Your secret, alter-ego names

I have to admit - some children's games are still pretty cool 25 years later.  I was recently reminded of one interesting kid's activity, but didn't remember all the details.  A Web search resulted in only a few hits, so I consolidated what I could and edited things to make it work better...

The "game" is discovering the names of your alter egos / secret identities.
Here are some of the formulas and how it turned out for me:

YOUR ACTION HERO NAME:
(first name of a main character in the last movie you watched + last food you ate)

Because of the formula, this changes depending on what you ate and watched most recently.
I got the following:

- Harry Pasta  (Sounds too much like a bizzaro Harry Potter)
- Albus Zwiebelrostbraten (German foods just don't work too well here...)
- Jason Satay (Sounds like a character from The Office U.S., but not too bad)
- Bourne Goulash (Just plain strange.)
- Bud Flammkuchen? (again, foreign food didn't work out)
- Jim Couscous (Not so great either.)

Verdict:  There is potential here, but just doesn't work in practice.  Especially with English names and foreign foods.

ACTION HERO [VARIATION]:
(first name of your favorite living politician + your favorite gemstone)

I got the following:  Chris Diamond

Verdict:  Not bad! Certainly better than the first formula.

BARFLY NAME:
(last snack food you ate + your favorite drink)

I got the following:  Cookies Margarita, Spekulatius Schorle (German)

Verdict:  Makes me sound like a poser or a floozy.  Guess it works!

CRIMINAL/MAFIA/STRIPPER NAME:
(name of your favorite perfume/cologne + favorite candy bar)

I got:  Aqua de Gio Nussini, Polo Reeces

Frau A got: Burberry Brit Crunchie (probably shorten to Burberry Brit or Brit Crunchie)

Verdict:  Kinda funny, actually.  In a cheesy mafia movie sort of way.

DETECTIVE NAME:
(favorite color + favorite animal)

I got:  Blue Wolf

Frau A got: Green Leopard

Verdict:  It's as funny as you find the Pink Panther or Sgt. Friday.  Think Saturday morning cartoons.

DETECTIVE/POLITICIAN NAME VARIATION:
(name of grade/highschoool + county,  not country, where you grew up... or switch these around as needed)

I got:  Dudley, Perrin, Deland, Monroe... Wow!  they ALL work in almost any order!

Frau A:  wow, way too many schools and counties..... Frederica Glynn, Hutchison Shelby, Stratford Tift...I think we'll stop with three 

Verdict:  The best one so far!  Probably because so many schools and counties are named after historical persons.

EASTERN NAME - warning, complex formula and definitely NOT politically correct:
(2nd letter of your first name + 3rd letter of your last name + any letter of your middle name
+ 2nd letter of your moms maiden name + 3rd letter of you dads middle name
+ 1st letter of a siblings first name + last letter of your moms middle name)

I got: Erolese

Frau A got: Nahaish (Not really sure what they mean by "Eastern"....doesn't sound Eastern European or East Asian. Maybe Middle Eastern, though not so much either)

Verdict:  Pretty good, if pronounced with the right accent. Who the heck came up with this formula anyway?

EXOTIC FOREIGNER ALIAS:
(favorite spice + last vacation spot visited)

I got:  Cilantro Maldives (but an herb?), Chile Male, Chile Doha

Frau A got:  Cardamom Maldives

Verdict:  Nope, just not funny.  Except Chile Male, that elicits a smile at least.  The vacation spot is the weak link here.  Wonder what would work better...?

GHETTO NAME - warning, NOT politically correct:
(first 2 or 3 letters of your first name & -Shawn/-Quan/-Quita/-Niqua
+ last name of whatever President or Prime Minister is on the currency you have in your pocket/wallet)

I got:  JeShawn Merkel (using German Prime Minister), JeQuan Van Rompuy (using Pres of the European Council)

Frau A got: Anniqua Merkel

Verdict:  Assuming everyone understands this is a harmless joke, it's really funny.  Sounds like characters on Saturday Night Live. 

HIPPIE NAME:
(what you ate for breakfast + your favorite tree)

I got:  Pretzel Oak, Butter-Breze Eiche (German)

Frau A got:  Käsekrainer Poplar

Verdict:  Again, foreign names/foods kill the joke.  I do like Pretzel Oak though.  Pass the granola!

MOB NAME:
(Dad's name + favorite Italian restaurant)

I got:  Lew La Scala

Frau A: Don Zanotti 

Verdict:  Great stuff.  This is clever and funny.  Probably too easy, because of the Italian restaurant name, but hey...it's a kids' game after all...

