Where Insanity and Creativity Fight to the Death!

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Where Insanity and Creativity Fight to the Death!

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Aaron Blaschke Rowden

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Adventures In Spam Episode 7	[Mar. 22nd, 2012\|10:44 pm]
Tomorrow is my birthday and this means I am going to post something easy to write and enjoyable to all. Also, Cracked.com recently ran an article too similar to something I was working on for this post for me to avoid accusations of plagiarism, so I bring you my most popular filler piece. For anyone just tuning in, this is the part where I willfully misinterpret the meaning of spam subject lines despite the hard work the spammers put into writing them. 1. Invest in a walk-in tub I am pretty sure that a walk-in tub is a shower. Additionally, how is this an investment? Are walk-in tubs actually expected to appreciate in value? Is mildew valuable? Perhaps we are moving to the mold standard. 2. View Photos of Millionaires Near You I can get behind this one. If there is one thing the 99% needs, it is photos of successful job creators to inspire them. Besides, if they spend all their time looking at pictures of rich people, they will know who to throw tomatoes at while they are occupying things. Alternate response: Mitt, the caucuses are over here. You can stop campaigning. Mitt Romney, formerly known as D.J. R. Money, posing with the likeness of his favorite robot clone. 3. INSTRUCTIONS TO CREDIT YOUR ACCOUNT WITH THE SUM OF (US$22Million) I took an accounting class in law school and even worked in a financial office for a couple of years, so I know that when you put a number in parentheses that makes it a negative number. So yes, Department of Education, I get it. I owe you a ton of money, but do you really need to try to take it from me by tricking me? I mean, you should know that I went to college for seven years and would not be so easily fooled because you paid for it! 4. Get a grip on your arthritis But not too tight, or if the weather is cold. And it probably helps if you take a Tylenol before you try. *5. Max-Gentleman EnlargementPills** As what one might describe as a Max-Gentleman, I can assure you I do not need to be enlarged. Much like my hero, William Howard Taft, I am already quite large and feel that any further enhancements to my largeness would be in poor taste when there are so many in the world who have yet to achieve this level of largeness, and others still who are mired in smallness. So, on behalf of Max-Gentlemen everywhere, I appreciate the offer, but really, I will practice some humility and leave some largeness for others. The one true real Max-Gentleman 6. Improve your skills with a Degree in Criminal Justice This ad sounds like it is targeted to someone who is already doing work in criminal justice, has some skills, but has no formal training in the field. Perhaps a vigilante, who hunts down evildoers by the cover of darkness. In fact, this message seems to be accusing me of being Batman. Well, I am here to set the record straight. I am not Batman. Batman is a dangerous vigilante. I am just a blogger. But I must run now because I am the blogger the internet deserves, but not the one it needs right now. I'll just let Robin deal with the comments about how this blog is getting repetitive and all the Russian phishers.
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Renaissance Man	[Jan. 18th, 2012\|10:52 pm]
... Oh. You're still here. Ummm... Wow. I would have thought you might have wandered off by now, but clearly you are the type who also sits through all of the credits and the movies hoping there will be extra content at the end. Well your faith is about to be rewarded. It time for yet another installment of Adventures in SPAM. Just kidding. I wrote a real post. Enjoy! It may surprise some of my readers to know that I am not great at arts and crafts. "How can that be?" you ask. "You were once the master painter for a theater company. Isn't that art, or at least crafts?" Well, it turns out that if you are reasonably genial, try hard, and are good at changing the topic of conversation, you can be really bad at something for years before anyone actually notices it or points it out. If my elementary school had given grades in art based on skill, I am relatively certain I would have managed a D+, but as most art related grades in school seem to be based on not ingesting glue, I managed to earn solid A's thanks mostly to my natural distaste for the school's plebeian glue. To this day I will only consume a 1978 vintage Elmers, and frankly even that is contingent on the right food pairing. And like all privileged snobs, I was inexplicably rewarded with symbols of societal approval for being inhumanly picky. As a result of this bizarre form of social promotion, I found myself with no real skills in the area of crafting. Normally I would not be bothered by this as crafting had for most of my life been something done in one's spare time and I owned a television. However the past few years have seen the rise of a movement seeking to popularize making things for one's self. While this flies in the face of decades of common wisdom telling us to let people halfway across the world make things for us, it seems that the do-it-yourselfers are starting to win and, in due time, everyone will be crafting. Some have even started calling this period in history The Crafting Renaissance. Calling this the Crafting Renaissance puts me in an awkward position. I was rather used to the "buying cheap goods from foreign countries while letting my hands atrophy renaissance". Now everyone I know is into crafting some quality goods from raw materials. I feel like someone in Fifteenth Century Italy who woke up one day to discover that not only was he the only person on his block not sculpting or making frescoes, he was the only person on his block who wasn't amazing at it. So while everyone else basically makes St. Peter's Basilica out of lambs wool or locally harvested corn husks, I just try not to accidentally lose a limb by walking too close to someone carving The Pieta out of ice with a chainsaw. Finally, I decided enough was enough and that I too would learn to craft. After realizing that most crafts require multiple tools and expensive materials that can only be acquired by going to stores full of insufferable hipsters and "enthusiasts" who make Branch Davidians seem noncommittal,I decided to attempt knitting since I could borrow everything I needed from my sister, who I have never actually seen knit anything. Knitting is everywhere these days, which surprises me because we have machines that do it faster and better. Hand knitting is, as far as I am concerned, like doing a math problem by hand. It is good to know how to in case society collapses, but until that happens I am going to use a calculator to do my taxes. That said, as 2012 has begun and we may be moving rapidly and inexorably toward the day when knitting and hand looms are the only ways of producing textiles, it is a reasonable skill to acquire. The first step to knitting is called "casting on." It is called this because one of your knitting needles had damned well be a magic wand capable of casting actual spells if you want to accomplish this. Otherwise, you will quickly discover that the knitting needle was a device designed by the lowest bidder. Although you will spend most of your time focusing on the top 6 millimeters of the needles, you will be required to attempt to find an appropriate place for the other eight inches of needle. Hint: tangled in the extra yarn is not* a good place. Neither is somehow intertwined with all of your fingers.