Four or five years ago, the temperature on Oktoberfest weekend was in the 70s or 80s. Tara and I were working in the funnel cake booth and I eventually ended up telling her to take a break to cool off. We still joke about me being the only person who’s ever “kicked her out” of an event.
The temperature today was in the 50s with a nearly constant rain. We were taking a break from setting up for tomorrow’s festival when I started shivering. Mark “kicked me out” to go warm up.
It seems that there’s some truth to the notion that what goes around comes around. What we need now is to close the circle and get Tara to “kick Mark out” of something!
All posts by dividingbyzero
Getting out the Vote
One of the downsides to living in the DC area is that you get inundated with political ads pretty much nonstop. And during an election year, it just gets worse. The barrage of ads is bad enough, but making it worse is that the ads contain little of any substance.
I ran into Zaphod’s campaign ad last year, shortly after the Hitchhiker movie came out on DVD. The movie’s not as good as the original BBC series, but that’s OK. I figure Zaphod’s a better choice than some of the other jokers who are running for office. His campaign ad is certainly no less informative.
Visual Enhancements
Folks have been telling me lately that the way to get more visitors to your web site is to add some eye candy. I really don’t understand why that would make a difference, but who am I to argue?
So first off, here’s some eye candy.
And then, for those who want something a bit more raw, here’s some eye candy with nothing on.
I have no idea why this would draw more people to the site, but if you find this sort of stuff appealing, please let me know!
Who needs to count sheep?
There was an ad on the radio a couple days ago for a revolutionary new prescription sleep aid; the latest in a long line of sleep aids claiming to be “non-addictive and non-habit forming.” (Believe that and I’ve got some ocean-front property in Arizona you might be interested in.) At the end of the commercial came the usual list of possible side-effects that make the cure sound worse than the disease. Midway through the list was one that really caught my attention.
May cause drowsiness.
Isn’t that the entire point?
The Green Green Grass of Home
It didn’t rain much in July or August. As a result, the grass went dormant and didn’t need to be mowed. It’s at times like these, when the yard requires zero maintenance, that I feel like a lawn care genius.
September’s rainfall has been somewhat higher, with several inches in just the first week or so. The grass is growing again. Last week the grass in the backyard was deep enough that Wylie could hide by just laying down.
It rained some more over the weekend with the result that on Tuesday evening, I spent an hour in the backyard. It wasn’t intentional, I just couldn’t find my way back to the house.
I don’t feel like such a genius now.
The Rest of the Story
After reading yesterday’s tale of laundry day, SueP wrote to ask for “The Rest of the Story.”
I suppose the request makes sense. After all, the tale ends almost as soon as it starts. There’s a brief explanation of why water doesn’t burn, followed by the revelation of a washing machine full of clothes and water with smoke coming out of it.
Clearly the water is on fire! Given that this takes place at Blair’s house, you know there must be a story behind it. Maybe the inhabitants of Pluto, enraged at losing their status as a planet have declared war and set fire to the laundry as a first strike? Or maybe it’s something more mundane after all, but with all that setup, surely there’s at least a half-dozen fire trucks!
This is exciting! Sue was doubtless looking forward to reading the next paragraph (both my other readers probably were too), and when she scrolled down a little further, there it was: Nothing. Nothing at all.
With that lead-in, you can’t help wondering, what’s going on? How can he stop there?
It’s simple really. It’s not that I didn’t want to write more, it’s just that “the Rest of the Story” is quite anti-climatic.
My best guess is that I just overloaded the washing machine. Once I realized where the smoke was coming from, I took the sheets out and washed them along with a shirt and some towels that had been previously overlooked.
That’s pretty much it. No spaceship battles for Terry. Wylie didn’t get to fulfil his dream of riding in a fire truck. Nothing dramatic at all. I didn’t even get to write about the smoke detector going off!
Leaving it with smoke coming out was just more interesting.
Where there's smoke there's…Laundry?
Water is a most interesting substance. It forms the basis of life as we know it and can be used for cooking, cleaning, swimming or dumping on your younger brother.
Aside from dumping it on my brothers, one of the properties of water which I’ve always found interesting is that it’s composed of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Combine them and they form water; but separate them and they burn – leaving water as the only residue.
Given the tendency of its constituent elements to combine in a flash of flame, water seems an unlikely choice for extinguishing a fire, and yet that’s exactly what you use in most cases. (The most common exceptions being, of course, grease and electrical fires.)
