Category Archives: Humor

“Puddles is the only one that really understands me.”

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The headline is my favorite entry so far in the ongoing caption contest for this photograph of myself as Cthulhu for Halloween 2009. That photograph was taken by my dear friend Christie Clark, and that is her late, lamented, lovely, little Llhasa-dog Allie in my lap. R.I.P.

Had some good use of the Cthulhu mask, too, during the MAKE online editorial team conference call on Wednesday. Pro tip for Google+ hangouts: You don’t have to point the camera at your head. When this screenshot was taken, the mask was fit over a big plastic jug with a couple of rocks in the bottom for weight, sitting on the desk beside my computer.

I actually have no costume for this year, and since Halloween is on a Monday night I will probably not be doing too much except handing out candy to the neighborhood kiddos. But the caption contest has inspired me to at least sponge Cthulhu off for that purpose. Perhaps there will be more photos to come.

My Dad, cleaning the floor

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He’s in his early seventies, and that thing in his hands is a modified weed-whacker.

Back story: Mom and Dad decided, recently, to polish the Saltillo tile floor in their home, and Dad bought a floor polishing machine off Craigslist, for that purpose, for a song. The guy who sold it had been using it to grind concrete floors smooth, but it came with “soft” buffers, and Dad had no problem putting them on and getting them up and running.

Dad uses the machine to buff the floors.

And discovers, to his great annoyance, that some previous owner of the house had sealed the floors without cleaning them, first. The polisher will cut through the sealant on the tile, but the dark grime in the grout, between the tiles, is sealed in and will not come off with cleaners or mechanical buffing.

The grout, he decides, will have to be abraded away, where it’s dirty, and replaced.

He buys a cheap electric trimmer—at Harbor Freight, I think—and replaces the line reel with a wire brush, supposedly made from brass and unequivocally purchased at Harbor Freight.

Using this contraption, he discovers A) the brush is too hard and tends to erode the surface of adjacent tiles, as well as the surface of the grout, and B) every so often, it gives off sparks. Which brass does not do. He holds a magnet up to it and, whaddya know, click, it sticks. The brush is steel plated with brass.

He replaces the fake-brass brush with a special nylon brush he’s found online and ordered through the mail. And it works: The dirty grout is ground away, but the adjacent tile is not marred.

And that’s a picture of him, up top, abrading away the grout between the Saltillo tiles on the floor of the home he shares with my mother, using a tool improvised from an electric weed whacker and a special-purpose nylon brush. In his early seventies.

I do love him so.

My college self’s idea of evil genius…

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…included making counterfeit rewards cards for used CD stores using my then-fancy 600 dpi all-in-one scanner/color inkjet printer, my student-licensed copy of Photoshop, and some Avery printable business card paper. I’d bought one CD, getting one card and one stamp, then used Photoshop to extract the stamp image and duplicate it nine more times. I don’t think I ever actually tried to pass one of these, but I could have. Which was the whole point, I think: “First, a free used CD worth $8.99 or less, then the world!“

Pot-head with brain cactus

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Pothead with brain cactus, 4

A new take on my old sight gag, that would’ve worked better if I could’ve found a better specimen of (what I believe to be) Mammillaria elongata monstrosus. Mom’s got one, too, and both hers and mine have, for whatever reasons, stopped growing in their curlicue “brain” fashion and started sending out straight tubercles. I don’t know if that’s a normal part of the plant’s life cycle and/or if there’s something we could be doing to prevent it, but whatever the cause, as you can see, it rather spoils the “brain” effect.

Feature Request: One-Click Magic 8-Ball E-mail Responses

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In the spirit of Chris Anderson’s E-mail Charter, I offer the 20 possible responses of a Magic 8-ball:

  • It is certain
  • It is decidedly so
  • Without a doubt
  • Yes – definitely
  • You may rely on it
  • As I see it, yes
  • Most likely
  • Outlook good
  • Signs point to yes
  • Yes
  • Reply hazy, try again
  • Ask again later
  • Better not tell you now
  • Cannot predict now
  • Concentrate and ask again
  • Don’t count on it
  • My reply is no
  • My sources say no
  • Outlook not so good
  • Very doubtful

Without going so far as to suggest they should be chosen from at random, I would very much like to have an e-mail client that included each of them as a one-click response button in a toolbar.  And yes, OK,  you might throw in a “Random!” button just for fun.

FEMA will admit of no plans for alien contact

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Per a random FOIA request I filed back around the end of 2009, Office of Records Management of the Federal Emergency Management Agency claims to be “unable to locate or identify any responsive records” to my request for “budget summaries from the years 1979 to the present, inclusive, that will indicate how much money FEMA has allocated and/or spent in preparation for, or analysis of, the possibility of emergencies that might be caused by contact with extraterrestrial life, sentiment [sp] or otherwise.”

When I sent it to them, of course, I typed “sentient” instead of “sentiment.” I am not yet so paranoid as to suspect their typo is part of the conspiracy. They claim to have conducted a “comprehensive search of files within the Chief Financial Office.”

I was not expecting them to admit that they had prepared for an alien invasion, but I thought there might be an outside chance that they had dedicated some resources to analysis of the possibility. And “sentient or otherwise” was intended to include the possibility of a “space plague.” I suppose I should really ask the CDC about that one.

Star Trek – Attitude Problem

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Every instance of the phrase “attitude control” from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager (that I am aware of), cut together in the most amusing arrangement I could find. Please let me know if I missed any.

They’re Made Out of Meat

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I have before opined that the universe is likely sprawling with intelligences that are utterly disinterested in us because we are still biological, and therefore mortal, and therefore think and act on a timescale that must seem ridiculously hasty to them. To stretch the as-flies-to-wanton-boys metaphor a bit, consider the two-week lifespan of the fruit fly. How seriously could we take them as a peer society? Even if we did somehow figure out they were trying to communicate with us?

Bre Pettis showed me this video, which dates from at least four years ago and is derived from a short story by Terry Bisson, at Bay Area Maker Faire 2011 last weekend, and I can’t stop giggling over it. The video shows more than a smidge of Twin Peaks styling, plus a nod to aliens Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons (“We are merely exchanging long protein strings…”) at the end.