A Day with Grandpa

Unnatural, but quite dull

This afternoon I watched Unnatural, the movie I was poking fun at yesterday. God, was it ever dull. Maybe a restored print with subtitles instead of dubbed English would make it better. I don't know.

The most interesting bit for me was the periodic damage to the print that appeared to be a burn mark. It would suddenly pop up for a few seconds and look like a boiling blob. And when the blob was boiling away on top of something with strong light and dark areas, it would end up looking like a solarized photograph. The screencapture shown below is my favorite example of this strange effect.

Unnatural, but suitable for children

I bought yet another cheapie DVD set of old horror movies this morning. The description of one of the movies caught my eye.



It's nice to know that on the list of things that are suitable for children, one can find, "deranged prostitute," and "vicious killer." Not to mention, "artificial insemination."

Sentenced to Death

Today at work, the red-haired guy pulled out a sheet of paper with an odd logic puzzle on it that I'd never heard before. I'll try and summarize it as best as I can.

Three men have been sentenced to death and are burried up to their necks in the ground. Man A faces a brick wall. Man B faces the other side of the brick wall. Man C faces the back of Man B's head and Man D faces the back of Man C's head. Man A can only see the wall. Man B can only see the wall. Man C can only see Man B. And Man D can only see Man B and Man C.

Each man wears either a black or white hat. Man A wears a black hat, Man B wears a white hat, Man C wears a black hat, and Man D wears a white hat.



The executioner tells the men that they will all be executed unless one of them can tell what color hat he (the condemned man) is wearing. None of the condemned men can communicate with each other.

One of the men successfully tells the executioner the color of the hat he wears and the four are set free. Which man was able to figure out the color of the hat he wore and how was he able to do it?

I tried to find this logic problem online, but I couldn't. I did find several similar puzzles featuring men wearing different color hats, but they're not quite the same as this one.

I think what interests me most about this puzzle is the bizarre scenario of four men burried up to their necks and threatened with death unless they answer some absurd puzzle. It's like the plot to a future sequel of Saw or some other ultra-violent horror movie.

Work weirdness

The red-haired guy came into the machine shop and said, "It's as hot as nuts in here."

Later at work, a guy said he was going to the doctor to get violated tomorrow. (Ah, prostate examinations. I can't wait to get older.) Then he said, "Billy told me to make sure the doctor didn't have both hands on my shoulders when he was doing it."

What the hell are you even talking about?

This morning I stood looking into the CNC machine I was running. The crazy guy practically ran up to me and leaned into my personal space.

"I'd hate to be a man who wakes up in the morning with a huge wart on his dick from sleeping with some whore," he said.

I agreed with him because I didn't know what the hell else to do.

Skittles and ticks

At work the red-haired guy (as he shall now be called) called my name and held up a huge bag of Skittles that he'd found in the machine shop office.

"Have some of these," he said.

I walked over and held out my hand. "Just dump some in," I said. "My hands are dirty."

"This is the machine shop. Just dig in."

When in Rome. So I grabbed some Skittles with my hand that was filthy from CNC coolant. God only knows what else was in that communal bag of Skittles.

Rather than hold a handful of Skittles in my nasty hand, I just dumped them all into my mouth. I probably hadn't had that much candy in my mouth at one time since I was little.

The red-haired guy stood beside me with his own handful of Skittles and then reached around his head with his other hand. He pulled something out of his hair I assumed was just a piece of aluminum since I always ended up with the stuff in my hair, pockets, wallet, mouth, etc. He showed me a tick as I chewed an inhuman quantity of Skittles.

The crazy guy came up and the red-haired guy offered him the tick. Much to my surprise, the crazy guy accepted the tick. He put on the table where I was sitting and then got his lighter out. The flame touched the tick. "Watch it pop," the crazy guy said. I leaned away, still chewing my Skittles.

He ended up mashing the tick with a piece of metal.

The red-haired guy then offered the rest of his handful of Skittles to the crazy guy, who actually took them and ate them.

"If you want some more Skittles the bag's in the office," the red-haired guy said.

"No, I've had enough," I said.

That's my reward?

The Coca-Cola Company has had this promotion for a while called My Coke Rewards that I've successfully ignored since its inception. Today, for some mysterious reason, I decided to actually go the website and enter in one of these codes. At first I thought the first four digits was "ANUS." How thrilling! Then I thought it was probably "RNU5." How disappointing.