* This extra needle space is probably necessary for something, but you never get to figure out what because if you take your eyes off the tips of the needle for even a second to assess the situation, you will somehow manage to slip the wrong loop off the wrong thing and have to start over. After an hour of casting on, I had made 30 loops, each of which corresponds to a stitch in the knitting process. That was two minutes to create each stitch, which is an amazingly long time to do something that my arthritic great grandmother was apparently capable of doing with relative into her 90s. Given the difficulty I had creating stitches on purpose, one must be able to guess how shocked I was after I knitted two rows and discovered that I had somehow managed to add two stitches in the process. I didn't even know it was possible to add stitches, and yet somehow my project (which is apparently the technical term for an unidentifiable tangle of yarn with chop sticks sticking out of it) was getting wider. I tried to correct this by removing a stitch, but that just caused a lot of things to unravel. Apparently there is no way of fixing mistakes in knitting, which makes it less of a hobby and more of an extension of several areas of life that one might take on a hobby to get away from. I have also found that knitting is a great way of learning things about yarn. In fact, knitting is the only way of learning things about yarn. The most important lesson about yarn is that it always moves in the manner which is least helpful to accomplishing your goal. For instance, if you want to gently slide a loop of yarn off the end of the left hand needle to complete a stitch, the yarn will tie itself into a timber hitch and cling like the needle is the last life raft off the Titanic. If however you have just neatly looped that same yarn around the right hand needle, the yarn will suddenly lose the physical property of friction and slide off the needle, traveling several inches to do so. And it is not just the yarn that is being worked with the needles that seems to see the least useful place to be and go for it. The rest of the yarn is slowly unwinding itself while you focus on your work and slithering around the room looking for all manner of objects to wrap around and barring that, it is just tying itself into the Gordian Knot. Ultimately I knitted four rows of approximately 30 stitches, meaning that I wrestled with yarn 120 times. I managed in that time to produce a piece of cloth as wide as my pinky finger. I also manages to untangle the yarn from my the legs of my coffee table about seven times. After that I decided it was time to take to the internet and let you all know that my knitting project is on par with Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Or is like it in so far as it will take four years and the constant urging of the Pope for me to complete it.
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Mars Ain't the Kind of Place to Raise Your Kids	[Aug. 23rd, 2011\|08:09 pm]
So in about ten days I will be heading down to Atlanta, GA for DragonCon, which is a science fiction convention. In preparation for this event I have been re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which happens to be my favorite of the Star Trek franchises. Watching the series for the sixth or so time, I have had the opportunity to notice things about the universe of Star Trek that would probably annoy the hell out of me if I had to live there. So here are my Eight Things About Life on the Starship Enterprise That Would Make Me Insane. 8. Communicators Are Pretty Obnoxious* The communicator in the original Star Trek series was a handheld device that was for all practical purposes a cellphone without any sort of texting capability. For the most part it was used by away teams to communicate with the ship. Fair enough. I could live with that. But in The Next Generation (TNG) the communicator is something far more sinister. The communicator becomes the badge that all Starfleet personnel wear on their uniforms. In addition to the frightening locator function that apparently anyone can use to find you just by asking the computer, the badge is terribly obnoxious. Unlike a cell phone that rings when you are called and gives you the option to take a call, the communicator lets out a high pitched chirp and then the party attempting to reach you simply starts talking and can hear anything in voice range of your badge. Think about how awful that would be. Your boss could call you during a romantic dinner or even while you are asleep and any momentary hesitation or complaint would be immediately transmitted back. In several episodes of TNG this is exactly what happens and no one is ever happy about it. This couple with the locator function means that privacy is pretty much impossible on the Enterprise. Furthermore, the comm. badge also allows the transporter operators to beam people around by locking onto their signal. What if you annoy the transportation chief or he goes rogue? You could find yourself two meters outside of the ship dying in space because of your communicator. Say what you will about the iPhone, at least there isn't an app for THAT yet! And if you are thinking that this wouldn't happen because Starfleet is an elite military organization that has safeguards against grudge holding officers consider the following: 7. Starfleet Never Seems to Punish Its Officers for Anything Starfleet officers dress smartly, act smartly, shoot straight and have an uncontrollable desire for insubordination. Pretty much every major character on the show has committed some act of total insubordination and yet only one character I can think of was ever actually punished for it. Here is a partial list of beloved characters and their transgressions: Commander Riker- Disobeyed an order from an Admiral to rescue Picard from the borg. Lt. Worf- Leaves the Enterprise without permission to kill Duras, a pretender to the office of Chancellor of the Klingon Empire. Lt. Commander Data- Disobeys an order while in command of a ship in a convoy under Picard's supervision. Ensign Ro- Disobeys superior officers at every turn. Eventually defects to the Bajoran Maquis terrorist group. Wesley Crusher- Helped cover up the death of a classmate at the academy. Captain Picard- Participated in a mutiny against Starfleet Command. Frequent violations of the Prime Directive, which will be discussed later. Of these officers only Ensign Ro was ever actually demoted or disciplined for her insubordination and even that was only after her actions led to the deaths of eight people. She served fewer than 4 years in a Starfleet