Author: Matt Maldre

Online personals have some interesting questions, especially eHarmony. They have 13 questions, and I’ve been meaning to share some of my responses, cuz there are some thought-provoking questions. I’ve posted the question What are the THREE things for which you…

My top five favorite tweets I made in October and November 2009 via @spudart: For one week I’d like each car on CTA trains to play a different genre of music. Just to see if people pick a particular car…

Fun crafts! By cool hip people! The DIY Trunk show was held on November 21, 2009 in the Pulaski Park Fieldhouse. It was a nice show with good variety from lots of vendors. The location is in a great old…

PaperGirl had a nice post about her twitter usage, so I’m making one too. I’ve been tweeting for almost two years now as @spudart. My tweets tend to be about fun ideas and interesting observations. My most-used word is Chicago.…

One of the fun things about frozen pizzas is that you get to slice it in any way you choose. Want pie slices? No prob. Squares are your thing? Totally. But the coolest thing of all is to do wacky…

This year I’m going to call Thanksgiving to be “Thank You Day.” The term thanksgiving often loses its meaning, because we don’t think about word actually is: Thanks giving. We are to give thanks. One method is to thank other…

My tummy hurts today. What could it be? Here’s what I had today: * Boing! Tamarind juice (I don’t even know what a tamarind is) * Jalapeno-stuffed olives * Almond-stuffed olives * Nutrition digestive health mix * Coca-Cola from a…

(polar bear cannonball anyone?) The fact that rivers and lakes have a bottom oddly unsettles me. Is that strange? I want to be able to safely cannonball into the Chicago River from the Michigan Avenue bridge. Third grade. Family trip…

I don’t understand why people complain about the city giving more parking tickets. You park illegally, you get a ticket. Pretty simple. That was something I tweeted recently. I got some interesting reactions: aaa: @spudart I think the problem is…

An eBay seller is trying to sell some “Chicago Cub Half Dollars from 1907 and 1908.” Only thing is that they are not Chicago Cub Half Dollars. They are merely normal half dollars from 1907 and 1908–the years the Cubs…

After making the last blog post, “A humidifier with water fills my heart with joy,” I was thinking that maybe it was too cheesey. But then the next day I across these verses in Psalms 65. It’s cool how even…

First sentence: — I’m happy in the morning when my humidifier still has water inside the tank. It’s funny how if the above sentence has slightly different meaning if the phrase “i’m happy” gets moved elsewhere in the sentence. Second…

Do you ever dream that you discovered a new rooom in your house/apartment? I mean sleeping-dream about it. Sometimes I’ll dream that there was this room all along in my apartment that I never knew about. I get so excited…

I was at home sick all last week with some sort of flu. The doctor didn’t know if it was the seasonal flu or the swine flu. He thought I had the seasonal flu, but H1N1 is so similar to…

What did the doctor say to me on Monday regarding my potential H1N1 flu? Here’s how it went down. My normal doctor couldn’t see me for another couple days, and i wanted to know if I had H1N1 now. It’s…

The following is what I submitted for the “Incident Description” field on chicago.stolenbike.org. They ask, “Describe in your own words what you think happened to your bike. Please include any important or unusual details that make your situation unique.” Was…

It’s Halloween. I’m at home feeling sick. Laying around was only making me feel more sick and I really wanted to be able to volunteer at the mens’ shelter tonight, so I take a bike ride to get some fresh…

First Geocities. Eight years later MySpace. What will come next? I’m guessing around 2012 we’ll have another attack of extremely poor design online. But you still have to hand it to Geocities and MySpace. Despite their total ignorance of design,…

Etymology. There’s no app for that. Dear iPhone developers, Please give the world an app for etymology. Much love, matt

(that is not me in the photo, but that is my Bluetooth headset I won) I won! I won! Here’s how it happened. Pre-game I’m sitting at work in the Tribune Tower. Outside my window at 11 am, I could…

Yesterday we talked about how the word Styrofoam has origins in trees. I’ve put screenshots styrofoam’s etymology on my iPhone, so it can be a conversation starter whenever someone is drinking out of a death cup. Please feel free to…

What does styrofoam mean? Styro. You’d think that’s made up, right? Styrofoam is a trademark name by Dow Chemical Co. in 1950. It’s based from the word polystyrene. (see polystyrene) What does polystyrene mean? Etymonline.com says: 1927, so called because…

Days of the week as verbs. Person 1: How are you? Person 2: I’m frying. You? Person 1: Yeah, it is very hot in this elevator. Tomorrow I’ll be satting. Person 2: Sweet, I love to relax and sat. On…

Twitter has some funny quips about balloon boy, you can read the best ones selected at twitter.com/balloonboytweet. Here’s my ten favorite jokes about balloon boy, Falcon Heene: Is Balloon Boy the new King Of Pop? The Balloon itself was cool…

The Metra train system in Chicago has a new website. It’s pretty nice. They have individual pages for each station with a little bit of info on each station. I wanted to take their idea a bit further and bring…

eHarmony has 13 interesting questions for their online profiles. They are interesting not only for these profiles, but for conversation questions in general for everyone. I’m making these questions into a series of blog posts on spudart.org where I’ll share…

Since joining last.fm a couple years ago, I’ve listened to 2,500 different artists. Cool! (That’s out 12,687 plays). I highly recommend last.fm. It’s free. You can type in artist or a tag, and it will play related music. It’s a…

These shoes need a cool little one-inch button. Please recommend a URL to an image that would be cool for a button for my shoes. I have a button maker, so I can take any image off the web and…

I feel like we are in the wrong year. Today is 10/10/09. Although it is rather comforting that we aren’t living THE perfect 10 day. We have some wiggle room for imperfection. By the way, this is my 2,000th blog…

I’ve been sitting on writing blog post #1,999 for the past week. I wanted to write something introspective about my blog. The timing was pretty funny, because my church (Park Community Church) is doing a series called Pursue. Last week’s…

Eight years ago today I wrote my first blog post, titled “Long live long tables.” Since then I have written 1,998 blog posts (including this one), and have had 17,939 comments. Wow. All over eight years.