Who's Worse?

Steve Miller Band or Jimmy Buffett?


Exhibit A














Exhibit B

Pop Quiz

1. I've been at my job since September 2004; that's 28 months. How many emails do you think I have sent?

A) 1500
B) 2500
C) 3500
D) 4500
E) 5500
F) 6500
G) 7500

Answer: If you guessed A,B,C,D,E,or F, you're wrong. I've sent just about 9500 emails in the past 28 months. That's ...opening Excel... 340 emails per month, and 16 emails per work day.

2. I regularly interact with notable scientists, and have met and worked with several Nobel Laureates. How many Nobel Laureates do you think I've made out with?

A) 0
B) 1
C) 2
D) 3 or more

Answer: If you guessed B, you are correct. I made out with Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, known especially for his calculation of gravitational collapse despite electron degeneracy pressure, a year ago during a conference in Prague on Earth-bound extramarital objects.

3. I am responsible for a variety of projects at work, from the small, easy, and quick to the complex, frustrating, and endless. What moment in my professional career has given me the biggest feeling of accomplishment?

A) Figuring out a way to cut $10,000 from a report's printing budget to keep the project on track
B) Receiving a promotion after a year on the job
C) Meeting Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
D) Being offered a postdoctoral position from a university professor when I don't even have a Master's
E) Succesfully shooting a rubber band across my cubicle and landing it so that it hangs from a thumbtack stuck in the wall.

Answer: If you guessed E, you're right "on target." It took me at least 3 months to get the firing trajectory and power level just right so that I could even just hit the thumbtack; sticking it onto the tack, however, was God's work. The rubber band still hangs there to remind me of why I'm here.

4. People who know I do something "sciency" often confuse where I work with other notable sciency organizations. Which organization is most commonly confused with where I work?

A) National Science Foundation
B) National Aeronautics and Space Administration
C) The Weather Channel
D) The CNN.com Astrology Page
E) National Car Rental

Answer: If it was left up to you, I would be trying to rent you a convertible instead of the compact economy car you asked for.

5. According to the general public, the Universe consists primarily of and is interconnected by:

A) Transcendentalist ether
B) Very thin, very long rope
C) Failed dreams
D) Failed hopes
E) Griffins
F) Marshmallows
G) Dark matter

Answer: As delicious as it sounds, F is incorrect, despite what the Jet-Puffed company has tried to tell you. According to the latest astronomical research, swarms of the mythical half-eagle, half-lion Griffin inhabit the heavens, policing the Cosmic Order and ensuring that the Infinity Gauntlet, Rings of Power, and Symbiote Suit are never used again.

Here comes a YouTube clip - Part 5

I started thinking about how cool normal things look when you slow them down to a pace your eye could never keep up with. Here's some neat-o high-speed camera work. Bullets going through stuff, water balloons, and other dynamic processes.

Here comes a YouTube clip - Part 4

I watch a lot of Mythbusters, a show on Discovery Channel that pits two special effects engineers against common (and not-so-common) myths. I thought this was awesome and really simple to do. Looks like a perfect activity for Dewey 07: Man Overboard.

Here comes a YouTube clip - Part 3

I was looking for a cool video of dominoes falling over but I found something much cooler. I've never seen a billiards trick shot better and more pointlessly complex than this.

Here comes a YouTube clip - Part 2

A bit unorthodox, but here's an incredible collection of wild soccer dribbling maneuvers and fake-outs. Pretty amazing stuff. Turn off the music, it's pretty bad.

Here comes a YouTube clip - Part 1

I'm feeling lazy and have been in Seattle for nearly a week now, so here's a clip of a Futurama that made me laugh out loud. I couldn't find a small clip, so skip to the funniest bit that begins ~2:37 and ends ~3:30.

Poker Sucks

I've said it before and I'll say it again, nothing fills me with angry boredom more quickly and more thoroughly than seeing poker on TV, listening to people talk about poker, and seeing people actually play poker (which happens about 1/10,000th as much as they talk about it). Why do I hate poker? Because it's boring as shit, that's why. I'll be as happy when the poker fad fades away as I will be when the moustache fades back out of style a decade from now after its unyielding return in a few years.

