A description of my blog. http://www.my-site.com 1029497775976453686 Terminator vs. Highlander: The Sarah Connor McLeod Chronicles 2008/02/#1029497775976453686 2008-02-06 Sarah Connor McLeod, proud Highlander woman, is tending her sheep in the Scottish Highlands, when a hulking stranger wearing a kilt approaches.

Terminator: Are you Sarah Connor McLeod?
Sarah: I am. Sarah Connor McLeod of the Clan McCleod. And who might you be, stranger?
Terminator: I am a cyborg sent from the future to kill you. I was reprogrammed by a resistance fighter and sent here to prevent a terrible catastrophe.
Sarah: Kill me? But why? I'm just a poor Scottish peasant type person, living in the Scottish Highlands.
Terminator: You will give birth to a son who will be named Connor McLeod. He will be immortal, as long as nobody chops his head off.
Sarah: Well, that doesn't sound like a bad thing.
Terminator: Yes, but in the 20th century he will father a daughter, who will be called Sarah Connor. And she, in turn, will give birth to John Connor, who is destined to be the leader of the resistance. He will lead humanity to victory against a race of intelligent machines who are trying to eradicate mankind.
Sarah: John Connor? That's odd. My husband's name is John Connor.
Terminator: It was long believed that John Connor died fighting the cyborgs, but we have learned that he dreaded the thought of living a life without purpose after the war was over, so he fled to a more exciting time, long before the cyborgs were ever created.
Sarah: Wait, are you saying...?
Terminator: Ma'am, your husband is not really a cod merchant from Cork. He is John Connor, the leader of the resistance, who was born in the year 1985.
Sarah: No! But that means....
Terminator: That's right, John is his own great-grandfather. We believe that is how this whole immortality thing started. Something about endless recursion in the gene pool.
Sarah: My lands, that's terrible! Now that you mention it, though, it does explain some things. But wait, you still haven't told me why you need to kill me. Sure, John going back in time and marrying his great-grandmother is a little kinky, but....
Terminator: We believe that what he did caused a rift in the space time continuum. All kinds of horrible, unexplainable things are going to start happening.
Sarah: You mean like Egyptians with Spanish names and Scottish accents?
Terminator: Exactly! History itself has become unglued. When you start mucking around with chronological recursion, the principle of cause and effect breaks down. Literally anything could happen, in any order, for no particular reason. Connor could be inexplicably replaced by a younger, better looking cousin, for example. Aliens could start arriving from other planets, trying to kill him.
Sarah: ...Mario Van Peebles could show up, playing a completely unconvincing villain.
Terminator: See, it's happening already. Mario Van Peebles won't be born for 400 years! You shouldn't even know who he is!
Sarah: Remember his breakout performance in Heartbreak Ridge, when everyone was saying what a big deal he was going to be?
Terminator: Stop it! You're only making things worse. I have to kill you so that none of this will ever have happened.
Sarah: Why didn't you just sneak up behind me and kill me? Why did you have to tell me all of this?
Terminator: In my short time here in the Scottish Highlands, I have learned what it means to be human. I am no longer a soulless machine.
Sarah: It's the kilt. Put a kilt on a guy and suddenly he thinks he's no longer a soulless machine. Hark! I think that's my husband on yonder ridge!
Terminator: You think?
Sarah: It's hard to tell sometimes. He can look like at least four different people.

While they watch the man with oddly indeterminate features approach, suddenly another man, slightly less bulky than the Terminator, but also built like a bodybuilder, shimmers into existence before their eyes.

Sarah: Is that...?
Terminator: It's Jean Claude Van Damme. Cheap knockoff of the T100 series. They make 'em in Taiwan.
Van Damme: Hello, folks. I'm agent Max Walker of the Timecop division. I was sent here to investigate a disturbance in the space-time continuum.
Terminator: Everything is under control here, officer.
Sarah: What's with the accent? Is everybody in the future from France or something?
Van Damme: France! I'm from Belgium! You never heard of the "Muscles from Brussels"?
Sarah: Why do you have a Dutch name and a French accent? Who do you think you are, Mario Van Peebles?
Terminator: Belgium is a product of the rift in the space-time continuum. Belgians are a little indecisive as a result.
Sarah: You mean the Belgians waffle?
Terminator: Ha! Good one, Sarah.
Van Damme: You're one to talk, Terminator. Explain to me why you're the only terminator model to sport an Austrian accent again?
Terminator: The terminators were designed to be able to infiltrate groups of humans undetected, but the early models weren't very effective. So they gave us Austrian accents. That way, if we did something really weird, people would just say, "Oh, don't mind Karl. He's Austrian."
Sarah: Good thinking.
Terminator: I've been programmed to kill Sarah Connor McLeod, thereby preventing the rift in the space-time continuum from ever having happened. That should take care of your disturbance, officer.
Van Damme: But if you prevent the rift, then Belgium will cease to exist! I'll never become a movie star!
Terminator: Yes, and it should also prevent any number of other inexplicable events.

