May 23, 2007

Given the dog a bone

I felt in the mood for some AC/DC at work this morning. Don't know why, but I its been a bloody long time since I've heard them. My dad had the LP for AC/DC Live so I used to hear 'Thunderstruck' and 'Back in black' to name a few, every once in a while. Good stuff! The problem was that my dad's record player was a bit busted, so the record would play slightly slower. So when I bought the CD, (or rather ripped it, because I believe Billu bought the CD), I was surprised at the pace of the riff. Not that much faster, but the difference was discernible.

Anyway, "Given the dog a bone", is undoubtedly my favorite AC/DC song. The riff is just so killer! Plus one doesn't need any hints as to what this song is about...
She takes you down easy
Going down to her knees
Going down to the devil
Down down to ninety degrees
She's blowing me crazy
Till my ammunition is dry
Umm, Yeah. Anyway, while doing a Google search for the lyrics, one of the top hits was a site about why we should give our dogs a bone. Hmm. A little excerpt is called for...
Q. Does it matter if the bones are raw or cooked?

A. It does matter. Raw knuckle bones are what I recommend versus cooked or sterilized bones. Cooked bones are more likely to splinter from the effect that high cooking temperatures have on them. And cooked bones, especially the white sterilized bones from the pet stores, will also be deprived of beneficial nutrients which raw knuckle bones are chock full of. A further benefit of raw bones versus the white sterilized bones from the store, are that they are much more yummy to your dog. This translates into more chewing time from your dog, which will both keep him occupied and better clean his teeth.
Good to know.

Apr 2, 2007

World's tallest man, who saved a dolphin, gets married

Certainly not headline making news, but another interesting follow-up from my end. Earlier I wrote about the Chinese shepherd, who is the world's tallest man, who saved a couple of dolphins.

And now he is getting married. From NBC.com...
Xia Shujian will be looking up to her new husband, who's more than 2 feet taller.Bao Xishun is 7 feet 9 inches and holds the Guinness record. A Chinese newspaper reports the herdsman from Inner Mongolia has married a saleswoman who's 5 feet 6 inches.Bao, 54, had looked for a wife by placing ads in papers around the world but found his lady in his own hometown.Bao was in the news in December for saving two dolphins by pulling plastic out of their stomachs with his 41.7-inch
Look at the incredible height difference in the picture!

Mar 31, 2007

Keywords in CNN headlines

My friend read my last post, which talked about how 'sex' is so unusually high up on the NY Times.com searched keywords list, and he referred me to an interesting blog post. This friend of my friend, made a script that captures CNN headline keywords and then outputs a tag cloud. So the text cloud "contains the headlines of the past 30 days and is updated daily" according to the author.

The output over the past 30 days is an interesting follow-up to my post. Strangely enough, 'Food' leads the list. 'Iran', expectantly, also tops the list while 'Iraq' is not far behind. The word 'sex' has a count of 4, which is also interesting, as one would never assume 'sex' to be a biggest news of the day.

This is a cool tool. But what would be cooler, is if it would be possible to compile the same text cloud for BBC, Fox, Reuters, and some other leading Internet news providers. Comparing headline keywords from various sources would be quite indicative of what different companies find newsworthy or not.

NYTimes most popular search keywords

The NYTimes most popular articles page on their website also include a list of the most searched keywords by readers. I occasionally glance at the list and its usually a pretty good reflection of the news trends of that week. Iraq is usually there, and recently Iran has been topping the list. However week after week, sex is consistently the number one most searched term. Now I know the average New York Times reader isn't the usual porn addicted freak, so the result is even more amusing for me. From the NYTimes...

Keywords most frequently searched by NYTimes.com readers.

  1. sex
  2. pet food recall
  3. iraq
  4. immigration
  5. china
  6. india
  7. health
  8. iran
  9. global warming
  10. long term care