Voodoo Time Dot Com

One year, in middle school, my friends and I realized that we were too old to “trick-or-treat” anymore. We spoke at length about what this meant to us, and discussed alternative methods of celebrating the holiday. First we decided to go to a party. It was a great plan - one that we all heartily endorsed and eagerly anticipated.

The only problem is that there were no parties.

Someone suggested, probably bitterly, that we go bag-snatching. (Bag-snatching is a brutal exercise in natural selection in which bigger kids go trolling for smaller kids with large candy bags. In true scavenger fashion, the big kids then relieve the small kids of their candy and ride away on faster bicycles.) When we resisted, he argued that candy is bad for children, and that we would be doing them and their parents a big favor. Even so, we decided that bag-snatching was still too assholian for us, so we put the kibosh on the whole idea. I think that guy ended up going bag-snatching anyway. Joey was that kind of jerk.

The winning idea for that Halloween ended up requiring a rather large investment in toilet paper. We decided to spend that Halloween on the edge. We were going TP-ing. TP-ing is the practice of covering one’s property with toilet paper. This is a service provided free of charge to the property owner. The unrequested nature of the act makes TP-ing as much a sport as it is an art. Speed and stealth are slightly more critical than aesthetics. We heard some kid got shot by a homeowner one year.

So we loaded up the TP and hit the road in our beach cruisers, mountain bikes, and GTs. After three or four easy wrap jobs, we got ambitious. We needed a major target. We were mere blocks from the Vice Principal’s house, whose daughter was in our same grade and was a die-hard New Kids on the Block fan. We had motive, means, and opportunity. It was on.

Once we reached the right street, a difference of opinion broke out as to the actual location of the house. There were two opinions as to which house it was. We flipped a coin, but in the end we decided this was too important to leave to chance. Our only option - we split into two teams and completely TP’ed both houses with equal vigor and panache. And just to ensure that the deed had been done, we TP’ed three or four other houses likely to be that of the VP. We went home satisfied.

The next day, a few of us approached the VP’s daughter and casually mentioned that we had heard that her house had been TP’ed last night. She denied it. She denied that her house had been TP’ed!!

To this day, I have no idea if I ever TP’ed the Vice Principal’s house.

Bye for now.

A “stone” is a unit of weight equal to 14 pounds. It is now currently used primarily to measure the weight of people. So that puts me at a weight of something like 11.5 stone.

The stone, as a measure of weight, comes from old Roman measurements. Allegedly, King Edward III of England standardized that value based upon the weight of the “Big Rock” that was used as a standard measurement for items sold by weight.

Today I learned about a few things you might have wondered about in movie credits.

What the hell is a:

Gaffer? - The gaffer is the chief electrician or lighting technician.

Grip? - A grip is one of the people who moves equipment and sets it up on the set.

Dolly Grip? - The “dolly” is a track with a cart-mounted camera on it. The dolly and track allow for smooth panning shots. The dolly grip is the guy who moves and positions the cart along the track.

Key Grip? - The key grip is the lead grip.

Best Boy? - The best boy is the first assistant to the gaffer (Best Boy Gaffer) or the Key Grip (Best Boy Grip).

Oh yeah, baby…

So the Anaheim Angels are in the World Series, and may in a few hours, be World Series champions for the first time. In spite of myself, I’m a little excited. I say “in spite of myself” because a couple months ago, I resolved no longer to watch Major League Baseball. As we crept ever closer to yet another players’ strike, I was disgusted by the greed and arrogance that has perverted “America’s Game”. So, of course, just after washing my hands of it all, my favorite team goes to the Show.

Anyway, the whole idea of me being excited by any sport is pretty rare. Despite my passing interest in baseball, I am, as a rule, completely uninterested in most sports. In my personal opinion, the amount of time and energy spent on sports fandom could be better applied to things like civics or literacy. People burn down whole cities after sporting events, but when’s the last time you saw a riot for better schools? The same people who will spend an entire Saturday painting a sign to support their favorite quarterback could never be bothered to paint up a sign protesting political issues. The reality of the whole thing is that ultimately, the outcome of any sporting event is completely meaningless.

