I know some of our Portland streets can be narrow and rather steep… but really, driving a car down stairs just doesn’t work as well in real life as in the movies.

This is a short-cut that probably should not have been attempted.

Is it just me, or does Tom Cruise have absolutely no sense of humor? Sharon Osbourne obviously does!

San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis announced at a news conference that the mystery of the chili finger’s origin has been solved. Police, and the rest of the world, were fairly certain that Anna Ayala hoaxed finding the finger in her bowl of Wendy’s chili. In fact, she’s been charged with attempted grand theft because of the sales that Wendy’s allegedly lost. Personally, I never eat Wendy’s chili anyway.

But the burning question in my mind has been: where did she get the thing? Human fingers can’t be picked up at Wal-Mart.

Wendy’s had received a tip on its $100,000 reward line, and apparently the tip panned out. A man who lives in Nevada lost the finger in an industrial accident. He gave the finger to Ayala’s husband, Jaime Plascencia. Test confirmed that the Nevada man was the finger’s original owner.

Now the remaining questions are: why did the man who lost the finger hand it over to Plascencia? Was Plascencia in on the hoax? Was the Nevada man in on it?

More info, please, Chief Davis!

My regular readers know that I began knitting again so that my hands would be busy and I would refrain from clutching spasmodically at the car door handle as #1 Son learns to drive. I’m happy to report that #1 Son is turning into a decent driver. While I still knit in the car, the number of stitches dropped while grabbing for support or stomping on the non-existent passenger-side brake has lessened considerably.

#1 Son passed the written test necessary to get a learners permit on the first try.

Then there’s Seo Sang-moon of South Korea. After 272 tries, the 70-year-old repairman has finally passed the Korean written driver’s license examination. Seo can’t read, you see, so he used the exam questions to teach himself the “rules of the road,” paying some $1000 in fees to do so. Test officials have been cheering him on over the last 5 years, and are thrilled to see him finally pass.

I bet they are!

Seo is now preparing for the road test and discussing with his wife what kind of car to buy. Said Seo:

Driving seems a bit hard. But after trying 271 times to pass the oral exam, what do I have to be afraid of?

Well… other Korean drivers might have cause to worry a bit… I wonder if there’s a limit on the number of times one can take the road test?

Closer to home, #1 Son is now enrolled in a driver’s ed course, which means that I am now learning every time we are together what an unsafe driver I am. I will be happy when he finally reaches the lofty goal of possessing his license, and the spate of driving habit corrections will slow to a trickle. June 23rd, but who’s counting? 😉

And less the gentle reader wonder… I have had a driver’s license for nearly 35 years. In that time, cars I owned have been involved in 5 accidents — and during one of those I wasn’t even there, as the passenger side of the car was wiped out in a parking lot by a jerk who neglected to leave contact info. Of the other four, one (the first) was my fault and four were not. I’ve had one ticket — for speeding. I was going down hill in a manual transmission car and was bit distracted by #1 Son (small at the time and riding in the back seat) insisting that I remember all of the reindeer’s names in order. The nice officer clocked me going 31 in a 25 MPH zone. I was pulled over once because my tags had expired, but since I had the tags (I’d forgotten to put them on when I got home from the DMV), all was forgiven.

I’m a pretty safe driver, #1 Son’s opinion notwithstanding. At least I think I could probably stack up fairly well when compared to Seo Sang-moon.

On the knitting front, I made it to the ankles of the Wildfoote socks last night. Now it’s just around and around until done. I’ll try to get a picture posted.

Gauri Nanda, an MIT graduate student, has invented an alarm clock that requires getting out of bed to find it. After one push — or in my case it would be slap — of the snooze alarm, Clocky falls to the floor and rolls away. To turn the thing off, one must get up and find it.

Nanda is currently developing a prototype and hopes to begin testing it soon with future world marketing in mind. Judging from the amount of interest Clocky has generated, it will probably be a hit.

Clocky features a built-in computer chip that causes it to roll a random distance, guaranteeing that it will end up in a different place each time. It has rubber wheels and is covered in carpet to help cushion its fall to the floor.

“My parents had amplifiers that looked like they were covered in carpet,” she [Nanda] said. “I went with it because it’s unconventional looking and gives the clock a playful personality. Maybe it’ll even make the user laugh.”

In my checkered youth, I possessed stereo speakers covered with shag, so I would feel right at home with Clocky.

But the real question, of course, is…

Would it get #1 Son out of bed?

At least it wasn’t this cold here!

Ottawa is in the grip of an intense cold spell; so intense that house have started making loud cracking noises. The noises have been so loud that worried Ottawans have been calling the police to report burglaries, gunfire and noisy neighbors.

Ottawa Police spokeswoman Monique Ackland said that one possible reason for the loud noises is exploding nails.

Now that’s cold!