I'll turn your nuts for $38 an hour

Ahh...the pleasures of manual labor. For the past 3 days, I've been on-site constructing a HUGE FRIGGIN LASER (HFL) that will eventually be amplified by our OX COCK LASER OSCILLATOR (OCLO). I always love these days. Research design on a budget means overly simplistic design that weighs 5 tons and requires $28bil in allocated funds for stainless steel socket head cap screws. The cool thing about it is that you can either 1)Zone out if you're ass tired or 2)Be completely contemplative or 3)Play Teamster all day. The only things you have to worry about are the quality of your work (easy thanks to simplistic design) and making sure no one gets hurt. Many thanks to the inventors of both the impact wrench and the 2-way ratchet.

Mmm, I smell delicious. My stink is the combination of epoxy floor grout, denatured alcohol, cutting oil, B.O., and climbing shoes. I'm going to get all the ladies tonight in Old Town.

THEY STOLE MY IDEA

But made it ROCK!


Of course my idea still retained the functionality of a toaster.

News.com did a wonderful piece on how far some people have gone to mod their computer. Most are based off of the Via "mini" motherboard. If you rifle through the images, you'll see one guy who turned a toy Millenium Falcon into a computer.

A Debate: Christmas Sprawl

Other people my age have told me my observation is wrong, but it has seemed to me that stores keep pushing forward the date in which they bust out their Christmas decorations. I saw many stores start selling Holiday type paraphenalia after the "Back To School" rush. September people? Come on.

To me, it seems almost like watering down the spirit of the holiday. I am no marketer, but this is how the Christmas Equation works.

• Holiday spirit creates a warm fuzzy for most people
• People are more willing to buy things when they are happy
• People want to get Holiday shopping out of the way early
• Ergo, push the warm fuzzy earlier and in increments to get people to spend more and shop earlier

But on the non-material side of the house, this incremental approach of Christmas imagery creates people to think about the other feelings that Christmas produces (like closeness to family/friends, good will towards man, etc) earlier as well. So instead of having a month of relatively high levels of these feelings, it can be argued you get 4 months of only somewhat heightened levels of feelings (but building up towards the end of course).

I mean c'mon. It's not like Christmas is any where near the coolness of Halloween.

7 Beers and All Faith In Humanity Is Lost

Now that I have an easy means of recording my thoughts all the time, including when I am drunk, it turns out that I'm a pretty cynical drunk. Here are some snippets a recent diatribe in the notes section of my Palm phone:

"I've been trying to maintain that humanity as a whole is good and should be
fought for, developed, and aided in any way possible."

"The only interest I've observed is self interest. People are asking less of
"what can I do for the common good," and instead are asking "How can I screw the
other guy for my personal gain.

The comments after that were a bit more caustic and stuff I generally don't accept as being true, but it is still funny to see what was going through my head whilest drunk off my rocker.

Here is a tidbit thanks to dictionary.com:

Word History: A cynic may be pardoned for thinking that this is a dog's life. The Greek word kunikos, from which cynic comes, was originally an adjective meaning “doglike,” from kun, “dog.” The word was probably applied to the Cynic philosophers because of the nickname kun given to Diogenes of Sinope, the prototypical Cynic. He is reported to have been seen barking in public, urinating on the leg of a table, and masturbating on the street. The first use of the word recorded in English, in a work published from 1547 to 1564, is in the plural for members of this philosophical sect. In 1596 we find the first instance of cynic meaning “faultfinder,” a sense that was to develop into our modern sense. The meaning “faultfinder” came naturally from the behavior of countless Cynics who in their pursuit of virtue pointed out the flaws in others. Such faultfinding could lead quite naturally to the belief associated with cynics of today that selfishness determines human behavior.

Ahh, those were the days....able to walk through town and masturbate on the street without recourse.

$5 Tax on The Freakishly Tall

I came to the realization a few weeks ago that the newest item in my wardrobe is well over 2yrs old, and it was a gift. The t-shirt reads "Are you looking at my nuts?" and has a picture of two bolts underneath. After coming to this realization, I scanned my closet and started to take inventory of when I got each item of clothing in there. It was absolutely pathetic.