run prison and received another commission to serve on the Enterprise. This would be awful if one were serving on such a ship. I imagine that like all military organizations Starfleet developed their chain of command and rules for good reasons. If the other officers and crew can't count on people to follow them, there would be chaos. And while chaos can be fun, for the number of times that the crew of the Enterprise comes under attack in the average mission, it seems like having junior officers disobeying orders as they see fit would be really dangerous. Furthermore, those rules probably would help to reduce the likelihood of personal conflicts creating workplace problems, but since apparently you have to off eight people for Starfleet to consider removing you from your post, I would be concerned that an upset crew member might actually hurt me. 6. The Enterprise Has the Population of a Really Small Town I live in a small town surrounded by small towns. My town has a little over 6000 people. It is nowhere in the grand scheme of things and one could easily run out of things to do and people to talk to. The Enterprise has a total population of about 1000 people. Running out of things to do and people to talk to would take no time at all. Additionally, gossip would take almost no time to get around and there is always the possibility that one would not be very popular. It is not like you can just make new friends and once you start making enemies there is nowhere to escape to. And even if you are popular and cool, you still might want to go out every now and then. There is nowhere to go on the Enterprise. If I want to get out of my small town, I can drive to Portland or Boston and be there in a matter of hours. The Enterprise is usually days if not weeks from the nearest Star Base, and who knows how far from anything actually interesting. But at least you are still doing cool space exploring stuff, right? 5. Most of the Jobs on the Enterprise Seem Really Mundane While the senior officer clique on the Enterprise gets to do cool stuff like explore alien worlds and meet interesting lifeforms, most of the crew seems to work in windowless rooms working on computers. This means that their jobs are not much different than cubicle work in the 21st century, just more dangerous due to circumstances beyond anyone's control. By comparison to being one of the legion of engineering galley slaves following Geordi's commands for no apparent reason, being a red shirt on an away mission actually sounds kind of appealing. The risk of death is about the same, but at least you get to go outside once in a while. 4. Your Kids Have to go to School on the Ship Apparently one of the major advances of the Enterprise-D, the ship in TNG, is its ability to accommodate the children of couples serving on board the ship together. I am inclined to agree with Captain Picard that this is a terrible idea. In addition to the ever present threat of the Romulans blowing the ship up or it being sucked into a blackhole, having children on the ship is awful because it also means those kids have to go to school on the ship. This seems like a pretty minor issue at first glance but the way it plays out in the show makes it clear that this is very annoying. Imagine if you were serving aboard an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Persian Gulf. You are discussing security protocols with the ship's captain when all of a sudden your child's 1st grade teacher calls you on your complete not ignorable cell phone and insists that a parent/teacher conference is in order. This is not only embarrassing, but obviously interferes with the safety of the ship. However this exact scenario plays out all the time on the Enterprise. It is like they hired the teachers on the ship without explaining to them what the ship is supposed to be doing. There is no situation dire enough that they think twice about interrupting to tell you that your kid sucks at finger painting and ate some paste. 3. The Holodeck Seems to be Used for Porn A Lot The holodeck is an amazing innovation of TNG. The original series had no such device. It is basically a room that does really good virtual reality simulations of pretty much anything. And some members of the crew write really cool programs and games, such as Worf's combat simulators and Data's Sherlock Holmes stories. But for every cool and innovative program there seem to be 20 or so of programs created by nebbish lieutenants and as one might imagine they all seem to be porn. Furthermore, this is not just a logical extension of how technology is used in the real world, i.e. the Internet. The characters in the show frequently imply that the holodeck might be used for such a purpose. Geordi is known among the crew for his penchant for falling for holodeck created women and even Commander Riker, the bearer of Kirk's legacy as the galaxy's most sought after male, attempted to use the holodeck... inappropriately on at least one occasion. While what people do on their own time in their own places does not usually cause me any concern, the series never makes it clear how often the holodeck is cleaned and since they appear to be public facilities with no locks, there is always the possibility one might walk in on some interesting simulations by accident. 2. Synthohol Starfleet wants their officers alert while they plot mutiny at their tedious jobs and so they discourage the consumption of real alcohol, preferring instead to serve the crew synthohol. Synthohol is described as being similar to alcohol except that it lacks most of the fun effects of real booze like the possibility of any level of drunkenness beyond slightly buzzed (and even that is somehow reversible on command). One can never get drunk enough to sing along to Journey or drunk dial someone on their god-awful communicator, or jokingly beam a lampshade onto someone's head. Those simple joys are lost forever in the sober world of Starfleet. Unless you happen to know anyone outside of the ship in which case alcohol is very easy to get. Also, it can be replicated on demand in every room on the ship. Why does synthohol even exist? 1. The Prime Directive The Prime Directive is Starfleet's number one rule. In its basic form, it states that Starfleet personnel cannot interfere with the natural development of any society nor can Starfleet share technology with any world that has not yet developed faster than light travel. This is a rule that no one ever seems to mention until about three minutes before they intend to violate it. And usually it is being violated for really good reasons, such as preventing genocide or saving lives from natural disasters. In fact there is, to my knowledge, no episode in which the Prime Directive is mentioned in terms of the number of lives saved by following it. Also, nothing bad ever seems to happen when it is violated. So the natural question is why have it? Nothing would bother me more than having to pretend to follow a rule that I only have to observe in the breach. So as much as I would love to go explore the stars, I have to conclude that as much as I admire the principles of Starfleet, the Enterprise would not be a good place for me.
