Gauze

When I started this blog thing, I vowed not to use it to gripe, or at least not to gripe too much, or maybe not to gripe exclusively. Tonight, I go for broke. I got an owee on my elbow this weekend, and the actual bad part is surrounded by parts that aren't so bad but are not something you'd want to stick a bandaid to. Fortunately, we have these big gauze squares that you can tape to stuff, so I did just that. Gross alert ahead.




ok, you were warned. Over the course of the day I evidently formed a scab, which normally is awesome, because that sucker stays around for a week or so and when it goes, behold, you have skin. Unfortunately, whatever it is that forms a scab melded with the gauze, so I had cloth embedded in my arm. it's midly amusing until it comes time to take it out. If that isn't already a thing they do to people who shake babies, we should really look into that.

While I'm thinking about it, check out www.dontshakeyourbaby.com
It is a real and very serious site, but you have to wonder how big the overlap is between people who shake babies and people who would stumble into that website. I've got this venn diagram in my head, and it looks like two hula hoops, only one of those hula hoops is silver and in storage in a European carport, and the other one is bright red, sweet, often found in the center of olives, and not really a hula hoop at all, when you think about it. Sweet Damn, I should've gone into the diagram business.

Oh, Sweet Boredom

I bought a pair of crossbows on the internet today. God Bless America! And capitalism! Yes, crossbows, like the sideways bow and arrow thing with a trigger. Our intent is to convert them to shoot paintballs instead of arrows, because a) we are some industrious and humorous fellows, b) what do we ever do that isnt motivated by paintball these days, and c) why the hell not. A couple weeks ago I hollowed out a pod and hid an air horn in it, and when the time was right I busted out the horn and scared the poop out of some dude instead of blasting him with the traditional gelatin encapsulated pellet. And yeah, that was fun, and obnoxious at distances of up to a mile, but this...well, you dont want to be the poor sap who gets bunkered with a crossbow. Youd never live that shit down.

The online store I got these things from claims to be a purveyor of self-defense equipment. Let us consider the practicality of defending your home or your person with a toy eff'n crossbow, and then let us chortle for a bit. The same store also sells ninja stars*, lockpicks, surveillance and night vision equipment, and a belt buckle that converts into a knife. The only possible conclusions are that either this is in fact not a self-defense store at all, but rather a nerd shop, or that it is some sort of store for ninjas.

Now I will admit to being a fair nerd myself. Im on myspace, for fuck sake. To some extent you have to kind of embrace the inner nerd. When you go to school surrounded by thousands of other nerds of various calibers, the bar drops real far. Its more of a speed bump, really. But I draw the line somewhere well before spy equipment and a knife concealed above my crotch. Evidently crossbows are right on said line, which I wouldnt really have thought, but I promise not to use them for their intended purpose**. Thats got to be worth a few points.

*Thanks to some dude who ventured into town from the river, Ari and I both know that throwing stars are illegal in California. We also know the fear of some guy from the river pulling out a big knife and waving it around while ranting some shit about throwing stars.

**The intended purposes of toy crossbows are to hunt wild chickens and potentially shoot your eye out, as near as I can figure.

--Epilogue--

After I posted this, this guy requested to be my friend. He sells stun batons, rings that shoot pepper spray, and gloves with steel shot sewn into the knuckles so that when you punch somebody the world explodes. They also would go well with my shoes. so....does anybody know how to make it so the blog isn't searchable by keyword?

whatever

I found a journal I was sort of sporadically keeping about 4 years ago, and it contained these sage words:
I bet if we didnt have shoulders sticking out to protect the head, we'd catch our eyes on a lot more nails and stuff when we bumped into things.

True now as it was then.

There's a paintball bunker sort of shaped like a lopsided pyramid that everybody calls a 'Dorito,' after the chip. In England they call it a 'teabag.' I'm pretty sure I couldn't handle everybody yelling that.

I sometimes use a strap wrench to open foods. But my mom uses chopsticks to get stuff from the top shelf, so I figure its a wash in the end.

I bought a cheap little RC plane on a whim, just for kicks. Don't look at me like that. I didn't spend any real money, it was an impulse buy, I tell you! The instructions for charging the battery are 'plug it into the wall and when it starts to get hot, unplug it.' Every time I add to the risk of catastrophic fire, Dave gets another gray hair. Said plane doesn't have flaps or ailerons or a rudder or any of that fancy shit. Just 2 motors, one on each wing, and the controls allow you to go left, right, or forward. Just as well, because I have no idea how to fly a plane and I don't really have the patience to learn. We tried to launch this puppy from the deck of Peter's beach house toward the sea, but the wind caught it and about 2 seconds later it smashed into the house nextdoor. Both wings broke off, the body shattered, the battery went to lands beyond, it was awesome. It has since been repaired with packing tape and coffee stir-sticks.

