10 Ways You Know You're Becoming Lebanese

1.  You drink soda out of a can with a straw.
2.  You ate lunch at 3 and dinner at 11.
3.  You say things like "April one" and "June fifteen."  You don't realize that you're not using ordinal numbers until someone points it out.
4.  You start asking people how they found something, and you don't mean how they physically found it.  I.e.   "How did you find the film/restaurtant/waterfall/Lebanon?"
5.  The answers for  "How did you find your meal?" (see #4) are "very nice" or "not very nice" and the answers for "How did you find the movie?" are "It was good/not good/beautiful."
6.  You say you'll 'pass by' later, and you really mean that you'll stop in later.
7.  Heeeeeeeeyyyy!!!   U staaaart using all of the emoticons u caaaaan muster!!!
8.  You "missed call" someone, which means that you call and let it ring once and then hang up.  This could mean a variety of things depending on the situation...
9.  You now find French, along with the more obvious Arabic, popping up in your daily speech.  "Merci."  "Bonjour!"
10.  You demonstrate the true meaning of hospitality every time you invite someone in to your beautiful homes.  Thanks for all you've done to welcome me friends!

Ten on Tuesdays- Sharks!

In honor of my week in Panama City Beach, this Ten on Tuesdays is dedicated to sharks.

1.  Great white sharks and mako sharks are both warm-blooded fish.  Warm blood is one of the reasons that the Mako is also the fastest shark, capable of swimming up to 45 mph.

2.  Shark corneas can be (and are) transplanted to human eyes and now shark bone marrow is being grafted into human bones.

3.  There are over 400 species of sharks!  A baby shark is called a pup.

4.  It's not safe to stay in the sand!  In one 16 year period, 16 people in the US died from sand-hole collapses while only 11 died from shark attacks.  Your chances of being attacked by a shark is actually very rare.  You're more likely to win the lottery, twice.  In the past 50 years, 1,970 people in the coastal US have died from lightening strikes.  In those same states, 26 have died from shark attacks.  In 1987, there were 1,587 reported human-bites-human injuries in New York City.  That same year there were 13 shark attacks in the US.  Of course, as Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, says, "None of which, to be sure, detracts from the ghastly, visceral horror of being eaten by a huge fish, but all of which should give some comfort to the recreational swimmer."

Ten on Tuesdays, the Thursday Edition

So, I forgot Ten-on-Tuesdays and World-Wide Wednesdays this week, so you're getting a Ten-on-International-Thursday tonight. :o)

10 Pictures Taken Abroad

Adigbo Tourno, Ghana

Vulcuno Masaya, Nicaragua

Outside of Košice, Slovakia

اَلْجُمْهُورِيَّة اَللُّبْنَانِيَّة ,صُوْر 

Tyre, Republic of Lebanon

Potwabin, Ghana

اَلْجُمْهُورِيَّة اَللُّبْنَانِيَّة ,صُوْر 

Tyre, Republic of Lebanon

Logba Tota, Ghana

Auschwitz Birkenau

near Kraków, Polska (Poland)

اَلْجُمْهُورِيَّة اَللُّبْنَانِيَّة بيروت, 

View from Harissa, Outside of Beirut, Lebanon

Frankfurt, Deutschland (Germany)

Ten on Tuesdays: 10 Things You Might Not Know About the Rubik's Cube

In true "Ten on Tuesdays" fashion, I thought "What could I ramble on and on about easily?" Bam.  The Rubik's Cube.  

In 9th grade, I set out to solve the Rubik's Cube.  It took me about a month to work it out, and I've fiddled with it ever since.  In college, I did my Senior Project on the math behind the Rubik's Cube, and I learned all kinds of interesting tid-bits about the history of the cube.  For your edification:

1. The cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian Erno Rubik.  
2. Rubik didn't realize the difficulty of the puzzle he had created until he mixed it and then tried to solve it; it took him about one month to solve it the first time.
3. The cube was sold to a toy company and marketed as the Magic Cube.  
4. Erno Rubik was the first self-made millionaire under communism.  
5. As far as I can gather, the fastest cube solve to date is 5.66 seconds.  You can watch it here.
6. Any combination of the Rubik's cube can be solved in 20 moves (some can be solved in fewer, but all combinations are able to be solved in 20).  This is called God's number, because it is the way he would do it if he were solving it.  You can read an interesting history of God's number here. (Google donated 15 years of idle computer time for researchers to study it.  The work was just finished in July 2010.  Get excited people!  Math is pretty unchanging so there's not closure on new advances very often.)
7. If 1,000,000 combinations were viewed per second, it would take 1,375,280 years to view them all.  Thus, Rubik was correct when he realized it was vain to try to solve the cube by happenstance. 
8. The number of possible combinations for the Rubik's cube is:  (8!)(12!)(38)(212) ÷ 12 = 43,252,003,274,489,856,000.  This can be reduced to 227·314·53·72·11.  
9. A group of 11 artists made the world's largest art piece out of 12,090 cubes, and was a copy of "The Creation of Adam."
10. Beware if you get hooked on the cube!  In the 1980s the medical field added the term “Rubik’s thumb” to their jargon to define the injury of a strained thumb due to too much cube-twisting.  