NASCAR NAME:
(first name of your mother's dad + father's dad)

Verdict:  Let's just say we self-edited content -- trust me, you didn't want to read the result. 

OPPOSITE SEX NAME:
(name of [opposite sex] friend + phone company you use)

I got:  Jennifer Vodafone

Frau A: Paul Telekom

Verdict:  Terrible.  Who decided to use the phone company in the formula?

PORN NAME:
(1st pet, a street you grew up on)

I got:  Thor Heatherwood

Frau A got:  Si St. Clair

Verdict:  For me, it is unbelievably great.  Thor Heatherwood?  Name says it all.  Frau A's is pretty funny too, but a little too much like a character in the board game Clue.

ROCK STAR NAME:
(current pets name + current street name)

I got:  Buda Prinz, Lyka Prinz

Frau A got:  Loki Sendlinger, Gus Sendlinger

Verdict:  This has potential... but I'm not convinced just yet.  Gave a chuckle, but not really memorable.

ROCK STAR VARIATION:
(your first pet & current car)

I got:  Lyka Bahn

Frau A got:  I have the same "car" as Herr J...it's called Munich Public Transportation.... Si S-Bahn?

Verdict:  There HAS to be a better algorithm for Rock Star names, right?  This is bad.  Although Frau A's is getting better the more I hear it...

ROCKSTAR TOUR:
("The” + your fave hobby/craft + your fave weather element + “Tour”)

I got:  The Trekking Sun Tour

Frau A: The Cooking Sun Tour

Verdict:  Mine is, well, interesting.  Frau A's is a total fail.  Not impressed with this formula.

SOAP OPERA Name:
(middle name, city where you were born)

I got:  Tom Rochester

Frau A:  Elizabeth Columbus

Verdict:  Not bad.  City name is a good choice for this algorithm, especially for me.

SOCIALITE NAME:
(silliest childhood nickname + first town where you partied)

I got:  Einstein Evanston (it's easy to get that childhood nickname when you play football and study even a little)

Verdict:  No, I did NOT get that name because I am so smart.  It came from some football players (low standards).  And no, the formula does not work so well. 

SPORTS NICKNAME:
("The" + favorite car maker + second favorite animal)

I got:  The Porsche Dolphin

Verdict:  Huh?  Car maker?  Animal?  The logic of this one escapes me, or maybe this is more like sports nicknames in the 1950s and 1960s?

SPY NAME:
(middle name + county, not country, where you grew up)

I got:  Tom Monroe

Frau A: Elizabeth Glynn

Verdict:  Nice!  Again, when you use counties, you get those general yet regal sounding names.

STAR WARS VARIATION X:
(the first 3 letters of your last name & first 2 letters of your first name
+ first 2 letters of mom's maiden name & first 3 letters of the town you grew up in)

Verdict:  Did not work for either Frau A or myself.  Not worth the electrons to show the results.  Bad formula.

STAR WARS JEDI NAME:
(First syllable of mothers maiden name & first syllable of city born in + mom's name spelled backwards)

I got:  Al Ro Ydnic

Frau A: Haco Yllas

Verdict:  the creator of this formula was on crack... but good crack I guess.  Kinda works!

Well, that was a great (and I truly mean that in the purest sense of the word) waste of time.  Good regression therapy.  Hope your results are even better.  Feel free to share the good ones with us all

Bathroom Break

My friends and I have joked about this for years, but now (finally) someone has developed the ultimate product for sports bars (or home, if you're lucky).  A urinal game!  Now it will be the women's turn to complain why it's taking the men so long in the bathroom!

It's called the "Toirettsu" and was developed by Sega. 

Here's the, um, equipment:

...and here is a non-offensive video of how it works:

Not only is it supposed to be entertaining for the guys, but also it might increase accuracy, resulting in less time and expense to keep the bathrooms clean.  (Keep dreaming)  Frau A and I will be visiting Japan soon and I'll try to find one!

BTW....What Does Hasselhoff Sing?

Since we're going to his concert tonight, this is a question we needed to answer. We really didn't know. I know he had a big song around the fall of the Berlin Wall and I know Dirk Nowitzki admitted in an interview that he often sang a Hasselhoff song in his mind at the freethrow line....but I hadn't actually ever heard The Hoff sing.

