where some charity in some city had an annual gala which was their BIG fundraising event each year, but one year they decided to not hold it and simply ask for the donations anyway, and their fundraising fell through the floor. We may not necessarily LIKE this aspect of things, but it’s simply the way things are. All the ALS people did was figure out a way to tap into one of the newer avenues people are having fun with, and frankly, if it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else.

That said, I cannot for the life of me have any problem with this whole endeavor. It’s a horrible disease (my wife’s grandfather died of it, just a few weeks after we started dating), but really — they ALL are. If we approach fundraising with the solemnity of the disease itself, nothing would ever get funded much at all.

I stand by all that, even if my posting was rather badly misplaced.

:: As I write this I’m basking in the afterglow of my first-ever Buffalo Bills preseason game. Oh wait, did I say “basking in the afterglow”? I meant to say, “waiting for the stench cloud to dissipate”. I know, it’s just preseason and it’s the last preseason game, so it’s not like either team was really trying all that hard, but boy howdy, the Bills just looked fundamentally awful. They attempted no long pass plays, they were bumbling and mistake-prone, the backup quarterback hit exactly one guy on the numbers, and I saw four punts in the single half of football we bothered watching. (The tickets were free; no way do we pay to get in there.)

That said, I am obviously no expert, but I still do not see why it’s taken for absolute faith around here that Ralph Wilson Stadium is an awful place that needs to be retired in favor of a spectacular new facility that’s “easier to get to”. RWS is plenty easy to get to, and I found it perfectly nice and structurally fine. Maybe some significant work to the exterior, like they did in Green Bay with Lambeau? Anyway, for my money, RWS is fine, and anyway, I’m loath to spend upwards of a billion bucks of public money on a facility just to help a collection of billionaires rake in even more cash. As for the current renovations to the Ralph, I like the place, although there could be some more signage directing where to go in the area between the ticketed entry queue and the actual concourses.

Oh, my prediction for the Bills this season? Well, they’ve gone 6-10 in four of the last five seasons, so why stop now? 6-10, it is!

:: Nobody ever gets to bitch about Presidents and their vacations again. I’m done listening to that shit. It’s just plain dumb, seeing as how in this day and age, with the technology we have, a President could run things from the Unabomber’s shack if he or she wanted to. Enough.

::  Speaking of vacations and such: it’s Labor Day Weekend, which reminds me of something I read once: three day weekends are better when the extra day off is on Friday, rather than Monday, because that way it feels like two Saturdays followed by a Sunday, as opposed to a Saturday followed by two Sundays. I kind of agree with that — July 4 weekend this year broke that way, simply because the 4th was on Friday — but I also rather like having the long weekend and then a shortened work week on the other side. Short weeks are nice, which is why I always try to schedule my vacations to straddle two different work weeks, essentially taking a six- or seven-day weekend, bracketed by two two or three-day work weeks.

:: The other day, Buffalo’s new-and-improving waterfront area became home to a sculpture originally from Cincinnati, called “Shark Girl”. It’s a little girl with the head of a shark. I am not making this up. Behold:

As art, I kinda like it. It’s not really my cup of tea, but it is a whimsical thing and definitely unusual enough that it will have people going to see it and talking about it and so on. My only complaint, such as it is, was that such a high-profile art installation here wasn’t seen as an opportunity to feature a local artist. However, I’m told that this is only the beginning, and that local artists will be featured at Canalside. Good.

Head of a shark. What will they think of next.

:: I’m not sure who I want to win MasterChef this year. I’m leaning toward Leslie, because he’s really gonzo, but he’s also best taken, I think, in small doses. Who I do not want to see win is Courtney, who has the single most annoying “Fake perfect Good Housekeeping wife” thing going on, along with incredibly annoying arrogance regarding her own kitchen skills. True, she has yet to screw up in any way at all, but land sakes alive, is she annoying.

:: A new law: If you have any kind of special request as regards bagging your groceries at all, then I don’t care if you’re only buying five things, go through the other line. Your “I want this item in double paper, double plastic and then roll it up and put it in a third bag” bullshit forfeits your right to use the express lane.

:: Finally, on a topic near and dear to my heart, I posted the following on Tumblr earlier:

Squirty whipped cream on a paper plate ain’t gonna cut it, folks.

So I’m seeing that on the heels of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, some folks are trying to make pie-in-the-face challenges the next thing. As you might expect I am TOTALLY on board with this, but I fear the well may be somewhat tapped, and folks are trying to do this in “honor” of several different diseases, such as depression and Huntington’s Disease. Again, this is great, but I suspect this might have the effect of diluting things.

