Category - Weird

Snippets from an IM conversation with my friend Sean on Thursday:

Jordon: today and tomorrow are when the honors students register for their honors courses
Jordon: you register online, it goes from 9-5 each day, and you can only register for one class per day
Jordon: so at 9:00 this morning everyone on my floor was going crazy because they couldn't register for their class
Sean: that sucks
Jordon: I was trying too because they get filled up pretty quickly, but I couldn't do it, and I was going to be late for class, so I hurried halfway across campus (a 20 minute walk) to my class where I was going to have a quiz
Jordon: on the way, I realized that the guy who sits next to me always has his computer, so I figured by then it would be working, so that made me go even faster
Jordon: so I get to the class (on the third floor), panting and out of breath, asking to use someone's computer, and everyone's like staring at me
Jordon: and I'm like, "honors registration, man... it's crazy"
Jordon: so I use that guy's computer, and I'm able to register for my class, so mission accomplished
Jordon: I just got an e-mail apologizing for the delay

I'm pretty excited today: not only about today's Florida-Georgia Game, but also about Bill Nye coming to speak next Tuesday. I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy all the time when I was a little kid. He made science fun! If you don't believe me, here's a clip. And who could forget the theme song? My sister and some of my friends are also planning on going. And why wouldn't they? Science rules!

Here are The 10 Strangest (Real) Things in Space. They're all real.

And here are the 30 Strangest Deaths in History. Who's the authority who decides what the strangest things are, anyway? I should come up with a list of the strangest things so other blogs can link to it.

My inbox was busy today. Earlier this afternoon, I got a notice from my web host saying that the balance in my account was down to $1. I didn't think much of it; I get charged for bandwidth and storage (usually around 10¢ per day), and then I make another deposit, and the cycle continues. I also got a large number of e-mails (3) about The Dvorak Keyboard and You, but I didn't think much of that either. After coming home from dinner this evening, I put two and two together. I had another e-mail from my web host in my inbox: my balance had gone down to 50¢ in less than 5 hours. I was being Slashdotted. Or Dugg. Or attacked. Or something.

Immediately, I checked my bandwidth and storage stats. Today's bandwidth use was about 10 times the average, and my storage was also climbing high. I combed through the latest access logs, and it didn't take me long before I saw that lots of hits were coming to The Dvorak Keyboard and You from del.icio.us and reddit, two very popular web sites. The page has also been mentioned on a thread on Fark. It seems that there have been so many hits that my access log was causing the drastic increase in storage.

I had to act, and fast. It sounds cheesy, but it's true. I made an emergency payment which should be enough. I could have bought bandwidth in bulk, but I don't think the influx of hits will last long enough to warrant that. I just needed to keep my balance from hitting $0, at which time the site would be disabled. We wouldn't want that to happen, now would we? I'd get even more e-mails about the site being down, and I'd be like, "I know, guys." Unless, by chance, I didn't happen to check my e-mail after dinner tonight, in which case I'd be in for a nasty surprise come morning.

As of this writing, The Dvorak Keyboard and You is #12 on the front page of del.icio.us, #31 on reddit, which puts it on page 2, and #2 in reddit's programming category. And the question is: why? The Dvorak Keyboard and You has long been bookmarked by del.icio.us readers, and only now is it enjoying its fifteen minutes. That's just the way the web works, I guess. The wisdom of crowds.

So, to you new readers that I've tried to lure in from the Dvorak page... welcome... if there are any of you, that is. (If you just found my site from the Dvorak page, post a comment and say hello!) I usually don't blog about my site very much, although I do have a category for it. Usually I talk about my life, and people think it's cool and/or entertaining, so they stick around. Okay, now what's something interesting that's happened to me in the past few days? Well, I was planning on asking a girl out on what would be my first date. Yeah, say what you want; everyone else has. (Actually, they haven't.) Stay tuned as this story unfolds.

Then I usually have a few links that I think are interesting. Here's the first one: Wikipedia's list of film sequels by box-office improvement. Apparently a lot of sequels actually make more money than their predecessors.

Fine Art Taco Photography. And you thought this site was weird.

Regular readers: Am I crazy for assuming that so many new visitors are going to be reading this? What if they're not? That could be kind of embarrassing, but I can't say it hasn't happened before.