Oscar the Grouch is probably grouchy because he lives in a trash can. Id be grumpy too if people kept opening up my roof and dumping garbage on me. Maybe he was a regular green fuzzy dude who fell on hard times and everybody dumps on him. Ooh, pun!

Check out the Ask a Ninja podcast at www.askaninja.com

Ive never really seen the point to having a video iPod until now, and now I want to get one at the risk of wetting myself in public while watching this thing. How to kill a ninja is the greatest.

Haikus on the Lifestyle

This is my life in haiku

Sitting on the couch
Working on my butt callus
Man, that's leathery

-----

I made eggs today
But forgot to scramble them
Do we have ramen?

-----

Socks off, ten seconds
Snake is hot, dorito one
Get that guy out ref

Progress

Updates in LIFE. mostly the monetary part. some of the digestive tract too.

1. I got a desk at work. hooray!
1a. I have to sit at it all day and enter data. sheet.
2. I've got health insurance. booyakasha.
2a. Now I can break shit again.
2b. Does anybody know how the hell kaiser works? All the directions say is to "live well and thrive."
3. My bowell movements are becoming quite predictable. What's that all about?
4. I spent my tax return already.
4a. Mostly on cookies. And a data acquisition device.
4b. Everybody needs a DAQ!
4c. Want to buy mine?
4d. I still have not received my tax return.
4e. Ow, my credit.


***Edit: The Strangeness Continues***

Something ain't right this afternoon. We caught one of the patients stealing a huge stack of magazines from the waiting room of our office...she did it in waves. She left the office like 4 times to pile another few magazines in the stack she was forming outside the hallway bathroom. I managed to shut my leg in the car door while standing outside the car, which was quite a feat, and I got a package from newegg that contained some blank dvd discs, some computer cables, blah blah, and a really long human hair. Also, I evidently have been drinking milk that expired 6 days ago. I'm still standing, and the milk hasn't gone chunky or anything, so I'm going to go ahead and call bull doodie on that one.

...and happy birthday to just about everybody, at this point. What the hell happened 9 months before april '82 that got everybody so baby makin?

Resume the Mediocrity!

It came to my attention that there are a few people who actually read my blog, which sort of unnerved me. I resolved that the next post would be something actually worth reading. ...and I haven't posted since then, over a month ago. In an effort to kick start the blog again, at whatever level of smeh is necessary, I present this lousy link.

I bought a lithium ion battery pack to put in my loader, and in a word it doesnt fit. So today's adventure will be to desolder and rewire these things. The following is the warning I found when searching for a how-to on the net.

http://www.able-battery.com/Lithium_batteriy_FAQ.htm

Who's seen happy fun ball?
Rest assured, none of these warnings will be heeded and some shit is going to get soldered tonight. If I look nervous or blowd up later you know why.

....and, of course, the image of the day....

so birds....

Was watching a flock of birds fly around and make turns as a unit today, and considering that while they look all cohesive and natural, some of the shiftier ones are probably thinking some of the following thoughts:

"Oh shit they're going left! oh shit they're going right! oh shit they're going left again! oh shit oh shit oh shit"

"Don't you fucking touch me, Larry. Don't you fucking touch me Larry. Don't you fucking touch me Larry. You fucker! Moooommmmm!!!"

"On lap 8 I'm going to make my move."

"Alright, who farted?"

Thing du jour

I've decided to try out a new thing in the blog, wherein I declare something or other the item of the day. The category may be of my choosing and you bet your ass it won't be daily. It'll be like adding a feature to a newspaper, except without any of the stress of journalistic integrity or a regular audience.

anyway...Moment of the Day: I was driving out of the supermarket parking lot with the window down and I hear this sort of slightly screechy blowing sound to the left. There's a man there in his 70s try to whistle to get the attention of his wife who had just stepped out of the store. Except the dude clearly cannot whistle. Mostly he just moved a lot of air and did some spitting. You'd think, at 70 yrs of age, you would either a) know how to whistle, or b) know that you can't whistle and stop trying to do it in public. Eventually he gave up and just started yelling "Hey!" and waving his hands.

A camel is a horse designed by a committee

Hoooly shit folks, you need to check out http://www.rickygervais.com and listen to the podcasts. Ricky Gervais is the dude who began the show "The Office" (british version, which spawned the US version) and is one of the writers for Da Ali G Show. The podcast is basically him and his friend interacting with this guy Karl, who is a strange bean. Give it a shot, its free and fooking hilarious. Man, I wish my mind worked that way.

