Still on hiatus

No, I'm not suddenly back into blogging again. I just wanted to note the fact that I'd passed my fifth blogging anniversary. I was thinking that it was on the 19th or 20th, but it was actually on the 10th. But do I get to have a five year blogging anniversary if I'm not actually blogging? Probably not. Never mind.

In other useless news, I finally got a broadband internet connection. Now I spend all my time at YouTube digging up obscure clips of bands. The one below by the MC5 is particularly good if you like black and white garage band hippie freak out stuff.

Goodnight

I really hate blogging these days. There's virtually no fun in it at all anymore, so I'm mothballing Volume 22 for the time being. I have no idea if I'll post anything new anytime soon.

Meanwhile, I have a Flickr account where I post fairly regularly, if you care about such things.

I don't think he's cured

While poking through the sad contents of my Yahoo inbox, I noticed an email with the subject line, "Please help me." Naturally I was curious about who needed my help this time; no doubt it involved getting a large sum of money out of a bank in Burkina Faso or some damn place. My curiosity was peaked further when I saw the name of the person sending the email: "Jennifer Aniston goes bra-less." It's an usual name, but they suddenly had my undivided attention. Much to my surprise, the email wasn't the typical email scam I'd grown so tired of. Nope. They're getting creative now.

I was a schizophrenic patients from China because of the need to take long-term anti - schizophrenia drug, the family has been difficult to bear drugs fees, Without medication, I would crazy .I hope that the people who see the e-mail in the United States to help me, sent money to my paypal account. My PayPal account is jinfaniu@hotmail.com

I'm sorry, Mr. Jennifer Aniston goes bra-less, all of my spare cash is earmarked to keep me sane. Without it I would crazy.

Cacahuate Japones

A few days ago I wrote about some Japanese peanuts I'd gotten at a grocery store. They were quite good and I wanted more. So this morning while in the parking lot of Dollar Tree, I noticed that in the next shopping center over there was a Mexican store. It was actually called something like "Mexican General Store". So, after I was done ogling the cleavage of the 19 year old in the inappropriate-for-work top ringing up my sad purchases at Dollar Tree, I went over to the Mexican store.

The food selection wasn't anything radically different than what I'd seen in the little Mexican sections of local grocery stores, but the ambiance was totally foreign. The store was also empty of people except a woman and two small children, a boy and girl. The boy, I noticed, was holding rather long stick.

As I walked through the food aisles, I kept noticing random things on the floor: bottles of water, bags of tortillas, etc. I guessed the brat with the stick was going around batting things off the shelves while his sister followed closely behind.

In addition to food, they had shoes (Reeboks and cowboy boots), soccer jerseys, big western-style belt buckles, Virgin Mary candles, loads of CDs by people I'd never heard of, and a wall full of DVDs and videotapes.

I had trouble finding the peanuts. Even though I studied Spanish in school, I can't speak it or read it. I wondered if I would even be able to ask if they had them, but the only word I could remember was "Japones". Thankfully I didn't have to do that because I eventually found what I was looking for. They had several varieties of Japanese peanuts, but I couldn't quite get to them. The brat with the stick and his sister were sort of in the way. I said, "Excuse me," and squeezed by. The grinning brat seemed to want to hit me with the stick. The woman, who I guess was his mother, quickly came up and took the stick away. So, stick-whacking averted, I selected three kinds of peanuts and paid. (And at twice the price of Piggly Wiggly.) I don't think gringos come in here that often because the woman behind the counter seemed vaguely unnerved. So unnerved in fact that she went and short-changed me by 76 cents, but I didn't bother to try and correct her. She wanted me out of the store and I just wanted peanuts. I began to wonder if anyone, even Mexicans, ever came into the store.

The peanuts? Well, the variety with the geisha girl on them aren't very good. And as far as ethnic stereotypes go, a geisha is better than a cartoon coolie-hat-wearing peanut-man, I suppose. The type in the bag on the left are pretty good, but nothing special. The chili ones are quite good. So, as far my future purchases of Japanese peanuts go, it's offensive coolie-hat dude and the chili ones.

