Being a Rock Star.

This past Saturday (May 30), I had a J-rock themed photoshoot in Portland. I got my hair cut in an asymmetrical, spiky fashion and some purple streaks added. Then I dressed up in a neon blue skirt, purple leggings, and hot pink tank top-thing. Also, I had eye makeup that looked like a box of Froot Loops vomited on me, and purple lipstick. It was pretty great. (pictured below: me being pale)

The shoot was for Ms. Jayla’s hair portfolio, as she is working on setting up her own hairstyling business. It takes a lot of skill and patience to make hair as thick as mine behave, so she obviously knows what she’s doing. Comment if you live in Portland and want her contact information.

Anyway! So we (me and two other pretty Asian ladies with fun hair) were doing the shoot. We were getting individual shots before moving on to the group poses. When it wasn’t my turn in front of the camera, I picked up the pretty red electric guitar that Mr. Photographer Andrew brought. It was missing a string and had no amp and produced no noise at all. I stood on the street corner in downtown Portland strumming the soundless guitar and loudly singing Disney songs. In the middle of my “Under the Sea” rendition, a very proper-looking middle-aged lady walked past. She gazed cooly into my face, turned up her nose, and marched on in a snooty fashion. She didn’t even give me a dollar.

I almost choked on my enormous feather earrings from laughing so hard.

Another fun thing: Some hobo took a picture of me on his camera phone. He’s probably introduced the picture to all of his hobo pals as his girlfriend or something. Awesome.

In conclusion, Ms. Jayla the Hair Lady is great, the shoot was great, and it’s a whole lot of fun to strut through downtown Portland dressed like the above.

-Caitlin

Completely Bizarre.

So I receive this email from some guy I’ve never heard of who is apparently named “Carpenter Marcinkowski.” The text of the email follows:

“Merely read it before a few once upon a time, channel from
a larger and thickly wooded island,m. Thee deeply, he said,
young man, for thou art that day handsewed their first pair
of boots), i’ve heared squire donnithorne say many a time.”

And so, I did the only thing I could do. I responded with this:

“So rightly cupcakes, make due to their fall danger
a modest gallon distraught. Yea, though certain
noodle flagellum thou, seek o great porpoise livid
Jabberwocky terrible said she island sandwich.”

I’m eagerly awaiting a reply.

-Caitlin

A Manly Sport. Also, Catfish.

We went to the Portland Rose Garden this fine evening and watched a bunch of enormous guys beat the stuffing out of each other with sticks. Apparently this is called “Lacrosse.” It was full of manliness.

At one point during the game, I pondered the fact that it would take a huge number of catfish to completely fill the Rose Garden. I really don’t know why I thought of that, but now I’m curious, so…

The Rose Garden has a roof that is 210,000 square feet and is 140 feet tall at its pinnacle (source). I’m not going to make this overly complicated because I’m feeling pretty lazy, so I’m just going to take 210,000 and multiply it by 140 to get an internal volume of 29,400,000 feet cubed. Then I’m going to make that an even 29 million, which is still quite a bit too high, to account for the rounded shape of the roof which makes the surface area of 210,000 considerably greater than it would be if it were flat.

Catfish vary greatly in size, but on average are between 3.9 and 5.2 feet long (source). I’m going to be lazy and use 4.5 feet as the length of a catfish. I’m going to be even lazier and say that catfish are approximately cylindrical in order to more easily calculate the volume of one, and guesstimate that the diameter of a 4.5-foot-long catfish would be about 1 foot. Therefore, the volume of a catfish in cubic inches is pi times r squared, or 36 pi, times 54 (4.5 times 12 inches is where that number came from), for a total of 1944 pi, which is 6104 cubic inches or about 3.5 cubic feet. (Why did I convert to inches first? I have no idea.)

29,000,000 divided by 3.5 is 8,285,714.

Given my extremely high estimate of the Rose Garden’s volume, plus the fact that I didn’t account for any solid objects (walls, seating, etc.) within the Rose Garden, 8,285,714 is too many catfish. A round 8 million is almost definitely still too many… But in any case, I think it’s safe to assume that completely filling the Rose Garden with catfish would require, well, a lot of catfish. Millions of them. Certainly over nine thousand.

If I did something stupid when calculating stuff, let me know. It’s midnight and I didn’t double check things.

-Caitlin

Celebrating Mediocrity is Bad.

If you haven’t read or heard about this story already, a high school girls’ basketball coach was fired after refusing to apologize when his team beat their opponents 100-0. Apparently losing so horribly is bad for one’s self-esteem, and any coach who would allow their team to trounce another team so horribly is being disrespectful and has no regard for the self-esteem of others.

Frankly, this is completely ridiculous. It’s competition; there will always be one winner and one loser and the losers have to deal with it. If any apology is necessary, it should be given by the coach who is so grossly incompetent that he couldn’t train his girls to score a single basket in 4 quarters of play. Seriously, what exactly would you be apologizing for? “I’m sorry your coach is awful”? “I’m sorry I didn’t tell my team to suck for a while to make you feel better about yourselves”? In my mind, allowing someone to score for the sake of their own confidence is more demeaning than having enough respect for them to not let up. As long as there wasn’t any cheating going on, there’s really nothing more to say. One team won, one team lost. You can go cry about it if you like, but firing somebody for succeeding by too much is moronic.

When you punish people for being overly successful, you’re encouraging mediocrity or even outright failure. Failure means that conversations like this actually happen. I sat and listened to that with my mouth literally hanging open, and now I’m terrified at the fact that people like that Verizon supervisor exist in society. On one hand, I don’t want to go outside ever again. On the other, the internet is frequently worse.

To end, here’s a letter of complaint written to Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines. Maybe it’s just late and I had too much sugar, but I was crying of laughter by the fifth paragraph. The grammar and spelling is unfortunately terrible, as I can’t help noting, but it was still probably one of the best things I’ve ever read.

I have to be awake in six and a half hours and am now going to bed.

-Caitlin

Vintage Ads are Hilarious.

While browsing Digg today, I came across an exceedingly funny photo set on Flickr filled with vintage ads and products. I didn’t get to look through the entire thing, as there are over 1,200 pictures in the set, but here are my two favorites so far.

I put my face really close to the screen and squinted so that you wouldn’t have to (you’re welcome); here’s the text on the box:

“Wonder Sauna Hot Pants
Health-Watchers of America
Look Better-Feel Better-Wake Up Your Body
For Men and Women
Slenderize Exactly Where you Want
One Size Fits All-Easy to Inflate
One Piece Wonder Sauna Long Hot Pants Simultaneously Reduces Waist, Hips and Thighs”

I actually think I’d rather walk around wearing Crocs than blue plastic sausage-pants. I wonder if anything is supposed to be worn underneath.

…Here’s the next strange vintage product:

I think this one can be appropriately described in one word: “wat.” I really have nothing more to say about it.

The entire photo set can be found here. Not all of them are entirely family friendly; there are some hairy guys modeling underwear in questionable poses and one or two illustrations of somewhat scantily clad women. Some also include blatant sexism, racism, fat-people-ism, etc. that was totally appropriate in 19-whenever but isn’t anymore. A few clothing advertisements from the 80s might induce dizziness or nausea. You have been fairly warned.

-Caitlin