I typed it in at the site and it was rejected. Maybe it was "RNV5"? Or maybe "ANVS"? The examples given at the site conveniently didn't show U, V, or 5. Whatever it is, I'll never find out because I got tired of typing in variations of ANUS and left.

Story of my life.

Holiday loafing

So, in lieu of actual content, I'm posting a collage I made in 1994.

File Under: Bad Jobs

Driving home from shopping this morning I spotted a guy wearing a bright green clown wig with a matching shirt holding a big sign that read, "WE BUY SCRAP GOLD." He was sort of marching back and fourth along the sidewalk in front of a pawn shop.

Oddly, in this same area a couple of months ago, I saw a woman dressed the Statue of Liberty trying to drum up business for a tax place.

More detritus

Something else I drew years ago that I found on that external hard drive.

In lieu of actual content

While digging through ancient files I've got backed on an external hard drive, I found the photo shown below.



I made this several years ago using the clone tool in GIMP. (I'm way too cheap to buy Photoshop.)

Loving tribute

At work today the conversation turned for some strange reason to tattoos. The crazy guy said, "I've never wanted a tattoo; I just don't think they're cool. But maybe when my momma dies, I'll get her name tattooed on my ass or something."

I just nodded.

I just paid who money?

I won an auction on Ebay today. When I got the email receipt from PayPal, I noticed the email address of the person I'd just paid was bleedingbuttgasm@blehbleh.com. Yes, that's bleeding buttgasm. I gave bleedingbuttgasm $12.99 of my hard-earned money.

It's make fun of the new guy day!

I ended up working in a different part of the machine shop today. As we stood in front of the huge CNC machine that punches holes in large sheets of metal, one of the guys said to me, "Watch out, this machine can throw metal back into your stomach. Pull your shirt up, Jimmy."

Jimmy pulled up his shirt and showed off a nasty looking scar at the bottom of his rib cage that ran from one side of his torso to the other. I grimaced, and then I got well away from this machine.

Then the guy who had just told me to watch out started laughing. Apparently, Jimmy's scar was from an old surgury and this machine doesn't periodically shoot metal sheets into your gut at all.

Just call me gullible.

Strange but true!

Sausage in a can revisited

I wrote about canned sausage last week, but I have a confession to make: that was an old scan from a few years ago. It had been so long since I ate that stuff that I really didn't remember what it tasted like. So, I bough another can. But, I didn't just buy another can of Prairie Belt Smoked Sausage. Nope. I also bought a can of Vienna sausage since the one thing I did remember about the Prairie Belt sausage was that it reminded me of Vienna sausage.



I used to eat Vienna sausages when I was little, but they always reminded me of little penises. Somewhere along the line I stopped eating them. I guess one day I realized that they just don't taste that good. It's been a couple of decades probably since I've eaten the things.



When I opened the can they smelled and looked just as unappetizing as I remembered them. The liquid reminded a bit of hot dog water, but not as appealing. The taste? Bland. Not horrible, just bland. It's hard to describe. Imagine a hot dog, but just not as good. (Which isn't much of an endorsement since I don't really care for hot dogs either.) They looked just like lengths of hot dog, but the texture was much softer. Maybe if they were browned in a skillet or cooked on a charcoal grill they would be worth eating. Maybe not.

Ingredients: mechanically separated chicken, chicken broth, water, beef, pork, less than 2% of: salt, sugar, spices, sodium erythorbate, sodium nitrate and garlic powder.

Printed on the can was the following, "Libby's Vienna Sausages in Chicken Broth are ready-to-eat plump, delicately seasoned sausages. Enjoy them heated, chilled or right out of the container as a snack, main dish or sliced and added to casseroles and soups." Or just buy some real food.

On to the next can.

The Prairie Belt Smoked Sausages were a little shocking after I dumped them onto a plate. The liquid was a distressing yellowish color. They looked exactly like Vienna sausages, except darker. The smell was mainly sort of smoky. The taste? Worse than Vienna sausages, but not entirely inedible. The Viennas were more tolerable because they were so bland, while the Prairie Belt sausages had an unsettling tang to them.



