Have you tried SimpsonizeMe.com? I gave it a shot back when I first heard about it on Digg (by way of the PopURLs aggregator), but their site was always too slashdotted to work right. But a 4chan post I saw yesterday reminded me about it, so I tried again and actually got results. I don’t think it looks much like me, but it’s pretty cool that it was able to match my hair and shirt color from the photo I uploaded.

(Tangent: Boy, PopURLs looks way better with the white-background option enabled. They must have added the feature months ago but for some reason I never noticed it till now.)

It’s kinda weird how, just as I’m building and collapsing hundreds of bridges in BCS, a real one falls down in Minneapolis. As with the V-Tech massacre, the relevant Wikipedia page is incredibly handy. (Longest span is only 140 m? This thing would be a cinch to build in BCS…)

I saw the Modern Marvels episode about the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island today. It had a couple bits of trivia that I found pretty interesting: Did you know the ethnic slurs “kike” and “wop” originated on Ellis Island? Apparently officials there would identify immigrants’ religion with a particular symbol at the top of their papers — a cross for Christians, a circle for Jews. Well, the Yiddish word for circle is “kykle” (sp?). You can see how it’d be shortened and used as a group identifier. Likewise, “WOP” was originally just an acronym for WithOut Papers. When a large group of undocumented Italians arrived, it was used a lot and eventually became associated with that nationality in particular. Isn’t it strange how benign terms like this eventually become terrible insults?

If you get a kick out of etymology like I do (esp. where blue language is concerned), you might be interested in Cecil Adams’s thoughts on the origin of “honky.”

I’ll be in Spokane tomorrow — Brett’s got a couple days off and his parents offered to buy us dinner in honor of his birthday if we came up. We’re spending the night at their place before heading back Saturday so I might have to blog from a Starbucks or something.

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