It’s a new year, even here at Liquid Egg Product, and you know what that means. Promises of more frequent updates that will not be forthcoming!

For those of you who follow me on Facebook, you are already aware of my New Year’s Resolution: to be able to name all four Beatles without help or prompting (really, that’s about as much energy as I can muster for the time being)

Katrushka and I have started a low-carb diet. While I’ve never been overweight, an extra bit of fatness around the stomach has become more noticeable. (Technically my BMI is borderline overweight, but anyone who sees me knows that should be taken with a grain of salt.)

There are a few specials we are excited about. Since Robert Pearson has taken over the Chess Blog Carnival for 2012, it seems appropriate to help him start things about with a bang! Stay tuned, chess lovers.

Freezing my credit…literally.

For the first time in 27 years, I will be costumed for Halloween.

No, I don’t feel deprived.

No, I haven’t given out candy (primarily because no kids show up).

No, I won’t be in a sexy nun or sexy nurse outfit; thanks for asking.

Thanks to everyone who entered this year’s Liquid Egg Product NCAA bracket! This year, I was the winner, correctly predicting UConn to win it all and ending up in the top 1% of all ESPN entries. Woot.

The Mascot and I had a bet…the loser would take a picture in drag and post it to the site. Just a little something to look forward to.

Last month, LEP received 4461 unique visitors, a new record! Haha, you fools. Oops, I mean, thanks for patronizing this site.

A high percentage of you work desk jobs. You may be aware that the human body is simply not designed to sit for long periods of time. Throughout most of our history, we have been farmers, hunters, soldiers, or some other profession that required we actually stand upright. (See chart below; click to view full-size)

So some New York Times blogger recommended that we switch to stand-up workstations to improve our health. One of the studies noted that even among regular exercisers, long periods of sitting correlated with worse health. It was a decent read, but even more fascinating than the article were readers’ reactions. Whether they liked the content or not, people seemed to think the article was saying more than it really did. (No one said standing instead of sitting is a cure-all for health, but some people got that impression anyway.)

In any case, several months ago, I raised my desk and have been trying to stand a good portion of the day while working (sometimes I get lazy). It may not be plowing fields or shaking down peasants for a feudal lord’s taxes. But it’s gotta be better than nothing.

Something like how the USCF ranks chess players, Blizzard now has a ranking system for multiplayer Starcraft 2. This weekend, I finally decided to take the plunge.

They give you 5 “placement games”, to determine which league you’ll be placed in, bronze, silver, gold, or platinum. (There’s also the elite diamond league, which takes time to earn.)

Now I know I’m not good. I’m (relatively) old and slow, running at 35-50 APM. APM is “actions per minute”, which gives a rough idea of how quickly a player can react. In comparison, there was a professional Starcraft 1 player who ran 280 APM and it was remarked that he was “kind of slow”.

All my opponents were low-level players. The two games I lost were due to rushes (once by Zerglings, once by Zealots). When the game was more standard, I won fairly easily. Overall performance was good enough to be placed in Silver (aka, “you kind of suck, but not utterly and completely”).

Sometime ago, Liquid Egg Product received its 100,000 unique visitor. In one sense it’s flattering that so many people would bother stopping by to visit.

In quite another sense, you calculate the numbers and determine that LEP gets about 85 visitors a day. So it’s not like we’re hogging up all the bandwidth.

So thanks to all of you who visit LEP, but most especially the ones who visit from both work and home to artificially inflate the numbers.

It’s said that we dream every night, but simply don’t remember them. I don’t know how true that is, but last night I had two dreams that I could easily recall. Whether that’s because of going to bed 2 hours earlier than normal, or reading the Tel’aran’rhiod chapter in the Dragon Reborn (it’s about a World of Dreams), who knows.

Anyway, here they are:

Dream #1

In a classroom, there were about 25 of us listening to a lecture by Martin Gardner, who was well-known for his recreational mathematics writing.

The topic had something to do with finding certain types of solids that could have integral values for their sides, akin to finding integral solutions to the Pythagorean equation. At some juncture, I pointed out some error he made while using an irregular solid as an example. He thanked me and I felt rather proud (even though the error was trivial).

During the lecture, somehow I realized it was February 1979, so I must have traveled back in time.

Despite not knowing what Gardner looked like, in the dream he basically looked like himself without the glasses. And maybe a bit more hair.

After the lecture, most the students gathered in a circle and started chatting. I had a suspicion that some of them were also time travelers, but didn’t want to tip off non-time travelers in case that had dire consequences. So I simply asked if anyone else was a “Traveler” (about 8 or 10 people raised their hands).

Someone also brought up World of Warcraft and talked about the first expansion. Not the actual first expansion, but some expansion invented in the dream, which had a Final Fantasy 5 Bomb pictured on the CD cover (?????)

Eventually, everyone packed up to leave. But I realized I didn’t know how to get back to my own time, and was hoping to tag along with the others. But they all left quickly and it took me FOREVER to pack. Fortunately, Gardner realized that I was a time traveler. He told me I just needed to keep going and I’d find the right guide, or something like that. I didn’t understand and tried to ask for clarification, but whenever I looked at him, he faded further into a brown mist and grew fainter. There was no choice but to move on.

Wandering through a hall, I couldn’t find the guide Gardner was talking about, and eventually wandered into a supermarket. I started to think about what would happen if I were stuck in this time period. My ATM card wouldn’t work. The cash I did have was from the 21st century, so that was bad. I thought about going to see my parents, which would include my dad in an afro. But I didn’t even know what state I was in, so that wasn’t an option.

Then I woke up.

Dream #2

If you don’t want to experience a somewhat disturbing mental image, please stop reading now.

Understand this is really for the 4 or 5 readers who are entertained by this kind of thing.

You probably aren’t one of them.

OK, I warned you.

The scene starts at the Griffins’ house. As in, the Griffin family from Family Guy. Lois and I start making out in the kitchen. Peter ambles by, and doesn’t seem to care in the least. Even so, I tell Lois we should go back to my place. Which is a house next door that we are teleported into.

From the inside, it seems to be a one-room log cabin with a bed and sparse furnishings. She climbs on top of me, and we start having sex. I look up, and Stewie is there in a blue diaper, yelling and all ticked off. I get up and tell Lois we really need to do this somewhere else, but she doesn’t seem aware of the danger.

Lois Griffin is so hot, she’s made me watch all of 6 episodes.

I had two seizures this week and still do not feel good. We will try to get back to entertaining you some time next week.

In the meantime, I will be sleeping and honing my Starcraft 2 skills.