THE BLOG IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE BLOG

If you couldn't figure it out already, I'm not going to update this anymore. I'm not out of super-awesome ideas or anything, it's just that I've gone back to raving at anyone and everyone in person. So no more blag. Take care, Internet!

Hey guys, it's been a while.

Well, I screwed up the light-capturing rig so it ended up not charging the mini-capacitor-bank. But this doesn't mean it shouldn't work! It just means I'm fallible. Hey look, a distraction!



I could amuse myself with this for days.

We can't break the laws of entropy but we sure can cheat them a little bit! I don't understand why a solar panel taking light from a light bulb to power the same lightbulb is a bad idea. Sure, it's not a perpetual energy device, but it's more efficient than without the solar cell. And we're all about efficiency nowadays, aren't we? I'm setting up a proof-of-concept solar capacitor charger right now and I'll make a blag post with photos later.

For those of you who've played Sonic Adventure 2: Battle

Has anyone else noticed that Rouge the Bat is a little...jiggly? Not in the stereotypical video-game-female-jiggle manner, though--Rouge's bust is as unmoving and chaste as a bronzed nun (which is probably for the best, seeing as it's a frigging BAT). No, it's her ears. They just don't stop moving. Ever. To me, that's way creepier than the visual image I just gave myself of dipping a nun in molten bronze.

Basically I just wanted an excuse to say "Bronzed nun." I think that's my best simile ever.

Fidel Castro

Holy hell, he just won't die. Fidel Castro is clearly a descendant of Rasputin. No, wait. Fidel Castro IS Rasputin.

***THIS IS A BREAK TO INDICATE A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SUBJECT. I AM AN EXCELLENT SEGUE-WRITER.***

Foodwatch 2007: Hour five. I'm fasting for Yom Kippur. I've never done it before so I don't know if I'll last until Saturday evening. I'll probably be hungry and cranky during the physics lab tomorrow afternoon, which will affect my results in interesting ways. I'll probably have things like V² = V₀² + SCRW YOU GUYS THIS SUCKESS. I can't wait!

h-diaeresis

We need a character for h with diaeresis. Well, there already is one (ḧ -- you might not have the right font to read that) but it's not in common use. Actually, it's not in use at all. Wikipedia acknowledges its existence but does not have an article nor mention any use for it. I would suggest it be used like ä ë ï ö and ü are used in English: namely, to indicate the start of a new syllable where it might be missed, like in naïve or coördinate.

There are many places where one could use an h-diaeresis! Take The Great Gatsby. There's a character named Wolfsheim. That's not pronounced WULF-shaim, it's pronounced WULFS-haim. Other words which could benefit from an h-diaeresis include the following: lighthearted, lightheaded, butthead, misheard, fathead, shepherd, lefthanded, and, of course, asshat. I've already started using h-diaeresis in my homework, but it's not that often that I get to use it. Maybe someone will notice eventually.

UshankaUshanka: Did I tell you my plan for Fiji?
bladez740: no
UshankaUshanka: Okay, some background info
UshankaUshanka: Fiji has had four--FOUR--military coups in the last 19 years
UshankaUshanka: Every one is because someone thought the current government was either a) too racist or b) not racist enough
UshankaUshanka: The majority of Fiji's population is Hindu descendants of Indian slaves, but the majority of the government and economy are controlled by native Fijians.
UshankaUshanka: So, in the most recent coup this February
UshankaUshanka: The army/police chief, who is in charge of EVERY FIREARM IN THE COUNTRY, noticed that of the 1000 tracts of land the government gave away that year, 997 of them went to native Fijians.
UshankaUshanka: "That's pretty racist!" he thought. "I have all the guns and all the soldiers in the country, I should do something about this!"
UshankaUshanka: So he drew up a list of his demands
UshankaUshanka: and gave them to the prime minister saying that he had three weeks to comply or else the military/police forces would rebel and take over.
UshankaUshanka: In other words, he gave three weeks' warning before staging a coup.
UshankaUshanka: They knew three weeks in advance that he was going to attack them. They had three weeks to prepare.
UshankaUshanka: And yet he still succeeded in taking over the country.
UshankaUshanka: But he's not much better
UshankaUshanka: like, lynching people and stuff
UshankaUshanka: So the way I see it, I should take over Fiji. It can't be too hard if you can stage a coup with three weeks' warning, right?
UshankaUshanka: I'll kick everyone out, deport them to Antarctica or something.
UshankaUshanka: And I won't let them back in until they can prove that they can play nice.

At long last!

I've been trying to read and translate a Spanish guidebook on Silbo Gomero for a while now. At long last, I've reached the part where it explains the mechanisms behind the identification of letters! Now I understand how to speak Silbo Gomero! The next problem is actually speaking Silbo Gomero.

Silbo is a whistled language, intended to be heard over a range of a couple miles. To generate a whistle loud enough to travel this distance, one has to use the "fingers-in-mouth" method. And boy is it difficult. All I've succeeded in doing so far is to hyperventilate and to cover my fingers in a film of slobber. I'm going to keep trying, so don't shake my hand for a couple of days, alright?

I've decided that I really want to visit the idyllic green lake seen in Hero, or some lake like it.

That's all I've got for tonight. I'm not really feeling the blaggy vibes.

A letter to Jamie Foxx

Dear Jamie Foxx,

I think you are a fine man and I respect your acting skills greatly, but I still cannot overlook something you did in 2005. The incident in question is one of the greatest disasters in cinematic history.

I am talking, of course, about your Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for your role as Max, the islophilic cab driver from Collateral. Now, don't get me wrong, I think you did a great job in that movie, but I do not believe you qualified as a "supporting actor." As I recall, you had more lines and more screen-time than any other cast member. This should classify you as the lead actor, should it not? How did you get into the supporting actor category?

I posit, Mr. Foxx, that you quite selfishly and purposefully demoted yourself to "supporting" actor so that you could have a shot at winning TWO Academy Awards in 2005. See, you had already been nominated for best actor for your role in Ray. If you were nominated for best actor twice, you could only win one award, but if you were nominated for both best actor AND best supporting actor, you had a shot at a second award! Fortunately for easily-angered people like myself, you did not win your second award--had you been voted best supporting actor, I may have had an aneurysm.

I've suffered in silence long enough, Mr. Foxx. Every time I have seen or heard your name, I remember this gross abuse of power, and it pains me greatly. What with The Kingdom coming out soon, I don't think I could have survived much longer without telling you of my great dissatisfaction.

Regards,
Sam "Captain Awesome" Ettinger
Semiprofessional bellyacher

Hon-Wasabiiiiiiiii

So, after hours of laborious research, I've found hon-wasabi for sale from the kiwi-mafia of New Zealand. I get 50 grams of dried, powdered hon-wasabi for $13.55 including shipping, or 150 grams for $25.50. Those are US Dollars, not NZ Dollars. That's really, really, REALLY expensive for a food additive. I'm going to finance all of this if I have to, but if someone out there wants to pay for part of this I promise you'll get a generous ratio.

This is kind of exciting. If the dried, powdered hon-wasabi tastes good, I may have to shell out the $300 to get a fresh, intact rhizome. Mmmmm, my mouth is burning already.

On Gangs

Alright, since I don't have enough ridiculous pursuits with which to waste my time, I'm going to continue fleshing out the idea of The Superfluous U's as a gang. We're a hyperlingual gang dedicated to confusing people, spreading pro-metric propaganda, and teaching bad words to children in foreign languages. Also, we find linguistics at least mildly thought provoking. All Superfluous U's must pick a sufficiently linguistic gangster name. I already claimed the diacritical mess mentioned below, and someone else (Hi ERTW!) is "circumflexxx," so you've got to avoid infringing on those names. The moment you pick a decent linguistic name and tell me about it, you are entered into the Superfluous U's. Then it's your duty as a gangster to go out there and confuse people, spread pro-metric propaganda, or teach bad words to children. Have fun!

Coming soon: A logo!

On iPods and Unicode support

So, one of the bands on my iPod is the ever-awesome Moxy Früvous. Also, some of the songs and artists are in Japanese, like the song "ホスピタル ダブ (名医とよばれたい)," by 鈴木慶一, 田中宏和, 松前公高, and on the album "MOTHER 1+2 オリジナル サウンドトラック." All of these show up properly, so clearly the iPod has some Unicode support for letters beyond the standard letters used in English. But just how much support did it have?

Enter đȉẳƙṝḭʈḯɕ. For those of you who can't read that, it should look like this:


That's "LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH STROKE, LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH DOUBLE GRAVE, LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE AND HOOK ABOVE, LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH HOOK, LATIN SMALL LETTER R WITH DOT BELOW AND MACRON, LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH TILDE BELOW, LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH RETROFLEX HOOK, LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH DIAERESIS AND ACUTE, LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CURL" for all you people who wanna go look it up in your Unicode handbook. Yeah, I know you're out there.

I made a three-second track of silence and said it was by The Superfluous U's, which, incidentally, would be an awesome name for a hyperlinguistic gang. I call dibs. I also gave the album name the ridiculous squiggly mess above, which, incidentally, would be an awesome name for a hyperlinguistic gangster. I call dibs again.

So, anyway, what did the iPod do? iTunes successfully displayed all the letters, but the iPod displayed it as đṝḭḯ (that's the d, the r, and the last two i's). Man, what a gyp. I should do as Mitch did, and walk into the Apple headquarters, screaming "YOU OWE ME SOME LETTERS!"

Edit: As it stands in this post, my gangster name is literally unpronounceable. To compensate, I changed the d-with-stroke to d-with-middle-tilde and the i-with-diaeresis-and-acute to i-with-stroke. Now it's theoretically pronounceable, but I still can't do it.

Vacations from Purgatory

So, recently the Today show had a special segment called "Vacations from Hell." In it, they featured the sob stories of four families who claimed to have the worst holiday. After they told their tales, America got to vote on which family they thought had the worst vacation. So, I only heard the last of the four stories. It was about some family on a Mexican cruise, and they suffered power outages at random intervals. Oh, boo hoo. They even stated explicitly that there were others who had it worse than they: families with screaming infants who got separated in pitch black and people on the lower deck with no air conditioning, for example. I thought to myself, "What a bunch of whiners. There's no way they can win this competition."