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Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits	[Aug. 14th, 2011\|12:32 am]
It has been two months since my last haircut and my hair is once again starting to get unacceptably long. My understanding is that normal people like to get their hair cut to remedy such situations, but as you loyal reader may have gathered I am unlike normal people in this respect. I hate getting my hair cut. The thing is I don't particularly like wearing my hair long and once I get my hair cut I usually like how it looks. I just find the process of getting a hair cut to be torture. To illustrate my deep concerns about this procedure I will walk you through my subjective understanding of the hair cutting process. The first thing about most salons, parlors, shops, and even the occasional shoppe in which I get a hair cut that I notice is the smell. Actually perhaps smell isn't really an accurate term. Smell is part of it, but the smell is just a warning sign that for the next 30 minutes to an hour I will be reliving the Battle of Ypres. As a sufferer of asthma and allergies, it does not take a lot to make my sinuses turn on the gas attack response and hair places always seem to have recently been the target of some sort of mustard gas raid. I try to sit calmly in the waiting room, but soon my nose begins to run. I pick up a copy of the most depressing magazine (which usually turns out to be Golf Weekly because apparently hairstylists don't get The Economist) so I can pretend I am crying over the humanitarian crisis at The Masters this year instead of just crying for no reason. Of course this plan lasts about three minutes before my eyes become too irritated to look at words anymore and I have no choice but to recite Wilfred Owen poems and wonder whether the stylist has an epi-pen or knows how to use one. People have told me in the past that the smell in shop is sodium thioglycolate, a chemical associated with perms, but I am still of the opinion that the UN should be imposing sanctions on any place that smells like that. Of course the mucus membrane destroying gas is only the first part of the carnival of horror that is the average salon. It is not until I get to sit in "the chair" that I really start to hate everything that is happening to me. Let's start with the chair itself. It is one of only two chairs you might ever sit in that the owner calls "the chair". The other is of course the electric chair. This is the only service I regularly engage with that shares any common vocabulary with execution. I never bring my car in for a tune up and get asked "can you pull it up to the gallows?" I never find myself at the dentist being asked to hop on up to the guillotine. But the barber/stylist is always asking me to get into "the chair". The next inconvenience is luckily quite avoidable if I go to a barber shop and not a salon or parlor of any type. However if I happen to be getting my hair styled, I will be placed in the awkward position of the stylist wanting to wash my hair. Putting aside the fact that a person who spends much of their day touching the heads of other people whose lice/skin disease status I cannot vouch for now wants to run their fingers through my hair, the washing process is awful. The method for washing hair in a salon would be a war crime if I did it to an Al-Qaeda militant in Guantanamo Bay. My first objection is the part where the chair suddenly reclines and my neck now lying in what seems to be some sort of yoke cut into a stone sink. That part just hurts because as physics would demonstrate, a human neck is not well suited to supporting the full weight of the head on just one point. That however is not the worst of it. For the next several minutes a complete stranger will water board me. There is nothing I can do to stop this once it starts. If I try to move my head out of the rapidly filling sink, the stylist will just put her hand firmly on my forehead, and of course due to aforementioned sink yoke all of the pressure in this struggle is directed to the one vertebra in contact with the sink, so eventually I will lose the struggle out of fear of breaking my own neck. And simply asking to be let up is not an option as most stylists seem to feel that the riot hose they borrowed from the circa 1963 Montgomery Police Department and are now using to fill the sink needs to be aimed somewhere in the middle of my face so that it can cause a steady stream of water to enter my nose and mouth while somehow failing to actually drown me. In case you think I am taking this too far, the similarities between this and "enhanced interrogation" become clear about 2 minutes into the "shampooing" when the stylist, out of nowhere, begins asking me personal questions. "What do you do for work?" "How many people are in your family?" and other basic census questions seem to be of genuine interest to the person currently holding my head in a sink full of chemical laced water. But this also comes to an end just in time for the final battle of the actual haircut. Just so everyone knows, I am not afraid of getting my haircut. I sometimes can get friends who are good at cutting hair to do so in my kitchen and I have no complaints. However getting a haircut at any hair cutting business leads to the following problem: the person holding a very sharp blade to my head wants to talk. Moreover, they want to carry on a conversation with me while they try to cut hairs, shape sideburns, and otherwise sling blades around the part of me that I least want gashed open. I am a decent conversationalist, I believe, but I am also an animated person when I talk. I move my arms, I fidget, and I do a variety of things with my face that, while expressive, probably cause my face and scalp to move a lot. For this reason I do not talk while I am getting my haircut. My silence seems to put off the stylists who tell me "you are being so quiet, it is making me nervous." I reply by, I believe reasonably, explaining my above objections to talking while I am being barbered. This does not seem to make anyone feel better and the last stylist to whom I explained this actually seemed to get more desperate to make me talk the longer the haircut went. By the end of the average haircut I am feeding more misinformation than a burned secret agent just so I can get out of the salon with the stylist going Van Gogh on my ear out of nervousness. I think last time I actually made up government contacts and troop movement data in hopes that I might not lose my nose. Once the haircut is over things seem to start getting better. The stylist dries my head with the most effective hairdryer I have ever seen, brushes the back of my neck with what seems to be one of the things the umpire uses to clean home plate at a baseball game, and before I know it the Abu Ghraib style black plastic smock I have been wrapped in has been removed and I am free to go. So I think. The drive home starts well and I take a moment to admire my new haircut in the review mirror while stopped at a traffic light. I might even run a hand across the newly cut bristles to see how they feel. This is my undoing. As soon as I do this, seemingly millions of just cut hair pieces fall onto me and, most annoyingly, down the back of my shirt. It does not take long before this begins itching and burn unceasingly. And since I am driving, my options are fairly limited as to how to remedy the situation until I get home. By the time I get home, the hair seems to have magically multiplied and taught its progeny how to tear at my skin for maximum annoyance. This continues until I strip off what has now essentially become a hair shirt from my torso as well as my other clothes, and take a shower to wash away what I am at this point sure are fire ants. I then also need to shampoo my hair so that I can get the remaining loose hairs out and fix the problem for good. When all this is done, I realize I have destroyed the style I just paid for and, not being a sadistic weirdo, I will be unable to recreate it nearly as well as the stylist. "Well," I think to myself "I will just let it grow out and it will look okay."