Ingredients: mechanically separated chicken, water, chicken skins, pork skins, corn syrup, pork spleens, salt, no more than 2 percent of: soy protein isolate, natural flavorings, pork stomachs, sodium phosphate, oleoresin of paprika, sodium nitrate, smoke flavoring.

I really find it hard to believe that there was no more than 2% of smoke flavoring because the main smell and taste by far was smoky. The only other flavor I could identify was salt. Lots of salt.

After I ate a few of the Prairie Belt sausages, I decided I'd had enough. They're pretty awful, but not in any way I can describe. But I still had to finish both cans for lunch, which was my big plan for this weekend. (Yes, I know how sad that is.) The way I saw it (and I was deranged at this point from salt and pork spleen), the only way I was going to be able to finish them was to put the remaining six sausages between two slices of cheese and bread, then nuke it in the microwave for a bit. One side of the sandwich was Vienna and the other side was Prairie Belt. I ate the Vienna side first, and much to my surprise, it wasn't bad. In fact, it was almost good. I expected the Prairie Belt side to be an improvement over eating them plain, but I was sadly mistaken. Vile things these Prairie Belt Smoked Sausages. I made myself eat the whole sandwich, but it was more than a bit nauseating.

After I was done, I noticed that the serving size for each of these was half a can, so I had quadrupled the serving size. Now I can go another twenty-five or thirty years without eating this kind of stuff again.

No fun

Yesterday, the crazy guy said to me, "You should go out with me one weekend and have some fun."

"No, I'd just end up getting teabagged."

Marching

This post is too stupid to have a title

The crazy guy came up to me while I was working and asked, "Have you ever been teabagged?"

"No, I haven't!"

Then he laughed his ass off. Apparently, he was surprised I'd heard of teabagging. (I may be a mild-mannered, teetotaling, non-smoking nerd, but I have an extensive knowledge of extremely filthy hardcore pornography.)

Later he came up to me and said, "Hey, lets go to a party some time and find a guy who's passed out drunk and teabag him!"

"Uh, I'll pass."

"Then we can videotape it and put it up on YouTube!" Then he burst out laughing again.

So, for future reference, if any of you hear about a really funny video going around online featuring someone teabagging a drunk, there's a possibility it'll end up being the crazy guy doing the teabagging. Or me.

Stop looking down my blouse!

It seems the unspeakable Sherri has gone and tagged me for one of those accursed meme things all the kids are doing on the internets these days with the computers.

What were you doing five years ago?

I was a full time elderly student. Also, I was blogging. The proof, if you need it, is in the column on the right. Bastards!

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?

* Drag my lifeless carcass out of bed to face yet another miserable day.
* Eat something while watching something strange on TV.
* Drive to work and try to not get killed by the maniacs who roam the streets and highways.
* Clean out the CNC machine because the damn second shift won't do it.
* Go home and try to forget I have to do it all over again tomorrow.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

* Cool Ranch Doritos
* Plain M&Ms
* Chili and lime peanuts
* A spoonful of Nutella
* Monkey casserole

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

* Retire
* Build a fortress of a house to keep the riff-raff away
* By a tank and a bunch of old cars to crush
* Give the exact amount the local PBS station is begging for right at the beggining of the pledge drive to see if they'll end the fucking thing right then and there.
* Buy robots to conquer (yes, conquer) the world

What are five of your bad habits?

* Checking out asses.
* Looking for subtle signs of jiggle.
* Expecting someone else will answer the damn phone.
* Loathing humanity.
* Looking down blouses.

What are five places where you have lived?

* Danville, VA
* Danville, VA
* Danville, VA
* Danville, VA
* Danville, VA (Exciting, no?)

What are five jobs you’ve had?

* Making ravioli
* Unloading trucks
* Moving crap out into the warehouse
* Slotting merchandise at a party supply company
* Machine shop peon

What five people do you want to tag?

* Benito Mussolini
* Liberace
* Bullwinkle
* Norman Fell
* Rasputin

So there.

Does this look infected?

At work this morning the crazy guy came up to me with the sleeve on his t-shirt pulled over his shoulder. He lifted his arm up and pointed his arm pit right at me.

"Is there a tick in my arm pit? Do you see any little black spots?"

I didn't see anything.

"What about that little spot right there?" He motioned toward a tiny mole I was surprised he could even see at that angle.

