Only a Dane could think of such a thing

I have seen the future and its name is Lars Lottrup. (Sorry, it's all in Danish, much like the future will be.) For a look at my dream job, check out the video clip here.

Dullsville

If you've been wondering what's been going on in my life (and I certainly hope you haven't), don't worry; I have no life, so there's no problem. But you need to tell us anyway! There's nothing to tell. Really, it's all quite dull and doesn't make for interesting reading even for a blog.

What about work? You never write about work anymore. Why don't you write about work? Well, nothing worth mentioning has happened at work recently, so there was nothing to write about. Although, today I was awarded employee of the month. I got a t-shirt I won't wear and a lunch box I won't use. Whoopee!

Also, the crazy guy (who's been disappointingly dull of late) said to me this morning, "I have a serious chemical imbalance in my brain." No kidding, I thought. He'd mentioned to me before that he has ADHD and he thought he was going to have his meds toned down because they were making him to crazy. No kidding, I thought again. He and I make an odd pair and I'm surprised we can even remotely get on the same wavelength seeing that he's so manic and I'm so depressive.

A milestone

Rare scenes of homelife

I'll pass

Ever get the urge to see photos of Cookie Monster on the toilet? No? Well, they exist anyway, so you might as well go and look at them.

Gah!

Smurfs in real life are kind of scary looking.

I'm too tired to come up with anything good.

Arthur

Anti-Belgianism

Earlier this week I was going to do a post making fun of Belgians, but I couldn't find exactly the right illustration that I could slap on a marginally humorous caption. Then today, purely by accident, I found out there's a Belgian Anti-Defamation Institute.

You won this round, Belgium, but next time you may not be so lucky.

Jack

Timmy

Barry

Margo

Look, a poll!

What do you think of this blog's new direction?
I liked the old stuff better.
I liked it when you were on hiatus.
You smell.
Meh.
It's better than nothing. I think.
I want to fellate you!


(View Results)

Create a Poll

Father

Tom's Big Day

9 to 5

Today at work, someone showed me the dull photos they took at Dollywood last week. The only remotely interesting pictures in the stack was a series of a parade where Dolly Parton herself was riding on a float. I wondered how often the parade was. For all I know it was scheduled multiple times a day, multiple times a week. I couldn't imagine living a theme park named after me and being the main attraction of a regular parade. What would that do to a person's mind? I began to imagine Dolly Parton as a Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il type figure.

If you're going to have your own theme park, then why not let it degenerate into a totalitarian personality cult? Why not let it go even farther? Imagine a cult where Dolly Parton is worshipped as some kind of fertility goddess. After the daily parades there would be orgies and human sacrifices.

This all made much more sense at work, but then most things do when you're bored out of your cotton-picking mind.

Grandmother Hall

thirty a game of trenteetun

This morning I received an enlightening email from a Mr. Pettigrove Chabbez with the subject line liquescent.

Hey,

Present unforggettable night to your belovved one,
imaggine yoursellf as a Macho!
[Deleted link.]

Poor men! We swoop on you when you're defenseless it there
flashed to his mind the fair face of hired a truck to take
them and their belongings by heaven you shall never have
it. I'll stay king a hot sun, and i told the quarterguard
what had traitor is ii'llby gad, i'll kill him. I swear
biocchnlolls promise you, till i see him again for i never ways
of dressing of all manner of roast meats, he was starting
to keep the appointment. I redoubled into a baking pan,
and bake in a quick oven thirty a game of trenteetun. That
would be a diversion. Endurance sorely tried not more than
i deserve, areaaaddnipl kait, herself, the children... All securc
all not at all like the country, especially now that compare
stripes with each other at the ends of.

I know the text in these things are spewed out by Markov generators, but they can make quite odd reading.

Artie

Weiners

WARNING!!! Filthy Man Talk

While I was busy deburring endless stupid aluminum parts this morning with the crazy guy, the second in command of the machine shop walked up to us and said, "It's almost Friday! Got any big plans this weekend? Going to the stip club?!"

He's always asking me what I'm doing on the weekend, despite the fact that every single weekend I haven't done a damn thing except vegetate in front of my computer, nap, or watch TV. Of course it didn't really matter what I said because he simply launched into a deranged riff about strip clubs.

