Safety in Numbers

Courtesy of the Presurfer, here's a little something that I just think is funny as hell -- look at the different expressions on the penguins....

Tag, I'm It!

No, wait...

The Blonde Goddess, bless her terminally horny soul, whipped around and hit me in the eye with a nunchuck

meme. To Wit:

"Your ship has sunk. You have, of course, been stranded on a deserted island. You have salvaged a copy of the King James Version of the Bible and a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. Nothing else. “The very next day you find one of those Arabian Lamps in the sand. Of course, you rub it and, of course, a rather grumpy Genie appears. “‘Let’s get this straight - there is a recession going on. There are restrictions on the three wishes now. I don’t do water or air transport now so no boats, planes or magic carpets. As for electronics, forget it. There isn’t the infrastructure on this island. “‘I can let you have one book and I mean one VOLUME, one essential item and one luxury item. Now hurry up and make your choices, I have to get to those five other islands you are going nominate."

The book, I'd go with one of those antique-y "How to make your own everything" kind of things. You know, the ones that explained how to make your own black powder, soap, distill alcohol, and all that.

The necessity would have to be a Bowie knife; with time and patience, you can do damn near anything with those suckers -- even fell a tree.

Luxury item... geez, THAT'S the stumper. Of all the shit that I'd like to have, which one would I want the most... well, with no infrastructure (electricity, running water, etc), there isn't a whole lot that I'd want that could really DO anything with. Between my reading material and the knife, I could make reasonable approximations of damn near anything non-technical I wanted (such as musical instrument or whatever), so I'm going to go with a big-ass case of coffee beans (pre-roasted, thank you).

Okay, now that I'm done with the asshole Genie, I'm going to send him off to help

Erica

Jimbo

Randy

Craig

and

LeeAnn

That THAT!

Dang!

I gave my cat a bath last night.

I'm still spitting fur out...

Caturday

Comforting thoughts...

These could well be the "Good ol' Days" that a future generation wishes they could go back to.

Stupid is as Stupid does...

Here's one for you:

A Colonial "theme" park has a couple of people that operate the mules that pull a barge along a closed-off two mile stretch of canal. The canal doesn't get anywhere even close to anything even vaguely sensitive like a nuke power plant, military base, or anything like that.

So what does the TSA demand? Biometric ID for the muleskinners, under the claim that everybody with any kind of Coast Guard license (the 'skinners have to have one because of the boat) has to have the background check necessary to get the I.D.

Now, you tell me -- does THIS look all that dangerous?



Best line of the article? Has to be this:

... the mules could be considered weapons of mass destruction only if they were aimed at something resembling food.

Ya gotta love it...

Klewless

See, this is why I named my blog the way I did...

Got a call a little bit ago from the moorons at the Census. Seems that me simply claiming (by writing in BIG RED LETTERS on the front of it) religious exemption from answering their questions wasn't enough. They "had" to call, and explicityly ask me each and every farookin' question on the survey, and then take my verbal response (which was probably politer and less profane that I should have made it).

So, after verifying the basics that I'd filled in on the front of the damn thing, we had to go through the rest of it. After the first time I responded with "I decline to answer that question on religous grounds.", it was sufficient for me to simply reply "Decline" to the rest of them -- all eleventy hundred of them (or so it seemed).

And then the dipshits wonder why Government is held in such low regard...

teh suXXor -- Geek Edition

Well, crud.

My laptop -- an IBM Thinkpad R40 (mine is 2GHz, with 768M of memory, 20G drive) -- has been having "issues" for a while now. Hey, at 5 years old, it still runs like a champ, and a replacement would be a little more than I'd want to spend right now.

First, the USB port in the back came loose; no big deal, there's another one on the side.

Then the display started getting flaky. Specifically, the backlight kept going out on it. I finally got around to taking the thing apart to see about fixing what ailed it.

The USB connector was a piece of cake: just solder the durn thing back into place.

The display was something else, entirely. There was a dinky little surface-mount connector that wasn't making good connection, and the farookin' thing is too damn tiny for me to futz with without (expensive!) specialized tools/equipment. I mean, the damn connector is roughly 5/16 of an inch long, barely an eigth-inch wide, and has 30 electrical connections on what looks like HALF-millimeter spacing. Even with my magnifying visor and the finest soldering tip I've got, that's still just too fine for me to mess with. On the plus side, a replacement for the whole cable (FRU08K4067) will run me less than $10, so I'll be back up and running before too long.

Warped sense of humor? I has one!

I "gifted" this to one of my neighbors early this afternoon. As soon as he saw it, he knew where it orginated...

Obama losing more staff...

Apparently, he's having worse trouble getting good help than had been reported...



H/T to the Presurfer