They won.

I'm sorry, but that is not a vacation from Hell. Not a chance. Being unable to play midnight shuffleboard off the coast of Cancún is not a vacation from Hell. You are not allowed to call your vacation a "vacation from Hell" unless it's something on the level of "Saharan marauders attacked our caravan, ate our dog, and flipped off our youngest child." Now, had there been Somali pirates who infiltrated the cruise ship and cut the power, then robbed everyone, set fire to the deck, _{flipped off your youngest child,} and tossed the captain overboard, then I can imagine your vacation being the ultimate vacation from Hell.

Here, I'm going to make my own vacation-from-Hell submission. *Ahem* "I was in Hawaiʻi, and it was like the greatest vacation ever, and we got free candy in the hotel room. So I grab some Starbursts, and I open the first one, and I'm almost done opening the wrapper, and I hear a tearing sound! The humidity made the candy all sticky and a little piece of the wax wrapper got stuck to the Starburst! It was rendered absolutely inedible! So I go to open the next one, right? And the same thing happens! Same with the next one! And the next one! It was sooooooo tragic!"

I feel like a total whiner now. Awwwwwwwwww.

Wasabi fraud?

This Wikipedia article blew me away. Apparently, the sinus-incinerating green paste we all eat with sushi is not genuine wasabi. It's horseradish dyed green. This, like so many petty other things, upsets me to no end. We call this horseradish stuff "wasabi" even though it's not even from the same genus of plants as real wasabi!

How, then, did we reach the naming convention that we did? Is there some massive conspiracy in the Japanese food market? Real wasabi is expensive and difficult to transport, sure, but that's no reason to dupe us into believing we're eating something exotic when in reality we're eating something boring and ordinary! Something bordinary! Maybe this is bad knowledge to possess. Perhaps the next time I eat at a sushi bar, the food will taste like ash in my mouth. Ash seasoned with lies.

Now I feel obligated to import some real-McCoy wasabi (called "hon-wasabi" in the biz) and compare the two substances. It'd be an interesting taste test, to be sure. But how to obtain it....

A Recipe (In English)

So, essentially I just now mixed some milk and rice flour and ground tea leaves and stuck them in the microwave for 90 seconds. DAMN that was some tasty tea-milk-rice paste. I recommend everyone try some variant on this, like with pork or vanilla bean instead of tea, or something that isn't rice flour (potato flakes! Use instant mashed potato flakes!), or different proportions of ingredients, and then report back to me. I don't even think this can be classified as a food. It's like industrial-grade paste that will turn out okay no matter how terrible a chef you may be. Mmmm, industrial-grade paste.

In completely unrelated news, the phrase "industrial-grade" is a bahuvrihi.

A cop-out blag post: More Leedsery

to: info@leedsmattress.com
re: Dubious statistic

Hello all,

I have e-mailed your organization once last week, but received no response. However, I will remain persistent. I would please like to know how Leeds determined that "9 out of 10 people need a new mattress," as is claimed in the commercial. The question of how you arrived at your unique conclusion has been bothering me for quite some time now, and you are the only individuals with the power to fulfill my request!

Gratefully,
Sam Ettinger

Blah.

Leeds has yet to reply

Leeds has not given me a response, which is surprising considering the prompt reply I got from Sit'n'Sleep. I will draft a letter to the Better Business Bureau soon. Woo!

CNN is an idiot too!

Okay, this is upsetting. Does everyone remember when CNN did a geography quiz on the streets? Well, maybe CNN could have used a geography lesson or two today.

This is an article about a cholera outbreak in Comoros. It's sad, and I don't mean to cheapen the deaths of those people, but I need to bring something to your attention. Notice the URL of the story:



See how it says asiapcf, as in "Asia and Pacific Ocean"? Yeah...this story is filed with the Asian/Pacific stories. Really. Oh, here's a map of the southern tip of AFRICA and the INDIAN OCEAN. Comoros is circled in red.



No stretch of the imagination could place Comoros in Asia or the Pacific Ocean. This is a horrible geographic transgression, CNN.com! I am ashamed!

I am an idiot.

Yeah, I feel pretty stupid right now. Sit'n'Sleep is not the mattress company that makes the "9 out of 10" claim. Leeds is. I was told that "Sit N Sleep’s commercials are very distinctive and memorable because of the 'Your [sic] killing me Larry' that is said at the end of each commercial." However, the Sit'n'Sleep representatives were very polite and I've now sent my complaint to the proper organisation.

At least I still have a shot at bringing down a mattress magnate, I guess.

A Letter to Sit'n'Sleep Headquarters

To: feedback@sitnsleep.com
From: Sam Ettinger, kepisottlegione@gmail.com
Re: Dubious statistic

Dear Sit'n'Sleep representative:

I have seen the same Sit'n'Sleep television commercial for at least two years, or what seems like two years. At the beginning, your spokesperson (spokeself?) named Neil makes the claim that "nine out of ten people need a new mattress." Personally, I find this statistic to be rather dubious, especially since Neil fails to cite any studies nor mention a single criterion. Instead, he expects us, the consumers, to take his word unquestioningly, which implies one of two things:

1) There is no statistic and the fact is in reality a lie.
2) Sit'n'Sleep assumes its consumers do not need to fret over things like facts, which seems condescending and disrespectful.

Please respond to this e-mail with the source of Neil's aforementioned claim. Thank you for your time.

Respectfully,
Sam Ettinger

Seriously. It seems like no one has brought this up before, but the lies stop now! I AM DEMANDING THE TRUTH FROM THE MATTRESS MAGNATES!

I just watched The Bourne Ultimatum.

The way I see it, there's no way any of us could ever join a secret agency like the CIA, NSA, FBI, KGB, or any other TLA (three-letter acronym). So what we need to do is create our own privatised secret agency. Man, that'd be totally awesome. I'd spend all my days stalking ambassadors of Pacific nations, tracking their activities, then sneaking into their offices so I could obtain secretive documents, like official border maps. Then I'd reapportion the border maps so some of the islands would magically become unclaimed. I'd use my super-secret secret-agency speedboats and stuff to claim them myself! Finally, my own islands!

I have a problem.

Sugarsugarsugarsugarsug--oh, and other crap too

Does anyone out there remember The Iron Giant? It was a very well-animated movie about a child in Cold-War-era America and a giant space robot from space that likes to kill people who have guns. Yeah, don't worry about the layers of hypocrisy there. The point is, there's this one scene where Hogarth (the child) makes MEGA-TWINKIES. He takes a standard Twinkie, puts it on top of a can of aerosol whipped cream, and sprays the whipped cream into the Twinkie until it leaks from every pore. Then he eats the whole thing in one bite. Holy CRAP I need to try one of those.

...

This would be a way better blag post were I to try one right now. Unfortunately, I have no whipped cream. This is a problem.

Now I can't get those mega-Twinkies out of my head. I do fully intend to try one. I have this idea in my head that trying an extremely excessive food once, and only once, then it's okay. Inexplicably, I think it has no health impact that way. I've done a couple things like that. Colee and I started the Super-Great Self Esteem Club, for example. To join the SGSEC, one has to consume five cupcakes and not feel any twinge of guilt That's pretty sugar-heavy. Then there's the time that I ate an entire jar of pickles in one sitting to see if I could. That's %700 of your daily sodium intake, right there. I still have this desire to eat a hummingbird--I guess that kind of fits into the "One-time food that's probably really bad for you" category. Mmmm...pickled hummingbird mega-Cupcake with whipped cream filling.

Oh, hey. I made a new blag. Check it out, if you're feeling particularly multilingual.

Quantifying kung-fu skill!

I'm back from engineering camp. Don't worry, it was really awesome, but I'm exhausted and don't want to talk about it.

I've determined that every kung-fu star is great in his own right, but after a while, we all go back to thinking "Yeah, but Bruce Lee is still the best." Maybe it takes a few seconds, maybe it takes a few minutes. I think we should have a scale on which to judge kung-fu stars, based on how long it takes before one goes back to drooling over Bruce Lee. But what would this unit be called? A Bruce-Lee-Hour? I need some help here.

More focus on projects.

Okay, I finally got into the prototyping room today. Financially and physically a vortex tube is most likely not going to work, but that's okay because I got to play with someone else's today. So instead of that, I'm going to play B, which is a DIY cotton-candy machine. Rock on! I'll still try making the steampunk blinds, too.

Blag again!

So, here I am at Rose-Hulman's Operation Catapult, and I just now got my internet back. And by "Just now" I mean about an hour ago. I've been checking my comics and stuff ever since. And now I've come at last to this, my final tab, my own personal blag.

For the next two weeks or so, I am going to be learning CAD programs and messing with milling machines and lathes. I will build a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube and maybe a miniature version of my idea for Steampunk blinds. I promise to post pictures as soon as I bother to take some pictures. Woo.

DIY Morning Sousalarm

In Los Angeles, 105.1 FM used to be a station called K-Mozart. It was light classical, without any opera, unlike the other classical station, KUSC (boooooooo). However, KMZT was not very profitable and its owners decided to replace it with a country music station, forcing us to listen to KUSC. KMZT can still be found on 1260 AM, but let's not kid ourselves: the quality sucks.

What I miss most about KMZT is something called the morning Sousalarm. Every weekday at 7:15, they would play a Sousa march to rouse sleepy listeners. Sure, most of us were awake by then, but it was still fun.

I sorely missed that Sousalarm. So I made my own.

iPods have this wonderful feature enabling them to act as an alarm clock that plays music. However, it's kind of difficult to find, which is why I'm making this guide. You need an iPod (god I hope you figured that out by this point) and a decent set of speakers. Now, load as many Sousa marches as possible onto the iPod. If you have Sousa CDs, great. If you're going to download them from the internet, that's okay too. I promise I won't tell.