"That's a mole," I said.

He turned around and showed me his other arm pit. There were no ticks there either.

I'm just glad he didn't do this that time he suddenly announced that he had a tick on his ball-sack and ran off to the bathroom.

For the greater good

Sausage in a can?

I bought this and then actually ate it. The retro label caught my eye, so I bought a can of the stuff. Oddly, I was actually expecting it to sort of taste good. What it ended up being was a gross sort of Vienna sausage, except different. Vienna sausages are bad enough, but these were just weird and kind of gross. I should buy another can to make sure.

Two books I'll probably never read

I went to Goodwill this morning to poke around. The best things I found were a couple of ancient WWI-era medical books. One called Physical Diagnosis from 1919 has a swell color illustration of a blue-skinned man suffering from argyria (who also kind of looks like Dale Earnhardt).



Argyria's that condition people get from drinking colloidal silver like that guy you've all probably seen on YouTube:



The other medical book I got is Text-Book of Operative Dentistry from 1918. It had once belonged to the Medical College of Virginia. Inside was a folded document that turned out to be an exam--from 1923.



Incidentally, the Medical College of Virginia still exists.

That's good, right?

Yesterday at work, after measuring an aluminum part I'd just made, the second in command said, "Oh, yeah! You're shitting in the tall grass now!" I just smiled and nodded. All I could think of was the tall grass tickling my bare ass.

News of the useless kind

My tail bone hurts and I don't know why. I didn't fall on it or anything. Nothing happened at work that in anyway involved my ass, so there's no real reason for it to be hurting. Although, I did get to come home from work at noon and then spent much of my free time in front of my computer, but that's no different from how I spend my time after work and on weekends. Maybe my tail bone is trying to tell me something.

She's a big girl now

Sad solution

Sure it is, Johnny. Sure.

Crash

I'd like to thank the person who crashed into the tree across the road from my house for giving me a blog post today. I had nothing at all to write about, but instead of scrambling around at the last moment to slap something substandard together, something actually happed that I can write about. It's still not very interesting though. Sorry.

As I got home from work I saw police cars, an ambulance, a tow truck, a fire truck, and a wrecked car blocking off the road only feet past the driveway. The phones are now knocked out because they hit the green phonebox thing that sticks out of the ground. Thankfully, I now have high speed cable internet. Boy would I be pissed if I was still on dial-up.

The driver? I have no idea, but I doubt they were seriously injured because this seemed like an awfully casual crash scene.

Science

Dune terminology of no use to any sane person

OK, this isn't the type of stuff I usually post, so people might actually like it.

Back in 1984 or so, my sister and I went to go see David Lynch's universally reviled adaptation of Dune. I remember the theater was nearly empty and no one even bothered to tear my ticket when I went in. My sister was handed several glossy sheets paper as she went in and she gave me a couple of them. They turned out to be a glossary of Dune words that I imagine some studio dork thought movie-goers would actually consult to make the film more understandable. Sure. No one pointed out to the studio that you can't read in a damn movie theater while the movie's playing because it's frickin' dark.

I don't even think I knew what the sheets were until I got home and actually looked at them. They ended up pressed in a large hardback book and that's where they've been for the past twenty-plus years.

Why can't newspapers be interesting like they used to be

Friday, it must be insanity

Today the crazy guy must've realized he was was being a bit dull of late and needed to make up for it.

While talking to me this morning, he suddenly announced, "Damn, I have a tick on my ball-sack!" And then he ran off to the bathroom. I expected a detailed story when he got back, but he didn't mention it again. I have to admit I'm still a bit curious if he did indeed have a tick on his ball-sack.

Later, while I stood looking through the Lexan window of the CNC milling machine I was running, the crazy guy came right up beside me and began dancing. He was practically humping my CNC machine while singing Steve Winwood's "Higher Love."

"Please stop," I said.

After lunch he simply disappeared. People asked where he was and if he came back from lunch. Since I had no idea he'd even left, I had no useful information for anyone. (He hangs out with me so much that I'm his minder now it seems.) After an over two hour absence, he returned to work looking rather frazzled. Apparently, he was tired from late night fishing and drove off to a nearby deserted area to take a quick nap. The quick nap degenerated into a two hour nap.

How this guy still has a job is a mystery to everyone.

On this day

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.