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Sugar, Sugar	[Apr. 26th, 2011\|03:32 pm]
Easter Sunday has come and gone, but I am willing to bet that most people still have Easter candy lying around and things that once seemed like really good ideas are now far less exciting. However, I would like to take this time to guide you through the left over Easter candy and point out what it all means. I will start with the most ubiquitous of Easter treats, the jelly bean. Jelly beans are part Christian morality play and part Jack and the Beanstalk. First of all, congratulations,despite living in a culture that requires children to memorize the inexplicable lesson do not trade your money for magic beans, you have done just that. And the giant from the Jack story, you know what he was supposed to represent? Diabetes. I will grind your bones to make my bread! I will also cause blindness and you might lose a foot! As to the message of Christian morality the jelly bean represents, here it goes. Each jelly bean represents a choice we make in life. Every choice has a consequence, represented by the highly variable flavor quality of different colored jelly beans. Some enjoyment of jelly bean flavors is subjective. Like red more than green? Who cares? But the whole system is bounded by two absolutes. The objectively best jelly bean is of course purple and the worst is, and always will be black. The purple is the best because purple is the one color that we also think of as a flavor (if you say orange is the same, you are not allowed to read here anymore). Seriously, when you see purple candy or Kool-Aid, you don't think "Awesome, that will taste like grapes!" It won't. It will taste like purple and you like it that way. I don't think it is a coincidence that purple is the color the Catholic Church uses to symbolize times of repentance and atonement. Purple is hardwired in as the right and holy choice, whether it is purple candy or priestly vestments. Black jelly beans on the other hand are sin and all that is terrible in the world. Black is the color of death, smog, oil spills, and Nazis. But every year millions of so-called candies of this color go out into Easter baskets everywhere and people eat them. No one likes them and they know that they taste like stale liquorice at best, but everyone gives the black jelly bean a go every year. Why? Because like sin, black jelly beans are tempting, even when we know they are an abomination. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying black jelly beans represent sin. I am saying they are sin in small candy form. Eating just one black jelly bean undoes baptism. Every time you eat one of these, the effect reverberates back in time and the Romans whip Jesus an extra time. And you know it as soon as you taste one. The next Easter candy to be examined is the chocolate rabbit. This has nothing to do with any Christian message at all. The chocolate rabbit was designed by tribal elders back in when Europe was a collection of tribes and being able to trust the others in your tribe was important. The rabbit allows you to easily identify which children in your village are going to grow up to be sociopaths. You see, anything in the shape of a living thing, even if it is obviously inanimate, has the tendency to inspire a sense of compassion in people. The chocolate rabbit is no exception. This will not mean that people won't eat it as it is made of delicious chocolate, but they will do so in a way that would cause the least suffering to a real animal, namely head first (assuming you eat live animals. More on that later). On the other hand, someone who does not consider this, or worse yet enjoys the idea that they are causing their chocolate rabbit to suffer will start with the feet. Those are the people who will become a liability to the tribe. You should set them adrift on an ice flow, which is totally possible in Maine at Easter. Finally, we must look at everyone's favorite Easter treat, the Peep. Peeps are like marshmallows, but somehow worse for you. If you have ever wanted to know what it is like to eat a live baby bird but did not want to be nominated for the Charlie Manson Award for Distinguished Citizenship by your local civic organization, Peeps provide the next best facsimile. This guy wins every year in the category of Best Crudely Drawn Forehead Swastika but everyone knows these awards are just political. Seriously, short of actually moving a Peep might as well be a real baby bird. It is adorable, although in a kind of way that makes you wonder how. It tastes, and I know this sounds weird but bear with me, fluffy. Not just that it has a fluffy texture, which it does, but I am pretty sure that there are fluffiness taste buds in my mouth that only become active while eating a Peep. I imagine that this is what feathers would taste like. Additionally, Peeps are also coated with some sort of hard as diamonds granulated sugar that never seems to dissolve. After you are done with the fluffy part, you have to deal with the sugar/sand. My only conclusion is that this stuff is actually made from ground up beak, just to add to the authenticity of the illusion that you are eating a baby chicken. So now take a look at that left over Easter candy. Not nearly as appetizing now as it once was, huh? Happy Easter!
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Pope Trivia	[Apr. 3rd, 2011\|11:28 pm]
I find the office of Pope fascinating. There have been two popes in my lifetime and I have seen both of them, and I read about popes and the papacy a lot. So naturally I would eventually come to the point of posting something here about popes. I present to you my list of the five most badass popes. 1. St. Siricius (384-399) St. Siricius woke up one morning and asked the entirety of Christianity "Who's your daddy?" He then immediately adopted the title Papa, or as we say in English, Pope. That's right, prior to St. Siricius the Holy Father wed to the Mother Church was just the Holy Guy that the Mother Church was seeing pretty steadily. To put it another way, this would be the equivalent of being the first king to say "I am tired of being called 'that guy with the spiky gold hat. I will call myself by some other word." But St. Siricius did not just stop at being every Catholic's new dad. He also decided to prove that he was a cool pope. He did this by protesting the verdict of a witchcraft trial carried out by Emperor Magnus Maximus, which is Latin for King Super Big. And keep in mind that this was before the whole "the Church is the law" thing. That guy was emperor of Rome, the same superstate that until 313, a mere 71 years before Siricius crowned himself World's Number 1 Dad, had been actively torturing and killing Christians en masse. 2. Leo the Great (440-461) Pope Leo I earned his nickname "The Great" by doing something that seems, in hindsight, more like attempted suicide than I am sure the Vatican would be comfortable admitting. In 452, when the Huns were on the verge of sacking Rome, Leo, along with two other Roman officials, met Attila the Hun face to face and politely asked him to leave. Yes, this is the same Attila the Hun that people mention any time they want to conjure images of raging barbarians and Genghis Khan is busy. What did the pope do to convince Attila to just turn back without any of his trademark murder and destruction? Well sources differ. The least pro-pope sources claim that he appealed to Attila's sense of economics by bribing him and then begged for mercy. Even if this is true, it is still pretty impressive that the guy could even form words while talking to Attila the Hun. Other sources claim that Leo skillfully negotiated the retreat with the help of the Saints and then promised Attila that he would make one of his descendants the king of a place called Hungary, which incidentally didn't exist yet. This version of the story is favored by Hungarians who like to believe that their country is the love child of Attila and the Pope. 3. Leo III (795-816) Much like his predecessor Leo the Great, Leo III believed that the Pope could