At the risk of turning my blogs into nothing but parroting back of shit i've heard, this was funny too....a short audio essay on how the indie coffee shop thing doesnt really work.

Olympics are on, and theyre currently showing Ice Dancing. Not skating, not racing, nothing involving a puck or a ball. People rag on curling, but seriously, how many people do you have to beat to compete in olympic ice dancing? There are probably what, like 25 people in the world who ice dance to begin with? Which is awkward, because there's that one odd person when they pair up to dance, and thats got to be hard on the ol' ego. But I have trouble believing that this is enough of an institution that there are real established parameters for judging and people qualified to judge and give commentary. I know skeleton doesnt really have that many participants yet either, but at least you put your neck on the line cruising down an ice chute at 70mph in a unitard. Also, you have to suffer the indignity of the unitard.

Dang, momma, git my shotgun!

A kid came up to our house today to sell magazines, and when I answered the door he looked at me for a second and then asked if my parents were home. No respect.

Same shit, different day, and for a while I considered posting my thoughts on the Danish cartoons, but instead I'm just going to catalog the greatest jokes I've heard so far about Cheney shooting a dude. Oh man. But first, a quick bit of commentary from yours truly...

Apparently people in the hunting community say that these sorts of things happen "fairly often" and its not really a newsworthy event. Ok....does that seem kind of wrong to anybody? guys are shooting eachother in the head fairly often, mundane or not....

In a potentially related story, America's hunting population continues to decline sharply. Some experts theorize that this reflects a shift in cultural values and urbanization throughout much of the country, but seriously, we just heard the hunters say they shoot eachother all the time. I think its natural selection.

*Edit*....you have to see the pic of whittington after he came out of the hospital. thats some nasty bruising! its like dawn of the dead. beware, slightly gruesome.

feel free to chime in if you've heard any good ones
--------------------------------------------------
"But here is the sad part -- before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor." -Letterman

"The weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear." -Leno

"I'll be here all day with continuous coverage of how Vice President Dick Cheney shot a 78-year-old man in the face after he mistook him for a small bird." -Ed Helms, of The Daily Show

"Newsweek's Andy Borowitz reported that the federal government had issued a color-coded "Cheney Alert" to warn of future attacks. 'What we have learned, the hard way, is that Dick Cheney can attack without warning,' a faux Homeland Security boss Michael Chertoff declared."

"Dick Cheney and his buddies go down there hunting in Texas, and Dick Cheney guns down a guy. And they're hunting quail, and the quail disappeared. They vanished. And reports now that they're hiding in the mountainous area near Pakistan" - Letterman

"A mere five days after shooting a man in the face, Vice President Dick Cheney broke his silence about the incident by submitting to a no-holds-barred grilling at a public press conference. I'm just kidding. ... Actually, he sat down with Brit Hume on Fox News for not some much a grilling -- more of a teat suckle." -Jon Stewart

"If this story gets any bigger, pretty soon they're going to have to tell the president." - Letterman

"When the ambulance got there, out of force of habit they put Cheney on the stretcher. No, the other guy!" - Leno

"I'm surprised Dick Cheney loves to hunt so much. The five times the government tried to give him a gun, he got a deferment." - Leno

"Apparently the reason they didn't release the information right away is they said we had to get the facts right. That's never stopped them in the past." -Craig Ferguson

"He is a lawyer and he got shot in the face. But he's a lawyer, he can use his other face. He'll be all right." - Craig Ferguson

Menace in the Kitchen

Ive never been much for cooking, but today I was feeling adventurous and decided to make a shake, completely sans instruction. Got Daves blender down off the shelf, threw in some fruit, some ice cream, some ice, some milk..that sounds about right. Then the wheels fell off.

For whatever reason nothing was mixing, so I decided to pick up the blender while it was on and shake it vigorously. In short, everything literally came apart, the lid came off, the glass part went flying, bounced off the counter, smashed a spare fruit that was sitting by the microwave, and then landed upside down in the trash can. The base kept clattered back down and kept making a noise for a few seconds until it finally quit, either out of some built in fail-safe or crippling damage. My shake ended up distributed amongst a good portion of the kitchen.

Since Ive lived here Ive made 3 attempts at cooking that havent involved something instant or plain pasta, and one of those resulted in some paper towels catching fire, and another resulted in a severely warped cookie sheet. The other one just produced bad food and dirtied every dish we own. For stroganoff.