It's October, and that apparently means that it's time to start registering for spring classes! I absolutely detest having to pick classes, and doing so in college is at least as bad as in high school. You still have to plan with the end in mind, but now the end is up to you. Plus, I need to change my major from computer engineering to computer science. Early on in the semester, I asked people how I could change my major.

Q: How do I change my major?
A: Don't worry about it.

"Don't worry about it" is an all-encompassing answer that means, "It's too complicated for me to explain," "I don't want to have to think about it," or "I don't know." I guess I should have changed my major earlier, because now I have to deal with all that in addition to the schedule frenzy. And, oh -- it is a frenzy. Or, at least, it will be. I have to talk to an engineering advisor as well as an honors advisor, so one or both of them should be able to help. On the agenda today:

1. Walk-in appointment with honors advisor to ask: Do I talk to an honors or engineering advisor first if I want to change my major? Do I need to have an idea of what classes I should take before I talk with either of them? How do I know when I should actually register for my classes?
2. Have a late lunch.
3. Hopefully meet with an engineering advisor, which they're making me do before I can register for classes.
4. Schedule an appointment for an honors advisor visit.
5. Study for the calculus and chemistry tests I have tomorrow.
6. Chemistry test review session tonight.
7. Eat some more? And then study? And sleep?

Yeah. Busy times.

It's time for yet a second edition of From Canada with Love, where my friend Natasha (and sometimes I) answer your love-related questions.

Natasha answers:

WikiScanner traces anonymous Wikipedia edits to the businesses, schools, and organizations from which they originated. Here are some not-so-nice things that UF students had to say about FSU. Also watch for companies removing parts of articles that make them look bad!

Bizarre? Embarrassing? Scary? Watch this MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Video and see what you think of it.

I tabled for Get Carded last week. They're the student group that signs people up to be organ donors. (Incidentally, manning tables is apparently so common among student organizations that it deserves its own verb. That's really all Get Carded does, anyway.) Although sitting at a table for two hours and getting people to sign organ donors doesn't sound like much fun, I have to say it was. While I was there, we got about 20 people to sign up and save lives. One of them was me.

I think some people might have been deterred by the idea of signing up to be an organ donor. They probably think that there's a lot of icky paperwork (or worse, costs) involved. Not so. All you have to do is sign a card and carry it around with you. It carries the same force as being designated as an organ donor on your driver's license (although you should specify it next time you renew your license because then you'll be in the organ donor database). If you're a Floridian, check out Get Carded's web site and print an organ donor card. If not, find out about similar groups in your state or country. Because you never know: tomorrow you might be dead, and your organs will go to waste.

College meal plans are supposed to be convenient. But if you don't know what you're dealing with, they might not be. My plan for this semester is 150 meals and $300 in "Flex Bucks." Too bad I didn't know the specifics. It turns out that meal-plan meals are served at one of two cafeteria-style dining halls on campus, and Flex Bucks are accepted at the restaurants. So I have four months to eat at a cafeteria 150 times with only $300 for other eatery options. After a month, I had 140 meals remaining and $138 in Flex Bucks, so it was time to switch gears. I've found that the dining hall is a convenient solution to the Breakfast Problem* on certain days of the week. Also, it took me about a month to find out that there was a second dining hall only half as far away from my dorm as the one I had been going to. Combine those facts with a steady supply of non-perishable foods in a cardboard box in my closet, and I've got a recipe for success... and a cheesy metaphor.

How does your height compare with averages from around the world?

HEERS AN ENGLISH 2 LOLCAT TRANZLATOR
IZ PRITEE AWSUM

* The Breakfast Problem is, quite simply, the problem of what to eat for breakfast. Do you eat the same thing for breakfast every weekday? I do. Then I get sick of it after a while and move on to something else. But a good breakfast is hard to find. It has to be easy to store and prepare, ostensibly healthy, and, above all, delicious. For those seeking closure to this ongoing story: since finding out about my shocking meal and Flex Buck balances, I'm down to 140 meals and $112 in Flex Bucks. That means I hopefully won't run out of the Bucks any time soon. And if I do, there's always cash.

Just before midnight last night, as I was going to sleep, the fire alarm went off. Unsure of whether it was a drill, and remembering that you shouldn't take your stuff with you in the event of a fire, I got out of bed, put on some shoes, and went outside. It was strange standing across the street from my dorm watching the blinking lights inside along with a bunch of other people. I forgot my keys and my cell phone, both of which would probably have been handy to bring. Luckily, I was able to borrow my roommate's keys so I wouldn't be locked out when (or if) I went back.

