Modern medicine is so simple nowadays

Gone

This morning I went down to have a look at the nesting Canada Goose I've been watching the past couple of weeks. It's gone and the nest is empty and torn apart. No idea what happened. I don't know if they hatched and the mother pushed them into the river, if predators got them, or if some asshole just trashed it for some stupid reason only understandable to assholes.

A guy who came up to me on the bridge when I was looking at it, said the goose was there yesterday morning. He also said a goose had a nest in the same spot last year.

Yet again with the geese

OK, I know no one but me is interested in these damn geese, but bear with me. The photo below is the goose family I've been observing over the past few weeks. At first they had six goslings and then four. The next time I saw them they still had four, but one was clearly adopted because it was much younger than the other three. I think this smaller gosling may be a little Canada Goose because it's got black legs.

I did catch a brief glimpse of some Canada Geese with their young in an isolated part of the river. They were partially hidden by trees and brush. When they saw me they began honking and ran for cover, which is the diametrically opposite of the behavior of the geese down river who expect people to feed them.

Expecting to fly

I first saw this Canada Goose early last week and wondered if she was nesting. She is. But why would she choose a nest site that's so high up? That's one of the pillars that holds up the foot bridge. Pedestrians have a front seat view of her sitting on her nest, which also makes me wonder why she would chose that as a nest site.



In the photo below you can see how high the pillars are. She's probably at least fifteen feet above the water. You can just barely make out her head sticking up on the left side of the pillar.



And so she sits there incubating her eggs, mostly ignoring the gawkers on the foot bridge.



Here's a shot of the eggs from Sunday morning during a rare period where she was away.



But what I want to know is, what's she going to do when the eggs hatch? Will she just sweep the goslings into the river and then try and round them up? That's a long drop.

Big Ugly Bird

I went down to the river this morning to feed the geese and ducks crushed pretzels. As soon as I got to the goose-zone, I saw this ugly-ass thing.



At first, when it was far away, I thought that maybe it was maybe the result of a Canada Goose interbreeding with one of the feral domestic ones. When I saw the red lumpy flesh on its face I wondered if it was diseased. After I got a really good look (it stood a few feet away for quite a while as it chomped pretzels), I assumed it was some kind of weird goose breed I wasn't familiar with. I planned on posting the image here and up at Flickr to see if anyone knew what the hell it was. (Maybe professional anthropologist and amateur ornithologist, Dr. X would come through with another bird identification.)

After I got home, a little searching among water fowl breeds at Wikipedia (oh, what would I do without you, Wikipedia?) told me it was actually a breed of duck. To be more specific, it's a Muscovy Duck, a big duck that's native to Mexico, Central, and South America. There's feral populations in Florida and Texas. So what's it doing in Virginia?

They're also kind of mean. It totally kicked a big male goose's ass while I stood there happily shooting pictures.

Flim-flam!

A few years back I bought a calculator at Dollar General for a buck. It was cheaply made, but it worked great. I liked it because it was compact and had a door on it. Small enough to put in your pocket and literally forget the damn thing was in there.

I took it to work and began using it there. (The work calculators were these big, clunky things. I guess they didn't want people stealing them, so they made sure they bought some that were the size of a sandwich.) It worked out great until I had to do a lot of stuff out in the warehouse and I ended up sweating on it a lot while it was in my pocket. It started malfunctioning, so I bought another one.



So what to do with the broken one? After it laid around for a few months, I decided to open it up to get the battery out of it and maybe swipe the solar cell for some kind of experiment. But, much to my surprise, I found out the solar cell was fake. It's just a couple of pieces of plastic not electronically connected to anything.



I have since lost all faith in civilization.

I'm on the internet, grandma!

Since nothing else is going on, I'm posting my most recent totally effed up search requests. Internet users of the world, most of you are insane, perverted, and/or stupid, but you amuse me greatly.

how large is a wild turkeys penis
Yeah, I know, it's just for research. Sure.

legality of masturbating using video cams
No good can come from this.

nice man wanking
He was such a nice man, despite all the wanking.

internet meh
Boy are you at the right place.

staples in your head after i cracked my head open
Why would the staples be in my head after you cracked your head open? Is the doctor's eyesight really that bad?

largeness your x organ
Is the x a variable, like in algebra?

pictures for wanking in front of porn
Porn is the easiest thing to find online, but yet somehow you can't seem to locate any.

korea pornography what happens
I'm no expert in Korean pornography, but I would guess that what happens is that naked people have sex.

where can i post my porn pichers
This is sad on so many levels.