John Connor walks up.

John: What's going on here? That's my wife you're getting friendly with.
Terminator: Not to mention your nana.
John: You! So you've come back in time once again to finish me off.
Terminator: Not you. Your wife. And your nana.
John: Who sent you here?
Terminator: You did, John. When the future you realizes the sort of havoc you caused by having sex with your great-grandmother, you sent me back in time to kill her before you give birth to your father, thus preventing yourself from ever being born!
Sarah: But if he's never born, then he can't send you back here to kill me either.
Terminator: True.
Sarah: So by killing me, you're saving my life.
Terminator: I suppose so.
Sarah: Ok, I guess I'm alright with that. As long as I never have to sit through Universal Soldier again.
Terminator: Not a problem. The "Muscles from Brussels" will never have existed.
Van Damme: I don't feel so good.
Terminator: Oh, and this will take care of Dolph Lundgren too.
Sarah: Hmmm. I have to admit, it's tempting.

Suddenly yet another figure shimmers into existence. It is a strange looking humanoid creature, with a long face, eyes on short stalks, and flap-like ears that reach almost to its knees.

Creature: Meesuh Jar Jar Binks!
Sarah: Oh, for f---'s sake. Just kill me already.




Humor-blogs.com is yet another result of the rift in the space-time continuum.

Labels: , ,

]]> 879830287426408971 My Laptop Bluescreened While I Was Trying to Think of a Title 2008/01/#879830287426408971 2008-01-11 So here's something you didn't know about me: I don't know jack about computers.

"Wait a minute," you say. "Aren't you, like, a computer programmer?"

Ok, first of all, I'm a software developer. "Computer programmer" is a term left over from when computers were the size of a Greyhound bus and packed as much computing power as your curling iron. "Computer programmers" were people who huddled in a dark room feeding punchcards to a giant steel behemoth made of spinning dynamos and vacuum tubes. If they were lucky, the programmers might be able to get the computer to beep or calculate half of 6, but in general they considered it a good day if the computer didn't go on a killing rampage and eat them.

Most people know that the first "bugs" in computers were literally bugs: Moths or whatever would get into the circuits and screw things up. Imagine how big a computer has to be for a moth to be able to get into the workings of the machine and cause 1 + 1 to intermittently equal 7. That's a big freaking computer. The very first computers were so gigantic, in fact, that computational errors were often blamed on stray cats stuck in the gears.

Ok, I made that last part up. It actually wasn't until the mid 90s that computers needed to be safeguarded against the threat of strange p*ssies.

The point is that when the term "computer programmer" originated, computers were nothing like they are now. Computers have gotten so much more powerful, more complicated, and more likely to be used by complete morons that the field of computer science, like human society in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, has fragmented into two completely distinct professions.

As you'll recall, Wells envisioned that in the future humanity would schism into two separate races -- and no, one of those races is not the one that thinks it's ok to use the word schism as a verb. The two races were the Morlocks, who were dark brutish creatures who lived underground and controlled the mysterious machinery that ran everything; and the Eloi, who were gentle, beautiful and vapid creatures who probably thought that Wal-Mart was a place to get "wall stuff."

In this analogy, the creepy guy who smells like Doritos and laughs at you because you tried to connect your printer with an RS-232 interface cable is a Morlock. He knows how all the hardware works. He knows the difference between Cat5 and Cat6, and no, it's notCat1. He knows whether his hard drive is SCSI or ATAPI, how much hard drive space he has down to the kilobyte, and whether he's going to need to dump the odd-numbered Star Trek movies to make room for the final season of Battlestar Galactica.

The software developers, on the other hand, are Eloi. They are beautiful, delicate creatures who use words like "elegant" to describe 300 lines of what, to any normal person, looks like the result of someone typing with his keyboard upside down. They can tell you the difference between a runtime error, a syntax error and a logic error, and may attempt to regale you with an account of the time that they crashed a production web server with an infinitely recursive Java function. A computer is to a software developer what a phone is to someone calling a 976 number: It allows him to do what he wants to do, but it's hard not to think of it as a somewhat limiting medium.