Once they're loaded, make a playlist for the Sousa songs (or whatever the heck it is you want to hear when you wake up). You can do this in iTunes or by highlighting the artist's folder and then holding the centre button (which makes a playlist called "On the Go" followed by a number). For some reason, the iPod alarm clock can only play a beeping noise or songs from a playlist.

Anyway, go back to the topmost menu, and select Extras > Clock. Here, you can pick any of the clocks shown. Then, go to Alarm. Set Alarm to "On" and Sound to the name of the playlist with the songs. Then, set Time to 7:15 am. It's not a Sousalarm if it doesn't go off at 7:15 am. Hook the iPod up to the speakers, make sure it's at a reasonable volume, and turn the iPod off. At 7:15, it will turn itself on and start playing music. If you don't want to hear the songs in the same order, setting Shuffle to "All Songs" will also randomise the order of your morning playlist. Sweet deal.

ZOMG

There was no post on Wednesday. You can blame the above film. It is so mindblowingly awesome that all I could type was, quote:

"hrgch, gaaarkch, qwhoooooo...glarble!"

...and I decide that would be worse than no post at all. This gives you a sense of how amazing this movie is. It's like this movie was tailor-made for me personally. I expect a certain amount of crap in kung-fu/wuxia films: stupid visual gags, corny dialogue, and stunts that are obviously filmed and then reversed (like throwing a silk shirt carelessly and having it land--perfectly folded and ironed--on a throne). Iron Monkey is perfect in its corniness. It has precisely the right amount of corn. Then, of course, there are the fight scenes. They're extremely well-choreographed and take place in unique situations. One of them has a government official throwing heavy metal rings (sewn into his 50-foot-long robe sleeves, so he can retract them--like a fishing lure) at people for really no good reason. The very last fight scene takes place on a whole bunch of bamboo poles, about ten feet above a raging inferno on the verge of consuming the very supports on which they are fighting. Unlike other "action" films, which spend far too much time on some obscure device called "plot development," Iron Monkey throws that scramble to the wind. On the rare occasion that an explanation is needed, Yuen Woo-ping (The director or choreographer of a metric buttload of excellent films) manages to work it into a fight scene, so as not to dilute the awesome with boring standing-and-talking. And als--oh my God, they made a sequel.

I'll be back later. I need to go find Iron Monkey 2.

At long last!

It is done!

Anyway, the applet is just a silly little thing. After you unzip it, open web.html in Internet Exploder. Then select a duration from the ones at the upper-left, enter notes using the keyboard buttons, and watch as they show up on the music bars. Then, push "play" and the applet will play the music back for you, but as if the sheet music were upside-down. In other words, this:



Would be played like this:



However, there are many limitations. It must be run in IE, it's written in Logo (*shudder*) and requires a special plugin, it's bulky, and it's really, really, really freaking stupid. Plus I think I'm the only one who ever thinks about crap like this.

Anti-pickpocket pockets

I'm still working on my silly program which I promised you on Wednesday. In the meantime, I had another brilliant idea for travellers in any place infested with pickpockets.

There already exist pickpocket-proof pants, with hidden interior pouches which only the wearer can reach. However, I would take it a step further and make ANTI-PICKPOCKET PANTS!

A battery pack and transformer generate a high-voltage current running through the fabric on either side of the pocket, but the circuit cannot be completed because of little plastic spacers. When someone reaches his or her filthy burgling fingers into the pocket, it completes the circuit and shocks the aforementioned filthy burgling fingers.

Of course, this means that YOU have to be wary and never stick your hands into the pockets without first turning off the electricity. Then you have to remember to turn it back on before entering a place with pickpockets. But hey, inadvertently shocking yourself is half the fun!

Sorry...

I'm making a project that's going to take the next two days or so. It'll be worth it, trust me. Well, maybe.

Science!

I'm going to write a sort-of decent explanation of what I'm doing this summer, so I have an easier time explaining it to people later.

I have an unpaid internship at Caltech doing computational chemistry, modeling 3-d shapes of proteins. Knowing the shape of proteins is important to understand how they react to chemicals, electrical impulses, body tissue, plasma cannons, &c. Proteins are comprised of chains of amino acids. The chain can be less than ten or more than ten thousand. However, they don't stay as one long chain. They fold, according to chemical structures, temperature, acidity, and other constraints until the structure looks like any number of amorphous blobs smooshed together.

Now, proteins are tiny little things, so the shapes can only be really determined by inputting the chain and a ridiculous number of other variables into a computer simulation and then waiting weeks for it to fold. However! Many proteins have similar structures and functions, and follow the "you've seen one you've seen them all" rule. By using comparisons, it is possible to take the already-formed protein, replace the dissimilar amino acids with the ones from the mystery-protein's sequence, and then fold that. This saves a lot of time and makes it far more efficient.

Well, I think it's cool.

Garbage cans

Houston has interesting trash cans. They're mounted on axles so that garbage collectors can simply tip it over and dump the cans' contents into a truck or whatever. Unfortunately, this means anyone can tip the cans' contents out, including raccoons, squirrels, Ted Turner, and other consumers of trash. I wonder if kiwis eat trash. Perhaps the Kiwi Union is in cahoots with the Texas Municipal Board Whatever It's Called. THOSE CONNIVING FLIGHTLESS DECEIVERS!

I'm baaack!

I'm back from Houston, mostly unscathed. I have a lot of random musings that individually are worthless, but together make for sort of decent blaggery. I'll try and spread them out for a few days' worth of updates.

* * * * * * *

I don't know anything about catalysts in reactions, but it seems to me like a reaction that used marble (CaCO₃) as a catalyst could be very useful in discreetly planting explosives. Put the reacting chemicals on the lip of a marble column, and the marble would de-form, catalyse the reaction, and re-form, sealing the reactants inside. It would tunnel through unnoticed! If one could get a little detonator to piggyback down the tunnel before it re-forms, no one would suspect a thing!

* * * * * * *

Airplanes are crowded places. Please make everyone's flight more tolerable by not being any of the following:
• The comedian. We get it, you make bad jokes. Some of them are funny. But please, learn some moderation. Not everything has to be snarky and sarcastic. Pronouncing "Phoenix" as "fu-wee-nix" every single time gets old really quickly.
• The person who laughs at the comedian. Aaaaaaaaaarhgblble.
• The parent with a baby. Hey, did you know that babies can feel the rapid pressurisation and depressurisation of planes far more sensitively than you can? Their inner ears are so sensitive that the changes in pressure are painful. Babies will scream on flights.
• The Game Boy. It has a volume knob. Turn it down NOW.
• The parent with the baby (again). One more thing for you: When your kid sees that the plane has stopped moving and taxied towards the gate, he will want out. However, everyone in the aisle seats get to stand up first, take out their luggage, and start to lumber towards the door. This takes time, and most people are standing for quite a while before the queue moves at all. This is when the baby goes crazy. "IT'S TIME TO GET OFF WHY IS NO ONE MOVING I WANNA GO AWAY WAAAAH." I think spirits should be complementary--no, mandatory--for babies, so they'll be knocked out for the duration of the flight and most of the trip home.

Un descuento en los fuentes

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person to whom this has happened. On several occasions, I've walked into a place that sells fountains of various sizes and varieties and purposes. I like fountains, and naturally start gawking. Then, suddenly, BAM! I see that that little six-inch-tall waterfall thingy costs SIX BILLION DOLLARS AND IT'S THE CHEAPEST ONE IN THE WHOLE COMPLEX! How sad. I suppose I'll never get a fountain. Unless....

Cue daydream!

...Welcome to Sam's Discount Fountainarium! Here you can fulfill all your fountain- and waterworks-related needs without breaking the bank! Instead of stone, bronze, cement and resin, we use the highest-quality laminated bamboo and ABS plastic! To save even more money, we make all our water pumps ourselves in the back of the warehouse out of stuff our interns steal from the municipal dump! We even offer fountainettes that fit in your hand, for those snotty individuals who want to be "zen" wherever they go!

End daydream!

Man, I could seriously make money selling those mini-fountains to faux-Buddhist hippie Angelinos. Those dudes are gullible.

Ode to a Peanut Butter Sandwich I Saw Stuck to a Tree

O peanut butter sandwich I saw stuck to a tree,
For what purpose could you possibly be
Mounted right there, stuck to a tree?
Peanut butter sandwich, you mystify me.

Did some young hooligan fasten you there
using the natural stickiness of PB?
Or perhaps some mystical voodoo force
leaves bread stuck there very firmly?

I'm pretty bad with poetry
and not that good with rhymes, you see.
But the point I'm trying to make here is
I saw a peanut butter sandwich, stuck to a tree.

What I'm about to do would have been illegal about 50 years ago.

I
Ils étaient là de sept à huit cents, à tout le moins. De taille moyenne, mais robustes, agiles, souples, faits pour les bonds prodigieux, ils gambadaient sous les dernières clartés du soleil qui se couchait au-delà des montagnes échelonnées vers l'Ouest de la rade. Le disque rougeâtre disparut bientôt, et l'obscurité commença à se faire au milieu de ce bassin encadré de sierras lointaines de Sanorra, de Ronda et du pays désolé del Cuervo.

Soudain, toute la troupe s'immobilisa. Son chef venait d'apparaître sur ce dos d'âne maigre qui forme la crête du mont. Du poste de soldats, perché à l'extrême sommité de l'énorme roc, on ne pouvait rien voir de ce qui se passait sous les arbres.

"Sriss!...Sriss!..." fit entendre le chef, dont les lèvres, ramassées en cul de poule, donnèrent à ce sifflement une intensité extraordinaire.

Un être singulier, ce chef, de haute stature, vêtu d'une peau de singe, poil en dehors, la tête embroussaillée d'une chevelure inculte, la face hérissée d'une barbe courte, les pieds nus, durs en dessous comme un sabot de cheval.

Il leva le bras droit et le tendit vers la croupe inférieure de la montagne. Tous aussitôt de répéter ce geste avec une précision militaire, il est plus juste de dire mécanique – véritables marionnettes mues par le même ressort. Il abaissa son bras. Ils abaissèrent leurs bras. Il se courba vers le sol. Ils se courbèrent dans la même attitude. Il ramassa un solide bâton qu'il brandit. Ils brandirent leurs bâtons et exécutèrent un moulinet pareil au sien – ce moulinet que les bâtonnistes appellent "la rose couverte".