So there I was. The night was cold (in the sense that it wasn't as warm as it should have been), I was wearing socks with sandals, and I had no phone to tell anyone that my dorm was -- possibly -- on fire. A police car came, and then a fire truck. Some firefighters walked into the building. For a while I stood nervously, but I didn't want to do anything else. Mark, who lives in the dorm next door, came around. He mentioned that it would be a good opportunity to go out for a midnight breakfast, but I declined. I wanted to make sure everything would be okay.

Another fire truck came. After about 20 minutes, they exited the building, and we were allowed to go back inside. The door to my room had been unlocked, so I didn't need my roommate's keys. I'm not sure whether there was a fire at all; if there was, it must have been minor. A few minutes later, my roommate, Adam, came back into the room. He must have left again, because he said he came back at 4:30 in the morning, and he says that I said to him, "It's 4:30 in the morning." I don't remember that at all.

Since Adam stays up later, he sleeps in later, so when I woke up this morning, I ate breakfast quietly and didn't do much. I went out for lunch to find that, instead of the usual oppressive heat, it was wet and overcast. Also, there were people picnicking with their cars on the lawn next to the dorm. It took me a moment to realize that oh yes, it was game day -- football, of course. Since the game was only on pay-per-view, I listened to it on the radio (thanks to the cable company broadcasting the university's sports radio station on TV). Florida beat Troy 59-31, so now they're 2-0 for the season. Next week's game, against Tennessee, will be at 3:30 on CBS.

This Ask Jordon is brought to you by The World of Stuff.

Peter: What's the sound of one hand clapping? Bonus points if you know why I asked this question. It's important.

One hand can't clap. Take that, Zen dudes with meaningless questions. I really don't know what would be so important about you asking this question. Maybe you could enlighten me? Ha ha.

Clairecrowww: Could you change the name of your blog to "Bliggity-Blog"? Please? Just for a while.

You mean change the word "Blog" that I put on the home page to replace "The World of Stuff," which I had considered redundant since the World of Stuff banner is already there? If I did that, then I'd have to change it to "Blob" and "Blag," and before you know it, I'd be obliged to refer to the Internet as the Intarwubbernettersphereoblogoblagotubes. You don't want that to happen, do you?

Clairecrowww: Could you do my religeon assignment for me?

What's it about? Can I create my own religion and then write about it? I would totally do that.

Thanks to reader Luke for this organ-donor-related link: Questions and Answers About Transplantation and Donation.

Mark Malkoff bought (and consumed) food or a drink from all 171 Starbucks outlets in Manhattan in less than 24 hours, and he has the video to prove it.

As you may not recall, I decided to use my own script to count the number of Google web searches I performed in the month of April. The grand total turned out to be 468, or 15.6 searches a day. I didn't realize how much I relied on Google. It's pretty interesting.

I consider myself a pretty good computer programmer. This is a complete lie, in fact. I have much to learn and cannot write any program that people could actually use. Actually, I sort of do (see above), but the point is, I can't really write any useful applications that you would have on your desktop, as much as I'd like to. I'm in the Programming III class at school, and it's pretty enjoyable, mainly because it's at the same time as the Programming II class, which is much larger and has a lot of people I know. But anyway, this year I was asked by the teacher to be part of the school's team that will compete at the countywide programming competition that's taking place on Saturday. The team was supposed to consist of me, Gilbert, Kenny, and Ivan, but Gilbert can't make it, so he's being replaced by Tanner.

I was asked to do it when I was in Programming I, and I didn't really feel like it, but now I feel ready. I've learned quite a bit since then, and the sample problems that the teacher gave us seem really easy. Like, really easy. Basically, a lot of them involve calculating a value according to a formula: area given length and height, and so on. Other problems we've looked at were more difficult, but I'm really not sure how we're going to be. It seems, though, that we'll be at a disadvantage because we use an object-oriented programming language, while most of the projects can be accomplished quickly and dirtily with... the other kind. You know, the ones that use the command line and all.