(Above) Virtual poker being played by actual losers. Notice two of them have chosen the Jamiroquai outfit, two others the gay Frenchman getup, and the remaining two have tried to fool their opponents with seemingly innocuous avatars: old woman and Mets fan with hat backwards. Riveting.

My dinner last night

My dinner last night was a 2.5-hour long grazing session that included:

1. Half a BBQ pork sandwich and french fries
2. Tortillas and salsa
3. Saltine crackers and peanut butter
4. Half a bag of red hot potato chips
5. 2 cookies and a glass of milk

I don't know why, but I just couldn't stop eating until I felt sick, and I sure as hell felt sick when I finally stopped eating. But it was delicious.

Then I threw up and yelled at myself in the mirror for 30 minutes about how fat I was.

HOLY SHIT AMERICAN GLADIATORS IS COOL

I spent the majority of my Saturday making single dollar bets on decade-old episodes of Double Dare 2000 and Guts on Nickelodean for Graduates; it's the channel above the HD History Channel and the one below Sunrise Earth. It was amusing betting on kids in every physical challenge or Mt. Crag event (though it wasn't amusing watching my dollar go to the guy who bet on the girl every time), but it really brought me back to a time when physical competition in completely unrealistic events was the norm in Hollywood (or Burbank?)---and American Gladiators was the pinnacle of that.
Here's why American Gladiators is the best TV show that will ever exist.

Hospital drama: boring and redundant
Family sitcom: lack of creative space between an "Urkel" and a "Screech."
Quirky character-driven apartment sitcom: Friends sucks
Nature documentary: who watches these besides me and my grandfather?
Cartoon comedy: played.
Live athletic, high-contact competition pitting juiced beach-mutants against wormy accountants and failed runningbacks and strangely reminiscent of Running Man: Sounds fantastic.

Let's take a look at some of our "favorite" TV characters.

• "Ross" from Friends> a big pussy. Bumbling meant nothing until Ross stepped onto the scene. How could fuck up both pretending to be British AND let that prettyboy Joey take Jennifer Aniston away from you?


• "Kramer" from Seinfeld> self-described racist and bigot. I heard they cut the Seinfeld episode where Kramer refers to a black man running down the street as a "spook with the heat on him."


• "Agent Scully" from X-Files> hot, but never got naked.


• "Dr. Doug Ross" from ER> easily the sexiest man alive for at least 2 nonconsecutive years, but his smugness could stop a monkey-driven rocketsled in its tracks.

Now let's look at the cast of American Gladiators.



Thunder
Diamond
Gold
Dallas
Lace
Nitro
Elektra
Diesel
Sky
Sabre
Siren
Viper
Storm
Tank
Sunny
Laser
Zap
Malibu
Ice
Jazz
Turbo
Gemini
Blaze

Jesus Christ. I had to take a breath halfway through. There's just so much goddamn energy in there. It's Perfect. And that Turbo guy, what a name! I'm so pumped just thinking about how awesome Turbo is, I think he could easily win the next Presidency. And not only is the cast 4 times larger than any other TV show, but every single person is a model of physical fitness and Muscle Beach fashion sense in the late 80's. I mean, it's obvious that the production staff of American Gladiators just asked the nut-brained gladiators to think of names that reminded them of transformers, X-Men, hookers, and airports they've been to lately. But hey, in Hollywood, it works.

While American Gladiators could have chosen to have scripted sequences that flip between playful, witty banter and instructive, meaningfully-emotional moments, like Friends, they instead chose to fire tennis balls at scrambling competitors at over 100 miles-per-hour using compressed air. Instead of resolving disputes with quirky neighbors by hilariously unorthodox subterfuge, like Seinfeld, American Gladiators put everyone in huge metal spheres and forced them to uncontrollably roll around an arena for 5 minutes. X-Files liked to pique the viewer's bewilderment by mysterious twists and endless conspiracy theories, but American Gladiators seemed content having the gladiators try to pull people off of a 60-foot climbing wall.

Check out Billy Wirth's (Axl Rose) victory against gladiator Malibu (Dave Mustaine) in the Assault in Season 1.