Some of the highlights:

• Only pair of tennis/running shoes: Purchased Summer 2000
• Only pair of hiking boots: Purchased Spring 1996
• Only pair of dress shoes: Handed down to me in 1997
• Newest T-Shirt purchased by yours-truly: Summer 2002
• Oldest T-Shirt still in regular circulation: Fall 1996
• Newest Sweater: Fall 2001
• Newest pair of work khakis: Summer 1998
• Newest pair of casual khakis: Spring 2002

As you can see, I'm not really an avid clothes shopper. But this time/item inventory made me realize I need some new threads. So I journeyed out into the wilderness, known to the feminine species as the "mall," looking for a few critical wardrobe items that needed to be updated.

Shopping has never been my style, mainly due to the fact that the industry has placed me in their freak category, and therefore make no attempt to have variations to match my frame. Apparently, the average consumer above 6'2" has a waistline of 36+, and shoulders of a linebacker. To get a t-shirt with normal length (proportional to one's body), I gotta get a large->x-large. The drawback here is that the shoulder seam falls somewhere low to mid-bicep, making me wish that I had taken those steroid in gym class early in life.

Eddie Bauer fortunately has a solution to this: Tall sizes. TADA! Congrats on that revelation. This being the case, I headed there for my first acquisition. Found something, tried it on, fit great, right length, went to check out and WAM!... $5 extra for tall sizes. Knowing a little about manufacturing and economics, I came to terms with it.

"$5 FOR BEING A FREAK?! What are people, sadists?!? Isn't it bad enough that everyone in the architechture business is out to break our foreheads? Car makers forcing us to buy big cars? Levi Strauss making us buy 38"W jeans when we wear a 32"? FIVE DOLLARS YOU SAY!?!?"

"Do you take credit?"

Iraqi Casualties and How Little We Hear About Them

Economist.com The Iraqi war

This is only the 2nd article I've seen published during the war on the loss of life in Iraq. In my opinion, Iraqi casualty figures is some pretty powerful data for or against the war. I started poking around once I heard on NPR that there were sites out there taking journalistic numbers ("10 dead today in a car bomb" type data) and converting them into casualty data. I said to myself "yea, I bet that's accurate." One site had a conservative estimate at the time of 4,000 civilian lives lost, where another one counted as high as 10,000. This new report says somewhere around 15,000, and is argued to be conservative because the total amount of deaths is rarely recorded (some die on the way to or at the hospital, some are missed by reporting agency, etc.).

These sites exist because the Pentagon's position on foreign casualties is that it's not their responsibility to keep those numbers. It is up to the leaders of that foreign body to account for their dead. In an invasion setting, it would make sense not to keep count, mainly due to the fact that you simply can't identify with 100% certainty that the person you just shot/bombed was carrying a gun and had the intent to kill you, therefore you don't know if they were a civilian or not. You also can't tell which people insurgents were using as human shields.

But as the invasion transformed into an occupation/rebuilding effort, a system should( or should have) been developed. How many more enemies are we making in our efforts to free Iraq. The whole model for success is that once people get a taste of freedom, they will forgive that U.S. bombs killed their parents when they were children (or vice versa). The U.S. is not the only society that holds retribution and vengeance in such high esteem.

Making enemies? Sure! When the U.S. first set out on this mission, they said we were going to 1) Oust Saddam, 2) Destroy his stockpiles of WMDs, 3) free the iraqi people. (Listed in order of priority of course). So a country came into mine, concerned about their own freedom (threat of WMDs), arrested my maniacal dictator, brought their ongoing war to my homeland, and killed many of my good countrymen, and were completely wrong about the threat to their country. But they DID give me freedom and secured it by killing all the evil people who would poison my freedom.

The U.S. is going to be there for a looooong time, because if Iraq were to fall back into corruption....you'd have an entire nation wanting revenge.

This Just In: I'm Not Adopted

I've been joking with my parents for a while now that I was adopted. This view was based on the grounds that I am the only one in my direct family who has an immune disorder, a heart defect, an IQ lower than 182, and has not needed braces or glasses...until now.

I was filled in about my Parishhood by my dentist. I asked him about the 0.5mm gap between my top and bottom front teeth when I bite down, and he soon discovered that only about 4 teeth were touching when I bit down. Taking into account confusion behind my lineage, he put it to me softly. "Holy Crap! How do you eat?! You're going to need braces if you want to eat normally." Blast.