Roughly speaking, the Morlocks are the hardware guys and the Eloi are the software guys*, and there exists an uneasy symbiotic relationship between the two. The Eloi rely on the Morlocks to keep the machines running, and the Morlocks rely on the Eloi to make the machines actually do something other than beep or calculate half of 6.

As an Eloi, I resent my reliance on both the Morlocks and their crude machines. I feel about my laptop the same way I feel about my car: It takes me cool places and lets me do all kinds of fun things, but I don't give a crap how it works. I'm pretty sure both of them involve a wheel and some gerbils. When something breaks, I open up the hood, tug on a few wires, and then take the damn thing in to a Morlock, who might have a chance in hell of fixing it.**

I hate it when people come to me with computer problems. Not software problems, mind you. I don't mind answering questions about Blogger templates or XML feeds. But calling me when your motherboard is fried is like calling up your brother-in-law the architect when your plumbing is clogged. Sure, he might know the answer, but at best he's going to resent you for coming to him regarding such a plebeian matter, and at worst he's going to flood your house with sewage. For architects, sewage exists only as an abstract concept, something to be routed away from the house by some decisive lines on a sheet of paper. That's not going to help you when your basement smells like the wool seat covers in Britney Spears' convertible after a three day rain.

The other day my sister-in-law asked me for advice on buying a laptop. I gave her the same advice I give everybody who is buying a computer: All of the numbers should be big except for the price. That's as detailed as my hardware knowledge gets. If one PC had herpes simplex 2 and another had herpes simplex 5, I'd go with the 5.

The only other advice I have is this: for the love of all that's holy, buy the extended warranty. Extended warranties are the equivalent of the Geneva Convention treaties in the eternal enmity between Morlocks and the rest of humanity. Sure, you're going to get screwed, but you'll know exactly how badly you're getting screwed and for how long.

Plus, you won't have to call me and bother me while I'm dancing and singing with the rest of the Eloi, trying to ignore those ominous rumblings underground.


*I use the term "guys" because, well, I've never actually seen any women in either of these fields.

**These days, of course, there is an alternative to fixing your computer. It's called "USB ports." USB ports allow lazy, non-hardware oriented people to just plug in a new whatever-it-is when the old whatever-it-is inside the box stops working. I've got so many USB devices plugged into my laptop now that I actually have a USB splitter velcro'd to the lid of my laptop, with all kinds of gizmos and dohickeys sticking out of it. When software people see this, they say, "Wow, that's cool!" When hardware people see this, they say, "What the f--- is wrong with your laptop?"


Humor-blogs.com thinks you're an idiot for not knowing what an RS-232 cable is.

Labels: , , ,

]]> 1020668895103354961 Vote! 2007/11/#1020668895103354961 2007-11-06 Wow, this was a tough one. Apparently the sight of me kissing a chimpanzee was enough to get my readers' creative juices flowing, so to speak. There were over 130 captions, and a lot of them were really good. It was so competitive this week that even Joel didn't make the cut. You should still buy his book, though, especially since today is your last chance to get a signed, discounted copy.

There were a lot of newcomers among the finalists. Here are the ten captions that I finally settled on:








"You had me at hello...then you flung feces.."
- Brad

Diesel (thinking): I sure hope this isn't Cornelius tricking me....again.
- y not i

After the joint's umpteenth trip around the circle in a rousing round of "Pass the Marijuana Smoke from Mouth to Mouth" Diesel began to realize that maybe, just maybe, he was already high enough.
- Tina

Diesel: Don't get me wrong, Zira, I love that you have opposable thumbs ... it's just that you can't swing on it like it was a tree branch.
- Mark Jabo

Diesel is hoping that what happens on Planet of the Apes, stays on Planet of the Apes.
- McCafferty Himself

Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one was not one of them.
- Theresa

Zira: "Did you know I can peel a banana using just my lips?"
- Jami

"She needs just a pinch of oregano. And cheese. Lotsa cheese."
- Kim

Diesel: "Yes, I am Homo Erectus."
- Lord Likely

Ziras cries of "I need an adult" went unheard, and the most brazen case of monkey fondling in years went on uninterupted.
- Pope Terry

Opinion Polls & Market Research


Humor-blogs.com is always up for some hot monkey lovin'.

Labels: , ,

]]> 3022216992133389149 Caption Contest: Planet of the Apes 2007/11/#3022216992133389149 2007-11-02 Have you ever had the experience where you can see yourself doing something, and you know you're going to regret it later, but you just can't make yourself stop? Like maybe when you're inserting yourself into the scene in Planet of the Apes where Charleton Heston is kissing Zira the chimp-woman and then posting it to the interwebs for the whole world to see?