To start you off, there's a montage of his appearances and "hits" throughout the last 20 years. Amusing and it won't hurt too much (except when you remember some of your old fashions and hairstyles from that time):
                        

When you're feeling braver, there's the video to "Hooked On A Feeling," which I love for it's absolute cheesiness factor. Off the charts! Perhaps it's aimed at a German audience - I'm not sure otherwise how to explain the random dachshunds and Alps. Though the flying angels and flying Hoff are a nice touch. We have aliens, African villagers, and the Hoff in both macho-motorcycle-man and suave tuxedo attire...what else could you want?
                        

And the song that started it all in Germany, "I've Been Looking For Freedom." I can see why it caught on in the time that it did. Here's Hasselhoff singing it at the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin on New Years Eve 1989. This German TV video is amazing on so many levels - for one, you see the Wall still up by Brandberger Tor and the excitement of the crowd. And then you see the full late 80's Hoff...complete with piano key scarf and leather jacket light show.  Also, as we saw in Munich this New Year's, Germans bring their own fireworks - and aren't afraid to shoot them at people or monuments.  He dodges one around the 1:50 mark.
                        

I'm guess this song was first played in Germany because it was a remake of another 1970's German song, "Auf der Strasse nach Süden" by Tony Marshall.  Hasselhoff gave it completely new words, but it was a already familiar tune to many when its new words of freedom helped it rocket up the German charts to #1.

If you're real masochist, here are links to a few other Hasselhoff hits:
"Crazy For You" Video (best described as The Hoff on a motorcyle, on a roller coaster, and with another dachshund)
Top 10 Hasselhoff Hits (in under 2 minutes)
"Secret Agent Man" Video (the 2nd comment on YouTube says it all "David, this is HOFFULL")
"Jump In My Car" Video (only available in US)

This guy has a good sense of humor - he seems to know that his cheesiness sells, not his talent, and he uses it. And he knows that he was in the right place at the right time to become a star in Germany. He was very successful in Austria in the mid-1980's and having the #1 song (about freedom) at the time the Berlin Wall fell won him a place in many German's hearts for decades. He still tours here every year, with his daughters opening for him. This year, he's having The Hoff Is Back Tour

Tonight is going to be wonderful or wonderfully horrible. Either way, it will be a fun cultural experience!

Fun with Science at Home

Since the typical German refrigerator is the size of an American college student's dorm fridge, there isn't much room for storing drinks. I've been keeping my drinks "refrigerated" by just leaving them on the balcony, where the temperature has been consistently below freezing for the past week.

Though the beer holds up well, we find an interesting reaction when I open a new bottle of Diet Coke ("Cola Light over here").... as soon as I open it and pour, it immediately turns into a Coke Slushie.  See it here:

Herr J immediately recognized this as "supercooling" the liquid.  The concept is this:  a liquid's freezing point is the temperature at which the free molecules "want" to stop being free and "prefer" to get themselves into a tighter, crystalline formation (because we've taken energy -- measured as temperature -- away from them).  As soon as just one set of cooling moelcules forms a crystal, the others will start forming more crystals right next to the first one.  BUT, if you have a relatively pure liquid and don't disturb it during the freezing process, the free molecules just might hang out in their freer liquid state well below the temperature at which they would normally crystallize.

This is definitely something anyone can do at home... get the kids to like science by making a Slushie!  Wonder if Cool-Aid would work, or if that has too many particles in the water...

In fact, there are a number of neat examples on YouTube where people supercooled water.  In this one, the guy cooled water down to -21 Celsius!  Notice how gingerly he holds & pours the water out -- so as not to disturb it too much.  The disturbance ends up being the water coming into contact with the bowl itself, where it immediately freezes with a cool effect (sorry about the pun).

Then we have this shirtless (Dutch?) guy who is pretty excited about his discovery.  He also "pours" gingerly so the disturbance is the water hitting the ice cube.  "This is not an optical illusion, this is for real!" says the surfer-scientist.

Finally, in this example, we see the entire process of doing this at home.  The water is only cooled to a little below freezing point, so it doesn't crystallize as quickly as in the other videos.  However, you can see that all it takes is a tap on the bottle to get the whole chain reaction going.  And notice that some of the bottles did freeze outside rather than become supercooled (probably because they had extra minerals/particulates in them to get the freezing started)  Warning:  the creator felt compelled to use "Ice Ice Baby" as the audio track.  Mute is advised.

