I have gotten more comments in the last month on my post from ages ago on Ligers than I have on any other post. Its the equivalent of having someone dig on your grandma: she’s old, just let her be. Plus, in my case, she’s married, so that’s double yucky. Anyway, its special being the source for liger misinformation. And, Um, Dave? You really ticked people off. Congratulations on getting people to leave a swearing comment (which I deleted) and telling you where to go and what to do with yourself when you get there. I just wish that Ligers weren’t a man-made creature that has been dorked with and manipulated. Because if they were natural, then I could justify loving them for who they are. Right now I have to just have sympathy for their being pawns. Also, white tigers are manipulated and that makes me sad, too.
Category Archives: The Obvious
Lat-eral Damage
My latissimi dorsi are hugely sore. I have been playing Wii Boxing for the last three nights. Parts of my body that don’t understand exercise are being exercised by a video game system that I didn’t even know could work me out. Its the bomb.
Or in the words of Switchfoot, “This is the bomb that I’ve been waiting for.” I’m very, very glad to be sore. I need to exercise this sad frame and turn it into a fighting machine for my 31st birthday next month.
Dear NBC Olympic Editors
Hi, its me, Randy, I just wanted to drop you a line to say, “We don’t need any more Volleyball coverage,” and also, “Can you edit the BMX video down to more BMX and less announcer garbage?” Thanks. Because I love global athletic events as much as the next bipod, but I really, really don’t like the 5 minute commercial breaks and the 1.5 minute BMX races wrapped in 5 minutes of announcers with diarrhea of the mouth.
We don’t need to hear the announcers saying things like, “They really can’t afford mistakes like this in an event of this caliber.” Really? I had no idea. I thought that the Olympics were like kindergarden for the X-Games. I thought that the athletes would be scored by how many wounds they could get from crashing, falling, slipping, and gashing their heads on diving boards. Its a good thing the announcer is there to help my make up for the brain cells I’m losing from watching all of those 5 minute long commercial breaks.
One last thing: Michael Phelps is an amazing athlete and I respect him a lot. But I don’t need to see replays of his wins as the start and finish of every viewing session. I leave you with the immortal words of Merlin Mann:
NBC’s stirring piano score makes this montage of memories from 10 days of watching TV recaps of time-delayed sports highlights VERY moving.
Solitude
Evie said to me this evening, “I just want to leave myself alone.”
There’s really nothing to add to that.
The July Fireworks Series of Aurora
The idiots specially gifted people in my neighborhood have been lighting off fireworks around my house for the last week just to make sure that their ears still work and that the fireworks continue to make loud popping sounds. Their sober under-aged children might have some serious, lifelong emotional trauma if their intoxicated parents didn’t light off loud and visually stimulating fireworks from their homes on July Fourth – so they do it starting in June. Last night for example I was doing an exercise that I like to call ‘sleeping’ and a neighbor was shooting off some sort of popping whirring thing (I grew up in Nevada where they kill people who have fireworks before the fireworks kill them, so I don’t really know which type of firework it was). If it was before 10, I might have thought I was grumpy, but it was post midnight, so I figured that there was some special problem with their ears or fireworks because they were still testing them.
I’m considering buying some fireworks and lighting them off myself next year because there seems to be this sense of amazement and awe that can only happen if you do it at your house. I have never wanted to do this. Fireworks amaze the girls, and I love it that they’re impressed, but I draw the line at exploding them at my house because I like my house. I want my house to keep not burning up, and continue not needing to be repaired due to fire damage. I’m a selfish guy like that. In a dry climate like Colorado, you could light a fire just by wearing corduroy paints that rub together a while and then sit down on some dry wood, so inviting danger to my house to come and blow up is not my first choice. OK, I’m done considering this option.
However, my first choice is to let other people, with fire fighters nearby, light off the fireworks. Each year many cities across the country do this in a celebration called, “lighting your tax dollars on fire and sending them off to blow up,” and we live in one of those cities. We’ve managed to never see the show they do because of rain or any number of other silly reasons, but this year, we just might go… that is if our neighbors don’t manage to blow us up first.
White Bored Quote of the Weak
My buddy Trint does a “White Board Quip of the Week“, I don’t have a white board up in my office, but if I did, it would be this gem from Merlin Mann:
It’s stunning how hypocritical everyone but me is.
At the end of the above video is a grape letting off a gaseous flame. I showed the above video to an 11 year old boy and he announced, “Oh! They made it better!” In boy terms there is nothing better than first making flames from a grape in a microwave – except to be able to make the flames float up in succession. That’s just magical.