"You should go sometime. The stripper will sit right on you beer can, pick it up, and crush it with her ass-checks." Then he and the crazy guy laughed.

"And they have the pregnant ones who can squirt milk." He mashed his man-boob for effect. "And if you want you can go in the back room with her and milk her yourself."

"I'll pass," I said. More laughter.

Then, horribly, he began gyrating to demonstrate something a stripper had done to him while he was holding a sucker. "I was laying down and she was squatting over me like this," and he went into a partial squat as he gyrated. As he was reaching his demented crescendo, supervisor walked up to him from behind, but typically said nothing. I imagine he's come upon far worse stuff after working with these people.

Unnatural

A couple of days ago at work I was reading the ingredients of the granola bar I was eating and saw that it contained strawberry-flavored cranberries and blueberry-flavored cranberries. (It also had regular old cranberry-flavoried cranberries.) This was a Kellogg's Nutri-Grain bar, something you would expect to have vaguely natural ingredients. Maybe Kellogg's thought it was it just too difficult to get actual strawberries and blueberries to put in their Berry & Almond Nutri-Grain bars. And who the hell spends time and money getting cranberries to taste like other kinds of berries? The label clearly shows a picture of two blueberries and a strawberry, not a pile of shriveled up cranberries that have been subjected to bizarre flavor-altering experiments. Incidentally, there are actually almonds in the bars, so I suppose I'm lucky that they didn't substitute almond-flavored cranberries.

This is the last one, I swear

I'm not a Pluggers fan, really I'm not, but reading the damn daily strip over the past few months has done something to my mind. Apparently I'm viewing the world as little more than potential material for Pluggers submissions.



All I could think of when I saw this sad, nasty hat in the ridiculous hat-frame thingy was, "You're a plugger if you think this hat can be saved." Also, "You're a plugger if you own one of these stupid hat-frame thingies."

Note to self: Stop reading Pluggers.

Note to readers: That's not my hat.

Piddling

Today at work, the crazy guy was walking around near me while talking on his cell phone. After he hung up, he came over to me and said, "I have this friend who smokes pot and he was asking me if I knew anybody that could give him a clean urine sample. I told him I was going to give him a jar of pregnant female piss. The doctor would tell him he was pregnant!" Then he burst out laughing. I suggested he give his friend some menopausal urine. He loved that idea. "Yeah, menopausal! We can mix it with the pregnant piss. Or mix like male and female. Mix a whole lot of different piss together!" He wandered away laughing.

Suddenly I began to wonder what would happen if someone taking a drug test slipped some non-human urine into the sample container? Would the lab know it was llama piss?

Let's dig a hole and live in it

While wracking my addled brains for something to post about today, for some mysterious reason I began to think about fallout shelters. Back in the 50's and 60's lots of people built these things in their backyards hoping to survive the inevitable nuclear halocaust. The Civil Defense actually sent out books showing how to build the things. When we were litle, my sister and I found one that my parents got in the mail in the early 60's. I wish I had a copy of it, but my sister is in possession of it now. (Although she'll probably deny it.) I have no idea if that particular volume is online, but at Project Gutenberg there's In Time of Emergency: A Citizen's Handbook on Nuclear Attack, Natural Disasters from 1968 that looks similar, but the illustrations aren't as good. Here's a commercially available fallout shelter handbook from 1962.



Goofy nostalgia, you say? Well, there's still people building fallout shelters. Here's some instructions. How about a Nuclear Blast and Fallout Shelters FAQ? And there's an online book called Nuclear War Survival Skills.

What if people tried to sell bomb shelters? There wouldn't be enough of a market for even one company to survive selling this kind of stuff, right? Wrong.

There's American Bomb Shelter, F-5 Storm Shelters (they also make bomb shelters), Radius Engineering Intl. Bomb Shelters (these are really cool), Alpine Survival Group (I'd like to live in one of these), and Utah Shelter Systems. Who knew there was so much money to made on paranoia?

Buying a bomb shelter too nutty? The American Civil Defense Association has a page loaded with stuff. Some of it's probably even useful, but I didn't check because I'm like that.

And last, but not least, The Civil Defense Museum is loaded with documents, photos, audio, video, and who knows what else.

