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Alex mentioned it briefly the other day, but I thought Matt Blum’s odyssey was worthy of another post a) in case you missed Alex’s and b) because you just can’t ever get enough bacon, right? Right!
So our friend over at GeekDad, Matt Blum, is on a mission which, in his words, means “trying anything and everything with bacon or bacon flavoring that I can lay my hands on. I will be trying the questionable bacon products as a public service, so you don’t have to.” To-date, he’s made and/or reviewed , Bacon Gumballs, a hamburger wrapped in ten strips of bacon, a hamburger ground entirely from bacon, and most recently: Fried chicken with a bacon crust.
No doubt due in small part to you Neatoramanauts, our friend Ken Denmead’s Geek Dad book is about to hit the New York Times best-sellers list and is presently ranked #25 on Amazon! Big big neato-congrats to our pal Ken. Celebrate the good news by reading our interview with Ken about the book and all things Geekatoid, if you haven’t already!
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John Madden of GeekDad relates the story of how the ‘smoot’ became a measurement of distance:
Way back in 1958, the MIT chapter of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity used pledge Oliver R. Smoot to measure the Harvard Bridge in Massachusetts, coining the smoot as a unit of measurement in the process – one smoot equaling five feet, seven inches. Smoot (the man) lay down on the bridge, his position was marked, and he moved on (or was moved on – eventually he so tired from the movement that his frat brothers carried him), until the bridge was established as being 364.4 smoots, plus or minus an ear, in length. Appropriately, Smoot would later become chairman of the American National Standards Institute.
Madden then passes on ten more recent forms of measurement, including some of his own devising. These include the milliwheaton (number of Twitter followers), the Warhol (fame duration), and the Emmet (power). The latter comes from the movie Back to the Future:
1 Emmet = 1.21 Gigawatts, or the amount of power required to operated the flux capacitor in a modified DeLorean DMC-12. GeekDad note – when describing the Emmet, it’s pronounced ‘Jigga’ watt. There was briefly some debate as to whether this should be called a ‘lloyd’ or a docbrown’, But for simplicity (and to honour the character rather than the actor – though don’t get me wrong, Christopher Lloyd rocks) I’ve gone for ‘Emmet’.
In the comments, propose Neatorama-themed measurements.
Link | Images: MIT and Universal Studios, respectively