Yesterday I found out that the HD-DVD process key had been cracked. It had actually been cracked for a while, but I'm slow to hear about these things. What it basically means is that it's now possible to remove the DRM from HD DVDs, which, although it shouldn't be illegal because there are legitimate reasons to copy movies that you own, apparently is. Yeah, they're saying it's illegal to possess a number. In protest, the Internet has been abuzz with people posting the number on sites like Digg, which eventually gave up on its censorship. The MPAA has apparently been trying to silence those who have publicized the number, but there's no way they can crack down on the 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 sites that have joined in on the fun.

According to the Wikipedia article, the key has been revoked, and no new discs will use it. But it's only a matter of time before the next key gets cracked. Why do they bother? Oh yeah, that's right: so they can try to sell you the same content over and over again.

When I found out about the infamous number yesterday morning, I wrote it on a piece of paper and pinned it to my shirt. Two people actually got the reference, which was pretty satisfying to see. I figured the guys in my programming class would be the ones who would appreciate it the most, and I was right. They wrote it on the board for all to see, and some of them tried to commit the number, represented in hexadecimal form, to memory. Kenny suggested that the programming competition team write the number on those "Hello, My Name Is" stickers and wear them to the competition. It sounds like a great idea; I'll just have to see if I can get the stickers. Where do you buy those things, anyway?

From the Journal of Irreproducible Results: All Theories Proven with One Graph. There are even calculus jokes in it. Yes: jokes, plural.

From the YouTubes Internet tubes: How to paint the Mona Lisa with MS Paint. Quite impressive, if you ask me.

Arriving at school this morning, I saw a flier for a missing person, and the name was familiar. That's never good. I recognized her name and photo immediately. She's in the class where I'm a teacher's aide, and I had noticed that she had been absent two days in a row after having perfect attendance last quarter. Immediately, I heard that her friend was missing too. That's a bit more comforting because it's not likely that they were kidnapped together; instead, they probably ran off in a Thelma and Louise style. I've never seen that movie. It'll be interesting to see how this develops. I hope they return home safely and soon.

I'm going on vacation this weekend. Yeah, I know, it's weird. I don't think I've ever been on vacation in the month of March. But my great-aunt's condo in lovely Ft. Pierce is free for the weekend, so I guess my parents decided to spring for it. We're going, and my grandparents are coming along too. It should be nice to escape the pressures of daily life. Not that daily life pressures me much on the weekends, but...

My friend Luke brought his guitar to school today so Tyler could change the strings. The three of us all have calculus class together with Mr. Gates. Before class, Luke and I were talking guitars, and Luke told me that Mr. Gates played classical guitar and sang. If you know Mr. Gates, you would find this fact very odd, as he is the most serious, straight-laced, professional teacher you will ever meet, and to many people, he doesn't exactly seem like the kind of person who "has a life" (as they say). If you play the guitar, you are likely to have a life. (Though the converse of this statement is not true, the contrapositive is.)

So, before class started, Tyler was playing Luke's guitar. When Mr. Gates came in, some people asked him if he knew how to play. He said that he used to play. Then we asked him if he wanted to play for us, and he said something along the lines of "Most definitely not." He explained that he used to play the guitar a bit when he was our age, "but then the rigors of life set in."

As we grow up, life becomes more rigorous. Actually, that doesn't always hold true. It's more like a bell curve, I think. But at this stage in the game of life, things are getting more complicated. I have quite a few hobbies and interests. Will I, like Mr. Gates, have to shelve them once I grow into adulthood? How can I avoid becoming a boring adult? How can I balance my emerging adult self and my inner child? I have no idea. I just hope that the conditions will be favorable for me to keep what's near to me dear to me.

What if Mr. Gates continued playing the guitar? What would he be like today? I bet anything he'd be a more fun person, and maybe someone with a little more wonder and appreciation for everyday life. Which is not to say that he hasn't got a lot of wonder and appreciation already, but... well, he's... I don't know. The intellectual musings break down here.

On YouTube: Here's a Canadian news report about a revolutionary new phenomenon known as "Internet."

Here are some famous sounds used in songs.

A few months ago, my dog, who has never really been housebroken, started making a mess on the carpet in my dad's "office" -- where his computer and all his computer-related stuff are. (Now that he's gotten Linux on his computer, I've made it my main computer also.) We no longer trust the dog enough to let him roam free while no one's home, but we've had to put up with the unpleasant smell of the carpet. Since it was old anyway, my parents decided to get new carpet and repaint the room while they were at it. Over the course of a few days, we moved all the stuff to other parts of the house.