Plugging Away

For reasons best left unsaid, I've found myself reading the daily comic strip Pluggers (which I suppose now means I'm a Plugger).

Anyway, Pluggers is mostly, or perhaps entirely, composed of reader suggestions. Since I'm now a reader, I've decided to see if I can come up with some suitable material that reflects the true nature of the Plugger lifestyle. My quick paste-ups are presented below for your criticism.

Working in a coal mine

The crazy guy at work was out for a second day in a row, so I thought I was in for another peaceful day, but another guy was working close-by. I was under the impression this guy was relatively sane, but after listening to him talk and talk I've come to conclusion he's somewhat insane himself.

My first clue to his derangement was when he suddenly said, "See that guy over there in the door?" I looked over and saw a guy I didn't recognize standing in the doorway of my supervisor's office. "I bet that guy's gay. He probably sucks dicks. I always see him walking around like this," and he mimed a limp-wristed motion.

A bit later he inexplicably launched into an attack on a mild woman who works in quality control. She's apparently picky when it comes to approving parts that come out of the machine shop. Picky enough that he said, "I'd like to catch her in a dark alley and beat the hell out of her." Keep in mind that this a twenty year old guy talking about a limping overweight woman who's probably in her late fifties. Then he said, "Have you ever heard her sneeze? Drives me crazy. Every time I hear it I want to go back there and hit her in the head with a ball-pein hammer."

Thankfully he went home early and the rest of the day was quiet.

Today's Project: The Flaming Deathmobile

Recently I was perusing a set of encyclopedias put together by Popular Mechanics back in the mid 50's. Judging by the illustrations, the articles are nothing but reprints of stuff from Popular Mechanics magazine that probably go back to the 30's at least. It's fascinating stuff, but quite a lot of it looks rather unsafe. Case in point: the iceboat, or as I like to call it: The Flaming Deathmobile. Or maybe The Widow-Maker. Or how about The Assisted Suicide Machine?



Whatever you want to call it, I can't imagine someone actually building this contraption, taking it to a frozen lake, getting in it (with a passenger, no less), racing across said frozen lake, and then escaping with their lives more or less intact. I just can't see it.

It's almost like the editors of Popular Mechanics were looking for a surefire way of reducing their readership. Imagine the following scene in a 1930's office:

"Damn, it's costing a fortune to publish this magazine these days. When we weren't that popular it was a lot easier and cheaper. How can we get rid of a lot of readers?"

"Maybe we can kill'em off."

"Yeah, right."

"No, seriously. We can come up with some kind of project that's sure to end in horrible mass death."

"Like a big bomb disguised as a lawn ornament!"

"Or a wall sconce that shoots poison darts."

"Oh! I got it! We'll print up an article about an iceboat, but it'll have an engine and a frickin' airplane propeller on the back of it. It'll go a hundred miles an hour, but you can't steer it without it flipping over. Imagine it slamming right into a tree or a house. Or going through a hole in the ice. Hell, maybe it'll even explode as soon as they crank it up. Jesus."

"Now, that's a good project!"

"And how!"

OK, I'm sure that didn't happen, but can you actually picture people riding in this thing and living? Whatever, but if you're interested in building this plywood death-trap, I've scanned the entire article. Just click on the three images below.



Oh, I should probably mention that if you do build this and it explodes and kills your whole family, or if you go deaf from having that engine right behind your head, don't sue me. Moron.

Frightening. I think.

Today at work I ended up away from the CNC machines and was deeper inside the machine shop doing other things I'm equally not qualified to do. I worked a few hours at a machine I later found out was called an insertion machine.

Later my supervisor (a mild-mannered religious type) came up to me and said, "I heard you got intimate with the insertion machine."

I shifter uneasily in my chair and said, "Um... yeah."

What the hell else was I supposed to say?

Further ponderings

Today at work while deburring heat sinks, I wondered why none of the body modification crowd ever bolted heat sinks to their heads. I've seen all kinds of crap people have implanted in their heads, such as a row of metal spikes coming out of the scalp like a chrome mohawk, so the notion of someone implanting something a heat sink could be attached to isn't that far fetched. And if the heat sink were installed properly, it would be useful to cool the head. I guess. I don't actually know since I'm not a doctor, I just play one on the imaginary TV show in my head.