Monthly Archives: January 2009

They’d better hurry

Interesting reading over coffee this morning…

The Romanovs The story of Russian emperor Nicholas II and his family is too long to recount in a blog post. But it is a fascinating tale, threaded with intrigue, murder, rebellion, bizarre liaisons, and mysteries only just recently solved. Wikipedia has a nice account, from the Czar’s rise to power to the day in 1917 when Bolshevik rebels shot him in the head as his family and staff watched. (They all met the same fate moments later.)

Nicholas saw the revolution coming, and before he and his family were captured, it is said that they, and other extended family members, took their impressive collections of jewels — sapphires, diamonds, pearls and rubies — and buried them.

In 2001, a treasure hunter with money to burn (and an apparent ax to grind) wanted to dig beneath the Russian Museum of Political History because he was certain some Romanov booty was hidden there. I don’t know if he was ever allowed to start the dig…likely not.

Then there’s this story, which I stumbled upon this morning. A rich lady living in L.A. knows where the jewels are?? That is interesting indeed. Now if only she knew where that silly map got off to…

All I can say is, if they’re going to use this gal to find the treasure, they’d better hurry. She looks a little delicate.

Hey, here’s the view from my back porch as of yesterday morning. Nice, eh? (Sorry about the camera tilt on that first one — I wasn’t going to actually step out *onto* the porch, don’t you know, so I just stuck my hand outside the door.)

Have a nice Sunday, fiends. And how about those Arizona Cardinals? That was actually cool. Underdogs win again.

Fink out.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Statistically speaking

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I’m not a fan of statistics as a field of study. Not only because of the math (actually, math is only a part of the stats picture), but because I struggle to find the key elements that combine to point a researcher to the desired statistical method for collecting and analyzing his or her data.

Was that ambiguous? Poorly stated? Yeah, I know. Let’s try this:

On my comprehensive exams coming up in April, I will be given two educational scenarios or problems, and two hours. My job is then to design a complete research proposal on each one. I will need to know what kind of research “lens” to use, and which of a dozen different tests will most accurately measure the data and facilitate the interpretation of my findings. This is all apparently an effort to test my synthesis abilities when it comes to the two basic divisions of research (qualitative and quantitative).

I know: this is boring, get to the point. Right.

The quantitative stuff is pretty scary to me, so I bought a book at the suggestion of some classmates. I started it last night, and I’m on chapter 3. It’s actually not too bad.

For instance, why didn’t my prof say in his lecture months ago that, simply, measures of central tendency are also called “averages,” and that they come in 3 flavors: mean, median and mode? How simple is that? But noooo…we’re doctoral students so we had to take the long way around and avoid such elementary statements that I would have understood immediately. Maybe that’s a bad example, but you get where I’m going with this.

When I read the reviews for Salkind’s book (“It really is easy to understand,” “This is the book that will finally open up statistics for you”), I thought, Yeah, yeah, right. But they haven’t met me.

Well, surprise surprise: actually, I do get it so far. So there is hope for the mathematically — and in some cases, logical-thinking — challenged. If you’re taking a stats class now, or you plan to in the future, I highly recommend the book.

In fact, I will save it for you and you can buy it from me. Such a deal.

Now, back to X bar equals sigma X over N. Cuz, you know, that’s how I roll.

Fink, waitin’ for the blizzard to get here (it’s started already…photos tomorrow for the Florida, Texas, or otherwise snowless people).

PS — Aw. I just read that the other Hager twin died. I didn’t even know the first one passed away.

What next?

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Friends, hit me with a two-by-four, beam me up and call me James Traficant.

Hollyweird’s all abuzz. Stars and starlets are seriously going to be more conservative in their appearance on red carpets this year. It’s going to make an important statement. Let’s honor those odd little people called Them What Barely Make Ends Meet, and wear the $6,000 Lagerfeld gown instead of the $60,000 Van Cleef & Arpels choker. Don’t do loose hair or puffy lips, and go easy on the Botox. **heavy sigh** It’s going to be tough, but we can do it. Let’s set an example. Cuz, you know, we have to cut corners; times are hard and we don’t want to appear overly ostentatious. I mean really…who’s going to wear “$500 false eyelashes when some people can’t make their mortgage payments?”

I know, gosh. I hope they’re going to be OK out there.

Goats are making drugs. I am not making this up.

Again with the smoking. Remove smoking from the movies! OK, I get it. Smoking=bad. Do a Google search on remove smoking movies television and you’ll get a metric ton of hits dedicated to pulling the cancer sticks out of the cinema. Now do another search, but replace the word “smoking” with “drinking.” Feh. We’re just so incredibly picky with our poisons.

Yeesh, I am snarky this morning, aren’t I? And I have used the word “snarky” in two successive posts. I think I’m OK…**feeling face**…do I look all right? I don’t even have a 2-hour delay, so what’s wrong with me? I must be unwell.

Back later. Start without me.

Fink, in a funk

This made me laugh

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Happy 2-hour delay, fiends. I’m beginning to hate them, however. It’s like having your mother-in-law come stay for the weekend. It’s nice the first few times, but by the twentieth, well…

So I was going to do a post I’d promised to do awhile ago on women who were “still fabulous after 40,” in answer to the one I did about men back in November. I got sidetracked.

In my searches, I found a hilarious condition identified as Madamism. You remember Madame, the sassy, snarky puppet operated by Wayland Flowers back in the 70s and 80s? I thought the whole act was hilarious.

Anyway, it seems that some Hollyweird actresses have had so much plastic surgery that their faces, over time, begin to resemble our lovely Madame.

Case in point from Dr. Tony Youn’s celebrity plastic surgery site:

All right, now you have to admit it: it’s funny. Maybe I won’t think it’s so funny ten years from now, but for today, ha-ha.

Madame Fink out.

Image credits: americanidle.net, cityrag.com

Well, that was embarrassing.

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Ya know…

I hate to give this guy a Boot to the Head, but geez, people. If you’re going to publish a book or blog or memoirs or personal account or ANYTHING, you need to check your sources, frontways, backways, sideways and allways. And don’t think for a minute that if you publish something to the web, it will go unnoticed by all and sundry, save the people you choose.

So it was for author Neale Donald Walsch, who played the plagiarism card and got caught. Worse, he played it, got caught, and gave a slightly suspicious explanation for it. Worst, he played it, got caught, and gave a slightly suspicious explanation for it — and his book is called Conversations With God. Yikes. That don’t look good for the home team.

What’s Walsch’s excuse for using a Christmas “memory” that belongs to someone else? From the article:

Walsch wrote on his blog Tuesday he was “truly mystified” about what happened and apologized. He said he had been telling the story for years in public talks and “somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

Now, I’m willing to give folks the benefit of the doubt. And the article does state that the story circulated uncredited for several years. But honestly now…is Neale saying he’s never in all this time come across another version of that Christmas story? Never? Even though it was widely circulated since 1999?

Hmmm. So he “internalized it” as his own memory. I guess that works, and it can happen to anyone. But it kind of reminds me of this.

I like 2-hour delays.