Friday night off the hook

What can I say I'm a wild man.

Oldie but goodie

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy and the JREF gives us a speech he wrote almost five years back:

I know a place where the Sun never sets.

It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon. It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down on there day and night, 24 hours a day — well, the Moon’s day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours down there 708 hours a day.

I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point. This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.

I know a place where the temperature is 15 million degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic dot. That place is the core of the Sun.

I know a place where the magnetic fields would rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star, a magnetar.

I know a place where life began billions of years ago. That place is here, the Earth.

I know these places because I’m a scientist.

It goes on, read the whole thing, it's great.

angry teddy bear

Neat.

my belt hat

Let me show you it

makin' love

Did we dress up like whores? Check! Check! Check!

makin' love

Did we dress like whores? Check!

talky tacky

Really

does anyone understand how happy I was when I finally got my tiny plastic sword? anyone?

Tonights poison

Last night

Some sirens went screaming past the house then stopped a block away, so I suited up and went to see what was happenin, with the trusty cam in tow. I ended up getting up to a cop setting up flares who wouldn't let me go in further, and said it was a fatal collision. I felt bad for poking around and just took a shaky pic of the cop.
**Update: I found this story. What a bummer. There's two guys who roll around my neighborhood on electric chairs, one that wears an American Flag helmet and helps around the church my kid goes to, and one that has no legs who I've only seen a few times. Of course, it could be someone else. But man, what a bummer. Who thinks "I'll go for a walk. I'll probably die."
On the walk home I saw some kind of rodent in the road. It would sit very still until I lifted the cam, then run slowly off in a kind of determined waddle. If I got in front of it, it would stop, then toddle away again as soon as I hit focus. I tired of him quickly. By the way, what the fuck is this thing?

Happy Friday the 13th

you superstitious fuckers. I'm having so-so luck today. I have a cold, but I don't have to drive to fucking OC, so that's good. My cookies came out good. Banana-pecan, they taste like little round banana breads. Some have a little baking soda-y tang, which is bad luck, or bad stirring.
I haven't been killed yet, so that's either good or bad luck, depending on how you look at it.

in a slightly different direction...

I did this years ago...my friend posted it to his myspace profile, i'd forgotten about it. If I may say so myself: awesome. A little shadow behind the smurf woulda been good tho (Use transparency selection in the layers palette for the initial mask cutting out the smurf, then add the transparency of the smurf itself by creating a new layer, filling the selection you have with black, painting the smurf shape in there, selecting the new black shape, create new layer, select black shape's transparency (Command-click the palette icon), and choosing Layer>Layer Mask> Hide selection.
Then set your brush to a soft setting, blend mode Multiply, Opacity 30% or so. Enjoy!

Happy Birthday Darwin

Charles Darwin, b. 2/12/1809 d. 4/19/1882
Here's raising a pint to the greatest idea conceived by the mind of man.
Yes, he wasn't the only guy to come up with the idea, and current science would not be comprehensible at first glance to the man. But we as a species would not be wherever we are now without Darwin's rigorous, detailed, meticulous work. Truly a historical giant.

Cal Berkeley's "Understanding Evolution" page
I slept in a park in Berekeley when I was a teen. And spare-changed for a Fat Slice.

PBS's Evolution resource page
I watched "Judgement Day" last night, about the Dover trial. It was awesome and recommended. You can watch the whole thing online at that link. Do it.

Here's the complete text of The Voyage of the Beagle, one of the works that made Darwin famous in his time.

Oh yeah, here's pretty much everything else he ever wrote, including Origin.

I'm going to take time through the day to think about the man, the ideas, and the results. If you've never looked into his work, I'd recommend it, again. To me, he's one of the pillars of the amazing trip humanity, and life, has been on. These things drive me to honor life, to love the time I have, and try to do everything I can with it.

holytaco

one of my favorite stupid sites.

esurance commercial, I hate you

So some esurance commercial comes on. it's a guy singing about how he gets animated about esurance, with a guitar. Get it? He's playing off how the commercials are animated, Genndy Tartakovsky-style.
I want to kill that commercial. I wish I was a D&D type magic-user who could cast spells reanimating the dead, or creating golems of inanimate materials (I realize that's clerics, but I also know you're a fucking geek now, so deal with that little nugget, you bastards), just so I could animate that commercial, and then kill it to death with my hands. I want to feel the life drain out of that horrible fucking abortion of a commercial's veins and hear its sputtering last breath. esurance is trying to cultivate this cooler-than-thou bullshit image. I know how bad they really suck. They tripled my rates after someone ran into me, and every time I see their spy-chick's fake perky boobies, I think to myself "Why can't the villains win? Just this once?"
Commercial, I hate you.

drinky crow show moment

from the pilot:
Uncle Gabby: "Let me clear something up for you...if it's horrible, it's exists. If it's beautiful, you're imagining it."