Search fuel my wank
Frankly, I'm speechless, but I think Fuel My Wank would be a good name for a game show.

girls in soaking wet socks
Talk about your weirdly specific, but yet completely uninteresting, porn search request.

pictures of boring bastards
Well, I am a boring bastard, but I have no photos of myself here. Sorry.

He ejaculated and
And...? And what?! The suspense is killing me!

boxing helena oops
I think the only "oops" involved with Boxing Helena was when the backers realized what a god awful movie they had sunk their money into.

pictures of boring
You should check out my Flickr page; I'm intimately acquainted with boring.

TURKEY HOMEMADE PORNO
Is this homemade porn from the country Turkey or porn that involves poultry?

penis geodes
I'm not cracking one of those open.

change vagina's taste
New! From the makers of Kool-Aid!

Postum if you got 'em

This morning I ventured out to the dreaded Wal-Mart to see if I could get my hands on a jar of Postum. Yes, Postum. It's a caffeine-free coffee substitute invented by noted cereal baron and whacko, C.W. Post in the late 19th century. (He also invented Grape Nuts, a cereal that contains no grape and no nuts. The man was a genius!) Post (a follower of another cereal barron, whacko, anti-masturbation crusader, and enema enthusiast, John Harvey Kellogg) considered coffee unhealthy and came up with a substitute made of wheat bran, wheat, molasses, and corn dextrin. All of this is roasted and ground up until it looks sort of like instant coffee. (In the South during the Civil War, the North cut off coffee supplies so it was common for people to roast things like grain, chicory, peanuts, acorns and brew them like coffee. My guess this is where Post got the idea from.)

I found it without much too much difficulty right there in the coffee and tea aisle. Postum! At last, victory was mine! So I grabbed a jar and made my way up to the checkout line to pay for it. No doubt I didn't impress the chunky goth-lite girl behind the cash register because the only people who buy Postum are older than your grandparents. Once the last of the people who remember WWII die off, Kraft Foods will probably dump Postum. But let's hope not.

So, this Postum, you ask, what does it taste like? At first I was afraid it would taste like off-brand dollar store instant coffee (or worse, Folgers) because that's kind of what it smelled like. But much to my surprise, Postum is actually kind of good. It does taste a little like cheap instant coffee, but it doesn't have that rank, burnt taste instant coffee always has. And it thankfully doesn't taste like Folgers instant. I like it. I can't say I'd want to give up real coffee for it or that I would want to drink it everyday, but I do like it. And I suspect it would go well with ice cream.

Addendum: This originally was a comment, but apparently it had too many links in it and Haloscan wouldn't let me post it.

The German coffee substitute I mentioned in my reply to Xolo's comment is called Pero, and it's actually Swiss, not German. Another Swiss one is Cafix.

There's a Bolivian one called Café de Cebada.

And on the herbal, healthfood side of things, there's Bambu, soy coffee, Teechino, and ramon nut coffee.

So there's a whole lot of coffee substitutes out there. No idea if any of these actually taste like coffee. Or if they go well with ice cream.

-----------------

2/11/08 Addendum: Since Kraft announced back in December (or whenever) that they had discontinued Postum, my humble blog has had a sudden, and fairly large, increase in visitors, most of whom are looking for Postum. A quick check at Google shows this blog entry is the second listed website for Postum. I'm suddenly one of the internet's leading authorities on Postum. Sadly, there's no way for me to cash in on this.

Today I got an email from Seattle Bob who informed me had formed a brand new Yahoo group for Postum lovers. Just go to the Yahoo Groups page and type in Postum. Bob outlined the aims for his group in his email:

The purpose of the group is multi-fold:


1. To lobby Kraft to resume production. I think this is a dead issue. A Kraft employee posted on one site that they had already removed the production equipment from the factory, But if they see a niche demand, they may decide to sell the rights to someone else.
2. To keep this story in the media. I am encouraging people to contact news media, and keep the pressure on Kraft. I am hoping to creat a "New Coke" type marketing fiasco for them.
3. To encourage people to contact smaller food processors and suggest Postum may fit into their marketing plan, and ask them to approach Kraft to sell them the rights to Postum. This seems to be the best scenario in my opinion. Even if there isn't a large enough pot for Kraft, a guarenteed market of a couple million people would be a tempting "cash cow" for a smaller processor.
4. Discuss alternate products from other manufacturers, such as Pero and Cafix, although I have tried them both, and they are terrible! I think they try too hard to simulate the taste of coffee, and end up tasting like bad coffee.
5. If all else fails, to try to crack the recipe, and make Postum in small batches for personal consumption. CW Post originally made small batches for his sanitarium in an 1890's commercial kitchen, all the ingredients are listed on the jar, and are available in retail quantities, so it may be possible to hack the recipe.... you know, 12 monkeys typing. It is also another way of letting Kraft, and other food processors know there is an interest.