and should be in the business of making people kings of places, however he decided to take this one step further and state that in order to hold the best kingdom you had to have the blessing of the pope. He then proceeded to establish a little kingdom known as the Holy Roman Empire and to name Charlemagne as its king, effectively announcing that the Roman Empire was back and the new Emperor was French. Anyone who has studied history is well aware of the works of Charlemagne, who was, not coincidentally, King of the Frankish Tribes before he was Holy Roman Emperor. And it is no secret that popes have had a part in the appointment of kings for a very long time. However Leo III, unlike many power playing pontiffs, was not a nobleman by birth. In fact Leo started out as a commoner and worked his way up to the top. The guy who granted Charlemagne his power was a self made man who despite the minimal upward mobility in dark ages Europe managed to climb the ladder farther than anyone else ever. 4. Formosus (891-896, 897) You may not be aware of this, but the actual seat of papal power is not St. Peter's Basilica, which is the large church that many mistakenly believe is the entirety of the Vatican City, but rather the Cathedral of St. John Lateran. For many, this revelation is like discovering that the real capital of the U.S. is actually Wichita, but seasoned pope watchers will recognize Lateran as the location of some important councils and events. This is because the chair or cathedra that the pope uses for official stuff is located there. Most popes sit in this chair a mere handful of times in their lives, but it seems only one has managed to occupy it after their lives. Formosus is that one. In a bizarre event known as the Cadaver Synod, Formosus, who had been dead for several months, was exhumed, dressed in papal vestments and placed in the papal throne at St. John Lateran. Interestingly, this elaborate show was not put on to honor Formosus, but rather so that Pope Stephen VII could put him on trial for a variety of offenses, including illegally elevating bishops, including Stephen himself. The corpse was represented by a deacon who gave answers on the body's behalf. When the trial was concluded and Formosus found guilty and his titles revoked, he was stripped of is vestments, his benediction fingers removed, and he was buried. However he was then dug up again, weighted and thrown into the Tiber River. His body washed up on shore and reportedly started performing miracles. At this point Stephen lost support and was quickly overthrown, imprisoned and subsequently murdered. In 898 Formosus was restored by a decree of yet another Synod. He was once again dressed up and reburied with the other popes in the Basilica. All in all, it appears that the most exciting year in Pope Formosus' life was the one immediately after he died. 5. John XXI (1276-1277) John XXI was a rare type of person in the middle ages. In addition to being a pope, he was also a scientist and physician. To put this in perspective, the trial of Galileo took place nearly 350 years after John XXI, and it is not hard to imagine that the Church's views on science were not any more advanced in 1276 than they were in 1640 and yet there was a scientist pope who had a personal laboratory built in the papal palace at Viterbo. It turns out that this new lab, which was shoddily built, would be his undoing. Apparently John XXi liked to be close to his work and slept in the new addition. One night the entire thing collapsed, mortally wounding him. At least that is the official Vatican story. I choose to believe that John XXI actually managed to open up a portal into a new dimension and is currently jumping from time to time putting right what once went wrong. And naturally I am not alone in this belief (or part of it anyway). It turns out that people were not thrilled to learn that the pope was also a mad scientist after his death and began spreading rumors that he was a magician (like Harry Potter, not David Copperfield) and that God had knocked the building down on top of him.
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It's Been One Week Since You Looked at Me	[Mar. 22nd, 2011\|10:28 pm]
Happy One Week Since My Last Post everyone! I listen to the radio a lot and I have come to the conclusion that unlike t.v. ads, which are generally either for products you have heard of or are laughably poorly produced, radio ads exist solely for the purpose of confusing people as to the difference between legitimate products and the things that are normally advertised in the back of comic books. Yes, there are all the late night t.v. commercials for various herbal "enhancements", etc., but they generally do not air during respectable day time programming and tend to show their hand. Radio is a wild west of advertising; a libertarian dog-fight of untested products trying to part fools with their money. Of course there is one very serious heavyweight contender that seems to be going for the, well, gold in this fight and that is Gold Line. Gold Line has been made famous for advertising its view that everyone, living or dead, should own gold. Coincidentally Gold Line has tons of gold lying around cluttering up the office and they want to get rid of it. Gold Line makes it very easy for you to get some of this nuisance metal for yourself. You can call them or even use their website to get gold. Of course it will cost you something. $1800 an ounce to be precise. Now this is a pretty gutsy move for a website that also quotes the actual price of gold on its homepage as nearly $400 lower than what they are asking. Okay, so maybe their motive isn't that they are trying to find their desks under their surplus gold and need you to help them take it off their hands, but I can assure you that this motive makes more sense than the one they advertise. Every Gold Line ad I have ever heard is predicated on the theory that the U.S. Dollar is in immediate danger of losing all of its value. All of it. And in order to not starve to death, you, the savvy investor, will need to have a lot of gold lying around to make gold soup and gold bread. Luckily, Gold Line is here to help. In exchange for your soon to be worthless cash, they will send you gold. I think I missed something. If gold is about to become the only hedge against selling oneself into slavery for a cup of shoe leather broth, why would anyone sell it for something they claim will soon be worthless? They are also pretty specific that the trade needs to be for money, not some other soon to be worthless good like unrefrigerated mayonnaise, or my sworn affidavits from Barry Bonds. I don't understand this rule if it is all going to be worthless soon anyway. And of course, it still doesn't answer the question of why anyone would want a soon to be worthless commodity in exchange for the world's oldest and most widely accepted currency if everything really is about to collapse. Then I learned another secret. They don't necessarily send you gold for cash. While some of your gold investment can be shipped to you directly, thus ensuring that your postman will know what house to raid in the coming apocalypse, a certain class of investment called "stored bullion" is stored for you in a facility somewhere. That arrangement is just great if you believe that auditors and federal bank regulators will still exist when you want to trade that gold for land, milled corn, and potentially a few wives, however if you are already betting against the U.S. Dollar, I am not certain why you have such faith in the governmental and banking systems that oversee that same dollar. Just a hunch, but those people are probably going to stop coming to work when their paycheck is worthless and angry mobs have camped out in front of their offices. I am glad I got that out of my system. It has been bothering me for a while since I actually do think owning metals can be a fun and profitable experience, but Gold Line is just trying to play on people's fear of uncertainty, not their unbridled greed like a truly responsible brokerage would.