Psychic Dada Spam

We've all seen the spam with the random gibberish tagged on the end of the message as a way of foiling spam filters. I used to take pleasure in this gibberish, but soon grew tired of it. A few days ago I found myself reading some of this material again and was vaguely entranced by the opening sentence: "America is perhaps, at this moment, the prison country of the whole grease town world..." Can't you just hear someone standing on a street corner screaming this? No? Maybe it's just me.

WTF, Mexico?

I found myself at Piggly Wiggly this morning, killing time while waiting for the neighboring dollar store to open up. Since I love ramen, I drifted over to the ramen section to see what varieties they offered. The ramen was right there with the genuine Mexican stuff local grocery stores are selling more and more of because of the growing Hispanic population. I selected a few packs of ramen and then began poking around in the Mexican food.

I'd seen so-called Japanese peanuts on sale before, but I never really looked at them, but the illustration on these caught my eye. A peanut with a Fu-Manchu mustache wearing a coolie hat? I shudder to think what would be on the package if they were called African peanuts.

Oh, I should probably add that Japanese peanuts are really good.

Oh, blogging

I've come to the conclusion that I hate blogging.

Yo! Bum Rush the Photos

Like I've said once or twice before over the past few weeks, I've been spending a lot of time at Flickr and posting lots of weirdo images at my page. (And mostly I've been ignored buy the other Flickroids.)

Anyway, Flickr changed its interface, and I saw the above button after I'd uploaded some photos. When I first read it, I thought it said, "SAVE THIS BITCH". So now whenever I upload anything I can hear a guy in my head scream, "SAVE THIS BITCH!" The guy in my head may be Flava Flav, but I'm not sure.

Eight random things about me

Gah! I've been tagged for a meme yet again! Grrr! This time it's the scurrilous Jeff who's responsible for this insolence. I'm supposed to list eight random things about me. Eight things?!

1. When I was little I used to love to pick my nose. I won't go into anymore detail.
2. I can't swim. And I don't really care.
3. I love watching cooking shows on TV.
   
4. I rarely cook anything more complicated than heating up ramen in the microwave.
5. I used to want to be a cartoonist. Not being very good at it pretty much cured me. Well, that and the fact that I took a drawing class once and learned to hate drawing. But doodling I love.
6. I hate to use public toilets. And I'm just referring to peeing in them. There's no way in hell I'm sitting down in one of those unless it's life or death.
7. I'm more comfortable around animals than people. Although people smell better. Well, most people.
8. When I was a lot younger, more than anything else, I wanted to be a pilot. I've ridden an airplane exactly once in my life.

There. It's done. I'm supposed to chose several other people, but I think everybody's been chosen, except maybe Sherri, who's probably done it already, and Jammies, who's busy with some dog-related catastrophe. Xolo's leaving the country and has no time for this nonsense. Sara's in parts unknown and only blogs once a year now. Cindy's busy mourning her 20's. And my sister is MIA. So there. No one else can do it.

Gak!

Monday morning I found myself in Wal-Mart yet again. (I've been getting film developed there because it's so damn cheap.) As I was cutting through the grocery section, I saw the black bag of the new mysterious Doritos X-13D. I'd seen these before and been curious, but this morning I impulsively grabbed a bag. I thought, "How bad can they be?" Well, pretty bad, as it turns out.

When I got home I popped one in my mouth and was immediately hit with a nasty-ass wall of nastiness. What is that, I thought. Pickle? Mustard? It's MUSTARD! It's a thirty yard high wall of mustard! I hate mustard. It took forever to get the taste out of my mouth.

I looked online to see what everyone else was saying about this misguided snack food. The most opinions I saw were in the comments of some kind of gaming blog. Oddly, most of the hundred or so commenters liked this abomination. And most of them said it tasted like a hamburger (specifically a fast food one) with pickles, ketchup, mustard, etc. on it. I didn't grow up eating all that crap on my hamburgers, so it's no surprise that I don't want gobs of toxic mustard stank on my tortilla chips.

Apparently they're having a contest to give these things a name. I suggest Vomitos.