Puis, le chef se retourna, se glissa entre les herbes, rampa sous les arbres. La troupe le suivit en rampant.

En moins de dix minutes, les sentiers du mont, ravinés par les pluies, furent dévalés, sans que le heurt d'un caillou eût décelé la présence de cette masse en marche.

Un quart d'heure après, le chef s'arrêta. Tous s'arrêtèrent comme s'ils eussent été figés sur place.

A deux cents mètres au-dessous, apparaissait la ville, couchée le long de la sombre rade. De nombreuses lumières étoilaient le groupe confus des môles, des maisons, des villas, des casernes. Au-delà, les fanaux des navires de guerre, les feux des bâtiments de commerce et des pontons, mouillés au large, se réverbéraient à la surface des eaux calmes. Plus loin, à l'extrémité de la pointe d'Europe, le phare projetait son faisceau lumineux sur le détroit.

En ce moment éclata un coup de canon, le First gun fire, tiré de l'une des batteries rasantes. Et alors, les roulements de tambours, accompagnés de l'aigre sifflets des fifres, se firent aussitôt entendre.

C'était l'heure de la retraite, l'heure de rentrer chez soi. Aucun étranger n'avait plus le droit de courir la ville, sans être escorté d'un officier de la garnison. Ordre aux équipages de rallier le bord, avant que les portes fussent fermées. De quart d'heure en quart d'heure, circulaient des patrouilles qui conduisaient au poste les retardataires et les ivrognes. Puis, tout se tut.

Le général Mac Kackmale pouvait dormir sur ses deux oreilles.

Il ne semblait pas que l'Angleterre eût rien à craindre, cette nuit-là, pour son rocher de Gibraltar.

II
On sait ce qu'il est, ce rocher formidable, haut de quatre cent vingt-cinq mètres, reposant sur une base large de douze cent quarante-cinq, longue de quatre mille trois cents. Il ressemble quelque peu à un énorme lion couché, la tête du côté de l'Espagne, la queue trempant dans la mer. Sa face montre les dents – sept cents canons braqués à travers ses embrasures – les dents de la vieille, comme on dit. Une vieille qui mordrait dur, si on l'agaçait. Aussi l'Angleterre est-elle solidement postée là, comme à Pékin, à Aden, à Malte, à Poulo-Pinang, à Hong-kong, autant de rochers dont, quelque jour, avec les progrès de la mécanique, elle fera des forteresses tournantes.

En attendant, Gibraltar assure au Royaume-Uni une domination incontestable sur les dix-huit kilomètres de ce détroit que la massue d'Hercule a ouvert contre Abila et Calpe, au plus profond des eaux méditerranéennes.

Les Espagnols ont-ils renoncé à reprendre ce morceau de leur péninsule? Oui, sans doute, car il semble être inattaquable par terre ou par mer.

Cependant, il y en avait un que hantait la pensée obsédante de reconquérir ce roc offensif et défensif. C'était le chef de la bande, un être bizarre, on peut même dire fou. Cet hidalgo se nommait précisément Gil Braltar, nom qui, dans sa pensée sans doute, le prédestinait à cette conquête patriotique. Son cerveau n'y avait point résisté, et sa place eût été à l'hospice des aliénés. On le connaissait bien. Toutefois, depuis dix ans, on ne savait trop ce qu'il était devenu. Peut-être errait-il à travers le monde? En réalité, il n'avait point quitté son domaine patrimonial. Il y vivait d'une existence de troglodyte, sous les bois, dans les cavernes, et plus particulièrement au fond de ces réduits inaccessibles des grottes de San-Miguel, qui dit-on, communiquent avec la mer. On le croyait mort. Il vivait, cependant, mais à la façon de ces hommes sauvages, dépourvus de la raison humaine, qui n'obéissent plus qu'aux instincts de l'animalité.

III
Il dormait bien, le général Mac Kackmale, sur ses deux oreilles, plus longues que ne le comporte l'ordonnance. Avec ses bras démesurés, ses yeux ronds, enfoncés sous de rudes sourcils, sa face encadrée d'une barbe rêche, sa physionomie grimaçante, ses gestes d'anthropopithèque, le prognathisme extraordinaire de sa mâchoire, il était d'une laideur remarquable – même chez un général anglais. Un vrai singe, excellent militaire, d'ailleurs, malgré sa tournure simiesque.

Oui! Il dormait dans sa confortable habitation de Main Street, cette rue sinueuse qui traverse la ville depuis la Porte-de-Mer jusqu'à la Porte de l'Alameda. Peut-être rêvait-il que l'Angleterre s'emparait de l'Egypte, de la Turquie, de la Hollande, de l'Afghanistan, du Soudan, du pays des Boers, en un mot, de tous les points du globe à sa convenance – et cela au moment où elle risquait de perdre Gibraltar.

La porte de la chambre s'ouvrit brusquement.

"Qu'y a-t-il? demanda le général Mac Kackmale, en se redressant d'un bond.

- Mon général, répondit un aide de camp qui venait d'entrer comme un obus-torpille, la ville est envahie!...

- Les Espagnols?

- Il faut le croire!

- Ils auraient osé!..."

Le général n'acheva pas. Il se leva, rejeta le madras qui lui serrait la tête, se roula dans son pantalon, s'enfourna dans son habit, descendit dans ses bottes, se coiffa de son claque, se boucla de son épée, tout en disant:

"Quel est ce bruit que j'entends?

- Le bruit des quartiers de roches qui roulent comme une avalanche sur la ville.

- Ces coquins sont nombreux?...

- Ils doivent l'être.

- Tous les bandits de la côte se sont-ils donc réunis, sans doute pour ce coup de main: les contrebandiers de Ronda, les pêcheurs de San-Roque, les réfugiés qui pullulent dans les villages?...

- C'est à craindre, mon général!

- Et le gouverneur est-il prévenu?

- Non! Impossible d'aller le rejoindre à sa villa de la pointe d'Europe! Les portes sont occupées, les rues sont pleines d'assaillants!...

- Et la caserne de la Porte-de-Mer?...

- Aucun moyen d'y arriver! Les artilleurs doivent être cernés dans leur caserne!

- Combien d'hommes avec vous?...

- Une vingtaine, mon général, des fantassins du 3è régiment, qui ont pu s'échapper.

- Par Saint Dunstan! s'écria Mac Kackmale, Gibraltar arraché à l'Angleterre par ces vendeurs d'orange!... Cela ne sera pas!... Non! Cela ne sera pas!"

En ce moment, la porte de la chambre livra passage à un être bizarre, qui sauta sur les épaules du général.

IV
"Rendez-vous!" s'écria-t-il d'une voix rauque, qui tenait plus du rugissement que de la voix humaine.

Quelques hommes, accourus à la suite de l'aide de camp, allaient se jeter sur cet homme, quand, à la clarté de la chambre, ils le reconnurent.

"Gil Braltar!" s'écrièrent-ils.

C'était lui, en effet, l'hidalgo auquel on ne pensait plus depuis longtemps, le sauvage des grottes de San-Miguel.

"Rendez-vous? hurlait-il.

- Jamais!" répondit le général Mac Kackmale.

Soudain, au moment où les soldats l'entouraient, Gil Braltar fit entendre un "striss" aigu et prolongé.

Aussitôt, la cour de l'habitation, puis l'habitation elle-même, s'emplirent d'une masse envahissante...

Le croira-t-on? C'était des monos, c'était des singes, et par centaines! Venaient-ils donc reprendre aux Anglais ce rocher dont ils sont les véritables propriétaires, ce mont qu'ils occupaient bien avant les Espagnols, bien avant que Cromwell en eût rêvé la conquête pour la Grande-Bretagne? Oui, en vérité! Et ils étaient redoutables par leur nombre, ces singes sans queue, avec lesquels on ne vivait en bon accord qu'à la condition de tolérer leurs maraudes, ces êtres intelligents et audacieux qu'on se gardait de molester, car ils se vengeaient – cela était arrivé quelquefois – en faisant rouler d'énormes roches sur la ville!

Et, maintenant, ces monos étaient devenus les soldats d'un fou, aussi sauvage qu'eux, de ce Gil Braltar qu'ils connaissaient, qui vivait de leur vie indépendante, de ce Guillaume Tell quadrumanisé, dont toute l'existence se concentrait sur cette pensée: chasser les étrangers du territoire espagnol!

Quelle honte pour le Royaume-Uni, si la tentative réussissait! Les Anglais, vainqueurs des Indous, des Abyssins, des Tasmaniens, des Australiens, des Hottentots, de tant d'autres, vaincus par de simples monos!

Si pareille catastrophe arrivait, le général Mac Kackmale n'aurait plus qu'à se faire sauter la tête! On ne survit pas à pareil déshonneur!

Cependant, avant que les singes, appelés par le sifflement de leur chef, eussent envahi la chambre, quelques soldats avaient pu se jeter sur Gil Braltar. Le fou, doué d'une extraordinaire vigueur, résista, et ce ne fut pas sans peine qu'on parvint à le réduire. Sa peau d'emprunt lui ayant été arrachée dans la lutte, il demeura presque nu dans un coin, bâillonné, ligotté*, hors d'état de bouger ou de se faire entendre. Peu de temps après, Mac Kackmale s'élançait hors de sa maison, résolu à vaincre ou mourir, suivant la formule militaire.

Mais le danger n'en était pas moins grand au-dehors. Sans doute, quelques fantassins avaient pu se réunir à la Porte-de-Mer et marchaient vers l'habitation du général. Divers coups de feu éclataient dans Main Street et sur la place du Commerce. Toutefois, le nombre des monos était tel que la garnison de Gibraltar risquait d'être bientôt réduite à leur céder la place. Et alors, si les Espagnols faisaient cause commune avec ces singes, les forts seraient abandonnés, les batteries seraient désertées, les fortifications ne compteraient plus un seul défenseur, et les Anglais, qui avaient rendu ce rocher imprenable, ne parviendraient plus à le reprendre.