I hardly even know her

I started playing poker again online, and I suck. I'm even watching it on TV. But I just blow. My brain is not thinking right for whatever reason. My brain is not geared for poker.
I'd like my friends to come over and play with me, still. Perhaps this weekend instead of a mini-scrabblethon. Some kind of game. I need to sit around a table with drinks and talk shit. It's time.

dinner fail

Tonight i decided i'd avoid making meat and cook a pasta dish for me and des. i found a nice looking recipe at my favorite site for arugula pesto. Fantastic. I gathered the ingredients. Roasted the garlic. Roasted walnuts. The pic in the link makes it look all clean and white, while mine ended up being green, grassy, and too intense (raw garlic). Alternate bites would yield alternate results...first a tasty chew, then essence of lawn clippings.



There's Desi chowing down on my green fiasco. Later she would complain of intestinal pain, and I blame myself. I have created death pesto, which attracted Tacky the Death Cat to creep up on Des in that pic. He was about to harvest her soul. I fended him off with a couch cushion and a hissing noise. Weak-ass Death Cat.

Post mortem: I believe my main failure was in the amount and kind of arugula I added. I hyper-compressed the cupfuls, so it was likely too much. The recipe called for arugula leaves, and I left the stems on. That would explain the woody/grassy taste of the pesto. The garlic intensity was pretty clear cut. I have to get a better idea of what a "clove" constitutes. I bet I had a couple that were too big, so when I roasted them, they didn't roast all the way through and as a result were super-intense. I was supposed to add a half-clove of raw garlic for a little kick, and instead added the equivalent of 4 cloves.

Overall, I'd recommend it, with the caveats of removing the damn stems and roasting the garlic fully. I was wondering what it would taste like if the arugula leaves were blanched in boiling water as well. I'll report.

tits and boobies

desi said if i wanted more hits i had to post tits and boobies

i was emo

before emo was emo. pre-emo?

aloneness

i think some people hear an echo of death coming, and realize they're going to be alone when it happens. and then they drive everyone off. it's not easy to do, you fight yourself, you try to stay close even as you push.
it's not a pleasant thing to see, or do.

Nicely done

My hamster. Let me show you it.

weedsnays lurk

Iron & Wine has some amazing songs, and you should just listen to them at random. This one makes me at times joyous and grieving...it makes me remember important things too, like you can't read someone else's mind and know what they're going through. Sometimes you have to believe they're good, which you believed before, and they have a reason for doing what they're doing, and take it as it comes. Remember, all of this passes.

This is only an audio track. That's why I made it so small.
Iron & Wine
The Trapeze Swinger
Such Great Heights Single

---

Please, remember me
Happily
By the rosebush laughing
With bruises on my chin
The time when
We counted every black car passing
Your house beneath the hill
And up until
Someone caught us in the kitchen
With maps, a mountain range,
A piggy bank
A vision too removed to mention
But

Please, remember me
Fondly
I heard from someone you're still pretty
And then
They went on to say
That the pearly gates
Had some eloquent graffiti
Like 'We'll meet again'
And 'Fuck the man'
And 'Tell my mother not to worry'
And angels with their gray
Handshakes
Were always done in such a hurry
And

Please, remember me
At Halloween
Making fools of all the neighbors
Our faces painted white
By midnight
We'd forgotten one another
And when the morning came
I was ashamed
Only now it seems so silly
That season left the world
And then returned
And now you're lit up by the city
So

Please, remember me
Mistakenly
In the window of the tallest tower call
Then pass us by
But much too high
To see the empty road at happy hour
Leave and resonate
Just like the gates
Around the holy kingdom
With words like 'Lost and Found' and 'Don't Look Down'
And 'Someone Save Temptation'
And

Please, remember me
As in the dream
We had as rug-burned babies
Among the fallen trees
And fast asleep
Aside the lions and the ladies
That called you what you like
And even might
Give a gift for your behavior
A fleeting chance to see
A trapeze
Swing as high as any savior
But

Please, remember me
My misery
And how it lost me all I wanted
Those dogs that love the rain
And chasing trains
The colored birds above there running
In circles round the well
And where it spells
On the wall behind St. Peter's
So bright with cinder gray
And spray paint
'Who the hell can see forever?'
And

Please, remember me
Seldomly
In the car behind the carnival
My hand between your knees
You turn from me
And said 'The trapeze act was wonderful
But never meant to last'
The clown that passed
Saw me just come up with anger
When it filled with circus dogs
The parking lot
Had an element of danger
So

Please, remember me
Finally
And all my uphill clawing
My dear
But if i make
The pearly gates
Do my best to make a drawing
Of G-d and Lucifer
A boy and girl
An angel kissin on a sinner
A monkey and a man
A marching band
All around the frightened trapeze swingers

Mike Nelson: A preretrospective preamble

Mike Nelson former writer and star of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, currently engaged in Rifftrax.com, has vowed to eat nothing but bacon for a month. Literally, nothing at all but bacon.

I have to admit, I'm curious as to what a month-long bacon-binge BM looks like. I bet it looks like bacon.

As a caveat, he's claiming he'll drink beer, wine, and martinis as well. So it could be horrifying bender-based bacon-binge BM's. Wow. Mike, you're too good for this world, we'll miss you. The bacon-based heart explosion should be spectacular, though. According to my calculations, it should cover most of the southwest in a layer of pig parts, Mike parts, and hilarity.