So instead of desperately reading my old blog entry, go join the Postum group!

One interesting thing I've dug up on my own is an alleged recipe for homemade Postum. I have no idea if it's the same thing as what Kraft sold, but it's worth trying I suppose.

One last thing. I have a confession to make. Back in December I gave away my sole jar of Postum to my sister because it had been sitting around untouched for months. Now I'm kind of wishing I'd kept it despite being kind of sick of it.

2/18/08 Addendum: The madness continues. Now there's a post at Metafilter on the discontinuation of Postum. And there's a few interesting links. (Thankfully they left me out of it.)

9/28/11 Addendum: There's a site called Ersatzcoffee.com that sells a Postum substitute. I haven't tried it.

Self portrait

Vote

My philosophy of life

I had to suffer for my art, now it's your turn.

My original of this mid 90's collage hung in my sister's kitchen for years. The text came from a Beetle Bailey strip, believe it or not.

Of things bloggy and dull

A few days ago I posted something about Blogrolling not working. I don't know if any of you noticed, but Ross Rader from Blogrolling left a comment on that post:

We've seen a couple of problems related to some unrelated code that runs on the same cluster. I'm working on a solution that should elminate this problem permanently, but we're in a bit of a reactive mode right now - ugh.

The good news is that we can look forward to Blogrolling 2.0 coming out this summer. More details on that soon...

So it's not dead, just slightly dormant. When the new version comes out I'll definitely try it.

Also, you may have noticed the obtrusive ad in the sidebar. Yes, I'm experimenting with the Google ads again. I wish I could just display ads in my archives because that's where I get the overwhelming majority of my hits. That way maybe those people constantly searching for various bizarre items and services can finally find what they're looking for. Sadly, some of those folks are beyond help.

The young inventor

Since yesterday's old artwork went over so well [note: sarcasm] I decided to post more. I think the collage below from 1994 doesn't need any explanation at all.



Now I don't feel quite so bad about squandering my 20's. [Buries head in hands and sobs.]

Old crap

Over the past week, my sister has been posting some of her weird collages from the mid 90's. I too can play this game of posting old crap I did well over a decade ago. So today I'm posting this comic I drew back in 1989. It used to be my dream to be a cartoonist and this sad, scrawling monstrosity goes a long way in explaining why I never achieved my goal. [WARNING: Huge picture of something stupid.]

Oh, the horror

A couple of posts down I made fun of the people who blundered across my blog while searching for really stupid and/or bizarre things. This morning while looking for something else, I found a pie chart of the top search requests people have used to hit my blog over the past 365 days. Great shrieking Christ on a Tilt-A-Whirl, this is a strange thing to read through. Or maybe it's just depressing. Do people ever search for normal, non-deranged, non-porn things while online?

3 extra on your willy?

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a pattern in the penis enlargement spam I was getting. (Yes, I know, I should be deleting these and not reading them for my amusement, but I have no life. Humor me.) In certain emails the first sentence was always a bizarre variation of the same statement. It's sort of like the spam version of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, a book where a trivial incident between two men is shown in 99 different styles. Well, OK, maybe it's not quite the same thing as what Queneau did, but I found it sort of interesting. Kinda.

If you wish to find advice with respect to by which means you are able to accumulate a few additional measures for your male organ, see our site.

If you expect to gain information relating to in which way you are able to reach another measure in your reproduction organ, don't hesitate to see our website.

If you are wanting to gain info on by which means you can achieve largeness (u know what :P)), you have come to the right place.

If you are wondering for recommendation relating to by which means you could grow some + in the breadth of your rod, do the right thing.

You need information with respect to in which manner you could amplify more size for -----D, you've opened the right email.

Should you want recommendation dealing with in which way you can accumulate a few additional measures for your x organ, u have to check out our page

We can give you expert's knowledge about how you could increase a few more inches in your male organ, do the right thing.

But now that I think about it, these are more likely just permutations done with a program than simply variations in style written by humans. I haven't really looked, but I imagine that I could break these down into four or five parts. As an example, if there were four parts and six different ways of wording each part, that would be 6 x 6 x 6 x 6, which would give you 1296 different versions of the same statement.

The lesson here? I amuse easily and have no life at all. Sad really.