Sigh. I'm just glad I have my eyes closed. Here goes nothing....



You know the drill. Post your caption in the comments. Mrs. Diesel and I will pick our faves and I'll post them on Tuesday. Have fun. And have a swell weekend!

Listed on humor-blogs.com.

Labels: , ,

]]> 2667655103439009321 Too Much to Bear 2007/08/#2667655103439009321 2007-08-15 I came across two alarming statistics recently. I read one of them in our local newspaper and the other one on the side of a Happy Meal container, so I'm pretty sure at least the second one is true.

Statistic 1: The world's population is likely to peak at 9 billion in 2070 and then begin to decline.
Statistic 2: Over 50 million Build-a-Bears have been sold since 1997.

It doesn't take someone competent in mathematics to see that, projecting from these trends, custom-designed teddy bears will outnumber people by the end of this century. If this weren't the case, would I have been able to generate this convincing chart in Excel? Hardly.



Numbers don't lie. Neither do pictures. And when numbers and pictures agree on something, you know it's serious.

The socioeconomic ramifications of this are staggering. It's a known fact that teddy bears who aren't loved as if they were a real live bear go bad faster than shows starring John Stamos. By the end of this century, we simply won't have enough misplaced treacly affection to go around. And thanks to our aging population, we'll be more dependent than ever on creepy middle-aged spinsters to love our bears for us. But there is a limit to the number of tea parties that even the creepiest of these women can have. What happens when we reach that threshold?

I'll tell you what: Build-a-Bears standing pathetically on every corner holding signs that simply read "Hug?" Marauding bands of Build-a-Bears wandering the streets, looking for hugs in all the wrong places. Build-a-Bears trolling chat rooms looking for a quick hug from an unsuspecting minor. Eventually bears desperate for affection will be breaking into our homes and smothering us to death with their fuzzy, cuddly love.

We need to take a stand before this situation gets out of control. First, every Build-a-Bear should be fitted with a shock collar that can be used to control the bear if it starts getting overly affectionate. Second, the bears need to be treated with Hug Aversion Therapy (HAT), a process of conditioning in which they are subjected to bear hugs while being forced to watch a three day marathon of According to Jim. Finally, the Build-a-Bears need to be trained in some sort of trade -- probably something that is too dangerous for humans to do, like coal mining or transporting six pounds of heroin in their bellies.

In this way we can create a servile caste of Build-a-Bears who cater to our every whim while they secretly plot to someday cast off their bonds. Except it won't be a secret, because we'll know they're doing it. Because if there's one thing I learned from watching sci-fi films, it's that the servile caste of apes/robots/Morlocks/whatever is always plotting to some day cast off the bonds of servitude. That's why everyone once in a while we'll grab a bear randomly off the street and torture him until he admits that he was plotting to cast off the bonds of servitude. Then we'll execute him and scatter his stuffing as a warning to the other bears.

It is also very important that we avoid saying things like "A world ruled by Build-a-Bears? That's absurd!" Because someone always says something like that right before the servile caste finally overthrows the bonds of servitude. Then it will be the humans' turn to be the servile caste, and we'll have to wait until the Build-a-Bears get cocky and say something like, "It is the natural order for Bears to rule Humans. Humans will never be anything but SLAVES! Mwuhahahahahahaha!"

It could take hundreds of years to achieve that level of ironic hubris, however, so our best bet is to stay on our guard and rip the stuffing out of anybody who looks like he might need a hug.



Did you enjoy this post? There's plenty more like it in my book, Antisocial Commentary. Order your copy and help me to not have to get a real job, so I can keep writing this crap. Thanks!

Humor-blogs.com just wants a hug. And to rule the world with an iron fist.

Labels: , ,

]]> 6007991820631947807 May the Force Be With Me 2007/04/#6007991820631947807 2007-04-09

Occasionally in my periodic journeys across the blogosphere I will run across a particularly erudite blogger decrying what they refer to as "organized religion." Now as you'll know if you've been around here for a while, I am a religious person. On the other hand, as you'll know if you've had a chance to inspect my sock drawer, I'm no advocate of organization. The solution to my plight would seem obvious, but I have as yet failed to locate a denomination that is sufficiently disorganized to meet my spiritual needs.