Soudain, un revirement se produisit.

En effet, à la lueur de quelques torches qui éclairaient la cour, on put voir les monos battre en retraite. A la tête de la bande marchait son chef, brandissant son bâton. Tous, imitant ses mouvements de bras et de jambes, le suivaient d'un même pas.

Gil Braltar avait-il donc pu se débarrasser de ses liens, s'échapper de la chambre où on le gardait? On n'en pouvait plus douter. Mais où se dirigeait-il maintenant? Allait-il se porter vers la pointe d'Europe, sur la villa du gouverneur, lui donner l'assaut, le sommer de se rendre, ainsi qu'il avait fait vis-à-vis du général?

Non! Le fou et sa bande descendaient Main Street. Puis, après avoir franchi la porte de l'Alameda, tous prirent obliquement à travers le parc et remontèrent les pentes de la montagne.

Une heure après, il ne restait plus dans la ville un seul des envahisseurs de Gibraltar.

Que s'était-il donc passé?

On le sut bientôt, quand le général Mac Kackmale apparut sur la lisière du parc.

C'était lui qui, prenant la place du fou, avait dirigé la retraite de la bande, après s'être enveloppé de la peau de singe du prisonnier. Il ressemblait tellement à un quadrumane, ce brave guerrier, que les monos s'y étaient trompés eux-mêmes. Aussi n'avait-il eu qu'à paraître pour les entraîner à sa suite!...

Une idée de génie tout simplement, qui fut bientôt récompensée par l'envoi de la Croix de Saint-George.

Quant à Gil Braltar, le Royaume-Uni le céda, contre espèces, à un Barnum qui fait sa fortune en le promenant à travers les principales villes de l'Ancien et du Nouveau-Monde. Il laisse même volontiers entendre, le Barnum, que ce n'est point le sauvage de San-Miguel qu'il exhibe, mais le général Mac Kackmale en personne.

Toutefois, cette aventure a été une leçon pour le gouvernement de Sa Gracieuse Majesté. Il a compris que si Gibraltar ne pouvait être pris par les hommes, il était à la merci des singes. Aussi, l'Angleterre, très pratique, est-elle décidée à n'y envoyer désormais que les plus laids de ses généraux, afin que les monos puissent s'y tromper encore.

Cette mesure vraisemblablement lui assure à jamais la possession de Gibraltar.

Man, I really wish I knew what that said. It's by Jules Verne, it's about monkeys and Gibraltar! Stupid language barrier!

Anyway, the point is that copyright expiry is cool.

Meh

It's still Friday for a few minutes! This isn't cheating!

With school culminating, it's time to look back on everything I've accomplished this year, within school and outside it.

...

Crap.



Yeah, I've finished almost nothing I've set out to do. I have most of the parts for a mechanical TV and the guts of a single player piano motor module (of my own design, of course) sitting on my workshop desk, which is cluttered and filthy. I still haven't gotten a new soldering iron tip. I haven't read as many books as I had hoped, and there are half-finished papercrafts and origami too numerous to list littering my room. I've yet to pick up any etchant for my steampunk blinds project. I have a slide rule guide to post for NP that just needs some pictures MSPainted, and I haven't done that yet; there's also a music one that needs to be continued and a dictionary thing that I need to finish. It's stupid, but I can't help but feel depressed by my lack of an ability to see an ambitious project to the end.

However, this summer is looking good. I'm going to try and resolve NOT to adopt any new projects. Yeah, right.

Wallet moth

Yet again, I'm getting inspiration from Uncyclopedia.

Imagine a situation in which you need to pretend to be strapped for cash--a nillionaire, if you will. What better way to accomplish this than to open your wallet and display its emptiness? The answer, of course, is to open your wallet and watch as a live moth flutters out. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a wallet moth.

I designed several mechanisms to operate this device. There are actually two main parts: the moth corral, where non-working moths are kept alive, and the wallet itself.

First, the corral. It's a giant clear acrylic box. Near the top is a series of antechambers that allow the moth-rancher to remove or replace any number of moths at a time. Inside the actual corral, fine mesh keeps the moths breathing happily while still preventing escape. A device not unlike an aquarium pump supplies fresh food into the corral. This serves to eliminate the risk of losing moths when opening and closing the chambers to refill the food container.

Now then. The wallet itself. There are two pouches in this wallet. One is for money, and one is for the moth transporting device. The latter pouch handily obscures the former, so close inspection won't really reveal the fact that you are not, in fact, poor. the outer pouch seems empty except for a thin acrylic chamber at the very bottom of the pouch. Inside this chamber is a single moth (which one would have selected from the moth corral before going out about town) and a cotton ball doused with sugar water to keep the insect alive. The chamber itself is comprised of two halves connected by a small spring that keeps the chamber closed. The two halves are stitched into opposite sides of the wallet pouch, so when one opens the pouch, the halves dehisce and create an opening from which the moth can escape. The creature may require a little motivation (troubleshooting: try shaking the wallet or turning it upside-down) but it should hopefully escape eventually. Fly, flit away! Enjoy your freedom, my metaphor for abject poverty!

Also, keep away from open flame.

Note to self: Attend this thing

A celebration of the world's B movies, including tips on how to write or act in your very own B movie. Sweeeet. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to cover bad kung-fu movies. Alack and alas.

I do expect many attendees to bring their own B-Movies to the event. Homemade stuff with names like "I Married a Monster" or "The Ethereal Marching Band of Tuskegee." If some people make a movie about ethereal marching bands of Tuskegee, I would worship them. Man that sounds fun.

Completely unrelated, I just learned that the proper spelling of that one thing people say when they hurtle over walls is "allez oup." Oh, those Frenchies.

Woolmer!

Bob Woolmer wasn't murdered after all! Maybe cricket fans aren't as insane as I had originally depicted them. They're still insane, mind you, just less so.

Script Frenzy!

Today marks the start of Script Frenzy. I've already done a lot of writing today. This event may cause blag posts to become sparse and/or lame.

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Meat Movement

So, I got to visit the Norton Simon Museum with new steampunk friends from Brass Goggles. It was a grand time, but we noticed something queer about the still-life paintings: despite the plethora of fruits and vegetables, almost none of the paintings showcased meat! It was distressing! Clearly, something needs to be done to remedy the lack of meat in still-lifes.

We need to begin the meat movement in art. I'm not much of a painter, but I'll do my best to convince others to start incorporating some nice cuts of beef and such into their works. Hell yes.

Man, I'm the best carnivore ever.

Things!

Today, May 25th, is Towel Day. During Towel Day, fans of Douglas Adams' literature show their dedication by toting a towel all day long. I am participating, of course.

Tomorrow, May 26th, is the day of the Los Angeles Steampunk Mini-Convention. Again, I will be going to this event. That'll be fun. It's also the day of my school's prom (I'm not going), a cubing competition in San Diego (I wish I could go, but steampunk takes precedence!) and a joint birthday celebration for all the May birthdays (I'm pretty sure I have to go to this one).

June 1st marks the beginning of Script Frenzy. I and a partner intend to write a 20,000 word screenplay by the end of the month.

July 14th is Bastille Day. I have no idea why I included it in this list of days.

Oh man, this is awesome.

I get to co-conduct an interview of Heather Joseph-Witham, the Mythbusters Folklorist, professor at Otis, urban legend expert, tree-cosplayer, and all-around interesting gal. This is gonna be sweet.

Some things I learned from simple research:

• Her last name is not pronounced WHIT-ham like I had assumed but rather WITH-hum.


• Her name is misspelled on the title tags of her own web page. That's kind of sad. I hope someone fixes it post-haste.


• Though it appears in this picture that Ms. Joseph-Witham is cosplaying as a tree, she is in fact a vampiress. Truth be told, I never would have guessed that.


• In 1993, she presented a paper to the American Folklore Society that mentions an Indian Jewish community in L.A. I must learn more about these people. Indian Jews! Everyone knows that us Jews are complete wusses when it comes to spicy food! I'm amazed they haven't starved yet, or exploded from curry overload.

That's all I got for now. Man, this is gonna be fun.

Latest idea: Book Gashapon

Right. Imagine a capsule-toy machine that distributes little books. They'd be short and small, printed cheaply to cut down on costs (because who wants to pay upwards of 50¢ for anything that comes out of a toy machine?). There is potential for a huge variety of stories to print, which would expand the consumer's reading horizons. Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, Snorri Sturluson, or...dag, I can't think of anyone right now. Pretend there's a much longer, more varied list in the previous sentence.

So, let's imagine that you get a book. We'll name it something completely at random: Schmuthering Schmeights by Schmemily Schmrontë. Now, let's imagine that you don't like the book. What do you do? You buy another book, hopefully one that's not a total piece of crap! After all, it's only another 50¢.

My mind today

Here is what my homework planner looked like for today. I love being me.

Books!

I finally convinced myself to finish The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn: An Excursion into Romantic Zoology (revised edition) by Willy Ley. I love this book because it's intriguing, insightful, delightful, and well-written. One of the reasons I wanted to finish the book was so that I could more singularly focus on another esoteric-history book. The one I am talking about is Riddles in History by Cyrus H. Gordon. It's about strange runes in strange places, undeciphered inscriptions, and pre-Colombian settlements in the New World. From what I've read so far (the first three pages), it seems pretty good. However, the author is pro-Semitic to an obnoxious degree which is not too surprising, because his middle name is "Herzl" for cryin' out loud. Anyway, back in the 60s, he proposed that a tablet found somewhere in the American Southwest was written in a Hebrew script (instead of the generally-accepted Cherokee script theory) and used this to go off on a lifelong rant that the Jews had settled in the New World in the 600s anno domini. I don't expect to believe much of what this man expounds in his book; after all, he clings to the thought that the Vinland Map is genuine.