More to the point, though, is that the “pie” is often a bit of whipped cream from a spray can on a paper plate. This is well below the standards we should be willing to accept as Americans, folks! If you’re going to experience the joy that is a pie in the face, make it happen with a REAL pie and not just a dollop of canned stuff! A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing RIGHT. Come on, America! We invented the pie-in-the-face routine! Let’s show the world how it’s done!

[Insert picture of Sam the Eagle here. Or something suitably pompous.]

Remember, folks, don’t do this:

Do this instead:

Or follow the instructions in the “A Pie in the Face is a Wonderful Thing” page to do this:

That’s all that’s running through my head right now, folks. Have a great Labor Day weekend! (I’m not taking off from posting, though.)

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Sunday Burst of…a lot of stuff

Time to clear the decks of some stuff I’ve been saving up! Some of this stuff has been lingering in my Bookmarks folder for a while, and I’ve long-since lost track of the sites from which I originally filched the links.

:: The Uncomfortable, an art project described thusly:

The goal is to re- design useful objects making them uncomfortable but usable and maintain the semiotics of the original item.

:: My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection, in which a woman is listening and reviewing her way through her husband’s record collection. Despite the word “stupid” in the blog title, she is really making an honest effort with each record. If I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I bookmarked this), she calls the collection “stupid” because they’ve moved a few times, and thus so have the records. Moving a lot of records is a pain in the ass if you do it a lot. (Kind of like…books…hurg!) It’s interesting to read reviews of music from the perspective of someone who likes music just fine but isn’t really into it.

:: Weird American things that Americans don’t realize are weird. I don’t disagree with some of these; mainly this is a list of things someone not from a place found odd about the place they visited. It just happened to be our place. (If you’re an American reading this, that is. If you’re not, you’re likely reading this list and nodding along, thinking, “Yeah, you guys are weird!”)

:: Two older ladies go on an airplane. For the first time in their lives.


:: Wow:

On a nature hike along Germany’s Baltic Coast in 1913, 20-year-old Richard Platz scrawled a note on a postcard, shoved it into a brown beer bottle, corked it and tossed it into the sea.

The bottle was recovered from the Baltic last month. Researchers haven’t yet figured out what the note said (conditions and age have faded it badly), but they did manage to identify the author and contact his living granddaughter, who is 62 now.

:: The worst jerseys in the history of the NHL. I’m not a hockey fan (in fact, I tend to be irrationally anti-hockey owing to the game’s odd emotional hold over this area), but I link this because a recent Buffalo Sabres jersey makes the list.

And to be honest…I didn’t hate the infamous “Buffaslug”. I liked that more than the red-and-black “angry goat” that the Buffalslug replaced.

:: Romantic pictures from Russian dating sites. I don’t for one second claim that this bit of oddness is unique to Russia, because Lord knows you can find a lot of bizarrely creepy photos on good old American dating sites. In fact, it’s kind of endearing (or depressing, not sure which) to learn that “creepy dating site profile pics” seems to be a universal thing about our species.

:: Everything you don’t know about tipping.

:: Worst excuse for criminal behavior ever:

Police say an Iowa City man claimed a faulty belt was to blame after he dropped his pants in front two women.

Most amusing to me is that this happened in Iowa, which is the overalls capital of the universe. And I know, I went to college and found a Wife there!

:: Finally, pies in the face…in slow motion!


OK, that’s it. Back to packing. Damn, I have a lot of books….

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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome

Oddities and Awesome abound!

:: Secret passage bookshelves. I dig this notion.

:: I note with sadness the passing of Geoff Edwards, who was a staple of my teevee watching as a kid, because he was…a game show host! As a kid, I loved me some game show hosts. Bob Barker, Bill Cullen, Jack Barry, Wink Martindale, Bert Convy…those guys were awesome. So was Geoff Edwards, who hosted a show I loved called The New Treasure Hunt. This show featured a whole lot of goofiness, with Edwards often ad-libbing to ratchet up as much tension as possible; producers were very proud that they actually got a contestant to pass out onstage one time. The show often descended into pure slapstick silliness, such as in this segment, in which cream pies are put to good use:


Gotta love the cheesiness of the 70s and 80s game show era! Colorful sets, weird skits, hosts in bad tuxes, and pies in the face. As much fun as Jeopardy! can be, I doubt we’d ever see Alex Trebek having any part of cheesy fun like this.

More next week!

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