Category: WWdN in Exile

This is in the Electric office here in Los Angeles. I took this picture when I joined John Rogers and Beth Riesgraf there last year for our live chat after The Ho Ho Ho Job aired.

(created by Storm, for the Stand By Meme portion of Wil Wheaton vs. Paul and Storm)

My son Ryan was home from college all week for Spring Break, and I kept expecting him to grab one of my logged-into-Twitter devices to tell the world how awesome I think he is. (I pretend to get all mad, but I secretly love it when he does this.)

Today, he went back to school, and I went out to meet a friend for lunch. We left the house at the same time, and when I got back and logged into Twitter, I saw this:

Who’s the greatest? Ryan. He’s the greatest. Someone should make a website named RyanWheatonEqualsGreatest.com. 

My first thought was, “I’m so glad he did that.” My second thought was, “Oh fuck. Some dick is going to buy that domain and do something horrible with it.”

Ryan is tremendously kind, and isn't the sort who would think "I better not do this, because someone may do something really terrible with it," but I've been around the block and through the wringer a few times, so I put the URL into Chrome, and steeled myself for the worst … but instead I saw that someone had indeed bought it, and made it go to the post he made on Twitter from my account.

I’m really lucky for a lot of reasons, but I’m especially grateful to interact with people on the Internet who are, for the most part, good people. I don’t know who bought RyanWheatonEqualsGreatest.com (whois is all protected and anonymized and locked and stuff), but whoever did it is a good person.

If you’re reading this, Person Who Bought RyanWheatonEqualsGreatest.com And Didn’t Do Something Cruel With It, please get in touch with me; I’d like to give you something awesome as a thank you.

Last night, my friends and I had a whisky tasting. As we neared the end, we were all feeling pretty happy … so I grabbed my silver sharpie and drew this, which I called #whiskyface.

It’s not as funny now as it was after several wee drams of scotch, but I think it's still worth sharing.

Preemptive FAQs: We tasted Caol Ila 12, Macallan Select Oak, Lagavulin 16, Laphroaig 10 and Laphroaig Quarter-Cask. Oh, and we poured our whisky into my Reddit glasses from r/Scotch.

I wrote this in 2004:

This morning over breakfast, I said to my wife, "Happy π day!"

"Happy pie day? What the hell are you talking about?"

"No, not 'pie'," I said. "'π'."

"Not 'pie,' but 'pie.'" She was clearly not amused. "Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"

"Anne, look at the date on the calendar."

"Yes it's march 14th, and you're going to watch WrestleMania dos equis* with your brother." She frowned. "Are you trying to tell me that you're taking a pie to Jeremy's house? Because if you expect me to make you a pie . . ."

"No, I don't expect you to make me a pie." I said, well into that area where you've explained the joke so much, it's never going to be funny.

"Today is March fourteenth. That makes it 3.14 on the calendar. 3.14 is also known as π."

She blinked a few times.

"Oh. It's π day."

"Yes!" I said. "And at 1:59 pm, it will be even more π day. Isn't that cool!?"

She took a long, thoughtful drink from her coffee mug, carefully set it down and said, "You are such a nerd."

And to commemorate pi day in 2009:

I present this incredibly awesome song by my friend Chris Hardwick:

This year … well, I got nothin'. Except maybe … maybe we could use today's date as an excuse to talk about math with kids!

Yeah! Check this out: When I think back on my years in school, I realize that math wasn't hard, math was just boring. Until I got into high school and started solving equations in algebra, which were framed as puzzles for me to solve, math was always framed as this collection of facts that we just had to know by rote, because … well, nobody really knows why, we just do it and stop asking so many questions you damn troublemaking kid.

Maybe we could use today's date, 3.14, and its relation to π as an opportunity to show kids how numbers and mathematics are all around us all the time, like a secret language or something fun like that.

…or you could just watch the video Chris and Mike made and leave it at that. I'm not the boss of you.

Edited to add: Over at Geek Mom, they're doing a ton of fun math stuff for kids today that's all pi-centric. I highly recommend taking a look.