Need to spice up your question? Try using two question marks back-to-back. Papergirl covers the double question mark issue with her blog post "Questionable Punctuation." She totally hits the nail on the head with the tone differences between using one question mark versus two. Really. Read the blog post. The thing I have to contribute is what happens when you use nine question marks? Oh, you can read the comments on that blog post to find out.

We have two holes in the front of our head filled with goop. They are for seeing. These holes with goop are called eyes. We have two holes in the side of our head for hearing. They are called ears. We have two holes for smelling, but they are called nose (singular). If eyes are plural and ears are plural, nose should be plural too. From now on i'm calling my nose to be noses. I smell the roses with my noses.

The U.S. Census Bureau offers free pdf map downloads. Fantastic! I downloaded the county map with the intention of making the county lines thicker than the state lines just to see what would happen if instead of states, we had counties. Imagine that. Instead of 50 states, we could have 3,000 states. But the free pdf map from the U.S. Census Bureau didn't allow me to open it up in Illustrator. Password protected. Lame! But the pdf did allow me to copy all the text and run it through a frequency program. The most popular county name is Washington. The word "Saint" is also used a lot. But ignoring saint for a moment and focusing on the names. The most popular president names used by counties are Washington, Jefferson, Franklin (oops not a president), Jackson, Lincoln. WHOA. Jackson outranked Lincoln! You go Andrew! Here's the top 30 most-used words in county names: Unique words:2029 Total words:3569Freq. Word31 WASHINGTON29 SAINT28 JEFFERSON25 FRANKLIN24 JACKSON23 LINCOLN21 SAN20 MADISON18 UNION18 CLAY18 MONTGOMERY18 LAKE17 MONROE17 MARION16 WAYNE15 CARROLL15 GRANT14 WARREN14 GREENE12 JOHNSON12 MARSHALL12 DOUGLAS12 LAWRENCE12 POLK11 CALHOUN11 LEE11 SCOTT11 FAYETTE11 CLARK11 MORGAN11 ADAMS

Let's delete all the 50 states and use counties instead. We could have 3,033 states. Here's what the map would look like. (take a look at the full hi-res version)There would be a problem that many of the states have the same last name. Washington is used 31 times. What would we do there? Put a number after it? Washington1, Washington2? How about a descriptor. Coolest Washington. Super Lame Washington. Or they could just rename those counties... i mean, states. There are 24 President's names that are not being used. I'll even offer up my last name for one of the 3,033 states. Welcome to the state of Maldre. I'll even make the highway signs to welcome people to my state.What would the United States flag look like with 3,033 stars?

amehzing Definition: Combination of "meh" and "amazing." The situation where one person finds something amazing and the other person finds it meh. In order to come to a conclusion about the situation, both parties can agree to call it amehzing. Usage: Person 1: Dude, Star Wars is so amazing! Person 2: meh Person 3: I think you mean "meh" as in "amehzing" Satisfied.

Take advantage of the day with the most sunlight, Summer Solstice on June 21. Some suggestions: Pull an all-nighter: I once did this when I locked myself out of my apartment on Summer Solstice a couple years ago. It was around midnight, so I felt bad calling my sister or my landlord who have the keys. I walked down to the 24-hour Golden Nugget and hung out until 7pm. It was interesting walking around and seeing all the activity going on late at night. Other people must have been celebrating the night as well. Walk home from work: Now this I can see being a National Holiday. Can you imagine a day where nobody drives to work. Nobody takes the train. Nobody bikes. Just everyone walking. Wow! I live 6.8 miles from work. That's totally doable. Maybe I'll do a photo sequence of my walk. Yay! New traditions!

if you got a goodreads invite from me, you can ignore it. That was a total mistake on my part. I thought I was adding friends that were on goodreads already. I didn't mean to send it out to my entire address book. I accidentally clicked on a link to send it to my whole address book. This is not goodreads.com's fault, it's mine. I'm actually not even a huge fan of goodreads.com, I much prefer librarything.com. Here's a comparison review of the two services. But yeah... oops. I thought I was adding a couple people that were on the service. But then there was an alert that came up on goodreads saying, "message sent to 515 people." WHAT!? I'm very sorry for this. At least it's not leading to a spam site. Goodreads is legit. If you do choose to join, I'd love to be your friend on goodreads.

