Baileycross.com

Happy 40th birthday Sis. Keep rockin!

It ain’t easy being a nerd but sometimes it very cool. Click on this neat animation and see an application of all of those nasty physics formulas that you learned in high school.

Read more at Jobe Makar’s website

This was a very special thanksgiving for me.  If things had been different last month, my father wouldn’t be alive today.  My Dad, Ernest Cross was involved in an terrible accident resulting in a multiple-fractored leg, 5 broken ribs, and a injured spine.  I’ll try not to give too detailed of a narrative on the accident as I’m a horrible writer but needless to say the farm tractor that he’s been using for the past 17 years almost got the best of him on Oct 2nd. 

From what I can put together, my dad stopped the tractor to answer a call on his cell phone.  The tractor accelerating forward and my dad ran to catch it. (My guess is that the tractor somehow slipped back into gear).   He grabbed for the steering wheel and large back tire snagged his leg and was pulled under.  The entire weight of the tractor ran over his mid section.  He then faced the scraper blade that was using to level the service road to his home.  The blade dragged him, rolling and tumbling for several feet until he was released. 

My Dad could have easily died or been crippled if the tractor had veered just a few inches higher - crushing his neck instead of chest and back.  His broken ribs could have punctured his lungs or other vital organs  but they didn’t.  He could have bleed to death but he was found by a neighbor returning home from an errand.  

I’m so thankful that he is alive and recovering.  Hoping that he will be able to walk again after his leg heals.

Read the article from the Progress Index

I wanted to share an article that I read today about a kid who attempted to hire a hit man to kill his Mom after she took away his Playstation and TV. 

“Like many middle-class, suburban American parents, Shannan and Joey Troiano worried about their son’s behaviour and his bad grades at high school. And like many wayward teenagers, Cory Ryder was grounded for weeks at a time, had a PlayStation confiscated and was banned from watching TV.

Less typically, this 16-year-old was plotting to murder his parents by hiring a hitman, while his mother was organising a sting operation involving a police officer posing as a contract killer”

“Police say that Cory offered the undercover officer his stepfather’s new pickup truck as payment for killing his parents. “Two bullets is all it takes,” he is alleged to have said. ”

You can read the entire article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2789073.ece

A great shot of Reya, had to share it.  Hope to see my friends in Austin soon!

Would you eat this?  This is a Horned Turban Shell caught and prepared on Enoshima, Japan.  I’ve been told that the best way to prepare it is to have it sliced and marinated rather than cooked in the shell over an open flame as shown below.   I have to admit that it was disturbingly fun, and a bit unsettling pulling the little guy out of his shell.  Its body is nearly 4 inches in length.  I tried to eat it in sections but the meat was a little bit too chewy to tear without making a fool of myself.  The best approach was to eat the whole thing and chase with a suitable amount of the regional Enoshima micro-brew.  A very fun experience that I will not soon forget.

More at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fe20070926at.html

Cool Hand Luke

Congrats to Lauri, Bob and little Reya.  Hope to see all of you soon.

I read somewhere that World of Warcraft accounts for staggering %1-%3 of the total internet traffic and has about 8.5M registered users.   There’s a new girl in viritual world, she wears pink, and she could remove WoW very quickly from the top of the MMORP food chain. 

“Mattel’s virtual world Barbie Girls hit the 3million user mark in its first 60 days and is growing at the rate of 50,000 new users a day, according to a report from the Scientific American. ”

You can read the entire article at Tech Crunch.

Castaway is one of my favorite Tom Hank movies.