The internet scares me

It's that time again. My file of stupid, scary, and perverted search requests people have actually used to blunder across my tedious blog has grown quite large. So here's the latest batch for you to use as nightmare fodder.

belt spankings for tough guys
A volume that will never be selected for Oprah's book club.

how to shoot downhill
I find this one completely bewildering.

X-ray machine exorcist
I have all of their albums, but the early stuff is best.

big ass blogspot gallery
This is what my next blog will be.

jaunty penis pics
Jaunty? What, are they wearing little hats or something?

little flaky things on your penis
Not on my penis, thank you very much.

root beer barrel nipples
Hey, check out the root beer barrel nipples on that chick!

spanking machine story
Once long ago in a land far away there was a man who owned a spanking machine. He was a very lonely man.

rube porno
So, it's like porno featuring slack-jawed yokels?

illegal Bikini
It's made out of human skin.

goodyear blimp peeing out window from blimps
Are you looking for news stories about peeing out of the window of the Goodyear blimp, porno about peeing out of the window of the Goodyear blimp, or instructions on how to pee out of the window of the Goodyear blimp?

"the gecko" sexual position
Just don't try the Geico sexual position.

sherry and jay porn
You spelled Sherri wrong. Heh-heh.

does getting staples out of scalp hurt
I would have to say yes.

ordering from spam e mail drugs penis account
Penis account?

lizard flim
I have nothing to add to this.

image of a big spammed bird
Hunters using Spam as a method of hunting? Are they firing it out of a cannon?

i wanked in front of my school teacher
And she gave you an F.

japanese extreme porn food
I'm not eating that.

chinese person with stitches in the head
Why specifically Chinese? No, don't tell me, I don't care anymore.

are there any famous people who swear by colon cleansing?
Of course! Didn't you know that one of the best kept secrets to sucess is colon cleansing?

1950's enema photos
Sorry, my vast collection of enema photos doesn't go back that far. Weirdo.

how do porn stars clean their colon
I think I saw a program on the Discovery channel about this.

Romance language

Yesterday I bought some film on Ebay from a seller in Taiwan. (Don't ask.) Anyway, the seller had the note shown below to alert buyers from France:


So that's the problem of mail delivery in France? They're too romantic? My mind wanders. Imagine a French mailman wearing a beret, smoking an unfiltered Gaullois, saying the following in a really cheesy French accent: "Ze mail? Oh, ze mail, she weel be deleevered wan she is deleevered. Bot raht now I weel mek ze lov weeth zis beutifool woooman!"

OK, maybe not.

My tea has a uvula!

No one thought this was funny at Flickr. Jerkasses.

Of course it's not as disquieting as the time I found a face in my pudding, but still, it's at least a little unnerving.

Putting the blah back in blogging

Yes, I haven't written a post in almost two weeks and haven't been commenting in my usual places. No, I haven't died or joined the circus. I just don't feel like blogging these days. Actually, I hate this blog these days and loathe even thinking about it. I haven't been spending that much time online, but recently I've been hanging out at Flickr quite a bit. Why? I don't know.

Meh. Bleh. Thosd nwhef wch h=chih[osidhc08ehc0I

Books, books, books, and more books

Several weeks ago Sherri got me to sign up for this site called Goodreads, a social networking site for book geeks. I hadn't done anything much with it until recently when I started adding all the books I knew I'd read. The problem is that I've gotten rid of a lot of books that I've read, plus there's all the library books. Who knows what I was reading ten years ago? I don't. Ah, but I did write them down. Problem? Well, yes, there's a problem. You see, I wrote all of these books down in the old journals I used to write in almost religiously.

From my last year in high school until couple months prior to starting this blog, I kept a journal. I have a milk crate with 21 volumes in it. There's four or five thousand pages of juvenile whining written in a nearly indecipherable scrawl lurking in that crate. Flipping through these things looking for book titles I wrote down is fairly unpleasant because the contents are alternately embarrassing and depressing. Occasionally there's some good stuff, but mostly it's just junk. So I don't know when or if I'll be able to go through all of them to get the book titles. I managed to get through maybe three volumes over the past few days, but I really don't want to go through any more any time soon.