It's pretty obvious to me at least that Malibu is a younger, healthier Dave Mustaine. He must have gotten embittered to the internal politiking within the American Gladiators cast set.

If it's not enough to have a cast of characters to rival a Dickens novel and a series of bone-crunching, ponytail-tangling competitive events, they "went there" and created THE ELIMINATOR. I capitalized the entire word out of respect and awe. I can just imagine the show's muscle-bound creators cackling in a dimly lit room buried in the heart of a mountain somewhere in the Urals.

Running up a 45-degree incline on a reverse treadmill is a tough way to start The Eliminator, but then you have to run across a 40-foot rotating cylinder while gladiators toss heavy boxing bags at you to knock you off. If you fall, the pit below is filled with venomous Cobras genetically bred with cat legs. Many unfortunate souls fell victim to these mutants' fangs (and claws). Then comes the 50-foot cargo net that I, personally, mastered in 5th grade yet, so I never understood the people who managed to nearly hang themselves in it. The zip line was put in for good measure, it didn't really take any athleticism. In fact, it would've been quicker for the contestants to simply leap off the platform into the bean bags but zip lines were all the rage in the early 90's, thanks to the Rambo franchise. Somewhere in there was a hand bike event, which while probably the most physically demanding (even moreso than the zip line!) section, it was only interesting when someone had trouble with it.

The kicker in The Eliminator was the endgame, where the contestants had to choose one of four paper doors to run through to the finish line. Immediately behind two of the four doors was a gladiator with a shield and a trident who would impale the unwise contestant who chose poorly. It really made for great television when contestant Wesley "Two Scoops" Berry thought he had easily beaten his rival in the race, threw his arms up in victory just before running through the paper door and having a medieval weapon pushed into his neck. It was sometimes difficult to gauge victory on the occasions where both contestants ended up dead, though. Later seasons saw the production staff convince the gladiators to replace their medieval weaponry with cushions, probably at the behest of the families of the deceased. Instead, and somewhat ironically, to give the competitors more motivation, the show would suspend their loved ones from the ceiling and slowly lower them into a vat of acid.

Here's the thrilling conclusion to Season 5 featuring Mark Ortega and Tim Goldrick. Mr. Goldrick's family didn't make it out of the studio with their lives that afternoon.

After reading this, it's pretty difficult to deny that American Gladiators was not only the most novel, entertaining television show ever created, but also accurately circumscribed the complex moral and political atmosphere that shaped the early 1990's. If you're like me, then you should feel a visceral duty to sign this petition to bring back American Gladiators.

I Want to Own an Aviary

- by Count Langenhoffen

An Aviary (capitalized because I would own it, and everything I own instantly accords pronoun status) is a large enclosure filled with trees and such for the purpose of enclosing birds. You've seen aviaries in such blockbuster classics as Jurassic Park 3 (dazzlingly directed by Joe Johnston, between October Sky and Hidalgo) and The Haunting (which features a pre-celebrity Owen Wilson decapitated by a haunted fireplace[seriously]).

So, essentially, the birds think they can fly through the webbed steel forming the aviary, but it turns out that steel reacts to birds the same way it does to everything else; they hit it, fall, and usually die. BUT, as Darwin taught us, the next generation of birds will know how the system works, and shall obey it unflaggingly, and so they become the living attraction of said Aviary.

Now, my Aviary will be fucking enormous; not because the birds need room to fly, but because I'm a big guy. In fact, my Aviary will be devoid of those dirty ornithological rats. If birds find a way into my Aviary, it's probably entirely coincidental. As soon as you walk into my Aviary you'll be confronted by some kind of spike or boulder trap; notice I use "you," since I would never fall for my own traps. If you make it past the trap(s?), you'll notice the air is pungent with a tenebrous pall, due in large part to the still black pond to your right and the cobwebbed man-sized iron cages squeaking longingly towards the floor which are numerous and hanging from the roof.