Certain charismatic sects are fairly disorganized and things can get a little out of hand at some of those black baptist churches, but such mildly informal affairs are still a far cry from the unmitigated spiritual chaos for which my soul yearns. Why, for example, must we always go to church at 11am on Sunday morning? What's wrong with 2:37pm on the third Tuesday of every month whose name has a numerological value that is prime? And why the same rituals every time? Maybe some day we could play Hungry Hungry Hippos and beat each other with soup ladles rather than sing songs and pray. And what I wouldn't give to just once walk into a place of worship and have absolutely no idea who I'm going to be worshiping that morning. I'd be like, "Really? Kenny Rogers? Cool." And then I'd join the rest of the congregation in a stirring rendition of Coward of the County. Or maybe I wouldn't. Because who's going to make me?

I've also heard that more wars are started over religion than anything else. This troubles me deeply, because I have not ONCE been asked to serve on our church's religious wars committee. I mean, I've probably played more Risk than just about any other member of our church. Does that count for nothing? I could advise them, for example, not to make Europe their power center because of all the borders you have to defend, and to avoid retreating to Australia unless you really want to spend the next three days on the losing end of a war of attrition. You might outlast the Presbyterians with that strategy, but you do NOT want to try that with Jesuits or Shiite Muslims.

No, instead I have to serve on committees that are concerned with unbelievably dull things like making sure needy people have adequate food, shelter and medical care. Occasionally I make a motion to start a war, and I just get blank stares. Last time I moved that we declare war on the Quakers. They're pacifists, for crying out loud. We could kick their asses, confiscate their oats, and be home before dark. But nobody would even second the motion. I don't get it. What's the point of being religious if we're not going to start any wars?

Disorganized people don't start wars. Well, occasionally they start them, but they never finish them. Frankly, disorganized people don't finish much of anything. It's part of their charm. Hell, sometimes they'll start a thought

If we were to eliminate organized religion, we would eliminate the number one cause of war. Of course, we'd still have the number two cause, which would then become number one. I wonder what that would be? Land? Food? Oil? The desire for power? Freedom? I'd say we should probably eliminate them all to be on the safe side.

It surprises me how few wars are fought in the name of evil. I think Darth Vader is the only one who ever stood up and said, "Hey, we're going to be the bad guys in this war. Oppression, cruelty, suffering, that's us. I'm going to hire gaunt lieutentants with clipped British accents, put the word 'Death' in the name of our headquarters, blow up peaceful planets for giggles, and wear an outfit that would make Satan shit his pants. Who wants in?"



Using the Dark Side of the Force must have about the same effect as eating paint chips, because those guys were none too bright. If I were the Empire's marketing director, I'd have made a few little changes that would have gone a long way toward improving their image:

OLD NEW
Galactic Empire Democratic Federation of Free Planets
Storm Troopers Customer Service Representatives
Star Destroyer Nuclear Fusion Cleanup Vehicle
Dark Side of the Force Look! Ewoks!
Death Star Moon o' Fun
TIE Fighter TIE Fighter (What, it's just not very threatening-sounding)

In fact, if you were really clever, you could probably find a way to convince people that the Dark Side of the Force was really the Light Side, and vice versa. You'd use the language of the Jedi order to promote your own nefarious purposes, and people would get confused and not know which side to support. And the really great thing is, even if you lost the war, you'd have convinced a lot of simple-minded people that Dark = Light and Light = Dark and that these Jedi bastards are just a bunch of troublemakers.

Anyway, nothing of that sort is likely to happen here on earth, where the world's religions continue to cause untold problems. Sadly, I think I'm about to give up my quest for a truly disorganized religion. The problem is that as soon as you involve other people, you have to start worrying about schedules and doctrines and people who refuse to see things your way no matter how hard you explain it to them. In the end, my religion is nobody's business but mine and God's -- and He'd better watch it, or it's going to be just me pretty damn quick.

Labels: , , , ,

]]> 6331025130907250867 Thee Eagle Has Landed 2007/04/#6331025130907250867 2007-04-04 I wrote my first novel in second grade.

Well, maybe more of a novella. It was 50 pages long. Although come to think of it, part of it was written on little kids' paper, so maybe it was more like 20 big people pages. You know the stuff that I'm talking about. The paper that's somewhere in between grocery bag material and industrial paper towel in terms of texture, so that occasionally your O's would look like Q's because your pencil had to jump over a chunk of wood pulp. It had like eight extra lines on it of all different colors so that you could see how bad your penmanship is.

"Diesel, the top of the loop of your 'd' should be on the red line."

"What 'd'? I don't see any 'd'."

"Right here. In the word 'ditch.'"

"Nope, don't see it."

"Here! Right here, plain as day!"