Another brilliant idea

First there was "punk." Then there was "cyberpunk." Then came "steampunk." After that came a bazillion other "-punk" genres, none of which have more than a handful of stories or what-have-you, and few of which have anything to do with punk at all (but that's okay). What differentiates the "-punks" are the settings: location, time period, and people involved. Dieselpunk takes place in the 40s, peatpunk chronicles the anachronistic adventures of Vikings, transistorpunk probably has something to do with radios...there's one called heliumpunk too, but I have no idea what that's about....

See? It gets confusing quickly. No one can remember all the "-punks," especially when many of them are just ideas that have no literary base for themselves. We need a place to catalogue all of them!

Enter Anachronismopedia. It's a single huge image map, a timeline that covers 8000 years of human existence. Every "-punk" is marked by when it begins and ends, and one can click the name of the "-punk" to be taken to a page that describes that genre in more detail. I've already started working on this, so no one steal it!

Viva...breadfruit?

I am jonesing for some breadfruit. This is a dilemma, because breadfruit quite literally does not exist at this latitude (a fact you may recall from a prior post, Viva Potato). There are many factors standing in the way of me getting fresh breadfruit in the comfort of my own home: climate, productivity, resource efficiency, economic soundness, and public awareness.

CLIMATE: Man, I wish I wasn't an uninformed pleb when it came to horticulture. Given enough time, horticulturists could solve the issue of temperature tolerance lickity-split. The Incas did it with potatoes, which formerly only lived in the chilly chilly Andes and can now tolerate warm, humid climes. Why can't we do the same with breadfruit, except backwards? It would probably take significantly longer than it did with potatoes, because breadfruit trees take more than a few growing seasons to come to maturity. However, this is only more motivation to get started right now!

PRODUCTIVITY: This is another horticultural problelm. Breadfruit trees produce fruit year-round, but there is one major growing season in which they yield far, far more produce. I dunno. There has to be some way to change the seasonality of the plants to make them produce lots of fruit year-round. An alternative route would be to buy breadfruit from the other hemisphere; that's how we manage to get succulent plums, cherries, and other super-seasonal fruits all year.

RESOURCE EFFICIENCY: How much water and soil will the breadfruit trees require? Most likely they will demand far more of each resource (compared to yield) than other produce trees, like orange trees or cherry trees. Of course, part of this is because breadfruits are so much larger than oranges or cherries, and the tree only produces a few at a time instead of dozens.

ECONOMIC SOUNDNESS: Will financiers rush towards this venture or will they balk at the risks? I have no idea; ask them, not me. Next topic!

PUBLIC AWARENESS: No matter how much I say, most of you are probably still wondering what the hell a breadfruit actually is. This is a problem. If I could somehow inform the world of the greatness of the breadfruit tree, then it would surely gain popularity and make this a worthwhile venture that will bring joy to people worldwide!

Holy crap, I can't believe I used the phrase "lickity-split." That's seriously weird.

Another Brilliant Idea

I'm going to invent a new kind of breakfast ceral. All the pieces are shaped like noses. I shall call it Cereal de Bergerac.



I know I've mentioned this to a lot of people, so it's kind of a cop-out, but I've an excuse! This was written on the 24th, but I got distracted by the ULWPP.

Borrowing a page from Bislama

(I told this idea to about a dozen people already today, but I think it's so great that I need to share it even more.)

In the English language, questions with negative modifiers are terribly open-ended. A straightforward question is "Have you heard the news?" This question can be answered in two ways with two distinct meanings:

"Yes, your statement is true and I have heard the news"
"No, your statement is false and I have not heard the news."

However, if one adds a negative modifier, making the question "Haven't you heard the news?" there are suddenly four ways to answer:

"Yes, your statement is true and I have not heard the news."
"No, your statement is false and I have heard the news."
"Yes, I have heard the news. Your statment is false."
"No, I have not heard the news. Your statement is true."

This generates confusion and inevitably requires some level of clarification. This question-response process needs streamlining, and Bislama knows how to do it!

Bislama, as you may recall, was created by people who though English was nutty enough as it was already, and created a rather minimalist language that simplified many of English's intricacies. One of the ways they did this was by changing how people respond to questions. A standard question, like in English, can be answered in two ways: Yes and no. However, to eliminate the ambiguity of English questions with negative modifiers, one would instead answer with si or no. Personally, I'd change no to something else, like na or ni, but the first one might still be confusing and the other is actually used as a weapon by some knights.

Anyway, "si" is used to mean "Yes, I have done the action asked and your statement is false," while "no" means "No, I have not done the action asked and your statement is true." If we adopt these practices today, we can end ambiguity tomorrow! Or maybe the day after tomorrow! Or some time after that!

Oh my god, it's finally happening.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I may, I'd like to direct your attention to what may end up being our collective doom.

Let's try to imagine a scenario where chimpanzees have basic rights, like owning land and collecting a paycheque. What happens next? Soon the gorillas (both mountain and lowland varieties) will demand their equal rights. Then come the other apes--orangutans, gibbons, and bonobos. And then the monkeys will start screeching for their justice! Spider monkeys, tamarins, macaques! Soon we'll be surrounded by angry aye-ayes pointing their creepy prolonged middle fingers at us, while they holler in protest of being put down by "The (hu)Man." Of course, by that time, the chimps will start to demand more rights, like voting and getting a driver's licence. THEN the others will start doing the same. Once all the primates can vote and drive, what's next? Pretty soon we'll have a sprig of parsley running for president. Hey, that's actually not a bad idea. It could certainly get on the Green Party ticket.

Athanasius Kircher and his creepy, creepy fan club.

Each word in this post is a link to an interesting article from the Athanasius Kircher Society's website. That's 46 pages for you to read. This should provide you with a hell of a lot of reading material for the coming days. It's a great place.

Chat tax!

I think constantly being on IRC is destroying my vocabulary. I find myself more and more often struggling to find words that eloquently convey my messages. I have come up with a most logical solution to this problem: ChatTax.

ChatTax is a program that forces the user to read passages of well-worded, vivid, enjoyable prose for 15 minutes or so before allowing the user onto his chat program of choice. It also has access to an electronic dictionary so the user can look up unfamiliar words without the effort of pulling out a meatspace dictionary.

I'm serious about this. It's a brilliant idea that could possibly make me millions while simultaniously alienating entire legions of teenagers whose parents bought my program!

Unfortunately, I can't code. Does anyone out there want to develop ChatTax and split the proceeds 50-50?

ULWPP Part 2: Bislama Words (sort of)

I was going to provide a nice compendium of lots of Bislama words in this entry, but I took all of them from this website by Andrew Gray. Of course, he also wrote a plagiarism article that so moved my heart that I decided not to do it after all. There are a handful of books on the subject too. Namely, this one and this one.

And so concludes this part of the ULWPP! Maybe there'll be some other language to work on soon.

ULWPP Part 1: Bislama, a Primer

Bislama is one of the official languages of Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific. The language could be described as a pidgin language of English, though it would be more accurate to say that it is "English if English was designed by a bunch of four-year-olds." Please note that I am not trying to insult anyone with that statement. I am actually quite in awe of the ingenuity shown by the native Vanuatuans who designed the language in the first place.

Long long ago, when the Queen's empire was still blossoming, many British explorers (hereafter referred to as "Sea Limeys") travelled the South Pacific, taking over whatever they could find. The rest of the South Pacific was taken over by Dutch and French explorers (hereafter referred to as "Windmill monkeys" and "Associates of that dude with the goatee from The Matrix: Reloaded," respectively). One of the territories the Sea Limeys claimed was Vanuatu, a loosely-organised collection of islands. These islands' inhabitants had very different cultures and very different languages from each other, a result of the minimal inter-island interaction. This became a problem when the Sea Limeys relocated all the Vanuatuans onto a few large islands, regardless of island of origin, and stuck them on a few big sugar plantations. The vast lingual differences proved to be a problem at first: no one could communicate with anyone else. Eventually, however, they began to craft a very simple language based on what they heard from the Sea Limey masters' speaking. This led to a very reduced version of English, one that was simple to learn. Since almost all the words were English cognates, it allowed Vanuatuans to communicate reasonably well with their oppressive Sea Limey overlords as well as with each other.

Oddly enough, they chose to name the language Bislama, from the French words "bêche de mer," meaning "sea cucumber." Why anyone would name their language after a creature who regularly defenestrates itself on purpose is a mystery to me. This also seems odd because bêche de mer is French, not English. While most words came (and still do come) from English, a fair number came from other sources. Here's a breakdown of the sources of Bislama's vocabulary:



Common pirate lingo words include "save," (pronounced suh-vay), which means "to know" and comes from the pirate-lingo word "savvy." Similarly, the word for "child" is "pikanini" which comes from "pickaninny." Please note that words that would be construed as offencive in English, like "pickaninny" and "shit," are used in Bislama as perfectly innocent, legitimate words.

Learn some more basic words next time, in ULWPP Part 2: Bislama sentences!

The Useless Language Wikipedia Project, Part 0: The Dark Ages of the ULWPP

Man, this is awesome. I'm all set up to teach you guys about a language that I don't speak at all. Talk about the blind leading the blind, eh? Okay, let's begin!

No, wait, we can't begin yet. I have to explain what the Useless Language Wikipedia Project is. The ULWPP is a project that I started to help inflate the article count on low-article-count Wikipediae. It began when I saw the Dzongkha Wikipedia. It claimed to have 14 articles, but 12 of them were spam, one was a random list of cities and things in Bhutan, and the other was the actual main page. This was sad, so I found some online resources and began to glark basic spelling and syntax. I then proceeded to write two brief Wikipedia entries: here and here.

That was sort of exciting, but frankly, Dzongkha is one of the suckiest languages ever. About half of the letters written are silent, remnants of the tonal Tibetan language from which Dzongkha evolved. It's also horribly painful to write in; seeing as it's written using the Tibetan alphabet, I had to take a character map and copy-paste letters and diacritics (all the vowels are written above or below the consonants, except for "a" which is unwritten and implied) one by one. It was lame and I then decided to move on to an easier low-article-count Wikipedia.

