Voodoo Time Dot Com

So you might have noticed that I haven’t written much here in a week or two. I have a good excuse though. Really!

See, it all started when I received an urgent call from the President of the United States. “I’m sorry to call so late in the evening,” he began (it was 3:36 AM), “but this simply cannot wait until morning. I received word at oh-two-thirty hours, that we have lost all communication with our secret lunar base. The status and whereabouts of our colonists are unknown. I’m afraid I must ask you to undertake another dangerous mission for your country.”

“No dice, Mr. President,” I answered. “I retired last year after the Delta Incursion. My walking papers are stamped all the way to the top. With all due respect, sir, not even the President of the United States can put me back on one of those confounded ETCs (Extraplanetary Transport Craft) again.”

“I’m not asking as your President, Justis,” he replied, desperation betraying his previously solemn tone, “I’m asking as your friend.” Twenty minutes later I was in a chopper headed to Groom Lake.

Again.
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Dear comments spammer at 66.36.249.149,

If we ever meet, I hope to stab you with a rusty spoon 175 times - once for each spam comment you left on my site.

I hope you die of hemorrhagic fever.

Best regards,
justis

I was thinking today, as I was trying to do about four different tasks at the same time, that it would be really great if there were some kind of distributed computing system that could network all of our brains together for extra mind power.

If you’re familiar with projects like SETI@home or grid.org, then you can probably guess what I’m talking about. For the uninitiated, distributed computing works on the idea that not all computers are using their full computing capability at all times. For example, while I’m writing this entry, my computer is not terribly busy. All it has to do is keep critical systems up and pay attention to my typing. Even while I’m browsing three or four Web pages at the same time, my PC is still well under maximum load. Distributed computing applications use this unused capacity on multiple machines simultaneously in order to make calculations or interpret raw data in the background. If I were to start playing a video game, the application would adjust itself accordingly and use up less of my resources, or none at all.

If only there were such a network for human brains, I could get so much more accomplished. At any given time there must be millions of people who are barely using their brains at all. Just look around next time you’re at the mall, or the grocery store, or sitting in traffic. Everyone around you is probably just floating around on auto-pilot - their minds spinning up just enough to keep those critical systems running and their feet landing one in front of the other. While I was nearing my cranial capacity this afternoon, someone somewhere was daydreaming and burning up precious synaptic discharges. I am absolutely convinced that for every one of us struggling to muster up enough grey matter to get through the day, there is some high school student daydreaming in chemistry class. That is prime processor time being completely wasted on sexual fantasy.

If there was a distributed mental network, I could have tapped all kinds of unused brain power. Just thinking of how many people sit at home in the afternoon watching soap operas, makes me lament the lack of such a network all the more. The unused 99.99% of some General Hospital viewer’s mind could have made all the difference for me today. And likewise, while I’m stuck in traffic, or Web surfing, or watching Spongebob Squarepants, some poor soul in need of a few extra synapses could benefit from my low CPU usage.

Anyway, I’m done for the evening. If anyone needs my brain for anything, go ahead and log on. There’s no password.

Bye for now.

Happy Voodoo Day, everyone!

The Earth rotates on its axis approximately once every 23 hours, 57 minutes. In the time the Earth takes to make a complete orbit around the sun, the Earth has turned 365.242 such rotations. We mark the occasion on an arbitrary day - the first of January. Ideally, on January 1st (and any other day for that matter) our planet should be in the exact same position relative to the sun as it was on that date in the previous year. But it isn’t. So because of a minor deficiency in our gregorian calendar, we add a day to every fourth year to catch up (except of course, for years which are divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400).

So once again, January 1st has come and gone - about a quarter of a day earlier than last time. Happy New Year, everyone. We all know the beginning of the new year is a time for reflection on the past, and plans for the future. It is a long-standing tradition that we make resolutions at the beginning of the year in order to better ourselves. Common examples are resolutions to lose weight, break a vice or a bad habit, save money, get organized, etc..

Personally, I’m not really one for resolutions. They involve too much conscious effort, and as I am a slave to inertia, that’s far more effort than I am comfortable with. Instead I think it would be much more convenient for me if everyone else modified their habits and personalities to accommodate me. To that end, I have come up with a list of New Year’s resolutions for everyone else.

Read more. Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan don’t count. People need to read more books and newspapers. Maybe we can all discuss something other than what was on television last night.

Stop watching sitcoms. See above.

Use your automobile’s turn signals. It’s only common courtesy to signal your intention to enter my lane before cutting me off with your gigantic SUV.

Register to vote. If you don’t vote, you’re not allowed to complain. Well… I guess you can still complain in you want, but the rest of us will just laugh at you. If you are already registered to vote, do it again - only this time, register as independent. Party politics makes people dumb.

Don’t believe everything you see or hear. If we have learned only one thing from the New York Times debacle, it is that mass media cannot be trusted. And that goes for those e-mails that are always getting forwarded around. Anti-perspirant does not cause breast cancer. No one is growing kittens in jars. And Bill Gates is not going to send you money for forwarding e-mail.

Actually, feel free to ignore all that. You don’t really want to be like me anyway (except for the part about turn signals - use your turn signals!). Besides, the Bible codes and the Mayan calendar say we’re all going to die in 2012 anyway. It’s true! I saw it on the Internet!

Happy New Year.

‘Tis the day before Christmas
And all through our flat
Not a damned thing is ready
What’s up with that?