Cool Guy DIY

If anyone knows of a good really high paying job, let me know.  (or any good real estate job in Munich that will take someone not fluent...)

Herr J hopes I'll find something that pays obscenely so he can stay home and eat bon-bons and do man stuff like build things in the back yard.

I'd be OK with this plan, as he's a really great cook. And of course I'd have all kinds of cool things in the back yard.

Wood Fired Pizza Oven

Photo by David Sheridanvia Serious Eats 

(You can find some instructions online at FornoBravo)

DIY Cotton Candy Machine

Herr J swears it's really easy...

Kitty Crack

I admit I'm a little intrigued to see the results of distilling catnip extract, though given that it involves steam distillation and a toluene bath, it seems a little wrong to be making meth for your pets. But hey, as long as they like it....(don't worry, catnip extract is safe for the cats).

Amusing step by step instructions are at Instructables

  Though I'm afraid this all would involve multiple trips to the ER and end in projects like this:

Homemade Backyard Rollercoaster

DIY Rocket Sled

Homemade Batman Tumbler

It's both good and bad to have an engineer in the house....

More Fun with Maps

Along the same lines as the international stereotype maps and US States by TV and movies, there are several fun US maps floating around out there right now.  Sure we can argue with a lot of the data and how they're drawn, but these are just for fun. Yes, I'm a bit of a geography geek and love fun maps.

These maps would lead us to some unusual (and completely unsubstantiated) stereotypes... 

Utah is full of very healthy people, who watch a lot of porn and basketball instead of Jeopardy and have the Highest Reported Wellbeing. Must be the green Jell-O they eat...

Illinois wins the prize for being the most average, which they are...pizza lovers of average health level and of average Jeopardy watching, but with the 5th largest GDP, the most robbery and a great interest in Lotto (hmmm...is there a connection?).

Poor Mississippi...growing up 20 years ago in Georgia, which was often ranked 49th in most positive stats and 2nd or 3rd in the bad ones, we often said "Thank goodness for Mississippi!" In its defense, I quite enjoyed the little time I spent in Oxford...great food, art, and bookstores. But the great Mississippi literary tradition is forgotten here, and instead we see the state portrayed as large, pie-eating, churchgoing, football watching, Jeopardy freaks living in a state with the GDP of Bangladesh.

Texas, as usual, is a bit of a contradiction...though it seems to be full of high school dropouts, it has the 2nd largest state economy (on par with Russia's), the most wind power production, and apparently is very well-fed by steak. We could have a whole blog on Texas, of course, and it is a pretty interesting example economically of doing things right. On the educational side, well...TX is kind of a mess right now...but they are doing something right in terms of innovation, business, and jobs. I'm afraid to ask if the autocomplete "Texas Rangers" is for the baseball team, for law enforcement, or for Chuck Norris.

First we have The United States of Shame, showing stats at which each state ranks 50th (or 1st, where it's a negative statistic).

via Neatorama, original and source data at Pleated Jeans

But Ilya Gerna has made a United States of Awesome map to balance out the shame, showing where each state ranks first in something positive.

via Neatorama

And a bit less scientific, the map displaying what Google suggests first to autocomplete when the state name is typed into the search function:    

via Strange Maps

One that has been in the news often is the Obesity Map

via CalorieLab

And one that might help explain the Obesity Map, the map of foods representing each state

via EdibleCrafts

The original, interactive version is on The Economist website, and also has one by population. Most shocking to me is that Italy has a bigger economy than Russia. I guess it shouldn't be that suprising, but my guess would have been that all the oil and gas and minerals would have put Russia higher.

via Neatorama

And finally, the map of Jeopardy fans...

via Strange Maps

Cool LEGO Inspirations

I kinda still love LEGOs.

Life-sized LEGO giraffe outside the LEGO Museum - Postdamer Platz, Berlin

In the Kaufhaus window display, near Munich Hauptbahnhof

via The Kitchn

And these adorable LEGO Bento boxes from Bento & Co

 via OhDeeDoh

And I have a special love for this LEGO style advent calendar. There are step by step instructions on making it at paper,plate,andplane, but I'm not sure if I'd have the patience to stack together all the hole punches necessary to make the LEGO blocks. Truly impressive!

via EdibleCrafts

Update on Friday, February 11, 2011 at 21:15 by Frau A

This heavy metal Norse video takes LEGO to new heights of coolness.

The video is by Matt Witham and David Pagano, with other cool LEGO animation videos here on Paganomation.

via Neatorama