"Well if it's plain as day, why are you making such a big deal out of it?"

"Diesel!"

"I think I might have that dyspepsi thing you were talking about."

"Why?"

"That's not a 'd'. I'm writing a story about you."

Actually my 2nd grade teacher was really nice. Also, she loved me. Early in the year she instructed the class to write a story, and I wrote one about Captain Bill and his spaceship Thee Eagle. No, not The Eagle. Thee Eagle, is in, "Hey, is that Thee Eagle?" And it was. Although my teacher later renamed Thee Eagle to Thee Eagle With A Line Through the Second 'e,' for reasons that were unclear to me. I guess she just wanted Captain Bill's spaceship to have a more unique name, in case it ever needed to race Seabiscuit.

Anyway, Captain Bill and his crew had all kinds of adventures in their big black ship that resembled a partially peeled and very overripe banana. I recall that they went to Jupiter, but I'm not sure why. Then again, why does anyone go to Jupiter? It's the strip clubs and legalized cockfights, am I right? What happens on Jupiter stays on Jupiter. Mostly because of the crushing gravity.

The story of Captain Bill and Thee Eagle never ended, for the simple reason that once I finished the story I would have to do insufferably dull things like add 3 and 7. I didn't understand why they needed me to do this. I was like, "It's 1977, people! Arabic numerals have been around for 1400 years and nobody has figured out 3 plus 7 yet? Don't you people have scientists for this sort of work?" I mean, hell, we even had calculators back in 1977. I used to cart mine around in a radio flyer. But no, they insisted that we do this drudge work by hand. And not only that, but after a while I realized we were doing the same problems over and over. "Who is keeping records at this place?" I demanded. "I swear I just multiplied 3 by 4 yesterday! Oh, that was 4 times 3. Nevermind. Man, I wish somebody would discover the commutative property of multiplication."

"So... do I need to do math now?" I would ask Mrs. P.

"Oh, you just keep working on your story," she said.

No freaking way! I thought. Mrs. P. is the coolest teacher ever! After that, Mrs. P. started making appearances in the story. Captain Bill and she once took some unauthorized leave on Jupiter, if you get my meaning.

In this fashion, the saga of Captain Bill and Thee Eagle went on, and on, and on, page after page after page until I ran out of grocery bag paper and moved on to the real stuff. It must have been the longest story ever written by a second grader. I never did end it. Eventually I think I lost the manuscript (I was forever losing things as a child), and had to move on. But in some ways the story still lives on. Sometimes when I'm weighed down by the drudgery of life, I imagine Captain Bill swooping down in Thee Eagle to save the day.

"Thank goodness you're here, Captain Bill! I'm a church treasurer now and I could really use your help. What's 3 plus 7?"

And Captain Bill would just shrug and say, "Dunno. Let's get wasted and go to Jupiter. I left Mrs. P. frozen in carbonite, so she looks the same as she did in 1977."

"Sweeet," I'd say, with an extra 'e' just for the hell of it.




Captain Bill once squared off against the entire fleet of humor-blogs.com.

Labels: , ,

]]> 846965196934715513 The Diesel Caption Contest! 2007/03/#846965196934715513 2007-03-23 Inspired by your comments on my bad hair posts, I put together a little treat for you: Diesel as Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise! I made myself bald and grayed my hair a bit to seem more dignified and Picard-esque. The dark glasses require some explanation: In the picture of me that I was using, my eyes were squinted because I was in the sun (it's the same pic as my profile pic on the top right of this page). I tried to unsquint my eyes, but there's no unsquint feature in the version of Paint Shop Pro I use. So I said, "Screw it," and gave myself shades instead.



I couldn't decide on a caption to use for the pic, and that's when the idea hit me: Caption contest! Submit your caption in the comments by this Tuesday, and then I'll create a poll where you can vote on the best one. The winner will receive an autographed digital copy of this picture and perhaps some Cheetos I found in my couch.

If this isn't a complete disaster, I may make this a regular feature. Feel free to suggest movies/tv shows for me to show up in.


There is no intelligent life on humor-blogs.com.

Labels: , ,

]]> 6883451074133039646 The Hair Was Created By Man. It Evolved. It Rebelled. 2007/03/#6883451074133039646 2007-03-16 My hair is getting out of control.

What started with sheer laziness and a vague desire to look like Baltar from Battlestar Galactica has turned into a disaster of Hindenbergian proportions. Or is it Heisenbergian? I can never be certain.