Paintball Vol. 1 - History & an Absence of Camo

Alright, I'm gonna educate those of you who are unitiated. It has somehow gotten so that my only hobby is paintball, which represents significant cutbacks in hobby breadth from my hobby heyday in high school where i actually played sports and shit. What can I say, I'm out of shape. Anyway, I play a lot of paintball. Not pinball, not ping-pong. Ok, some pinball. But mostly, paintball.

I've been wanting to try paintball since sometime in the early 90's, but my parents never let me. My mom has since commented that knowing what they know now they wish they had let me. I might actually be good or something, instead of just acceptably decent. Its just as well, I suppose, since I probably wouldve gotten hit and cried and quit anyway. But I digress. Been playing since 2001, been playing nearly weekly for a little over a year. Yes it is expensive, yes I am completely broke, no I'm still not that good.

A quick note of history: Paintball began ~25 yrs ago in the woods, a bunch of friends stalking eachother and playing guns. In the past few years it has come almost entirely out of the woods and onto a sort of concept field known as 'speedball,' where the bunkers are all man-made and even on both sides of the field, and the field is generally small enough that you can shoot the opposing team off the break and the games take no more than 5 minutes.

For whatever reason, I am fucking terrible at woodsball. I started in the woods, everybody starts in the woods, and you go out for the first time with your friends because you want to play guns and see how you would do or whatever. Its nerdy, but I've accepted it. I should also point out that once you've gone a couple times, the camoflauge/military-look-alike thing gets old, and you end up being glad its becoming a sport in its own right. I am confident that in a real military event I would suck just as bad having never played paintball. None of the regulars at my field wear camo except as a joke or to be retro, nobody thinks they're a sniper, nobody calls the paint" bullets," "ammo," "rounds," nobody calls the paintguns "weapons," there is not a single tree or shrub at said field, and there is no rule that if you get shot in the leg you just hop around on one leg but keep playing, although I'm not saying that last one wouldn't be funny. My point is, we're trying to distance ourselves from militia types here.

PAINTBALL =/= MILITIA TYPES. well for some people it does, but I think they were probably militia types before they found paintball, and they really need to leave me alone.

Bandaids and CAD

There are a remarkable number of people who are allergic to bandaids. What happens if they get an owie?

Website is finally coming along a bit, made a few awkward moves into some CAD models and threw an article or two up. If anybody out there needs to know in great detail how a sheridan valve works, and how it differs from its nelson-based cousins, we got you covered! It's to hell with formatting for now while we concentrate on content, so you the eager viewer cant actually view it. Ah well. My blog, and I'm excited about it. the website, not the blog.

Gung hay fat choy

EDIT: Turns out there's a thing called a "steri-strip" for the bandaid-phobes out there. hmph.

TGI Naptime

Its friday night and I'm trying to decide what to do. after a long spell of sitting quietly on the couch, I decided maybe I'd just nap. Dave suggested that hey, lots of people nap before they go out. This, however, is the pre-sleeping nap. Details to follow

zzzzzz

*edit*
woke up and turned the lpr on my timmy up to 80. wowsa that shit is quick. its staying there. if you understood that, you are my friend and an equally big nerd. the rest of you, piss off! On second thought, I need all the friends I can get. For next friday night. I mean, the lpr is already at 80, what's left to do?

Long Live the Double Helix

I have only the following to say tonight:

A) I detest the letter R. That is not negotiable.
2) 'q' has the tail pointing to the right and 'g' has the tail to the left, people. holy shit.
D) I never thought I'd say this but impulse threads are kind of cool.

Resolutions Update

So I'm going to edit the resolutions a bit. I can do that instead of actually doing what I resolved to do, right?

1. Branch out the musical tastes, which are sort of singular at the moment.
2. Eat less sugar.
3. Get on a team and play some goddam tournaments.
4. Get this shit website shit off the ground. No, not THIS website, but THE website, which has nothing to do with myspace lameness.

flew to dc and back this weekend, and it looks really weird to fly through rain at night with the plane's wing lights on. The woman in the seat next to me tossed her cookies. one day i'm going to break down and buy a gamebody to make that shit more bearable. the flying, not the cookies.

What else do you talk about in a blog? What else do I even do? Work is not going to furnish a lot of material here. I work as a filing clerk at the moment, and there's only so many stories that can come out of that. I also work alone, in a parking garage that had a temp wall put up to make a little space to store the files, so as I progress through the alphabet I get further from the window, which is a shame, but closer to the electric heater I brought, which is good, cause its cold as shit in there. Oh office drama, why, why?