The Rules of Shotgun

1. You must be able to see the car to call shotgun.
2. Shotgun only lasts until you get out of the car. If you stop at a gas station and get out, shotgun is up for grabs again.
3. Shotgun can be trumped by "Slingshot Warrior" unless "Shotgun no Slingshot Warrior" or "Shotgun no battle" is called.
3b. "Indian Rampage" trumps both "Shotgun" and "Slingshot Warrior" unless "no battle" is called. I know this has potential to be very offensive, I didn't make the rules here. Indian Rampage allows the caller to decide where everybody in the car sits, including the trunk but excluding the driver. Indian Rampage is only effective between the hours of 11 and 12 (AM or PM).

The Birds and the Bees

I swear this actually happened.

Monday 6/4 – Went out to the car at lunch and found it covered in a swarm of bees. None of the neighboring cars had bees on them.

Tuesday, 6/5 – 3:00 Soda break at the Silo Bookstore. Walking back to my building with a berry-Dr. Pepper in hand, a duck flew into my head. Yes, I was struck by waterfowl. A mallard swooped in from behind and to the right and whacked me in the temple with his wing. He then landed alongside another mallard who had managed to avoid me and began to quack. I looked around desperately for spectators. None to be found.

Wednesday, 6/6 – Walking to the car after work and a crow was following me and screaming at me. Every time I'd get away a little, he would fly to the tree or building directly overhead and continue squawking at me. Followed me for about 2 blocks, which is the entire distance from my building to my car.

Thursday, 6/7 – Crow was waiting for me in the morning, and followed me back to the building. Terrific, he knows where I live. Now I know crows are smart as hell*, but this one is about to get blasted.

Friday, 6/8 – No remarkable encounters with anything flying. Best day this week.

Saturday, 6/9 – Went to the air show at Mather field. A Thunderbirds solo pilot experienced a 'birdstrike' and had to land. Yeah, we killed the bird, but it damaged a $15 million plane and sunburned 70,000 people. But man, we killed that bird.

Week of 6/10 – Crow follows me to or from the car several times this week. A passing cyclist informs me that the crow is scolding me. Who the fuck asked that guy?

Wednesday, 6/20 – The crow is after me again. This time I hid behind some trees until there was nobody around and then lobbed a few small rocks at it. My ability to throw straight up in the air shames me. Try it sometime, your body gets in the way.

Thursday, 6/21 – Walking around downtown Davis and a bee lands on my shoulder and will not go away. This isn't something that would be worth mentioning at all if it wasn't part of the ongoing chain of 'airborne critters harassing me' events. After 2 minutes of walking around and flapping at it, drastic measures were taken to get rid of the bee. Success, but at the cost of minor loss of clothing. I was getting tired of this shit happening so I squished the bee when it came out. Take that, nature.

Later Thursday, 6/21 – Riding along the American River Bike Trail, where there are tremendous swarms of bugs around dusk. I've never figured out what a swarm of bugs like that does except for get hit by bikers. There were several of those little flippy darty birds flipping and darting around after the bugs, and one such bird darted in front of me and hit me in the armpit. At 20 mph, I sort of hit him too. Dragged it along for a half-second before he got away. Further down the road, as I was wondering what all this meant, I nearly ran over a quail that was walking across the path.

After the first couple of these things I was figuring it was just weird, but now I'm starting to consider my options. They seem to all revolve around building an ark, carrying an attack-rodent, growing gills and living underwater, or generating some sort of force-field powered by crystals and diesel gasoline. Anyway, I'm open to suggestion.

*Crows can use tools. Davis contains a few groves of walnut trees and a huge flock of hungry crows. During the walnut season the crows want to eat the walnuts (no surprise here) but are unable to break the shells. The solution they've devised is to pick up the walnuts and wait for a car to drive by and drop them into the road in front of the car. The car runs over the walnuts, cracks them, and birds feast. The first time I saw it I couldn't believe it, there were actually birds dropping what appeared to be bouncy balls on the road in front of me. Evidently, the crows are unable to distinguish between cars and bicycles, which has resulted in more than one cyclist being pelted with walnuts from above.

For the skeptics who are saying "that's not really using tools"……check this out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo
BAM!

Only so Complicated...

If you only had one job and you'd been doing it professionally for years and years, you'd think you'd be fantastic at it. Hendrix could play an out of tune guitar and bend the strings to bring it into pitch. Old machinists can feel a screw with their fingers and tell you the thread pitch, and identify what type of steel you're working with by the sparks it throws when you hit it with a grinder. Professional truckers can back up trailers with free pivots in a smoother arc than I can drive my car. Meter readers can go to an apartment complex and read 8 meters at once, and work out the math in their head on the way to the next stop. They say we only use 11% of our brains, and I'm betting the other 89% is there for adaptation (and good ol' laziness).

So why can't a shopping cart company make a cart with 4 wheels that touch the floor? How is it possible that after 25 years cd cases still suck so hard? Why can't the vending machine lady load the snacks so that they actually fall out when you order one? Is it really possible that this entire rant is because of a stuck bag of skittles?

God Gives Man Earwax

Here you go, man, a wax for your ears. No need to apply, it will just sort of occur naturally. This will not affect you and you may not even notice it for quite some time, since you will not have anything proper to stick in your ear for thousands/millions of years, depending on who you listen to. In the future it will become a nuisance when it gets on your headphones and generally grosses people out. Around the same time somebody will invent a swab to clean your ear with, and then immediately tell you not to use it in your ear. For now, if you are fortunate to live long enough to grow ear hair, it will hold it down nicely so that it doesn't blow all willy-nilly when you're running after something. And put on a loincloth, for the love of me.

It's really been quite slow at work.

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.