An interesting factoid I learned during this visit: Sipping sugary drinks such as coffee and soda over a 20+ minute period is HORRIBLE for your teeth. When sugars mix with saliva, the PH of your mouth decreases (making the mix acidic) and has a certain fall off time to get back to a neutral PH. Sipping maintains this acidic PH in your mouth and eats away at your teeth. Solutions for me: 1) Inject Mt. Dew intravenesly, 2) Splash hot morning coffee in my face to take in caffeine transdermally, and 3) Use Expresso Shots instead of Visene to moisturize eyes.

Circumcising my Prelude

Dear Abby,
My car has lost a little something since I replaced its muffler yesterday. What is the matter? Is it something I said?

~Missing That Growling In My Pants

No, seriously. For the past, oh, year, I've been driving around with a pretty sizeable hole in the pipe that runs between the catalytic converter and the muffler. Sizeable enough to change the sound of my car from normal rice-burner status to around "MY CAR PEENER IS TWICE THE DIAMETER OF YOUR CAR PEENER....I can pass grapefruits through my car-peen." Well, may be not that big.

Well, I finally take the curs-ed car to get it inspected, and sure enough it fails. Turns out, that hole corroded to twice the size (probably from the constricting abilities of the muffler to not allow any hot carcinogenic evil to pass) than I remember. So deciding to NOT take it to Fairfax Honda (they blow liquid ass btw), I get a new one for half the price, and makes it sound like a normal Honda. How the hell am I going to pick up chicks with a wimpy sounding muffler AND a small penis?

May be they sell Muffler pumps at MVC.

Homicidal Dorkdom: A Tribute To November

November is going to be a tough month...lots of things to kill these next few weeks according to my trusty PDA-Phone/death scheduler.

Hmm, let's take a look shall we?
Nov 2: Killzone (PS2) - Isolated human colony gets angry for being isolated and mutated. They make a sizeable space naval fleet out of sticks and twine and set out for revenge.
Nov 15: Metroid Prime: Echoes (GC) - Loner, hot, single, galactic bounty hunter manages to get herself into trouble AGAIN by AGAIN losing all of her power suits abilities that will need to be collected, lest the universe be destroyed (or she's self-conscious about her ass just not looking right without her Varia Suit upgrade). Obtained key item "Wave Purse"
Nov 16: Half-Life 2 (PC) - "Fleshy headed mutant, are you friendly?" A lot of mutants this month. This time you're a scientist who has had it up to, uhm, ^^^Here^^^, with mutants and you want to kill them all with your ability to perform multivariable non-linear Fourier/LaPlace Transforms in your head.
Nov 17: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2) - {Original Title: MGS 3: Answering "What the Fuck Was I, Hideo Kojima, Smoking When I Made MGS2?" referred to in development as MGS3:WFWIHKSWIMMGS2 for short} I've got between now the 9th and the 17th to ram the plot of MGS2 into Mikey's stomach.

Not to mention that for my birthday (IN JUNE), I received Nightshade (From Joe), and Time Crisis 3 (From Mike), which I haven't played because the area of the world I live in can not support Playstation 2 crops due to it's high concentration of BullShitanium in the soil.

But it seems like I'm missing something here....something.....hmmm. November. Wyclef coming back in November? No. Oh yea!

HALO FUCKING 2!!!!

Ok, so I was fucking with you. Joe and I pre-ordered our copies of Halo 2 Limited Edition from EB Games in Fair Oaks. Everywhere halo was being sold, stores had a "Midnight Madness" event the Midnight of Nov 9th. I must say I am truly proud to have played a part in this congregation of social outcasts (present company not excluded). Mike says Joe and my obsession of all things Halo pales in comparison to his obsession with video games, and I think, now that I've seen this crowd, must be somewhat cathartic to him. "I'm bad, but look at these guys." I hate judging people, but goddamn people! Every other person in line was either 1) Playing Tetris on their GameBoy Advance, 2) Playing Tetris on their cell phone or 3) Making phone calls to arrange a post Midnight Madness LAN party.

I mean, c'mon people, we're at least waiting until Thanksgiving to have our first Halo 2 LAN party.

BATMAN?!!? Batman?

Could somebody tell me WHAT kind of a world we live in, where a MAN dressed up as a BAT, get's all of my press?

THIS BLOG NEEDS AN ENIMA!!