I can't remember the last time I had my hair cut professionally, and my definition of a hair care "professional" is pretty generous. If you own a pair of scissors that doesn't have bright orange plastic handles, you're probably overqualified to cut my hair. Generally I cut it myself -- by which I mean I set my $7.95 trimmer to 1/2" and buzz away until the bathroom floor looks like a scene from a werewolf movie.
What kind of creature could have done this?

I don't know, Sally, but whatever it was, it was big.
I've grown my hair out a few times before. The first was my unfortunate Kevin Costner/Dances With Wolves phase, during which I danced with few wolves but was occasionally mistaken for one. Then there was my even more unfortunate Steven Seagal phase, which had the unanticipated side effect of prolonging Steven Seagal's career by making him look relatively good in comparison. I suppose my selection of Baltar as my current hair role model will eventually seem foolish as well, especially since my hair has thinned to the point where I'd have a better shot pulling off Colonel Tigh than Baltar -- even the John Colicos version of Baltar.



So now I have a choice: tough it out, knowing that even another eight inches isn't going to make me into Baltar (insert your own joke here), or shave it off and start over. I finally broke down and bought some conditioner a couple of weeks ago. I bought the manliest (read: cheapest) conditioner I could find: White Rain, the conditioner with the vaguely disturbing name. In fact, now that I think about it, how manly can you be when you're squirting something called "White Rain" on your head?

Besides, in case you didn't know, White Rain pretty much sucks as a conditioner (I'm comparing it to my wife's fru-fru conditioner, which I used during the transition stage between "I don't need conditioner; I'm a man!" and "Ok, I'll buy conditioner, but I'm not paying more than 84 cents for it.") White Rain is cheaper than motor oil and probably about as effective on split ends. The first ingredient listed on the label is water, which seems like a ripoff -- unless it's holy water, in which case there should be a warning label for vampires. After all, vampires were the original metrosexuals, in addition to being surpisingly litigious -- although it's true they don't have to worry about sun damage, so they have that going for them.

Where was I? Oh yeah. The second ingredient is alcohol. Then comes something chemical-sounding I don't understand, then citric acid, then another kind of alcohol. More chemicals, then "sodium chloride (sea salt)." Sea salt differs from table salt in that... uh, I think it's pretty much table salt. Then more alcohols, acids, and other chemicals. So White Rain is mostly alcohol, acid, salt and various scary sounding chemical compounds. Now I don't know what those scary chemicals do, but I hope it has something to do with counteracting the damage done by dousing your hair with alcohol, acid and table salt.

The good news is that if you've watched Battlestar Galactica at all, you know that Cylons are indistinguishable from humans except that the Cylons pretty much all look like supermodels. The only characters that we know for sure are human are the ones who are so frakking ugly that it's hard to believe anyone made them on purpose. Given that fact, I think it's clear which of the two characters in that first picture is the Cylon.

And homely as I am, at least I'm no Edward James Olmos. Although I'm sure that's nothing that long term exposure to White Rain and Don Johnson won't fix.




This post would show up on humor-blogs.com if I wasn't preoccupied with my hair.

Labels: ,

]]> 8493963085630195662 And He Pays for His Half of Dinner Too! 2007/03/#8493963085630195662 2007-03-02 Note: Sometimes my posts start off kind of slow, but if you stick with them there's often a pretty good payoff at the end. This is one of those.

I find inspiration in the strangest places. Like right now I'm reading a book called Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It's about souls and consciousness and intelligence, which probably explains why I keep accidentally typing "An Eternal Golden Brain" and then snickering about it. That would be a cool James Bond movie. I can hear the sultry voice of Shirley Bassey singing the the theme now:
Pretty girl beware of this brain of gold
This brain is old. It's thinking of gold
Only gold. Thinking gold
It's thinking gold. Only gold
It thinks gold.
Or maybe Indiana Jones and the Eternal Golden Brain.

Anyway, the book explores how a work of art, such as a piece by Bach, encodes information, and intelligence decodes that information. An intelligent entity can, in a sense, "reverse engineer" meaning from a work of art, to ascertain the artist's style. "Perhaps," Hofstadter writes, "works of art are trying to convey their style more than anything else. In that case, if you could ever plumb a style to its very bottom, you could dispense with all the creations in that style (emphasis mine).

In other words, if you could really understand the work of Bach, you wouldn't need any of Bach's actual music. You'd know "what Bach was getting at" without having to listen to any of his music. I know, pretty cool, huh? All the profundity without having to listen to hours and hours of classical music.

This got me thinking. If you really could fully understand the "style" of an artist completely, then you could also produce new works of art "by" that artist, in the same way that if you had a complete of the DNA of a tyrannosaurus and sufficient resources, you could make a string of increasingly lousy box office behemoths.