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While My Guitar Gently Weeps	[Mar. 15th, 2011\|04:26 pm]
Some time ago I rekindled my on again, off again relationship with Beatles Rock Band. I have always loved the Beatles and even as an adult and young professional the opportunity to pretend that I am playing on-stage with John, Paul, George, and Ringo is too good to pass up. However no matter how cool I feel pretending that I am the fifth Beatle, it does not change the fact that I cannot sing, I am unable to understand rhythm well enough to play drums and I have the hand-eye coordination of a toddler, making guitar a frustrating task that is more likely to cause me to fall over than make music. And so I play bass. In the Rock Band world I am Paul McCartney with laryngitis. However I have also never owned a gaming console, and so my enjoyment of this game is entirely dependent on being around other people who own it. And so when I get the chance, I play bass for a really long time. It is awesome. It is even more awesome when we play the same songs over and over again to try to get some sort of trophy that had nothing to do with awesome bass talent, so I really learn a few songs. I will of course not remember them when I try to play again in a few months. One thing that makes Rock Band a really awesome party game is that it has stuff for up to six people to do and even if you are not playing, unless your friends are just terrible the music is fun and the amount of intoxicated singing is not really much more than at a normal party. I think there should be more party games like Rock Band and so I present my suggestions for party games: 1. Juke Box Hero So we've all been to bars with jukeboxes and everyone likes the old timey Fonz feel they get from using one, but up to now jukeboxes have lacked organized competition. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of informal competition in the world of juking as anyone who has ever attempted to use a jukebox in a strange bar can attest, but so far no one has kept score and frankly that is a shame. To remedy this, I propose Jukebox Hero. The point of the game will be to play through your play list first, or to accomplish some goal like playing through an entire concept album uninterrupted. Players can earn coins by winning standard bar games, like betting on trivia, drinking really fast or a shocking amount, or just plain old bar fighting for quarters. The more coins you have, the better your chances of winning. Fun Fact: You are not legally allowed to print the word jukebox on the internet without including this picture. 2. Bob Dylan Rock Band Rock Band, in most of its incarnations, is an awesome game. However, unless one of your friends is a really good singer or a prolific drunkard, finding someone willing to do vocals can sometimes pose a challenge. Usual objections such as "I can't sing" or "I don't know the words/English language" or "I had my vocal cords surgically removed" no longer hold water. Bob Dylan Rock Band is truly the people's game. The multi-talented Mr. Dylan recorded music with literally no care to basics such as pitch, classical theory of music, or English syntax and therefore no one has an excuse not to sing like a recording legend. Additionally, the singer can always break into an unpracticed harmonica solo any time they really can't figure out what they are supposed to do. I know that there are some Bob Dylan songs available for Rock Band and they are among my favorites to perform. Because I can. He doesn't look like he knows what he is supposed to be doing, so I doubt he has many expectations for you. 3. Marching Band Another common and well placed objection to the Rock Band format is that it can only really accommodate up to six people at a time, and for those of us who have more than five friends, this is awkward at best. How do you decide who gets to play and how often you have to rotate parts so someone isn't stuck playing bass the entire night? Marching Band Hero solves that problem by having more instrumental parts than you can possibly fill among your party guests. Allowing for up to 76 trombones, 110 cornets, and more reed and percussion instruments than you can count. Of course this game has a limited selection of music, mostly patriotic tunes and military anthems, but no one will be left out. Comes with a free War Bond. You do not have enough friends to warrant an aerial photo. No one does. 4. Chant Hero The Guitar Hero games and their progeny have brought back to public notice musical acts and songs that had begun to fade from collective memory. It is time to apply this resurrection power to a musical phenomenon that many have forgotten ever had a hold over this country: Gregorian Chant. This centuries old musical form had long been the province of monks, making public appearances only in particularly boring church related sequences of movies and t.v. But in 1998 the United States could not get enough of Chant, an album of one hour of Gregorian monks doing what they do best. The album went triple platinum in the US and sold six million copies world wide. If the American music gaming audience can rekindle a fondness for Barracuda, surely catchy songs such as Ave Mundi Spes Maria and Media Vita In Morte Sumus deserve a second chance to capture our imaginations. Besides, haven't you always found yourself drunkenly reciting Verbum Caro Factum Est in the cab on the way home anyway? This guy knows what I'm talking about!
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Laws are a different thing here in the north	[Jan. 30th, 2011\|11:55 pm]
Everyone knows that if you want to get laws passed you have to give them cool names. That's why we have the USAPATRIOT Act instead of the 9/11 Mass Panic Act or the No Child Left Behind as opposed to Making School Suck Worse. It seems that some members of the Maine Legislature did not get that memo. Of the 211 bills currently pending, the following are the strangest named or seek to accomplish something that could be better sold through marketing rhetoric. 1. LD 11: An Act to Regulate the Keeping of Wolf Hybrids This law sounds far more exciting than it is. While you are probably imagining something like this: The act is actually more concerned with things that look like this: This is less Lon Cheney and more... well... puppies. The purpose of the legislation is to create a licensing system for breeders of wolf-dog hybrids to replace the current registration system, however the title sounds significantly more like Senator Kelly's Mutant Registration Act than an act to keep track of slightly less predictable puppies. 2. LD 25: An Act To Allow the Registration of a Bus as an Antique Vehicle This bill should be more properly titled the Make Hippies Feel Old Act as its primary purpose seems to be to allow VW Minibuses over 25 years old to be registered as antique cars. LD 25 will also allow young people to remember a time when complex pieces of machinery were power by the combustion engine and the combustion of marijuana. Ultimately this will afford special status to vehicles from an age when this was an acceptable way to get to work: Oh who are we kidding. No one who drove that ever had a job that wasn't Grateful Dead groupie. 3. LD 77: An Act To Include the Study of Franco-American History in the System of Learning Results We have a lot of French people in Maine, so it is not surprising that there would be a law with this title, however I choose to interpret this differently. I believe that this bill will require school children to master a knowledge of the effect of SpaghettiOs on US history to graduate. I trust the state legislature has a good reason for such an arbitrary requirement. Surely there is a career skill in that somewhere. Fig. 1: A SpaghettiOs historian 4. LD 101: An Act To Institute a Snaring Program for Coyotes If television is to be believed, coyotes are pretty good at snaring themselves, but why take chances? Unfortunately this bill has been filed as a "concept draft" meaning that someone wanted to secure this sweet bill title but didn't actually have any legislation ready to put in it when the deadline came, so that will come later. Nonetheless, I have my guess as to who sumbited this one. Rep. R. Runner (D-Portland). When asked for comment he replied "beep-beep". 5. LD 126: An Act To Allow a Person with One Arm To Possess Certain Kinds of Prohibited Knives This is probably the most intriguing title of all of the bills presented so far. Apparently even though God did not grant these people the right to bear arms, the State of Maine will see to it that they do. Or perhaps the legislature is simply confused about the recent casino referendum and believes that the people of the state want to legalize literal one armed bandits. Or maybe they just felt sorry for this guy. 6. LD 158: An Act To Improve Public Understanding in the Rulemaking of Certain Departments The title of this act illuminates several problems with government. First of all, it is well known that the rulemaking ability of public agencies is confusing, complex, and frustrating. This act does not improve that. It simply gives the public a better idea of how confusing, complex and frustrating it can be. The second major issue with it is that it only covers "certain agencies" meaning that the public will be left in the dark as to the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the rest of the state's agencies. So there it is, the six most strikingly named pieces of legislation in the Maine Legislature. Let's see which ones become equally oddly named laws.