So, over the weekend, I was kind of disconnected from the world. I could have used the other computer, and that's what I did end up doing for some things, but I want to immerse myself in Linux as much as possible, and that means making a Linux desktop my main computer before I go off into the world and get a laptop of my own. It's good to be back, though, and I see that I haven't missed much.

Actually, I spent much of my weekend (and last week) toiling away at the Greasemonkey user script I'm most proud of. Before I go any further, I should mention to the uninitiated that Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox (you know, the browser) that allows you to run bits of JavaScript called "user scripts" that change the look and/or behavior of web pages. Anyway, my favorite user script out of the ones I've written is Myspace Ignore Bulletins, which allows you to set specific friends whose bulletins you want to blacklist or whitelist. I've spent much of the past week improving it, and I'm satisfied with the results.

The script grew out of a need, as all of mine do, and it was simple enough at first. I wanted to be some people's friends on MySpace but didn't want to read the zillions of stupid bulletins they would post every day. Rather than ignoring bulletins altogether, I decided to write a quick and dirty little script to hide the bulletins from users that I would specify in the code. Figuring that others could also benefit from it, I uploaded it to userscripts.org, a repository of, well, user scripts. For such a not-very-popular script, I got a lot of comments on it, some of which clamored for the ability to see only bulletins from the users you'd blocked or the ability to see only bulletins from users you specify.

Realizing that these people were asking for the same thing, I figured out how to integrate that functionality into the existing script so that you could toggle between blacklisting and whitelisting with just a click. That was last week. I uploaded the new version of the script and got some more downloads. But I wasn't satisfied yet because you still had to tweak the code in order to add or remove friends from the list. So I came up with a visual interface for adding or removing friends right on the bulletin listing page. It's nothing fancy -- just a textbox with the user IDs in it -- but I think it will help for people who don't know enough JavaScript to alter a little bit of the code. As it happened, just before uploading the improved version, I got a comment from a user who liked the script but had to ask "the Unix nerd I married" for help with configuring it. This new version of MySpace Ignore Bulletins goes out to her and everyone else who wants to block MySpace bulletins from certain users or show bulletins only from certain users and doesn't want or know how to edit the actual code.

So yeah. If you like MySpace bulletins but don't like some of them (and you use Firefox), do check out the fruit of my labor, MySpace Ignore Bulletins.

Turns out that the annoying Nokia ringtone comes from an old Spanish guitar piece. Here's a page with some more info and an excerpt from the original work.

Are you not a big fan of facts? Do you see reality as having a liberal bias? Then Conservapedia is the web site for you. It's like Wikipedia, but instead of aiming for a neutral point of view, it aims to be biased! (See also: A (Conservative) People's History of New York City.)

This semester, I have Mr. Mumtaz for two of my classes. These days, good old Room 319 has been really cold, and he's been powerless to stop it. When the students complain about how cold it is, he has his line ready: "Because I'm the coolest teacher." Incidentally, he uses a similar reply for when the classroom is too hot: "Because I'm the hottest teacher." It makes me want to say, "Your classroom is really smelly," so he can say that he's the smelliest teacher.

Yesterday, early in the morning, the room was particularly cold, so I had my opportunity to use the joke on him as he sent me to his car to get his jacket. He didn't fall for my bait, but he laughed (after I assured him that I was kidding about the room smelling bad). When I headed back to class from the parking lot, I did notice that it smelled kind of strange, and I mentioned it to Mr. Mumtaz ("It does smell kind of funny here after all"), but I didn't think much of it after that.

About fifteen minutes later, as the school's morning TV-type show was about to start, a school administrator came on the PA and announced a Code Orange -- a general evacuation. It was not a drill, he said. Of course, I got very nervous. What could happen that would cause an evacuation? Obviously, if it wasn't some kind of bomb threat (a Code Black), it would have to be a gas leak or something. (I had never even heard of the phenomenon known as the gas leak until going to a public school. Even now, the idea seems strange and foreign to me. But I did know that if it were a gas leak, things would not be pretty.)

We went to the football field as the emergency plans dictate. "We" meaning the entire school. Obviously, this took quite a while, and some people ended up getting separated from their classes. Each class is supposed to sit together on the bleachers, and the teachers are supposed to see to it that none of their students are missing. After a while of sitting around, the few students who had gone in separate directions returned to the fold. I was still pretty nervous because it's never good when you have to evacuate a building. I wondered if they were going to tell us what it was all about. Eventually, they did.

