shampoo – Nothing About Potatoes

(Originally sent September 2008)

Films
If I have time, I may watch Pineapple Express, because a collision between a stoner flick and an action adventure movie sounds very silly.

IMDb: 7.8/10
RT: 70%

Last week’s puzzle
Why does shampoo become less effective with use?

I received some answers to this, and it seems there are two main theories.

1) The hair/scalp adapts to the chemicals and starts to resist them

2) Shampoo residue builds up over time

I then put these questions to the yahoo answers community through my secret research alter-ego.

The fact that hair is ‘dead’ would seem to deny theory 1) to me. In The Week I read that the biggest mistake made by people washing their hair is that they don’t rinse it enough, and you should rinse it for about twice as long as you expect. This would seem to endorse 2), but having tried this myself for the past 2 months I found the problem persists.

Mystery status: unsolved
This week’s puzzle
Why are some people photogenic and some not? In other words, why do people look different in photos to real life?

A video:
Cat heaven, including peaceful co-existence with dogs:
Cats on the kings:

A link or 3
There has been much talk about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and whether or not it will end the world. Someone has helpfully created this page:
http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
View the source code to see how the site works.

However, there is an interesting development – it seems the site does not really work:
http://gist.github.com/9810

Meanwhile everyone can keep an eye on the experiment for themselves from these webcams:
http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

A quote
A wonderfully true and melancholic song title from the Future Sound of London:
“Everyone in the world is doing something without me”

A picture
The big challenge when designing shop window advertising is to somehow get people to stop walking by and actually come into your shop and buy something. See a copywriter’s innovative answer to this problem in the image attached. (Photo taken between WWAV and Hammersmith tube)

(Originally sent September 2008)

As I had suspected, Things is not by nature interactive – one person requested to be on the CC list (and this also happened to be the one person to reply to last week’s puzzle). Since the functionality with one person is identical to keeping everyone on the BCC list that is what I will do, until someone else wants to be CC’d!

Nothing wrong with this, it just reaffirms my decision to switch to BCC by default.

Films
Films continue to be rubbish, ‘Rocknrolla’, ‘Step Brothers’ and ‘The Duchess’ all having zero appeal to me.

Last week’s puzzle
Shoes are like friends…

“You only need a few and even then there’s only one or two you really spend much time with”
“You’ll always know which the best ones are because you like wearing them constantly and you never feel like they’re worn out.”
“They come in pairs”
“You only know their true value when it rains”

Additional answers from 2010:
Richard: “Shoes are like friends … everyone needs two good quality ones that they’ve worn-in over many years”
Phil: “A good thing to put on before going out, but there were far too many episodes which are all basically the same?”

This week’s puzzle
Sometimes it seems as if a shampoo becomes less effective the more you use it, and by the end you have to switch to a different one entirely. Why is this? (Note, I don’t have a good answer on this one, please do send in any theories you may have).

A video
I taught our dog to catch a frisbee and thought I would upload some video of this to YouTube. Then I reasoned that someone had probably already done this to a much higher standard, and upon searching discovered the amazing world of competitive dog frisbee catching:

For anyone interested, I did end up including some of my dog’s frisbee-catching skills in the background of my review of the Bourne trilogy:

A link
A lovely game (in the very loosest sense of the word) involving a cat and some dots.
(Possible challenges to set yourself: enclose the cat in the largest area possible, let the cat escape with the most dots filled in possible)

A quote, or rather a poem
I went to the funeral of my great aunt this week. During the service my mum read this poem:

Gone From My Sight
I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come
to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says;
“There, she is gone!”

Gone where?

Gone from my sight. That is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side
and she is just as able to bear her
load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone
at my side says, “There, she is gone!”
There are other eyes watching her coming,
and other voices ready to take up the glad
shout;
“Here she comes!”

And that is dying.

by Henry Van Dyke, a 19th Century clergyman, educator, poet, and religious writer

Personally I’m a bit of a nihilist when it comes to death, but I can see how this would be comforting to others.

A picture
Something went horribly wrong when I searched itv.com for video of the Edinburgh Fringe festival – it seems they have some kind of automatic title generator. Result number 2 is the most problematic (click for full size):