List Tuesday: Old Industrial Skyline

Things That Demoralize Me

1. Death of A Salesman


2. Diet A&W Root Beer


3. Flocking like a herd of cattle off the Metro


4. Too-small pants


5. Sinning


6. Flame-retardant logs


7. Not living on the West Coast


8. When someone says "turn that frown upside down!"


9. When someone doesn't say "guess what? Chicken butt! Fried in grease, want a piece? Maybe a turkey?" or something similar


10. Cold underwear and socks with holes in them


11. BMW drivers


12. Firecrackers going off right beside my ear


13. Getting kicked out of a bar for starting a cake fight


14. Not having any more pie


15. Peak Oil


16. Peak shirts


17. Peak coffee


18. No coffee


19. Frozen tundra


20. Not going to Arctic Circle for lunch


21. This one guy I met


22. Selfishness


23. When you wake up and look at the clock without your glasses on and you think it says 3:20 and you think "yes! I can sleep for another 3 hours!" but then, 10 minutes later, the alarm goes off and you realize that it actually said 6:20, not 3:20

I Can't Change The Law of Averages

If fish rode bicycles I would so not need another long holiday weekend right now. But fish don't even have legs so it's a ridiculous rhetorical question. Besides, even if fish did have legs, they'd better get some fish shoes first because have you ever ridden a bicycle without shoes on? Not a good idea. According to my missing left pinky toe anyway.

So what did I do this weekend? I went to the zoo. Along with every single other person in the Washington metro area. Seriously, there were 2.5 million people at the zoo on Saturday. Maybe not, but there was a lot. Somewhere between 15 people and 2.5 million people, are you happy now? Here is a list of the three most popular and foot-traffic-congestion-causing exhibits at the zoo:

1. The Giant Pandas


2. The Bengal Tiger Going For A Stroll


3. A Squirrel Eating A Nut By The Side of The Path (no I am not joking)

But being at the zoo was nice. When we went into the large mammal house with the hippos and the elephants, it reminded me of the time I was on safari in the wilds of the central African savanna. The most memorable thing from that trip was when a charging rhino charged right at me. I tried to run, but I wasn't fast enough and the rhino's giant horn pierced me right through the abdomen. It missed my spine by less than an inch, so I didn't die. However, my stomach was completely obliterated and had to be repaired in a complicated procedure in which it was patched up with gold filaments and burlap sack cross-hatching. My spleen ruptured and had to be replaced with a mandarin orange.

Pickin' A Crazy Apple Off a Stem

You know what I like to do a lot? Well, yes, that, but it's not what I was thinking of. What I was thinking of was that I like to come up with grandiose plans for stuff that will take the world by storm only then not ever do anything with it. Trust me, it's just as easy as NOT coming up with grandiose plans and doing something with it. I've done that way more. Anyway, when I first heard that we would probably be moving to Detroit(ish) I thought to myself "you know what this town needs? A guerrilla sticker campaign that reminds people to be nice to each other! I could design some stickers in regular size label format (2"x4") that people could print out at home and then put up in Metro stations, at bus stops, in parking lots, wherever! Then, other people would read them and realize that they should be nicer! It will change the world."

So I came up with all these stickers (okay, all but one of these stickers since my friend Kirk actually came up with the slogan for one of them several years ago and made some shirts that said it) and planned to start putting them up. I was going to start an underground, emergent organization called you≥me. But I never did. Now you can not put them up too! Feel free to not print out as many as you don't want to and go out and not put them up in Metro (or whatever the light rail mass transit system is called where you live (i.e. "your carpool" in Seattle)) stations, bus stops, hallways, etc. You can also not design any additional ones when you feel like not changing the world one person at a time.

Bah.

I Am Trying Not To Have A Bad Day

We'll Try Not To Get In The Way Of The Guns

So, if you've been reading anything around here, you'll know that I complain about Detroit often. Basically every time I have to go there. Well guess what? It's not quite official yet, but it looks like we're moving there in a couple of months! How do you like them apples? They are tart and firm and, like Detroit, they taste like a potent urine, exhaust and malt liquor cocktail.

But how bad can it possibly be, right? Let's take a look at some of the uplifting news stories that have come out of Detroit lately!

1. 2 killed, 3 hurt in Detroit shooting spree


2. Man arrested with $78,000, nuke info


3. Detroit Now only SECOND most dangerous city!

Still, it's better than this steaming dungheap of cronyism, corruption, violence, poverty, callousness, petty politics, taxpayer boondoggles, drugs, condescension, apathy and downright evil.

P.S. I did my part to battle the evilness of DC yesterday. Charles the Street Sense guy at Metro Center was hanging out so I chatted with him a bit. I asked him if he was doing anything for Thanksgiving, if he had any family in the area. He said no. So I didn't invite him to our house for Thanksgiving.

Words Decompose All Around Me

Charlie Brown reads Ayn Rand



This is better.

List Tuesday: I Worked Here Last Year, Remember?

A Bunch of Complete Non Sequiturs Presented As a Coherent List

1. Hey, guess what? Thursday is my birthday!


2. I will be (3.456E10*(3^3*(1825/SQRT(25))+7)*(SQRT(3600)))/((8^(1/3))*3
   *SQRT(5^2-3^2)) microseconds old.


3. While you were figuring out that equation, I was at your house stealing all your fruit roll-ups.


4. Avogadro's number of s'mores would weigh more than the known universe.


5. When I was in Miami last week, I ate some stone crab claws. Here are some little known facts about stone crabs: they taste better than Maryland crabs. You only eat the claws because that's all that is harvested, one claw at a time. It's a true renewable resource.