Boy did Christmas ever sneak up on me this year. We barely have our tree up. Until this week, it’s seemed like Christmas was still a month away. I am so not ready for this.

Most years (this one included), I am so buried in work and day-to-day minutiae that I feel like I’ve hardly digested Thanksgiving dinner by the time Christmas comes around. The whole thing rolls right past me, and despite my best efforts to the contrary, I find myself standing in an enormous line somewhere on Christmas Eve, angry for the half hour of my life I just wasted trolling for a parking spot.

In my adulthood, I’m becoming jaded with Christmas - or “giftmas” as I’ve taken to calling it. It hardly seems worth the trouble; trading greeting cards by mail that no one really wants to write, worrying about what to buy people, the stories of parents fighting other parents for this year’s “gotta have” toy… I’m not saying I don’t enjoy giving gifts (quite the contrary) but it seems that more and more, we’re all just going through the motions. Christmas is supposed to be about peace, but there’s never a moment’s peace for most of us this time of year.

At this time last year, I had been unemployed for two months. We were draining our savings and racking up credit card debt just to pay the bills. We were about four to six weeks from completely broke. It sucked. Needless to say, there were not many Christmas gifts. But for probably the first time in my adult life, I noticed the cool evenings, the lights going up on houses, and the carols on the radio. And there were no last-minute trips to the mall to sour my love for humankind. My wife and I spent several evenings just driving around the neighborhoods looking at light displays, and drinking hot cocoa. The night we drove around lost in the hills with the rain pouring down is the greatest Christmas memory I have since childhood.

It came without ribbons! It came without tags!
It came without packages, boxes or bags!

Next year - don’t buy me anything. Spend that time going for a drive, or making eggnog, or watching that corny “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” cartoon. Celebrate and enjoy yourself. Be at peace.

Buy Bye for now.

I assure you that President Saddam Hussein has not been captured by the American soldiers. These crooks have glued a moustache to a farmer and told the world a great lie. Do not believe them!

This is a photograph of a Pygmy Marmoset - the smallest species of monkey in the world. They weigh an average of four ounces fully-grown. They live in rainforests in sections of Central and South America (specifically western Brazil, southeastern Colombia, eastern Ecuador, and eastern Peru).

The Pygmy Marmoset is not the smallest primate in the world though. That distinction currently belongs to the Pygmy Mouse Lemur of Madagascar which weighs an average of only 30.6 grams. (1 ounce = 28.35 grams)

My wife and I are avid readers. We each go through a book about once every week to two weeks. Over time, this becomes an expensive habit, and the monthly amazon.com bills are really starting to add up. But as it turns out, there’s this place in town that has thousands of books that you can borrow for like two weeks at a time, and it’s free! Just pick a book, read it, then bring it back. So yesterday, we made an exploratory visit to this “Public Library” and it did indeed contain many thousands of books. We even brought two books home, and no one has called to ask for them back yet, so the system appears to be working as advertised. I wonder why no one thought of this sooner?

Anyway, this is not about the library itself, but rather about what we found when we arrived. There is lettering attached to the building in such a way as to spell out “PUBLIC LIBRARY”. Only, somehow an ‘L’ has come up missing, so it now reads “PUB IC LIBRARY”. I suspect this was not an accident. In fact, knowing what I do of human nature, I have come to believe that this ‘L’ was deliberately removed in an act of vandalism. And though I am no detective, I believe I can construct a reasonable profile of the perpetrator - an adolescent male.

How do I know this? I used to be one. In my experience, I know that adolescent males have a propensity towards vandalism, and a love for toilet humor unmatched in any other demographic. This tends to manifest itself in many unique ways such as:

  Drawing of external genitalia on anatomical diagrams of the human reproductive system in high school textbooks.

  Prank phonecalls to every listed telephone number belonging to a Mr./Ms. Butts, Cox, Dick, Gaylord, Johnson, Peters, and Wang.

  Construction of large snow phalluses (though, to be fair, the first time I ever saw this, was in college)

  And, my personal favorite, the Magic Marker defacement of an advertisement for the “Museum of Art” into “Museum o’ fArts”

So, to the anonymous teen now running around with a silver letter ‘L’ on his keychain: Please bring it back. Just drop it down the after-hours book drop - no questions asked. Let’s all just put this silly little episode behind us. Believe me, 10 years from now, you will not look back on the time you made the library sign read “PUB IC” as a defining moment in your life. No one is laughing. Put the ‘L’ back.

Now, “Museum o’ fArts” on the other hand… that’s funny.

Bye for now.

So I hear there is an old folktale in parts of Europe in which an innkeeper stuffed two children in a pickle barrel on Christmas day. Interestingly enough, I cannot seem to find any information suggesting why said innkeeper would have done so. But regardless of motive, two children are now sealed in a pickle barrel. Then St. Nicholas happens by and saves the children from the pickle barrel by tapping it with his cane.

This story evidently begot a tradition in which a blown-glass Christmas tree ornament in the likeness of a pickle is placed on the family Christmas tree on Christmas Eve - presumably by Santa Claus himself. On Christmas morning, all the children run to the tree to be the first to find the pickle. Oh how they laugh and frolic! Then the lucky child who finds the pickle is rewarded with an extra gift from Santa, and gets to open the first gift of the morning.

So, in a nutshell, grab Santa’s pickle and win a toy. Then there’s the whole lap-sitting thing. I’m just sayin’…

Watch out for that pickle, kids.

Bye for now.