Enter the Marshallese Wikipedia. I was really excited about this one, because it was Roman alphabet-based (albeit with some funky diacritics, like an n with a macron, n̄). To top it off, Marshallese is an extremely laid-back language, a byproduct of it being unwritten for so many centuries. Words can pretty much go in any order in a sentence and the listener will be able to understand the gist of your message. There is no one spelling for any word, either. For example, the word for "hello" can be spelt as "yokwe," "jokwe," "iokwe," "jiokwe," or any of numerous other spellings. My Marshallese glee, however, was short-lived; I had only written one article before I discovered an even easier language's Wikipedia to mess with: Bislama.

I wrote a giant and pretty cool history of Bislama here, but you'll get to read it later, when I make ULWPP Part 1: A Bislama Primer! Stay tuned!

I want to actually make ULWPP a legitimate Wikiproject, like Wikiproject:Biography, but I'm pretty inept when it comes to Wikipolitics and I don't know how to go about doing this. Similarly, I'd like to become an administrator for Dzongkha or Marshallese or Bislama because these wikipediae don't have any adminstrators, and consequently lie ripe for vandalism. Alas, my Wikipolitical ineptitude stops me here too. I need some ULWPP diplomats. Also, we need to change the name. I sincerely doubt that Bhutanese people, Marshallese people, and Vanuatuans appreciate their languages being labelled "useless."

...Even if it is true.

Olga?

I don't get it.



Apparently, there's a place on the border of South Pasadena and Los Angeles proper called "Olga." I have no idea what it is, nor does anyone else I have spoken to. Even searching on Google yields bupkis. Perhaps I should investigate this some more, but for now I'm left to creating wild fantasies.

Who, or what, is this "Olga?" Is it a teeny-tiny city nestled inside South Pas near that one liquor store and the really ridiculous intersection with the Gold Line? That seems unlikely, because Google Maps refers to it as "Olga, South Pasadena." Maybe some sly city planner named the intersection's stoplight. That too seems unlikely, because Olga traditionally connotes rotund Scandinavian women belting out Wagner arie and our stoplight posts are rather slender, and not very musically inclined. Man, if I could train a lightpost to sing I could make millions on Broadway. That's be worth at least 20,000 caps.

What I believe to be most likely is that somebody at Google is continuing the traditions of cartographers of yore. Many mapmakers, in order to prevent plagiarism, would invent their own city, street, river, forest or whatever, and name it after themselves. If, for example, a cartographer named Phineas McGillicuddy wished to defend his work from unlicenced copying, he could add, say, a city in Georgia named "Phineas" or "Loch McGillicuddy" in Scotland. Were he to see these spots on someone else's map, then Phinny would know that his work had been stolen and uncredited.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go see if anyone at Google HQ is named "Olga." Perhaps I could lure her out with a nice herring dish and some Wagner....

Update!

My long rants usually take an hour or so and I'm pressed for time today, so you get a mechanical TV update.

The video driver works now, and I'm just waiting on some parts. Next I have to figure out if the software used to convert images to audio also works for video. Unfortunately, none of this will happen now because of my aforementioned time-pressing.

There, a 45-second post. Bye!

Kiwi!

There's a new baby kiwi at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. You can see it on a live webcam here (I found that that the webcam only works in IE, unfortunately). This news excites me greatly, because I friggin' love those fuzzy apteryces*. This news also confuses me, because I don't know why I love those fuzzy apteryces*. Seriously, they're pretty ugly and gangly and not very entertaining. They seriously look like an oversized kiwi fruit with bug-eyes and too-big feet. So what's the deal? Why do I love them so much?

The only possible explanation I can think of for my admiration of these flightless birds is that this is video games' fault. I am specifically blaming The New Zealand Story for the Sega Genesis**. The premise of the game is as follows: You are Tiki, a kiwi living a carefree life with all the other kiwis in your home on the North Island of New Zealand. One day, a walrus waddles into your village and kidnaps everyone, intent on sending you all to an evil walrus-run zoo. Somehow, you manage to escape, and you must chase the walrus all the way to the bottom of South Island to rescue all of your kiwi comrades. Also, you have a girlfriend named Phee-Phee.

It's a pretty fun game, and it involves some GTA-esque elements, like hijacking vehicles. Granted, those vehicles are hot-air balloons piloted by anthropomorphic cats who throw hatchets, but the idea is the same. The point is that the game is fun, and--since the main character is a kiwi on a morally righteous mission--it limns kiwis extremely positively. There is one major problem, however:

THIS IS NOT A KIWI.

Tiki (and all the other in-game kiwis) do not look like real kiwis. I am sure the game developers at Taito were aware of this, and had some motive for making their sprites look absolutely nothing like what they are supposed to represent. My working theory is that Taito was in league with the powerful Kiwi Lobbying Group, currently the only political machine to be comprised of flightless birds. The KLG knew that its members were ugly, and an accurate depiction of them in a video game would be less-than-stellar for their popularity in the always-critical youth market. Together, Taito and the KLG hatched a plan to convince the ignorant masses that kiwis were actually adorable yellow balls of fluff that fought evil monsters like walruses and aliens in order to keep the world safe.

YOUR SECRET IS OUT, KIWIS! I KNOW OF YOUR DECEITFUL PLAN! YOU CANNOT SILENCE ME, FOR YOUR PUNY, USELESS WINGS ARE INCAPABLE OF MANIPULATING COMPUTER EQUIPMENT! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

And that is why I love kiwi birds. Awww, it's so cute!

* This is not the real, appropriate plural for "apteryx," a word coming from the Greek "a-" and "pteryx," together meaning "no wing." The plural I used is a Latin plural, not a Greek one. If someone is able to decipher this chart, I'd replace it with the legitimate plural.

** There is an earlier version of TNZS, called Kiwi Kraze and released on the NES, but that one was pretty sucky and I didn't actually play it until after the Genesis version. I don't know why I bothered explaning this to you putzes.

Proof that humanity is hosed.

If you haven't already lost faith in humanity, perhaps the fact that there is a Wikipedia article on Rasputin's penis will be the last straw. Come on, humanity. We really don't want to read about famous weirdoes' body parts. I pray that this never comes up in conversation, anywhere, ever.

Catpennies!

Science has managed to quantify nearly everything. Heat, light, vibration, even colour hue and intensity. One thing that hasn't been quantified, however, is entertainment. It's never been done before. However, sometime last month someone finally made headway in this field. The entire body of research can be seen here.

Catpennies. IT'S BRILLIANT! Finally we have a way of measuring how much fun we're having. For example, the conversation I had about Luxembourg today was about 100 catpennies, or one decacatpenny. It would be easier to call that a "catdollar," but I can't do that. You'll see why two paragraphs down.

If we now can measure units of fun, how do we measure units of dullness? The obvious answer is something mildly sucky. It has to be about as sucky as a catpenny is fun. The best thing I can come up with is losing a quarter. One lostquarter is equal to negative one catpennies. Waiting at the baggage claim in LAX is close to 50 lostquarters (unless you have a Game Boy, in which case it is about 20 catpennies.)

Unfortunately, I suspect that science will be unkind to the names "catpenny" and "lostquarter." To make this system of measures accepted by science, the names must be changed. The easiest way to do this would be simple abbreviations, like "cap" and "losque." Sadly, this also means that 100 catpennies cannot equal one catdollar. If it did, then the unit of measurement would have to change to "cad" and that would make no sense. Instead, it will have to be a "decacap."

Actually, caps and losques might make more sense than the originals. If I were to use catpennies, catnickels, catdimes, catdollars, and so forth, this would cause great problems when converting to lostquarters. Since 1 catpenny is equal to 1 lostquarter, 1 catdollar is equal to 25 lostdollars. This would quickly become confusing.

Now, go out in the world and embrace this system! Make sure to live every day to the fullest! Try and have a million-cap day!

A disappointing post!

This was going to be a post about cats and pennies and such, but it's late and I'll save that for a time when I have more energy. Right now I'm at the very beginning of a new project: a mechanical television.

Other, bolder people could turn this device into something new and amazing. I'm probably going to take the lame route and not add anything new. If I were to add something new, it would be sound. That seems remarkably easy to do, but some stuff I've read seems to imply otherwise.

Anyway, mechanical TVs work by a single light source rapidly changing brightness to represent different shades of grey. Each instance of brightness is shone through a hole in a rapidly spinning disc, so that a little square appears in on the other side of the disc in the same shade as the light source. Do this 6400 times a second and you have a mechanical TV! The best part is that the information being sent requires no film, very low voltage, and can run for hours using only a CD player.

I should get started. So long, aetherweb!

Bird cloning!

I'm lazy. Instead of getting a fresh post, you get my lecture that I delivered to nobody in particular in the #nerdparadise chatroom a few months back, which also happens to be a forum post I made about thirty seconds ago (Today's Saturday. Pretend this update happened on a Friday, okay?).

I'm really interested in cloning extinct birds (and, for that matter, most creatures that come from a hard-shelled egg). The geirfugl, the dodo, the Rodrigues solitaire, the passenger pigeon, the moa, the California condor (there are fifty-something left...it may not be extinct but it needs all the help it can get), and all sorts of dinosauranoids.

Anyway. There are lots of reasons why we have yet to bring back extinct bird species. There are two extremely large reasons.

The first is that this reintroduced specimen will have no parental figures and, consequently, much of its behaviour will be drastically different than the original species and it may not know how to act in certain situations that would doom the creature in the wild. This is unavoidable unless avian psychologists make some amazing breakthroughs soon.

The second reason, which is the one I understand far less, concerns the eggs themselves. As far as I know, not a single avian has been cloned, because the eggs are a pain to deal with. Every species' eggs are slightly different, and many extinct animals (like the dodo and Rodrigues solitaire) have no living relatives close enough to act as substitute-egg-donors. Then there's the issue of actually inserting the extinct animal's genetic information into the nucleus of the egg cell before it starts to form a morula. Then there's the issue of successfully implanting the egg in a suitable foster parent (because, really, there's no way in hell you're going to have any modern bird lay a dinosaur egg) who will also care for the young hatchling if need be.