I've got around 475 books posted on my Goodreads page already. I've read a lot more than that I'm sure, but unless I remember them, it's unlikely I'll ever find out what they are unless I wade back into the depressive verbal swamp I keep in that milk crate.

I can't wait for the movie version

I think The Tale of the Mad Feces King is the greatest piece of literature ever written in the English language.

Not coming to a theater near you

Sometime last week I put up a two more very short stop motion videos up at YouTube: one is color and the other is black and white.

10-4, Good buddy!

Yes, it's yet another post that deals with stuff I found while cleaning out the rat-hole I live in.

The photo over on the left is from a Radio Shack catalog from 1980. What fills me with glee about this item is that they basically admit that it doesn't work in the description:

Explore this new, not yet fully perfected technology NOW!

It's like they had some extra CB radio parts laying around and didn't know what to do with them, so they slapped together a bizarre computer peripheral.

The only thing online I could find about someone actually using this thing was in an archive of some old Usenet posts:

I remember working (read: tinkering ;-) on a Model 1 in High school (as it was abandoned by everyone once we'd gotten 6 shiny new Model 4 machines) and it had a TRS-80 branded peripheral called the "Vox-Box." It had a Citizens-Band microphone hooked into (I'm guessing) an A-D converter that hooked onto the expansion buss. I actually got it "working" but noticed that the recognition wasn't the best, and IIRC you got maybe 20 words max. The included program let you "teach" the computer digits 0-9 & a few other commands (Save/Load/etc.)

Filth!

I'm still cleaning. I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but that may be death rather than completion since I've probably done irreparable harm to my respiratory system after breathing in loads of dust and mold.

And speaking of filth, while cleaning out a desk drawer, I found a not quite safe for work postcard of a girl spanking a naked guy. OK, fess up; which one of you filthy perverts gave this to me?

More archaeology

Since the previous post went over so well [note: sarcasm], for my next post I was going simply type the word poop 376 times, but I was inspired to do something else. I can always save the poop for later.

Jeff over The Phantom Tollbooth has written a post about a Science Fiction movie he did a bit part in during the mid 90's. Now I've never done anything cool like be in a movie (home movies don't count and neither does my right arm appearing on YouTube), but once I got to be on a movie set. Well, actually I had a job where a movie had been filmed seven or eight years previously.

It was summer and fall of 1997 and I got a job as a temp at the school for snooty rich girls. The movie that had been filmed there was the wretched Dudley Moore/Daryl Hannah romantic comedy, Crazy People. And despite the fact that the movie had been shot there years before I got there, there was still plenty of evidence that it had been a movie set. When we were cleaning out old storage areas I found complete screenplays, a Paramount interoffice envelope, a shot list, and even a photocopy of a storyboard:



The movie isn't all that good, like I said. Dudley Moore's character plays an ad exec and the ads that he comes up with when he's losing his mind are funny, but not enough to suffer the rest of the film. So, to save you the trouble of watching Crazy People, here's the funniest thing in it:

Archaelogy

I've been de-junkifying my office over the past few days. I took two loads of books, magazines, and other unidentifiable detritus to Goodwill. Also, I threw away a bunch of stuff. Did I really need to keep every single box I've gotten in the mail over the past couple of years? Probably not. The room is now four times the size it was at this time last week.

The great thing about getting rid of lots of unwanted junk is that you end up finding interesting stuff you forgot you had. While getting rid of all those photography and auto racing magazines, I stumbled across several vintage girly magazines my sister gave me a few years ago. I totally forgot about these. The cool thing about them is that they were all obscure competitors with Playboy who have long since fallen by the wayside. Ever heard of Cavalier? Gent? How about Dude? No, me neither.

I'd love to have a big collection of 50's and 60's girly magazines. So if you were wondering, gently used vintage girly magazines would be the perfect gift for me. No, actually the perfect gift for me right now would be a new camcorder. Maybe one of those fancy ones with the hard drive. But I digress.

The ads, cartoons, and articles are probably the most interesting things about these magazines. For example, this bizarre cartoon from the February 1967 issue of Rogue:



Seriously, what the hell's going on here?