You can probably see how my point of view is somewhat unpopular. Being a man of rather slight build, the fact that I don’t spend my Sundays watching football tends to emasculate me all the more among my stouter and more hirsute comrades. I never really cared to participate in sporting events as a child - which is probably due to the fact that, by an unfortunate fluke of genetics, I was born with no athletic skill whatsoever. It’s a diagnosed medical condition - athleticus patheticus. I’m missing a gene or something.

Having spent my childhood as a dodgeball target, I’m entirely willing to consider the possibility that my disinterest is all just “sour grapes”. Because of my medical condition (see above), I was usually chosen just before the kid with no legs when teams were chosen for kickball in elementary school. It’s entirely possible that my early sporting experiences have sullied my views on the subject. Whatever.

I will probably tune in to the game in a few minutes though. I have to see what the rally monkey is up to tonight. I’d watch more sports if there were more monkeys involved. Everything goes better with monkeys. Seriously.

Bye for now.

In the spirit of Halloween, here’s something I just learned about today. If you’ve ever seen a shrunken head before, your first thought was probably “How did they do that?”

OK, so your first thought was probably really something along the lines of “Oh man, that’s nasty. I think I’m going to be sick.” Fair enough. But I bet sometime between then and now, you wondered how they did that.

“They” were the Jivaro - an aboriginal people found along the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador. The heads were collected from their slain enemies - the gruesome results of raids of neighboring vilages. Now for the “how-to”.

It starts with a decapitated head - but you probably already knew that much. Anyway, (get ready for this) the head was split in the back, from the crown of the head down to the neck, then the scalp and face were peeled from the skull and cooked in a pot. The next step was taxidermy. The head was stuffed, sewn, and tanned.

So there’s that.

Today I learned of the phenomenon of the “flying manhole cover”. I have never ever heard of this before. I never even knew manhole covers had even the slightest affinity for aviation whatsoever. But apparently they have.

Evidently, underground electrical wiring, when frayed or otherwise worn out, can begin to melt its shielding which creates pockets of explosive gas. Eventually this gas is ignited by a spark or superheating caused by the wiring itself. If you know how an internal combustion engine works, then you know what comes next.

The explosion causes a pressure build-up which is capable of launching an 85-pound manhole cover up to 50 feet in the air. Consequently, manufacturers are making slotted manhole covers which help prevent the high pressure buildup that allows for these explosions.

By the way, in case you didn’t know, manhole covers are usually round so that they cannot fall back into the manhole.

Am I the only one who thinks the word ‘manhole‘ sounds like it ought to mean something obscene?

Contrary to popular belief, the shelf life of a Hostess Twinkie is really only two weeks - One week on retail shelves, and up to one more week at a discount store. If you freeze it though, your Twinkie can last up to one month.

Last Thursday I talked a little about tea and how it is supposed to be made.

Mike knows more about tea than I do. Check it out.

I’m really excited about what I learned today. Today I learned what dinosaurs looked like - at least brachylophosaurus anyway. This is pretty damn cool. In case you don’t know, the physical appearance of dinosaurs has been largely conjecture since humankind began excavating dinosaur fossils. That reptilian skin we associate with dinosaurs was mostly just an educated guess based on the shape of their skeletons.

Well, it turns out that the scientists were probably right. The brachylophosaurus was a hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur; in my opinion some of the more interesting of the dinosaurs. Leonardo (they named the brachylophosaurus Leonardo) was covered with pentagonal scales ranging from the size of a BB to the size of a dime. We don’t know what color it was though, since fossils have no organic tissue left in them.

Go look!! Here and here…

Hey, I learned something else today… how to spell “brachylophosaurus”.