So You Think You Can Cackle
Jessica has been watching a show called, “So You Think You Can Dance.” There is a ‘judge’ who cackles and screams. She is the very reason why America will not watch this show. You can witness the nastiness here:
Security in Light of Comedy
I have a friend who went through security holding onto a Mountain Dew soda beverage. Security at the airport. The airport where congress in the United States has made that illegal. So my friend was told by security, “You cannot take that drink through security, sir.” His curt reply was, “What? Am I going to make a bomb out of Mountain Dew?”
They really made the rest of his stay at the airport exciting and irritating. Security, whose purpose is to make sure we’re all safe, was not a joke. While traveling through the security checkpoint at the Denver International Airport, around the same time, I discovered I had accidentally left my pocket knife in my pocket (where it belongs). I quickly slipped it into my computer bag with my keys and wallet and let it go through x-ray. If they find it, I want them to find it and remove it from my bag and I’ll blush for having forgotten to put it on my night stand. Security didn’t catch my knife on the x-ray screen. I got to keep it, hidden, and then when I arrived in Grapevine, TX, I put it in my luggage that was checked so as to not get it confiscated by the DFW screeners who are effective at finding knives in bags… I’ve lost two to them.
Last night I watched Spaceballs at the movie theater with my brother-in-law. In that movie there are a few really, really good bits on security holes that often exist in real-life security situations. The combination number for the planet Druidia’s security system was 1-2-3-4-5 [as was the president’s luggage combination]. The security guards protecting the self-destruct mechanism inside of Spaceball One (the extra-long battleship) help foil the security. Mel Brookes, the genius behind Spaceballs, saw the idiotic nature of much of our security in the world and cried foul, and nearly made me cry because it was so funny.
This morning I watched Pinky & the Brain with my daughters. Again, they bring to light the comedy of lax security in what should be important situations. Comedy makes us laugh about what is really important. What is so often funny in the comedy is that we all know that the human error involved in the scenarios is quite probable. Worse, we can laugh because we see the horrible catastrophe playing out before our eyes. Even more we see in books like Dave Barry’s Big Trouble has a great section at the end of the book where terrorists jump through security with guns as if its no problem simply because they can time the system and game it. The writing is hilarious (as is most of Dave’s work) but the problem is real.
Does the staff at the TSA, FBI, CIA, BMW or AT&T [that was a little comedy right there. Very little.] ever watch comedy movies or television shows? Because when they make choices about security it isn’t always obvious? Bruce Schneier, a respected security expert and security blogger, has written on many occasions about the bumbling choices that get made in the name of security. I would laugh if it wasn’t so irritating to have so many good examples. I hear you loud and clear from here, Bruce, there’s very little that we won’t try in the name of security, except for the stuff that works, because that’s just ridiculous.
That’s The Fork Calling the Knife Cutlery
In what is an ironic twist of science meets computers meets religion a “scientist” used a “computer program” to determine the origins of “religion” in “Michigan”. You can read an article about it here if you want to. I’ll pick some excerpts to poke holes in or poke fun of below in case out of context quotes are your thing:
The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others.
I got confused when I read this line because I was pretty sure this was the definition of journalism. Clearly the journalist who wrote this has the intellect to determine that because no time machine has been invented and mass produced and marketed yet that one of the clear issues this concept faces is that a computer program does not equal verifiable information. It also indicates that when you use the word assume, and the author does, that you’re not using facts, you’re using assumptions. I’m going to assume the author is a chimpanzee, though this is not a fact, it is merely an assumption. Or the author has a religious gene, but its being portrayed in the temple of the media.
The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.
Here the author is clearly implying things about people with marketing degrees and those who blog. Marketing bunks and bloggers debunk, right?! Don’t sell them what they need, sell them what they want. Or maybe this is a typo and he meant ‘reel information’ and ‘unreal information’ as a euphemism to fishing stories involving fish that get bigger and bigger. I can’t tell.
“[Now] you can be a Lutheran one week and decide the following week you are going to become a Buddhist.”
Ah, the classic argument about the issue of ‘being’. Philosophy at its finest. If you’re being a doctor and then the next week you are being a mechanic you better not force your co-workers to call you doctor when you’re tinkering with transmissions. And if you get sweaty on your brow asking bubba to come over and wipe your forehead like you might request a nurse to do is just out of the question 😉 But seriously, being a Lutheran and then being a Buddhist the next week is improbable if you’re truly being something. The change will more than likely be gradual and involve a disinterest rather than be this quick. A quote of generalization about religious attitudes from a less religious professional does not a good article make. Unless of course you want to pass along unverifiable information to people because of a genetic disposition. In which case those pants make you look fat, Mr. Callaway. I can’t prove it, but I’m willing to publish it on the internet for religious reasons – its in your jeans.