The reason it’s safe to use water on most fires is that once they’re combined, the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms form a bond which requires a great deal of energy to break. In order for a fire to split water molecules back into individual atoms, the fire would have to be around 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the water in your water heater is generally only 140 degrees or so. Nowhere near the temperature required for the gases to dissociate and burn.
Knowing all that, perhaps I’m being something of an alarmist. But I can’t help thinking it might be cause for concern when midway through a load of laundry, smoke starts coming out of the washing machine.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
Avast ye skurvy dogs! Are y’not knowing what day this be? That’s right matey, t’day be Talk Like A Pirate Day! ‘Tis the one day out of the year when ye can talk like a pirate without being insane!
And don’t be fooled lest ye find yerself walking the plank! The genuine Talk Like A Pirate Day be celebrated on September 19.
And a hearty thank ye to Cap’n Dave Barry for shivering timbers nationwide by popularizing this event back in 2002!
And lest ya be taken for a lily-livered landlubber, sail over to Tom Smith’s island and download the “Talk Like A Pirate Day” song!
Some slightly more original excuses
Friends of mine are getting married on September 30th and unfortunately I can’t make it. The real reason is a prior commitment, but Chris and Karen both have somewhat warped senses of humor (this no doubt helps them put up with me) so I offered a list of reasons for my absence and left it up to them to choose which ones applied:
- I’m on the run from the law.
- Galactus has promised to spare the Earth provided that I become the new Silver Surfer.
- If I don’t act, V.I.K.I. and the NS-5s will impose their own brand of social order “for our own good.”
- My katra is currently on its way back to Vulcan.
- I have a prior commitment.
- Dom and I are scheduled to fly a job for the firm.
- I’m out hunting replicants.
- Jobe Smith is taking over cyberspace and must be stopped.
- The frakking toasters destroyed my home world and I’m busy protecting the last remnants of my people.
- Voldemort is growing stronger and Harry Potter must be protected!
- Boss Hogg is up to no good and I need to be available in case Daisy comes by for some help.
- I just entered the Federal Witness Protection Program.
Naturally I wish them all the best, but it’ll be fun to see how many of those references they can figure out and which one(s) they choose to accept. 🙂
Dinner and a floor show
One day last week Laura and I decided to go to Lone Star for dinner.
More specifically, it was Lone Star #4306. I don’t know why that would matter, but they seem to worry that people won’t know that bit of information. Neither the waitress nor the hostess told us the store number. They no doubt guessed – quite correctly – that we didn’t care about the store number. (Besides, how strange would it be if either of them greeted us with “Welcome to Lone Star #4306, the 4306th store in the chain”?) But the management (probably at the corporate office) compensated for that by programming the register to print the store number across the top of the check in the same size print as the name of the restaurant. It seems quite odd, but most managers seem to be odd in one way or another. But I digress…
It used to be that you could go to Lone Star (and this was the entire chain, not just #4306) and while you waited for your food, you could munch on peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. It leant a fun sort of folksy air to the place and made for some crunchiness as you walked to your table. That ended a couple years ago when the health department (I have no idea what level, but it does seem to be a national thing) declared that anything fun, folksy or crunchy was unhealthy and forced them to end the whole peanut thing. (This no doubt also made life a lot easier for the staff members who had to sweep up the peanut shells at the end of each day.)
Despite the lack of peanuts (or shells) we still enjoyed our dinner and halfway through the meal something most unexpected happened.
Lone Star has a Western theme to it and the background music is Country. The song playing right then was “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” and David Allan Coe was just about halfway through explaining how his friend Steve Goodman had ended up writing an extra verse for it, making it the perfect County and Western song when the music switched to Tracy Byrd’s “Watermelon Crawl.”
What happened next seemed like something from a musical, where one of the characters says something to someone and the next thing you know the know, the entire cast, plus all the extras in the background are suddenly singing and dancing as if it’s a perfectly common occurrence and the entire population spontaneously feels the need to sing. And just like the residents of one of those only-in-the-movies towns, the moment the music changed, the entire restaurant staff started dancing!
Bunny Sue Fu and others have told me that this is a common occurrence, but evidently I’ve never timed my dinners correctly. And just like the folks in those movies, the people working in that restaurant seemed to be enjoying themselves.
And then, just like in the movies, the moment the song ended, everyone went back to work.