But my favorite is this deranged ad from the May 1964 issue of Carnival:



Did they really think this clumsy drawing of a freakish, grinning weirdo would sell a product about reducing wrinkles? Sure, I'd buy a product that will make me look like I should be fighting Batman.

My first short film

I've been secretly toiling away for a long time on a short film. I've had to do lots of difficult things like learn about writing a script, shooting video, editing, sound, lighting, etc. It's all been very trying, but I think the finished result is worth all the effort, frustration, and great expense.

Yuckity-yuck

In lieu of actual content, here's an old joke I found someplace online:

A salesman's car breaks down, so he asks a farmer to let him spend the night, and the farmer agrees. In the middle of the night, the salesman wakes up and is really thirsty, so he decides to go to the barn and get some milk from a cow.

Soon, the farmer hears noises coming from the barn and goes to investigate. He then sees the salesman coming out of the barn-soaking wet and with a white liquid dripping down his face. The farmer asks, "What happened to you?" The salesman says, "I just got thirsty, so I milked your cow. It was so dark in there I don't know how I did it. But I'm telling you, that cow has great milk! I must have drank a gallon of it!"

The farmer then stares at him with a puzzled look and says, "But we don't have a cow. We just have a bull."

Too much of a good thing?

I got a penis enlargement spam a couple of days ago with the following sentence:

Penis Enlarge Patch can enlarge your dick so much it would be hard for women to have sex with you.

Yes, I need another reason for women not to have sex with me. Sign me up for that!

Look, Grandma, I'm on the You Tube!

I put a new (and very short) clip up at You Tube. Consider yourselves lucky I don't have a fast internet connection.

Help me, I have no life

I know all of you have been on the edge of your seats about my recent claim that Nissan's Top Ramen and Aldi's Jehling brand of ramen were the same thing.



Look at the flavor packs. Not only do they have the same printing on them, but they have the same number on them. But, you say, that proves nothing. Maybe both companies buy their flavor packs from the same place. Yes, I suppose that's possible, but what about the photo below?



The same illustrations appear on the back of each package. And they're not just similar either; they're exactly the same drawings.

Also, the ingredients are the same, right down to the punctuation.

That's a painting?

Photo realistic art has always impressed my simple monkey brain, but this painting by Dru Blair is maddeningly detailed. It's so realistic that it's kind of pointless. If you can't tell it's a painting, then why go to all of the trouble?

Mystery Hill

Yesterday's post about a local gravity hill inspired me to see if I could find that ancient brochure I mentioned in the comments. For many years my parents have had a drawer with nothing in it but travel brochures and maps. Some of this stuff is older than I am. Since my family never throws anything away, I figured there was a good chance this brochure was still in there even though I probably hadn't seen it in twenty years or more. Well, after a bit of digging, I found it.

I thought this place was in Florida, but it's actually in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. My mother said everything was built on an angle and it made her physically ill. (Which probably explains why we never went back despite the fact that my sister and I really wanted to go.) She's also never heard of the local gravity hill.



I don't know if I could stand the terror of that "Spooky Spigot."



Looks quaint, huh? Wish you go there, don't you? You're all sad because stuff like this doesn't exist anymore, aren't you? Don't lie! Well, guess what? It still exists and they have a website. They even still feature the "Spooky Spigot!" Run for your lives!

Ooooh, scary road!

In the newspaper this morning there was an article about a new book called Weird Virginia. (The book's part of a series, each dedicated to a state.) Apparently here in Danville there's a "gravity hill", one of those places where things (namely vehicles) seem to roll uphill. Often these are tourist traps, but the one here is just an obscure section of road. I've always wanted to experience one of these and had no idea that there was one in my own hometown. Of course, the gravity-defying effects are just an optical illusion, but the newspaper article didn't mention that. Typical.

Foiled by fowls

Now that I have this hacked CVS camcorder, what can I do with it? Sunday morning I went down to the river with the camcorder and a bag of crushed pretzels. I put the camera on the ground facing up and poured pretzels around it. I hoped to get a great video of the geese sort of attacking the camera, but they wouldn't go anywhere near it. Next time I'll bring a shotgun. That'll be a great video.