6. P.S. Miami is stupid


7. What is the resonant frequency of paper?


8. If I was ever to direct a movie (I mean, other than The Big Deuce-kee), I would totally hire Janusz Kaminski to be the cinematographer.


9. I know everything about film.


10. I've seen over 240 of them.


11. Yesterday, I ate some Indian food.


12. The name for this month, November, has roots in the ancient greek. Nov means "time" and embere is the root meaning "to use the word 'cornucopia' for no good reason at all."


13. Yes, you can blame Dave Barry for that


14. 34 years ago today, Gene Rodenberry probably did something.


15. Remember Tiananmen Square? That was pretty cool.


16. The state of Arizona has more gravel than any other state.


17. Whenever I see a monkey, I can't help but think s/he would be better off in a costume of some kind


18. There is a good chance that the world is naught but a lamppost of danger amidst the cacophony of time.


19. Someday, I want to write a memoir: I Was a Mediocre, Unread Blogger: The Story of A Life Lived Very Far From the Edge.


20. No one will buy it.


21. Don't forget to do that thing!


22. "Guest" rhymes with "best." I don't know what to make of that.


23. What if everything that rhymed was true?


24. Well, it's not.


25. Yeah, but what if!


26. Let's do a contest!

Come On, You're Lying to Me

Boy, it's sure been awhile since we pulled out the old livejournal random picture generator thing for a beautiful friday afternoon. So here...








Oh man, either way, I really want to know the story behind this picture. Is it A Christmas Story obsession gone wrong (or maybe oh so right)? Is it the prelude to a series of explicit "furry" action pictures? Where do you even find such an outfit? Did he borrow it from Matthew Perry? (I am so sad that I can make that allusion)

Guess What the Other One Did Instead

Okay, this has certainly been quite the week. Most of the time I've been sitting in a conference in Detroit, listening to people talk about all kinds of relatively gross stuff. I got to see some sino-sagittal nerve complexes get ripped in half! Of course, I was a co-author on one of the papers, so that was kinda cool. And one of the other papers cited a paper that I helped write a couple years ago. But on the whole, we spent almost a week in Detroit. Yikes. Being in Detroit for a week is kind of like someone swinging a baseball bat at your head only at the the last second you duck and it misses you.

Then on Wednesday (confirmed on Thursday) the wife had a miscarriage. That's like someone swinging a baseball bat at your head only at the last second you duck and it misses you, only then you notice that they actually had two bats and the second one is now about 35 mm from hitting you in the chest. Oof.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

A Story for the Ages

So, the other day, no, not that one, the other other day, I was cooking up a pot of stew. No, that is not a "metaphor." I was literally making a giant pot of stew, and if you have anything against stew, well, you suck. Stew rules. Anyway, this stew particularly ruled because it had sausage in it. Basically, the sausage took the place of the traditional potatoes. It was even preservative free kielbasa. I got it at Whole Foods. And before you say it, no, buying preservative free foodstuffs from Whole Foods doesn't mean I'm a yuppie if I'm buying it to make stew. So, we needed to go to Whole Foods AND Safeway, and I turn around in the car and realize it's a terrible idea to turn around when you're driving (see the results of Virginia Tech's 100-car Naturalistic Driving Study) and turn back to look at Tenley Circle and ask my son whether we should go to Safeway or Whole Foods first. In response, he says "when I get older, can I have a trombone? I want to have a trombone and play music about tigers." Obviously we went to Whole Foods first. And obviously that is a brilliant idea for a moderately successful band. If the Decemberists can be moderately successful while singing, essentially, sea shanties, then I could be moderately successful playing the trombone and singing about Tigers. You don't think so? Go tell that to Blake. Wait, he died in penury. Uh, go tell that to Blake about 100 years after he died. Also, in case you were wondering, no, we don't believe in paragraphs any more. They are superflous.

But that is a story only for the minutes, not the ages as my title suggests. The following is that story. It is also related to the stew. As you know, stew has beef. Well, maybe not all stew, but certainly the stew I made this weekend. Now beef is one of the more useful materials. You can eat it, you can throw it, you can build bridges with it, you can climb mountains of it, you can launch it into space. But before this weekend, I didn't know that you could carry on a conversation with it. Oh wait! That's the denouement of the story! Crap! I just ruined it foreshadowing, yes! Well, actually that's basically the whole story. I was just cooking away, browning up some beefs when one of the last pieces says to me "Dude, don't throw me in there! I hate those guys! Cook me with the parsnips!" "Oh, I'm sorry, I already cooked the parsnips!" I replied curmudgeonly. "You jerk!" said the beef, "you know I've been hooking up with that one parsnip!" "Actually I didn't know that. I hope it wasn't anything serious because I probably peeled and chopped her." "Nooooooooooooo," moaned the beef as he began to cry bloody tears, which for chunks of beef is, I guess, not too unusual. He just kept moaning and moaning and I got sick of it so I threw him into the crackling oil and that was that. The moral of the story is: before cooking something, do not drink an entire bottle of vinegar. Well, maybe a little one, but certainly not a liter. The second moral of the story is, just throw the beef in the pot right away. Don't bother talking to it.

Oh The Humanitarianity!

I know, I know. I shouldn't traffic in schadenfreude. But man, there are some things that just warm the cockles of my heart. And this in one of them.


Ahhhhhhhh.