This is an interesting article on how names affect a person's life. I read a long time ago that what you name your child determines, in some very small way, what their life will be like. And coming on the heels of Penn naming his daughter "Moxie CrimeFighter", the subject had been in my head. I think I need to go pick up a copy of Freakonomics. Come to think of it, Steven Levett was at Google the other day and I missed it. Nuts. Damn work always getting in the way...

And I've always wondered about this:

For the study on black names, he analyzed birth records of all children born in Florida between 1989 and 1996. Names with apostrophes and unusual letter combinations were more likely given by mothers who dropped out of school, he found.

He also applied what he calls the Scrabble test: Names that would earn high scores in Scrabble - with z's, x's and q's - were most likely given by poorer, uneducated mothers.

I could never figure out why someone would name their kid "Da'Quan" or "Shaquasia". I always thought it was something cultural that I wasn't privvy to, when in reality it's because the mothers are uneducated simpletons. Ockham wins another round.

And dig the sociology experiment that guy at the end of the article is running on his kids. That's cruel and unusual.

I had this song in my head all day, from when I woke up until about 5 minutes ago. Everyone gets a song in their head once in a while I guess, but this one wouldn't go back to where ever it came from. I just kept humming it all day long, not knowing how it got there.

And that part is more disturbing than the fact that I must have hummed it like 450 times today: I didn't hear on the radio in the car, it wasn't in a movie I watched the night before, it wasn't playing on the clock radio when my alarm went off, nothing. As far as I know, I hadn't heard the song for years. In fact, I didn't even know what song it was! It was driving me crazy! All I knew was the general tune and a few words from some chorus, which was what was looping in my head all day: .

Now, I think, if you're at or above the age of 40, you know the full gravity of my predicament. The song that just would not leave my skull all day was in fact Do You Feel Like We Do by Peter Mothergrabbin' Frampton.

I needed it out but bad. I was having flashbacks of Big Surf circa 1976. What to do? I tried listening to other music, but that hadn't worked all day so a little more would be similarly ineffectual. Reading a book was straight out. My foot kept tapping out tiny autonomic beats, completely of it's own accord. Can't use a drill. All my bits are in San Diego.

For lack of anything else to try, I wound up buying the the whole album off the Russians for $2.20. Forty-two minutes and forty-five seconds worth of listening later, it's finally gone.

Some demons need to be exorcised just so.

Ever hear anyone talk about Gentoo? Yeah, me too. And I'm convinced that Gentoo is for ricers.

I just finished reading a book I picked up in the airport called Shadow Divers. It's nominally about these dudes who discover a WWII German U-boat that was sunk off the coast of New Jersey during the war at some point. Lots of trips to Germany and visits in deep water to find out what sub it was. Nova did a show about it. (If you read the pages at that link, you spoil about 75% of the book.) Ridley Scott is making a movie about it. That probably explains why it was among the limited selection of books at the tiny post-security gift shop at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.

So anyway, I was poking around the web looking at U-boat stuff. I really need to get p to Chicago to see the U-505. Be awfully cool to walk around inside a U-boat. I've already been up to the USS Pampanito at Fisherman's Wharf, and had a really good time banging my head on things inside it. Having the European perspective on WWII submarines would be interesting.