Discoveries

A few minutes ago I was digging through a desk drawer and I found a note card with the following written on it:

"Nuns and knives are standard equipment among teenagers.[...]"

Maybe it's a typo from a newspaper years ago. Google turned up nothing. I only vaguely remember writing it down.

Milestone? Millstone?

Sometime today I passed the 70,000th hit mark. Which means this pitiful blog has been looked at at least 70,000 times. Of course the overwhelming majority of those folks were looking for weirdly specific porn or something even more bizarre.

And for no reason at all, here's a photo of a praying mantis I took this afternoon.

Ramen!

Don't ever let anyone ever tell you the Jehling brand of ramen that's only sold in those weird Aldi grocery stores is crap. Nope. Not crap. It's the same thing as Nissin's Top Ramen. I can't prove it, but I'm almost completely convinced that Nissan makes it. Even the flavor packet inside has the same printing on it. And you can get a 12-pack for $1.39.

Wanton You Tubery

Since I'm stuck on a crappy dial-up connection I haven't spent too much time at You Tube. I've looked at a few things, but it just takes too long for the clips to load when I'm poking along at 33.2 Kbps. Also, it really sucks when you're halfway through loading some stupid video clip and the connection dies. Yay, I get to start all over again! Kill me now.

Anyway, since I'd been shooting more video clips lately I decided to upload a few short (very short) ones for your amusement. So, here's some infrared trees, some infrared yard, some geese and some more geese.

Don't expect me to embed the You Tube viewer in my posts ever. I hate those and almost never look at them because they take too long to load for the reasons explained above. So there.

The awkward stage

This morning I went down for my weekly trip to the river to check on the goose family I've been watching for nearly two months. The above photo is one of the goselings. They used to be cute little fluff-balls, but now they're just ugly. Damn ugly.

They're down to three goselings now. Much to my disappointment, the smaller one with the black legs was missing. I was really looking forward to seeing that one grow up to verify if my guess about it being an adopted Canada goose was right.

Stick it to the man!

A few years ago CVS started selling these "disposable" video cameras and still cameras. The idea is that you'll buy one of these things for around $20-$30, use it, return it to CVS, pay a fee, and get your video on DVD. Then CVS recycles the camera; you don't get to keep it. It's kind of stupid idea in my opinion, but no one asked me. I'd rather buy a cheap digital camera and own it instead of basically paying what amounts to a rental fee for a cheap camera. Naturally geeks found a way around giving the cameras back and paying for a DVD, prints, etc.

So this morning, inspired by this website, this forum, and using a free program from this website, I hacked the cheap-ass CVS one time use video camera. I got it for $20 this morning and by 1:30pm I was done with the hack and watching the first video on my computer.

I actually had to solder tiny wires from a USB cable to the circuit board because I didn't feel like tracking down a Palm cable to modify. For someone who knows what they're doing, soldering isn't a big deal, but I have the soldering skills of a chimp. Somehow it worked. The program to unlock the camera worked as well. Everything worked, which never happens for me. I probably should've just bought a lottery ticket today instead of a stupid, cheap camera.

The video quality? Well, it kind of sucks, but it's not horrible. What do you expect for $20?

The sound of stupid

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An all reptile post

No birds, I promise.

This morning I was down at the river looking at the [deleted]. When I was leaving I noticed a lizard sunning itself on the concrete. It kindly posed for a picture.



After I got home I saw something out of the corner of my eye as I walked to the front door. At first I thought it was a lizard's tail, but when I looked I saw it was a little black snake. It was out in the open and began rearing up and making threatening movements at me, which weren't particularly threatening considering the snake was less than a foot and half long. I watched it for a bit and then it took off for an azalea bush. There it started vibrating the tip of its tail in the dry leaves making a rattlesnake-like sound, something I'd only ever seen on nature programs.

I got one good picture, but the snake disappeared before I could chase it out of the bushes. What I would've done with it once I got it out of the bush isn't clear. I didn't really want to pick it up since it was fairly agitated and would've certainly bit me. If I could've got it by the very tip of its tail I probably could've gotten it far away from the house and flung it away, but I didn't really get a chance.

