Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

Today in a press conference, Greg Page, known to parents and toddlers around the world as the yellow-shirt-wearing Wiggle, announced that he is quitting the group due to a recently diagnosed chronic health problem. Evan is a HUGE fan of the Wiggles. For those of you without Cheerios ground into your carpet, the Wiggles are a hugely popular musical group from Australia known for their kids’ show. “Greg Wiggle” is the lead vocalist of the group.

The Wiggles plan to continue touring with a new yellow Wiggle, Sam Moran, who has actually been with the group for ten years as a backup singer and “Professor Singalottasonga”. Sam has been filling in for Greg over the past several months and now has officially been handed the yellow shirt.

The Atterberry household would like to offer our best wishes for good health to Greg, who has taught Evan such phrases as “Dig Dig Dig!”, “Quack Quack Quack Quack”, “Bow wow!”, “Dough Dough Dough, Dough-D-Dough”, and “Wake up Jeff!”

Here’s what I learned from Wikipedia tonight. The Guinness Record for highest note sung by a male is known as C#8, which is one note higher than the highest note on a piano. If you want to see the video of the record, see this clip on Youtube.

The highest note by a female is G10, which is three octaves higher than the highest G on a piano, and also well out of the range of human hearing, about 25000Hz. I’d post a video of that, but even if your computer speakers could produce that note it wouldn’t do you a lot of good. Just sit quietly for a couple of seconds and imagine.

For comparison, the highest note I’m able to produce in any ugly fashion is A#6, and the highest Dusty (who’s currently in a community theatre production covering the highest soprano parts) can screech is somewhere around D#6. Two more octaves and she’d best Adam Lopez…

For what it’s worth, the lowest note record is held by a singer named Tim Storm. The record is B-2 (two octaves below piano range), but that’s only 8Hz. 20Hz is the lowest note that a human ear interprets as a tone. We just hear that note as 8 clicks per second.

Thanks to the nice weather, we took Evan out to see the Santa Parade on Friday morning. We got there about an hour early to stake our claim at a nice spot.

Evan had a great time. We sat through basically the whole parade, enjoying the marching bands and firetrucks the most. Once he learned people throw candy to you, he was hooked!

We hosted Thanksgiving at our house this year, inviting all of our siblings, parents and grandparents. Everything went just fine with that, and Evan had a good time with all the people at his house!

We had been checking out the “Black Friday” ads online and saw a number of deals that couldn’t be passed up, so my in-laws planned to stay up in Peoria to try to hit the deals, especially at Best Buy. I went to Best Buy two years ago, and even though I got there at 3 am (for the 5am opening) there were already 40 people in line. We decided, if we’re going to take advantage of this sale, we have to commit. So, at about 8pm, my father-in-law, sister-in-law and I hopped in the truck, complete with sleeping bags, cots, rain gear, etc. ready for an adventure. When we got to the last stoplight before the store, we noticed there were far too many cars in the turn lane going to the store, since everything in that plaza was closed.

Rounding the corner, we saw the parking lot lit up, full of cars, with a line of people heading around the back of the store - over 150 by our estimates… We, along with the other cars in our line, turned around and left. We drove by Circuit City and there were only 25 people there, but the deals there weren’t quite as good, and Circuit City doesn’t have the courtesy to post “minimum 18 units” in their flyer. A $250 laptop would be worth camping out for, but camping out only to find out there’s only one available wouldn’t be as appealing.

Upon returning home we heard it reported that people had been lining up since 11am. Now, we were ready for an adventure, but people willing to skip Thanksgiving with their families in order to wait in line are just too hardcore for us. I kept an eye on the weather overnight. If a snowstorm or plague of frogs rolled through, I would head back out hoping to win a spot near the front through attrition (I’m equipped for such conditions but everyone else just had plastic deck chairs and blankets!), but as it was, the weather was just too nice. I never thought I’d see a downside to nice weather…

In case you need yet another way to waste time, there’s an interesting game at http://www.peekaboom.org. You get partnered with a random player and you have to guess a word based on an image. Your partner reveals parts of the image to you and provides hints.

The game is actually part of an initiative to train a computer program how to recognize objects in images. I presume they take image labels provided by the Google Image Labeler. As part of the game, you’re telling them where those objects are in the image.

What’s funny is that my wife and I were both playing separately… and discovered we were partnered with each other!