Spiders are rampant, though not so many so as to draw your attention too much from an omniaural moan permeating the wispy white fog. There's some wilting shrubbery that's not been clipped for years, but its plainly obvious they were shorn to resemble souls writhing in the fires of Hell. Twisted trunks of half-dead trees litter the place haphazardly; there's a pretty cherry blossom, too (for contrast by juxtaposition). This is obviously just to create the mood for my Aviary, so that the next door neighbor's kids feel compelled to breach my Aviary.

Then, once inside, they'd be forced to serve me (not sexually) until their premature death or embark as a group on a dangerous quest for a pirate ship full of gold hidden in a secret cave within the sewers of the town. If none of the kid's are Asian, then they won't have the quest option, since no one can convincingly yell, "Booby traps!"

Now, being a business-minded person, considering the logistics of maintaining a model aviary requires some serious rumination.

First, manpower. Simple. Pay some poor Polish countrymen to immigrate over and upkeep my aviary (I wouldn't use "Aviary" in the newspaper ad so as not to stir suspicion). Their rudimentary belief in the spirits of the Old Country would surely remain alight as they torment in my hellish Aviary. And while they toil and cry out at spirits nonexistent, they'd come to me begging to allow their indenture to end. I, of course, would grow to twice my size and cackle ghoulishly at their simple beliefs and hilarious terror. I might allow them put a bird in my Aviary if they agree to stop being fed, but the odds that they learn conversationl English are slim to none.

Another important logistic is always making sure the troops are officious in their duties, so once in awhile I'd release a pack of hounds or swarm of locusts into the Aviary. I might also release one of those badass string-tripped swinging log traps that did in the Predator, and I think also may have taken care of Benicio's character in the cinematic feast that is The Hunted.

If the INS or similar got too hot on my Aviary, I'd just cover it with a tarp whenever they came by looking for missing Poles. If they ask what's under the tarp I'd probably just make the whole damn thing send itself into another dimension, and then return when everyone's not looking.

What's most important for an Aviary is, of course, having a secret room where you crossbreed various hapless animals via torture. There'd be strungup bunny rabbits, kittens, otters, dolphins, parrots (since they can talk), chicken (in the form of buffalo wings in the freezer), and then a couple of random beating cows' hearts connected to more electrodes than seems necessary for good measure. I'd also pay Edgar Allen Poe's great grandson to sit in a tall black chair and read aloud The Telltale Heart and The Raven at odd temporal intervals. When the creatures I manifest are ready to unleash doom upon the world, I'd make sure they go straight for the places of worship, just to fuck with everyone's psyche.

One last item, let's throw in some gargantuan pterodactyls with lasers attached to their shoulders like those Dinobots.

I feel that building from this simple Aviary template, I'll have countless hours of entertainment to tide me over until my battleship is complete.

Leave Your Footprint

If you read something on this blog, and you like it, hate it, agree with it, disagree with it, find it revolting, find it empowering, or it makes you able to travel through time, put in a comment. It's the only way I'm going to make the millions I need so that I can retire early to spend more time with my possessions. And yes, you'll be invited to join me.

- The Mgmt.

Some More Travel Photos---New Mexico

I've never been to the "Great American Southwest," but I've been hoping to get to go there for work sometime soon. My deepest wish came true and I visited the Very Large Array in Socorro, NM in mid-October. You may know the VLA from such movies as Contact, Armageddon, and generally any movie where they show a bunch of big telescopes all turning simultaneously.

Here's some photos from that trip. I had a day off on the tail end of the trip, so I decided to drive around the state for 8 hours. I chose to go toward White Sands National Park / Missle Testing Range. I took a bunch of photos along the way.

Seeing New Mexico left me with the impression that there will be no shortage of available land for humans to populate within the next few centuries. There is so much open land it is nearly incomprehensible. It's also very neat, topologically; tall ranges of mountains are bounded by vast, flat plains and steep rolling hills. It actually looked a lot like Rohan from Lord of the Rings.

Anyway, here's your goddamn pictures.

The Very Large Array itself, pointing to the heavens.

Another angle of the Very Large Array.

A view skyward, from inside one of the dishes in the previous shots. Yes, I stood in the dish. The lack of a natural horizon made it feel like the clouds were stationary and I was whizzing through them.