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.

Blogrolling no more?

I believe Blogrolling is dead. I'm referring to the site or maybe the actual functionality of the code. When a blog on your list updates an asterisk (or whatever else you chose) pops up beside the link. Mine hasn't worked properly in quite some time, something I originally blamed on the new Blogger code which seems to be incompatible with some of the third-party add-ons we've all been using for years.

This morning I decided to see if I could fix it by replacing the code with new code. Nope. Still broke. To see if I could find a fix, I went to their forums but instead found out lots of other people are having the same problems and the powers that be weren't doing anything about it. In fact, there hadn't been an update to the news portion of the main site since last summer. So it appears that Blogrolling is all but dead. Our links are still displayed and they still work, but that's it.

Tucows bought Blogrolling some time back, so it's kind of odd that they would buy this service and then basically abandon it.

So how do we go about fixing out Blogrolls? We don't. Instead we dump them in favor of blogLinx. It's in beta, it's free, you can easily import your old Blogroll data, and it actually works.

The stupider side of the internet

Since I can't think of anything else to write about, here's yet another post of stupid search requests actual humans have used to blunder across my humble blog.

Rube Goldberg marital aid
Great idea for a porno movie.

so me pichers off how to fined a womans g spot
Like any woman in her right mind would ever let you try to find it.

pop ups, hearing things , flashbacks stuff that happen in real life
Seriously, do you even know what you're looking for?

"enormous schlong" wife
That's so not the kind of wife I want.

watching videos of BRUSHING a dog's TEETH ONLY
That's one kink even I've never heard of.

funny events that happened in the year 1973
Nothing funny happened in 1973. Nothing.

under no circumstances should the bagpipes be mistaken for a musical instrument
But I like bagpipes.

pictures for wanking in front of porn
The porn is for... Oh, forget it. You'll never understand.

girls accidentally peeing in stores
Yet another reason not to open a store.

"but i was naked"
Nudity's rarely a good excuse.

Staples, Do they drug tesT?
Ah, yes, the cream of America's work force. Remind me not to shop at Staples. I'd rather not have to deal with either Cheech or Chong when I want to get some paper for my printer.

can lava melt everyting?
Get off the island, now! You need an airplane or boat, not Google in this situation.

Enema Warehouse
This is either the title of a movie I don't want to see or the name of a company I don't want to work for.

small pens porn
And the winner for least interesting porn category is...

cartoon of someone wanking on the internet
Don't do that, you'll get the internet all sticky.

Of things spammy

I can understand a subject line that reads "start losing weight", but I simply can't fathom one that reads "start losing weight groin". Leave my groin out of it, please. Or your groin. Whatever. Also, "fiduciary less victorious" doesn't fill me with confidence either.

Mystery solved

The astonishing Dr. X has identified the odd birds shown in the above photo: they're cormorants. After a bit of Googling, I found a page on them that shows, and explains, the wing-drying behavior I saw (but didn't get a photo of).

To get the above picture, I had to set the camera to its maximum resolution, max out the 4 x optical zoom, and then crop it when I got home. That's a small section of fairly massive photo.

Down by the river

I went back down to the river this morning, but this time I had a bag of sunflower seeds to feed to the geese. My only fear was that they would rush me, peck me in the nuts, and when I was on the ground in a fetal position, they would eat all the sunflower seeds, then peck me to death. Fortunately, that didn't happen. When I tossed the first handful of seeds on the ground they all came to me, but didn't eat the seeds that much. They're probably too full from being fed potato chips and popcorn all day every day.

Anyway, I put up more photos at my Flickr page.

Photos of boring stuff

I posted around twenty-four pictures over at my mostly unused Flickr page. All the stuff I mentioned yesterday is there: the bridges, the scenery, the squalor, the geese, the ducks, and even the big snake.

Gooselets!

I went for a long walk along the river this morning, something I haven't done in a couple of years. Since I'm now unemployed I have the time for frivolous things like enjoying myself. I walked the new section of the paved walking trail that runs along the river. No idea how far I walked, but it was a few miles at least.