Apparently, a teacher had smelled smoke, and at some point the decision was made to evacuate the whole building. The fire department came to check it out. They declared it was due to faulty wiring. Not long after the announcement, they declared Room 322 and the rest of the building to be safe. After we got back to the building, I saw exactly how close to this Room 322 I had been -- I had actually been walking past it when I smelled something funny just about fifteen minutes before the Code Orange was given.

What would the Interstate Highway System look like if you drew it highly stylized like a subway map? Have a look and see for yourself.

Can't decide where to go for lunch? Enter your US zip code and spin the Wheel of Food!

Note: This is definitely not an attempt to squeeze in some posts at the end of the month to avoid what would otherwise be a 43-month low. Nope. Totally not one of those.

On an unrelated note, why does February have to be so short?

To recap: This week, the 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-graders have been taking the FCAT in the mornings, disrupting the normal class schedule. There's no real reason for 12th-graders to even show up in the mornings, but they've been making us do stuff to keep us busy. Those 12th-graders who showed up on Monday and Tuesday mornings would get to go on a free trip to (as the field trip form put it) "Aetna Rx plant and local mall." Fun? Well, it would be better than sitting at school, and I was eligible to go, so...

Well, the form said that we would leave at 7:30, but apparently there was a change of plans. When 7:30 rolled around, we went to the auditorium for the staff members to judge our presentations that they made us do on Monday while the other kids were testing. That made me nervous. My group's presentation was bad. Like, really bad. As in, kind of insulting to the school and, overall, a poor effort. The best presentation would be shown to incoming freshmen to introduce them to the school, but our presentation didn't even really try to tell new freshmen what they need to know. In fact, it was mostly filler.

I enjoyed watching other people's presentations, which were mainly slide shows and videos. Many of them were insanely funny because they made fun of the teachers. One presentation that specifically warned of the Health teacher and urged new students to take Health online instead elicited a wild applause from the audience. (Taking Health online was the smartest thing I ever did.) Another included headshots of teachers that were humorously defaced with MS Paint. A science teacher was given a white moustache and hair like Albert Einstein; another science teacher was saying "Touch my neutrons"; a math teacher was surrounded by "2 + 2 = 9" and "1/2 = 4/5"; an administrator was given the Mr. T look and, of course, pitied the fool. It's always funny when students make fun of teachers. It's not always right, but it's always funny.

My group's presentation was last. It was in Flash, so I wasn't sure if it would work right. It didn't. The music didn't play. The background was white instead of black, obscuring some information. The videos we included at the end as filler didn't play. I was very relieved. I would rather have a confusing presentation than one that the administrators didn't like.

Then it was time for the field trip. But we were going to have to go in shifts, and guess whose group had to wait 40 extra minutes before leaving? That's right: mine. But we were finally on our way to what turned out to be a mail-order pharmacy run by an insurance company. The purpose of the field trip was to give us information about careers? We toured the facility, and it was very much like an assembly line for filling prescriptions. In fact, that wasn't what it was like; it's what it was. There were lots of conveyor belts and things. I couldn't imagine working in a place like that. I guess I'd feel more comfortable on the white-collar side, which we saw briefly. Also, the whole place smelled really bad, except for the actual assembly line, where it was all white and sterile.

Then it was time to go to a "local mall" for lunch. They wouldn't say which mall it was, which made me certain that it was the outdoor Pompano Citi Centre (formerly the Pompano Square Mall). If we had known we were going to the Pompano Mall, most of us probably wouldn't have gone on the trip. But we were there, and due to that two-and-a-half-hour delay for watching presentations and doing nothing, we had about a half an hour to buy lunch before having to go back to school. Since I was sure we were going to the Pompano Mall, I was set on going to Pollo Tropical. I did, and the food was amazing as usual. Then we had to go back to school, which wasn't so amazing.

"Thing" is a very common word. Where did it come from? I'm glad you asked. The word once meant "assembly" in Scandinavian languages and is still used in the names of parliaments in the region. For example, you have the Law Thing, the Land Thing, the General Thing, the Great Thing, the People's Thing... all kinds of things.

Here are some Truly Awful Star Wars Collectables. Who would have bought this stuff?