The only solution I can think of for issue #2 would be to invent several new substances that can act as artificial albumen, yolk, shell, and other stuff that goes into eggs. It would have to be pliable at times, to allow for gene-insertion as well as readjusting the levels of the fluids and nutrients in the egg, but it would also have to be rigid to mimic a proper egg. I dunno. Someone else can figure that one out.

Recommended reading: Digging for Dodos by Ian Parker, New Yorker Magazine, January 22, 2007. The link I provided is not the full text; it continues for many more pages. While you're at it, you might as well read Jurassic Park and The Lost World by Michael Crichton.

Several letters that I wrote while touring colleges on the east coast

An open letter to all residents of Baltimore, Maryland

Dear residents of Baltimore, Maryland:


This is a turn signal. Use it.

I am serious, residents of Baltimore, Maryland. This is a problem. You have this wonderful highway system, much better than L.A.'s. It's a highway system with a rational layout, one that doesn't look like it was designed by a blind chimpanzee, and you are using it irresponsibly. I am distraught by the lack of signalled turns. pI was watching traffic on the highway for over an hour and saw two people signal when changing lanes. TWO. Y'all signal turns at intersections, so you obviously know how to use your turn signals. Now it's only an issue of making you actually freaking use them.

Here's a primer: When changing lanes to the left, use your left turn signal. When changing lanes to the right, use your right turn signal. The end.

Seriously, how hard is that? I may not be very familiar with the East coast, but I know this isn't the norm. I did not witness anything this horrible when in Washington, or even in NYC. You've got to clean up your act. Think of the children, residents of Baltimore, Maryland. Thanks for listening. Please take my advice to heart.

************

A letter to the Baltimore World Trade Centre, Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Baltimore World Trade Centre:

I can't help but notice that you have a North Korean flag among the hundreds of flags in your lobby. Why is this, Baltimore World Trade Centre? I highly doubt you do any world trade with North Korea. Please either remove the North Korean flag or at least move it to a less prominent position than the middle of the flag-display. Thanks.

************

An open letter to all residents of Albany, New York


This is a car gas pedal. Use it.

I know your fine city is sort of close to Canada, but you have to remember that it's not in Canada. When a speed limit sign says "35," that number is not 35 kph. I know it is lamentable that we are still using the Imperial system of measurement, but we are, and you have to use the Imperial system while here. Please increase your speed by approximately 61% to ensure that you obey our speed signs. Thank you.

Mmmmmm...

Loaf of doughnut.

I said these words on Thursday when trying to (very inaccurately) describe brioche, a sweet French bread. Though my description failed, this statement was etched into my memory. It's heart-cloggingly awesome.

Imagine a doughnut loaf. For the most part, it would be little more than changing the shape of the doughnut. The only major altertion I can think of is that the icing/sugar/other toppings would have to be mixed in evenly because it'd be too messy to handle icing-covered bread in many situations.

Obviously, a sample must be made. I'm going to buy a whole bunch of old doughnuts from the grocery store and compress them into a dense cube. Then I will proceed to slice and enjoy my doughnut loaf. Later, I will be found dead on the floor. Maybe I died from cardiac arrest. Maybe I died from a caloric overdose. Maybe I just collapsed out of sheer ecstasy because I just ate a loaf of doughnut.

¡Los Fidelistas tienen un líder una vez más!

Díos mio, I may have to admit that Fidel Castro is finally fully recovered from his exploded colon. This is a mixed blessing for me--it's bad because I've been talking about how sure I am that he's going to die, but it's good because it means his actual death will be totally hilarious. If you understand my logic, that's good. If you don't, continue reading to learn about the Castro Comedy Corollary Proposal, or, as I like to call it, the Soviet Union. If you don't get that joke, then there may be no hope for you.

The basic theory behind Soviet Union says that Fidel Castro's injuries have gotten progressively and linearly more hilarious since the 60s.

Let's consider some important points.
1960s to 1980s: Various leaders, beginning with Kennedy, use unsavoury methods to attempt to kill Fidel Castro. These methods included: making underwater mines that looked like clams, because Fidel enjoyed diving; send Fidel cigars laced with botulism; hiring Ian Fleming (famous for writing the James Bond novels) to come up with ideas; encouraging disgruntled peasants to rise up in rebellion; convincing one of Fidel's old flames to come back, re-seduce him, and slip him poison pills; the infamous exploding cigar; filling his SCUBA suit with myotoxins; and possibly the most direct route: hiring mobsters to gun him down. None of these assassination attempts succeeded (obviously), so they aren't very high on the hilarity scale. They do become funnier as time goes on, however. This phenomenon is known as the Making My Graph Look More Like It Justifies My Original Claim That Fidel's Injuries Have Gotten Funnier On A Linear Scale Effect.

After that, there's a gap in my chart. This too is a result of the MMGLMLIJMOCTFIHGFOALSE.

October 20, 2004: Fidel Castro speaks in front of a crowd of art instruction students, about to graduate. On the way towards the stairs, he loses his footing and slips. He falls perfectly on his face while dozens of cameras record the incident. Totally hilarious. At least a seven on the hilarity scale.

2006: Fidel Castro complains of intestinal pain. Doctors discover inflammation in the large intestine, near both the appendix and the rectum. A surgery is botched, and Castro's large intestine ruptures, filling his abdomen with blood and faeces (<eofpi> So...Fidel Castro is literally full of shit?). Surgeons manage to staunch the bleeding and end up replacing about two feet of his intestine with an artificial one, as well as giving him a prosthetic anus (<Ushanka`s_Dad> That must have been a pain in the ass.). Prosthetic anus, people. That's a 9 on the hilarity scale without a doubt.

Since his injuries have gotten progressively funnier and his last injury was a 9, it stands to reason that Fidel Castro's next injury will be close to a perfect 10. After that, it would be nigh impossible to continue having progressively-funnier injuries, meaning the next hilarious wound will be his last. Predicted manners of death include, but are not limited to: Being struck by a meteor, choking on a pretzel, falling down a flight of stairs, spontaneous combustion, playing chicken in his private jet, or accidentally listening to a Donna Summers album. Also notice that none of the past injuries were funny to Fidel. They were funny to ME. I am the judge of the hilarity scale. If you disagree with any of my judgements, I will chalk it up to the MMGLMLIJMOCTFIHGFOALSE.

Enjoy your time on earth, Fidel. Though I incorrectly predicted your demise in late 2006 and early 2007, I shall not fail again! The Soviet Union does not lie!

I'm tired.

You got a long, involved post on Monday. For now, you'll just have to live with learning what I'm doing in math class. Here's the explanation, as best I can give it: "This is the equation to find the volume of a 3-dimensional solid of domain [3π/4, π/4] with a base made of the functions sin³(x) and cos³(x) and cross sections (perpendicular to the x-axis) of a sine wave, with period and amplitude equal to the height of the base at that value x."

Sigh.

Viva potato

I talked about Bob Woolmer on March 20th. In the days that followed, his death received significant news coverage all around the planet. The only logical conclusion is that I am responsible for this. I have the touch, I have the power and whatnot. Unfortunately, I'm sick of Bob Woolmer, which means the news is going to shut up about him tomorrow. So sayeth me.

Okay, time for the actual blog post: Starch.

The four most widely-grown crops are, in this order: rice, wheat, corn, and potatoes. All of these crops are starch. The only problem is that rice, wheat, and corn are all terrible, terrible crops in terms of efficiency. The effort needed to cultivate these three crops is significantly greater than the noble potato, which lives by Ron Popeil's motto, "Set it and forget it." In addition, it takes far less effort to prepare. Let's consider the bare minimum requirements to eat these crops:

Rice: Pull out a few dozen plants, remove the chaff, boil, eat.
Wheat: Pull out several dozen plants, remove chaff, grind, boil, eat.
Corn: Remove husk, dry, remove chaff, steam or boil or pop, eat.
Potato: Pull out of ground, brush off dirt (this step is optional), eat.

Like peanuts, potatoes have undergone a renaissance that has shown the world their many uses. This amazing tuber can be baked, fried, boiled, mashed, steamed, deep-fried, exploded into strings and compressed into panels (this is how both Pringles and hardwood floors are made), whipped, foamed*, or just eaten raw. Potatoes have been selectively bred for centuries and can grow effectively in nearly any region, be it their native Andes or in that kooky place Ireland. They can withstand freezing temperatures and, as tubers, are damn good at storing water during dry spells. Geneticists have engineered strains of potatoes for rural villages that help combat diarrhoeal outbreaks, as well as ones with built-in vaccines for polio and (in the near future) hepatitis B.

Potatoes. Preventing. Polio. If that hasn't sold you on the mightiness of the potato, you are a lost cause.

There is only one starch that I respect as much as the potato and that is the breadfruit. This thing is versatile. I have not had the pleasure of eating a breadfruit, but people who have describe it as capable of tasting like bread, fruit, vegetables, or any combination of the three, depending on how it's prepared. This could change the food industry as we know it. Imagine a fruit tart, with the exact same plant producing both the crust and the fruit filling. Imagine a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich with breadfruit bread. When you open it--*gasp*--there's no jelly! The delicious moistness came from the bread and the bread alone! Even better, picture a thanksgiving plate. A nice, plump turkey, surrounded by breadfruit stuffing, breadfruit casserole, breadfruit jam, breadfruit soda for the little ones, and breadfruit wine (or as I would call it, "brodka") for the adults. Then mom comes out with the desserts. Oh, heavens! It's breadfruit pie, with a breadfruit crust! And it's à la mode! There's breadfruit ice cream too!

Man that sounds good. Unfortunately, breadfruit has not experienced the years of cultivation that made potatoes and other starches so versatile. Consequently, breadfruit's domain is limited to tropical areas like the South Pacific and the Caribbean. If geneticists can make potatoes that prevent polio, I think we can make some hardier breadfruit trees with a little tolerance to cold, no? Ladies and dudes, it is high time for the Breadfruit Renaissance.

I wrote this entire post while listening to Andrew W.K. My head hurts. A lot.

*Those last two were borrowed from ElBulli's menu. I doubt anyone else would make foamed potatoes.