The trail is an odd juxtaposition of beautiful river scenery on one side and depressing industrial squalor on the other. Danville is trying to make itself look less ugly and depressing, and it sort of works in places, but since there's so many closed factories and mills with smashed out windows, the curtain of beautification isn't anywhere near large enough. This city has the highest jobless rate in the Virginia and the eighth highest in the nation.

With my spiffy new digital camera at the ready, I took pictures of everything in sight, including both the beautiful river scenery and the depressing abandoned buildings. I even got a couple of photos of a big snake. But mainly I took pictures of geese. I took almost 150 pictures total and maybe half of those are of geese. They were all over the place and in a better mood than usual. Well, the Canada geese are pretty relaxed most of the time, but the feral domestic geese are usually a bit obnoxious and more than a little aggressive. I was able to get closer than I usually can and they seemed not to care that much that I was standing there like a rube taking loads of photos.

I was planning to post more than one photo, but I took so many that it's overwhelming. Maybe I'll work up enough enthusiasm to put a bunch up at Flickr. Maybe not. The photo at the top of the page is one of the better ones I got. The white goose is apparently the father and the mottled one is the mother. At first I didn't notice the little goslings, who must've hatched quite recently, because the two big geese were sitting on them. The white goose was very protective of the little ones and on several occasions chased off Canada geese that got too close. I thought of running down and snatching one up to take home as a pet, but I didn't relish being pecked to death by those honking abominations. I'm joking, of course, but geese are rather big and kind of scary.

A really long-ass post (with pictures)

I hit Richmond friday evening and didn't get back until a few hours ago. The above photo shows one of the many hardships I endured at my stay in Casa de Catastrophe. Why this animal isn't bald by now is mystery best left to those more qualified to investigate it. Everything my sister owns is covered in cat hair. Everything I brought back home is covered in cat hair. I've probably got it in my lungs.

The reason I was in Richmond in the first place was to go to Ravencon and meet up with Sherri and Jay. So my sister and I went yesterday around four. Neither I nor my sister go to cons, so we basically wandered around like lost dogs and just generally got in everyone's way. I brought my camera, but was too embarrassed to actually take photos of the people dressed up like Storm Troopers and whatever the hell else they were supposed to be. (You can tell I really keep my finger on the pulse of modern science fiction and fantasy, huh?)



I did get a picture of the scheduled events taking place, most of which we didn't see. Actually, I don't think we saw any of them. We're just not hep to this convention stuff. In a world of nerds we're just a couple of dorks.

When weren't getting in the way, or bothering Sherri and Jay at their big table in the dealer room, we sat on a couch at the far end of a hallway away from the con action and talked about stuff that had nothing to do with the con.



In the above photo you can actually see the convention at the far end of the hallway. Well, actually you can't see anything because it's too dark, but that stuff on the foreground table was free. We both loaded up on free stuff, because it's like, you know, free stuff.

We did actually meet an author, which is appropriate since the con was devoted to science fiction and fantasy authors. C.J. Henderson, who I must admit I'd never heard of (but I'd also never heard of the big famous guy on the schedule that won all the awards), had a table set up in the hallway and was seriously working at selling his books. He could probably sell water to fish. I bought a book and my sister bought two.

While I regret not taking pictures of people in costumes, I mostly regret not buying any of the dice from the dice-guy. I like dice. I have regular six sided ones, but none of the multi-sided Dungeons & Dragons types. He had loads of many types of dice and even though I looked several times, I didn't buy any (dumbass that I am). Not that I want them to play Dungeons & Dragons or any other RPG. Nope. I'm fascinated by the random number thing. Yes, seriously. I actually own a copy of the Rand Corporation's A Million Random Digit and 100,000 Normal Deviates in book form even though I could've downloaded it free. (You think maybe I was at the wrong convention?)

All in all it was interesting and fun evening. I even got tanked up on free Mexican food and later unexpectedly got to say hi to Jammies on the phone. My usual Saturday would've passed with me in front of the computer slowly irradiating myself.