En route to White Sands, the Town of Truth or Consequences has an interesting history. It was originally named "Hot Springs," but changed its name on a dare made by a 1950's radio show host. The name change has survived several public referendums.

The actual town of Truth or Consequences, viewed from a hill.

Still en route to White Sands; I took this shot white driving. Notice the road bends left. I did not notice that at the time. Driving and shooting is dangerous.

STILL on the way to White Sands. This is one of many endless, flat stretches of road that disappears into a point in the distance. I'd never seen that before. A really cool shot would've been through the power lines on the side, but the weather was uncooperative and I had to pee at this point pretty bad. This is the stretch of road between Las Cruces and Alamogordo.

The sky opened up for a combined total of probably 3 minutes during my entire time at White Sands. It was disappointing, because the whiteness of the sand didn't present itself as eery as it otherwise would, but when the sun did come out, it offered really a neat contrast between the sands and the blue sky peekign through above.

Half of the park was flooded, so I had to walk for two miles through a flooded desert roadway. When the sun popped out, it gave me a few chances to catch some cool reflections. This one looks like an alien planet, or some Buddhist vision of serenity.

Speaking of serenity, White Sands was the quietest place I've ever been in my life. Since the park was flooded, no one (except me) was willing to walk the two miles further up the road. The only noise I heard was the light breeze, and when that died down, and I stopped walking, the only thing I could hear at all was my own breathing. It was an outdoor sensory deprivation chamber. No wonder the aboriginal inhabitants found this land so spiritual.

A F117-A stealth fighter patrolling the area. National parks are known for their surface-to-air capabilities I guess.

I changed filters and out came some shots that looked straight out of an inspirational poster or the game Myst.

Same pic, camera rotated.

#1 Ohio State - 42 vs. #2 Michigan - 39

We're proud of our Michigan boys. They played hard, they played well, and they were barely beaten. Arguments will be had about penalties, play-calling, etc., but it's been clearly shown that the rankings are exactly accurate. OSU is the best in the nation, and Michigan is, by 3 points, the second best. GO BLUE.

How to Cut Global Paper Consumption in Half, Instantly.

The World Wildlife Fund, Sustainable Harvest International, Greenpeace, The Rainforest Alliance, Rainforest Action Network, Environmental Defense. Just several of probably hundreds of "conservationist," or pro-environmental protection lobby firms here in DC.

All of these organizations hope to deliver trees, one way or another from the axes of paper manufacturers. A noble ambition indeed. True, because on one hand, it's nice to have trees because they're pretty, and on the other, because there aren't enough trees to keep up with mankind's use of them. Also, deforestation contributes to carbon dioxide pollution, which might be bad.

Of course, none of these organizations' websites provide any useful information on how they would like to accomplish this noble ambition, and that's probably because in reality they use a combination of muckraking, sensational advertising campaigns, missionary-style recruitment schemes, and good old-fashioned lobbying.

Surely there must be an easier way to cut down on the world's demand for paper products? We're not going to all of the sudden switch from paperbacks to that Minority Report-esque e-paper, right?

Then our hopes be dashed. Or are they?

Meet the Hewlett-Packard 2420d Laser Printer. The "d" stands for "dargain," which is close to "bargain." Actually, the "d" stands for "duplex," and "duplex" means double-sided.
BAM! Double-sided printing. That's it. It's just that simple. I just saved like a hundred thousand square kilometers of rainforest.

But they must be restrictively expensive; nobody uses them. Not quite.

The HP 2420d Laser Printer is................$479.00
The HP 2420 Laser Printer is................. $459.00

A difference of $20. Twenty fucking dollars. I spent more at the bar on Monday night. MONDAY.
In fact, you can retrofit those old-fangled single-sided printers with an easy-to-install kit for around $150.

Well, maybe it's slow...

The HP2420d prints at 1,200dpi, 30ppm, with 48MB.
The HP2420 pritns at 1,200 dpi, 30ppm, with 32MB.

So unless I'm reading this wrong, the double-sided printer prints twice as fast, and the additional $20 goes to a bigger memory chip.

And there you have it. My analysis is admittedly cursory and half-baked, but you get the idea. DOulbe-sided printers. The wave of the future. Ride it.