You just accidentally sent invites to EVERYONE in your address book to a book cataloging service. What do you do?1) Laugh it off. "People get these every day."2) Freak out and immediately send an email to everyone in your address book apologizing?3) Freak out and ignore it.4) Send an email to only the business contacts in your address book explaining your error.What I did: Yesterday I did a little bit of 2 and 3. I freaked out and posted an apology on twitter, facebook, and my blog on spudart.org. There's a level of freaking out, because my address book is a collection of EVERYONE I've ever met and have their email address. This includes anyone I meet in business and anyone I meet online. If you added me as a contact on flickr, I add you in my address book. If I meet someone through a personal, I add that person in my address book. I want to make sure that if someone tries to email me, the spam blockers don't block your email. Plus, I just like to have one central location where I have everyone I know. Networking is very important, and I've learned it's essential to have a complete address book of people that I get in touch with for helping each other.When I send out a willy nilly accidental email like this, there's an element of losing control that is very unsettling, because I just did something I didn't mean to do. The flip side is that it's still a nice email. No harm done. And that's what I realize now. (I should note that it was not goodreads fault. I clicked on a button I should not have clicked on in their site. Goodreads does NOT do "contact scraping") The result: What then resulted from my online posts is people were disappointed that I was disingenuous with my invite. "Oh you didn't really want to be my friend." Which I'm sure is said in a joking manner. But there is some sort of truth behind that. In all reality, YES, I would love to be your friend. I just don't send invites out to my ENTIRE address book. But really, people don't care if your whole address book got sent an email, especially if it was for a service that is legit. Now if it was a spam site, then yes, I would probably email my entire address book telling them to ignore it. But goodreads.com is a nice site. I ended up with 16 new friends on goodreads.What I should have done: (maybe) Part of me wonders if I should have just emailed the business contacts to explain. But instead I went the passive way and posted a message online. Of course the business people don't see those messages online, but my friends do see them. It's my friends that should see it as completely normal for me to add them as a friend on goodreads.com. But I posted those messages online, because I want to at least try to be up front with people and let them know what I was thinking. I don't like to pretend or be fakey. Plus, I'm very willing to admit when I make an error. So, hence posting a messages to let people know a bit of the history behind the invite.Once I saw all the people add me as a friend, I was really happy. Now I have 16 new friends on goodreads, and that's TOTALLY cool. I welcome Alice, Clorissa, Crissy, Cyndi, Erik, Frederic, Heidi, Jason, John, Julia, Pd, Steve, Tammy, Tracy, Wendy, Yoshinari as my new friends on goodreads.com!The ultimate result: Let's share some good books!

What do the following 15 items have in common? * Eastern Tiger Salamander* Northern Cardinal* Monarch Butterfly* Square dance* Bluegill* Violet flower* Popcorn* Gold Rush Apple* Tully Monster* Big Bluestem* White-tailed deer* Fluorite* Painted Turtle* Drummer silty clay loam* White oakThese are all OFFICIAL symbols of Illinois. What fun and odd conglomeration of things. I'm sure there's meaning behind each of these choices, but it's funny that together they should really say Illlinois, but I'm not sure I'd look at this list and say, "Wow! That's Illinois" It would be fun to have a game where there are 50 lists like this, and you have to try to match them up with each state. I'd play that game on Facebook.

I want to go around and shake people's hand at work and say, "Congratulations, today is National Handshake Day." Actually what would be more fun is to go around with a hand buzzer and do that. A selected sampling of factoids on handshaking from wikipedia: In some Oriental countries (like Turkey or the Arabic-speaking Middle East), handshakes aren't as 'strong' as in America and Europe. Consequently a grip which is too firm will be considered as rude.Especially firm handshakes are sometimes called "Manshakes" President Theodore Roosevelt, who set the world record with 8,513 handshakes at a White House reception on January 1, 1907. (i'm not bothering to mention the Atlantic City Mayor who broke the record in 1977). Other handshake stuff: Wikihow wrote an article about how to be a jerk and manipulate people with your handshake, "How to Have a Persuasive Handshake." Batman and Superman shaking hands