Ten on Tuesdays: 10 Pieces of Superman Trivia

Last night I watched the 1978 "Superman," which got me in a Superman kind of mood.  So today's Ten on Tuesday is all about the big man in blue.

1.  Kal-el, Superman's name from planet Krypton,  is Hebrew.  (Creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were both Jewish.  Siegel named all of the characters.)  The exact meaning is debatable, but it can be read as "Son of God" (that makes Jor-El, his father, "Father God"), or "Strength of God," or "Star Child."  No matter the interpretation, Sielgel intended messianic symbolism in his name.

2.  In the original 1939 comics, Superman couldn't fly, but could only 'leap tall buildings in a single bound,' or more specifically, up to 1/8 of a mile.  (see strip to the left)

3.  In the DC universe, Clark Kent officially tied the knot with Lois Lane in 1997.  In the future though, after Lois dies and Superman doesn't age, he eventually ends up with Wonder Woman. (boo.)

4.  There is a comic trilogy called Superman: Red Son that examines what it might be like if Superman landed in Russia instead of the US.

5.  Metropolis, the city Superman calls home, has come to be representative of NYC.  Frank Miller (a Batman author) has said that "Metropolis is New York in the daytime; Gotham City is New York at night."

6.  In the DC universe, Superman gives Batman a piece of Kryptonite to take him out in case he ever gets out of control.

7.  While green Kryptonite makes Superman weak and can be lethal, red Kryptonite has a variety of effects on him (i.e. intensifying his powers, making him apathetic, etc.).

8.  Many actors and actresses closely associated with the Superman character have met tragic fates.  This has led to the conception of the "Superman Curse" (another post for another day). 

9.  In "The Death and Return of Superman" DC storyline, villian Doomsday actually kills Superman, but he is soon resurrected.

10.  The phrase the "never ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way" was originally just the "never ending battle for truth and justice."  "The American Way" was added during WWII, then dropped, and then added again.  (And now dropped again it seems.)

I'm not a big comic book person, but I grew up watching and reading all of the Superman I could get my hands on.  He's a great character, with a great supporting cast, and his storylines regularly examine timeless questions of humanity, love, good and evil, morals, and identity.

P.S.- Don't forget to vote in the poll at the top left for which book I should read and review next.

Ten on Tuesdays: My Shakespeare Plays

This is the Twelfth Night of my blog (seriously!), and I want to be a Passionate Pilgrim and really try to do 30 posts in 30 days.  Ironically, it's been a Comedy of Errors, and I don't want today to be Love's Labour Lost, so I'm going to give this "Ten on Tuesdays" things a stab.

What would be a quick, easy Top Ten for me?  As I look to the shelf to my left, I see my collection so Shakespeare's works.  I don't want to make Much Ado About Nothing, so I'm going to let you Take this as You Like It:  my Top 10 Shakespeare plays.

1. "King Henry IV, part 2"*
2. "King Henry IV, part 1"*
3. "King Henry V"*
4. "King Richard III"*
5. "King Lear"
6. "Julius Caesar"
7. "Romeo and Juliet"
8. "The Taming of the Shrew"
9. "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"
10. "The Tempest"

To be fair, it's hard for me to Measure for Measure because I haven't read them all.  But all of you Merry Wives (of Windsor) reading my blog out there, don't get all in a Tempest.  This isn't a Lover's Complaint.  Maybe I'll work on rounding this out over the next couple of years...

I wish I were off to a Midsummer Night's Dream, but unfortunately this is more of a Winter's Tale.  I'm going to go to bed now, or there might need to be some Taming of the Shrew at 6am prayer with 2 Gentlemen from Verona, err, I mean people from my church.   Oh well, All's Well that End's Well.

*These plays form a collection called the Henriad that tells a consecutive story.  The Henriad is my favorite of all of Shakespeare's work, so those four as a collection really made my top four, more than as individual plays.