the shrewdness of apes

some completely unrelated items:

Bob Nasatanovich's horse racing blog/site is now up and running (heh), but it's pretty hard core so don't go there looking for hijinx or the like. do go if you'd like to know how The Bohemian Girl did in the 9th race at Oaklawn Park on Friday.

remember Sniglets? apparently they're still going strong. Banterist published some with a Starbucks theme today (though he didn't use that particular name) which made me wonder how prevalent they were on the internet. this turned out to be a bad idea as they are everywhere with numerous themes from computers and frisbee golf. perhaps the best was the "Infertility" sniglets i came across which included entries such as "'The Sperminator' - nickname for any friend of your husband's who insists on extended sauna sessions after playing squash" and "Preggozone - the magnetic area around all infertile women that draws expectant mothers into close viewing range; the first day of any cycle has the greatest magnetic field, closely followed by any day on which an infertile womans fails a pregnancy test." does Rich Hall still get royalties from these?

finally, a big Happy Birthday to my wonderful mom, who is celebrating her (3x + y)th birthday where x is your score in bowling if you make a spare in the first frame and then roll a "clothesline" and y is 3 times* the square root of the square root of x. hey, she's a math teacher and a bowler - it seemed appropriate.

* in what can only be called an unfortunate miscalculation, my original equation added in some extra years to the answer. sorry, mom. that's got to be disappointing on a couple of levels.