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Adeventures in SPAM IV: A New Junk Mail Filter	[Jan. 12th, 2011\|01:40 am]
Yes, it has been a long time since I took this blog seriously. Like months in fact. Yes, everytime I want to trick my readers into coming back after these walkabouts I do one of these SPAM posts. And you know what? These are the most popular thing I post. Okay so here is my attempt to restart a clearly futile enterprise. Also stay tuned after the featured program for a special announcement. I present the top five SPAM subject lines and my response to them: 1. GET FDA APPROVED MEDS FROM A US LICENSED PHARMACY This seems like sound advice, especially considering the source. Most SPAM seems to want me to buy my medications from them in some type of "it fell off the truck" style scheme or to buy some less well known versions of prescription pharmaceuticals. But these kind people want me to know that going to a licensed pharmacy for tested drugs is the better way. Thank you for looking out for my health. Also, if you are encouraging people not to buy drugs off the internet, how do you stay in business? 2. A Better Bible For Today's Children Bible 4G seems to have been released, which is great considering they have been promising it for well over 1000 years. This 4G take on the Holy Bible will allow you to worship God while posting your favorite things about Deuteronomy to its proprietary social networking tools such as Facebook of Life and MySavior. Not sure of the correct dowry price for a virginal but talkative youngest daughter? When is it okay to smite a helpless tree? There's an App for that! The new Bible's app store allows you to find and download apps that guide you to the correct justification for almost any behavior. Lastly, the new "rapture mode" feature also allows you to safely use this Bible during air travel, whether by plane or otherwise. Look for the Bible 4G at churches. Bible 4G is a licensed product of Bible Inc. God coverage may not be available in all areas. See religious service provider for details. Salvation valid with new two year agreement. 3. Stop Being a Nervous Wreck I am not trying to be! I swear. I just... well... err... Now you've put me on the spot and I can't think of what to say. Umm... Stop looking at me like that, this is hard! I am doing my best, but I can't think under this kind of pressure. 4. Your Package is set to grow On the surface this seems like a completely reasonable SPAM subject header attempting to sell me some sort of East Asian version of Viagra, but the more I think about this, the more I realize that this could be advertising any number of awesome possibilities. For instance, the author of this email could be offering me an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an investment opportunity and my financial package could grow. Similarly it is possible that my benefits package will grow over the time that I am invested. But these are unlikely to pan out, so I must conclude that the author is shipping me Sea Monkeys and when I receive the package and add water I will enjoy watching the brine shrimp grow. So seriously, if you are reading this, hurry up with the Sea Monkeys. 5. Affordable Forklifts to Fit Any Workload People who know me know that I often complain that if only forklifts were more affordable I would get so much more heavy lifting done. Hell, if I had a forklift I would never lift anything manually again. Need to offload some bricks? No problem, I have a forklift! Dropped a handkerchief? Milady, I will return it to you with this forklift! Sir Applethorpe has thrown down a gauntlet for a duel? Not only will I pick it up with my forklift, but it is forklift jousting for honor! And if these forklifts are as affordable as they say, I could get two and have a formal and everyday forklift. Also I would finally have a use for this sign I bought: 6. COBRA Is Expensive But You Have Other Options COBRA is expensive. The constant botched operations, the extensive martial arts and tactical training that never seems to help us win in battle against the G.I. Joes, and the vast amounts of money that we give to Destro for a series of failed super weapons really starts to add up. Frankly if it weren't for the Bush tax cuts we would probably just have to disband COBRA entirely or at least seriously cut back on our recruitment efforts. 7. Party On With Our Wonder Pills I hate it when Timothy Leary adds me to his address book. Look, we've talked about this. The Saturday night rave is fun and I know I get a little crazy, but during the week I have to be mister nine to five and I can't have you showing up in my email talking about stuff like this. My boss could be looking over my shoulder. But since we're here, I'll take three purples with the Batman symbol on them and just for fun a green in the shape of the Lucky Charms leprechaun. 8. Lucky You. You Are Going To Vegas In what way does this make me lucky? Usually unexpected trips to Vegas end poorly. And I note that I am not being given a choice in this matter. In fact I am beginning to suspect that the purposely non-exclamatory nature of the phrase "Lucky you." may be intended to imply sarcasm. In fact I am pretty sure this has something to do with the loan sharks I ran out on that one time. What happens in Vegas gets you dragged back to Vegas in the trunk of a car. The ads could have been a bit more explicit on this point. Even in the best case scenario this phrase is being uttered by this guy: Let's face it, this is not a lot more comforting. 9. Live Easier With Diabetes Where is Wilfred Brimley when I need him? Clearly someone needs to talk some sense into this fool about the 'beetus. Stabbing myself in the finger several times a day to check my blood sugar does not sound easier, and last I checked there wasn't some sort of blood sugar based subsidy that would make this worthwhile or even less crippling expensive and illness to contract. Is diabetes recruiting or something? Is this their version of "See the World. Join the Army"? It seems like given the American diet that diabetes would be swamped with volunteers and not need to be making these sort of recruiting pitches. I WANT YOU! to test your blood sugar with Liberty Medical supplies. 10. Grab 16,000 Shed Plans Inside For what earthly reason would I ever need 16,000 shed plans? That is probably 15,999 more sheds than I will ever want to have built and likely 16,000 more than I will ever personally build. Furthermore, how different are these sheds that I need individual blue prints of 16,000 different types? Surely I should be able to deduce the needed modifications for any shed needs I would have after mastering the basic shed concept. This seems like more of a burden than an opportunity and so I resolve to live the rest of my life blissfully unaware of the 16,000 varieties of shed. Special Announcement: Coming Soon! A new blog with a regular theme and focus and who knows maybe even regular updates. The project is called I Am Not A Doctor and as the name implies it will focus on the fact that neither I, nor most of the rest of the internet are trained medical professionals. I am hoping to have it up and running soon and I will let you know when it is up.
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