Now I've never been a big Bach fan, but I can see the value of creating new works by certain great artists. For example, this is worth over $40 million:



That's FORTY MILLION DOLLARS.

Now I don't pretend to be an art expert, but compare that to this painting, created by a promising young German artist at the beginning of the 20th century:



Personally, I like the second one better, but curiously it's worth nowhere near $40 million. It's probably worth a hundred grand or so, but that's primarily because the artist went on to conquer most of Europe.

Whatever. The point is, the first painting, crappy as it is, is worth an assload of money for the same reason it was virtually worthless while the artist was alive: because it was painted by Vincent Van Gogh.

Imagine what a newly discovered (even relatively crappy) painting by Van Gogh would be worth. My mind reeled with the possibilities after reading that passage by Hofstadter. I was so consumed with the idea last night that I couldn't sleep. After tossing and turning for a few hours, I got up and descended to my underground laboratory, where I proceeded to build an automaton programmed with the painting style of Van Gogh. It took all night, but by morning I had produced the one and only Vincent Van Gogh Bot.

Capable of producing an original Van Gogh every 6 hours (plus drying time), the Van Gogh Bot is a modern marvel of mechanical ingenuity and expressionism. You simply fill it with paint, give it a subject, and press a sequence of random numbers on the front of the machine (the latter is not technically necessary, but it makes the whole business seem more Star Trek-ky), and voila! (Or, since the Van Gogh Bot is Dutch, daar!) Instant Van Gogh.

He started with a self-portrait:



I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. I'm going to be so rich.


Humor-blogs.com won't be truly appreciated until long after I'm dead.

Labels: , , ,

]]> 691848206224900858 The Adventures of Crash McFarlane in the Blogosphere 2007/02/#691848206224900858 2007-02-05

Crash McFarlane hopped into his iPod, desperate to reach the blogosphere before dark.

The iPod sputtered to life, creaking and shuddering as it soared above the docking station. McFarlane prayed that the batteries would last. If they gave out before he reached the outer blog ring, he’d be stranded in Bluetooth territory when the sporks came out.

Once clear of the ebonic barrier, Crash set the iPod to shuffle to conserve energy. He sailed above the playstation, absently watching the kleenex bots meticulously detoxing the muffin-toppers and zine phishers. He wondered if he would ever come this way again.

The bloggers had made it very clear that they wouldn’t hesitate to TiVo his beloved Wiki if he didn’t return with the emoticon before dusk. He reflected on the irony of the situation: he knew that the power to defeat the bloggers lay within the emoticon itself, but only Google knew how to use it, and only the bloggers knew how to reach the old man. There was no other solution: he would have to turn the emoticon over to them, giving them the power to floam the entire city.

He wished there was some other way, but he couldn’t bear to allow Wiki to be TiVo’d. If the bloggers had given him the choice, he’d have gladly allowed himself to be TiVo’d in Wiki’s place. But they would not be so merciful. If he failed to deliver the emoticon, he would have to live with the fact that he had allowed the Wi-Fi energy of the TiVo device to turn Wiki into a mindless spork. So here he was, doing the bidding of the blogosphere, feeling like a complete palm pilot.

Eventually Crash nodded off, exhausted from hours of web hacking to retrieve the emoticon from the Wintel spamcops. He awoke to the sound of the gentle bling-bling alerting him that the iPod was nearing the Youtube. The tube would take him to the outer blogosphere, where the blogrollers were constantly shoring up the blog ring to protect the blogosphere from spork attacks.

Crash checked the battery levels. Two percent. Just enough to get him to the Youtube gateway. From there, the Youtube would propel the iPod to the blogosphere.

Suddenly the gaydar sounded. The neocon showed two spamcops approaching rapidly from behind.

Crash took the iPod out of safe mode and hit the accelerator. The Wii engines roared to life and the iPod rocketed toward the Youtube gateway. Crash could practically see the battery levels dropping. He wasn’t going to make it.

The gaydar blinged again: The spamcops had launched a volley of Gnutella logic bombs.

Crash looked down, scanning the netscape for a place to ditch the iPod. He spotted a small patch of blue. No, he thought. It can't be. Can it?

As the blue patch grew larger, there could no longer be any doubt. It was a long shot, but it was his only chance.

He jammed the joystick forward and the iPod hurtled downward, toward the Blue Screen of Death.


TO BE CONTINUED...


Listed on humor-blogs.com

Labels: , , ,

]]>