Primate Brow Flash

I guess the worst mistake I ever made was going to New Years dressed as an Industrial Wet-Dry Vac. This was 1986. It was an awesome costume with a real vacuum cleaner hose strapped and duct-taped to the front of an old football helmet and a huge cardboard box painted red and decorated with real-looking RIGID tool logos. I glued a big red power switch to the top of the helmet and glued a huge black handle to my back.
I had a few drinks the normal way and then got the idea that I should be vacuuming up stuff, since I was the industrial Wet-Dry Vac.
First it was only a jar of olives and some baking soda that had been spilled on a counter. Then I cleaned a container of prescription medication off a chair. Even after that, even after the marbles and hickory chips, I probably would have been fine If I just left right then. But people kept spilling drinks on the floor and I’d say, “THIS is a job for the wet-dry vac!” Looking back, I believe they were spilling those drinks on purpose.

I couldn’t be just any wet dry vac. I had to be the best Industrial Wet-dry vac on the market. It was as if there was a guy dressed as a competing brand of Industrial Wet-Dry Vac in the next room doing a better job of huffing pretzel crumbs off the shag carpet.

It was after the bath soaps when my stomach first started bugging me.
I found out how it feels to be a clogged vacuum cleaner. I tried to throw up, but the seemingly endless wad of tissues I sucked out of some chick’s purse seemed to be blocking both incoming and outgoing action. I started to wish I had one of those bypass vents right in front of my adam’s apple, because that seemed to be the source of all the blockage. Eventually the tissues got smaller and I swallowed them all the way. The tissues must have absorbed some of the nasty stuff in my stomach because I started feeling much better after I ate them and I started to play my role in a very inspired fashion. I kind of became the focus of the party and it became impossible to stop. People were grabbing the handle on my back and dragging me here and there. There were so many more messes to clean up! At one point the host’s mom’s underwear got caught in my throat and I couldn’t get my arms out of the costume to do anything about it. Luckily, someone reached in and pulled it out.
I remember kind of a blurry circle that seemed like I was looking at a Christmas tree ornament that was reflecting the rest of the room. In the circle, faces I vaguely recognized were laughing and cheering me on. I remember wanting to please them by doing an exceptional job cleaning up the dirt from a spilled houseplant. There was a rushing sound that I attributed to my strong suction capacity.

I woke up in the hospital. The nurse was being all snippy with me because some lead figurines I had eaten had wrecked their stomach pumping machinery. Then the nurse said something I’ll always remember: “Consider getting some new friends”. She was right, I guess. The experience really made me wiser about who I hang around with and what I wear to costume parties. It also gave me keen insight into the lives of ordinary appliances.

You should know that when you visit this site, I can see your IP address and from that, I can tell the network, organization and geographic location you come from.
In some cases, I can tell when specific people visit. I can also see the search query that led people here, the type of computer and web browser they used, their connection speed, the pages they read and the time they spent on the site.

If you’ve ever worried about that, or that the government. other web site owners, Verizon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, your school, work, or library knows what sites you visit, you could use a web proxy. proxy.org has all the information you might need. They recommend a proxy service called Proxify that offers both free and paid service.

proxy.org also provides a nice little device to launch your anonymous surfing. Enter a web site into the form and click on any site listed to become invisible. Alternatively, click on any site listed to be whisked to that proxy site. Then, as long as you use that site to surf here or anywhere else, all the web site owner will see is that you came from a proxy site.

Obviously, the owner of the proxy site will have access to your IP address and nobody can vouch for them. I don’t advise banking through one of these proxies. I’d be interested to know if my bank even allowed traffic from a web proxy.
Certain flash objects and Java applets in web pages can defeat proxies. Also, if you act outrageously enough, the government may subpoena the proxy service for a list of visitors.

We make traditions all the time around here. Ralph, a 10-inch tall elf who sits on a shelf, came stay with us for the first time this year. He keeps an eye on kids and reports their behavior to Santa every night and then re-apparates onto a different shelf for the kids to discover the next day. Adults can use Ralph to threaten and cajole:
“What is Ralph going to say about the socks on the living room floor?”
“If you don’t pick up your room, I’m going to cut Ralph’s parts off and send him back to Santa to say whatever he wants about us.”

Maureen immediately understood how to wield the power of Ralph and loudly invokes his name when her brother antagonizes her.

I heard about the tradition of “Blue Christmas” services at churches for the first time. It is an acknowledgment that everyone doesn’t feel as god-damned merry as expected and would like to get together in a darkened church to listen to hymns in a somber key and talk about death. I’m not joking around.

Finally, this was the first bowling Christmas eve. Bowling alleys are pretty empty on Christmas eve and some have little lane-walls to help kids keep their balls out of the gutter. We went to the Park Tavern Bowling Alley. I reveled in the fabric of the building, the cigarette burns and cracked tiles in the bathroom and the worn wood of the shoe station. There were several drunks in the bar because there must be at least two drunks in every bar on Christmas eve. I could tell their hearts weren’t in it, but they did their duty as codified in a dozen New York Christmas movies from the early 60s.

I suck at bowling.

Putting technology into the hands of the average Joe, the USB home endoscope promises an education if nothing else. This is a skinny stick with a lens and a bright light at the end that you can use to capture surprisingly high quality images and videos of where ever you can manage to cram it.

For example,

This is the inside of Dan’s ear. The danger with this device is that when you first bought it, perhaps your nose or mouth would satisfy your curiosity. Then, you’d start to wonder if you could go one better, perhaps something more intrusive, and you’ll be out buying a longer USB cable.
Found at Kevin Pho.

This was too fun not to share. The headline says it all: “Huge Chunks of Ice Fall from 1600 ft. TV tower. Found it on Cynical-C blog.

I’ve been thinking that the famous 7 stages of grief applies to the threats to our lifestyle and can go a long way to explain the behavior of Americans.

Here are the seven stages and how they relate to the coming global shitstorm:

1. Shock and Disbelief. Most of us visit this stage daily. For instance, I have trouble believing that we are in a decades-long war to secure oil resources, that the comfort all of us enjoy today will soon be attainable only by the super-rich, that the earth’s environment is irrecoverably ruined. The reality in front of our faces can cause frontal lobe lock if taken in large doses. The work-hard, play-hard ethic can be a good antidote to this.
2. Denial. This is a deeply entrenched and powerful response. Most Americans spend most of their time enjoying this stage right now. Everyone is an armchair climate expert who somehow knows more than the scientists who have spent their careers studying the issue. There is a big gap between the information we have in front of us and the way we behave. Denial can cause behavior that seems to be opposite of the most logical response. Taking part in ecstatic displays of resource consumption can be comforting. This explains NASCAR. “The American Way of Life is a blessed One!”
3. Bargaining. We’ll just retool our economy to burn ethanol. Or hydrogen. Or something. I read in a fascinating profile of Sir Richard Branson that he is offering a prize to someone who can come up with a technology that will replace fossil fuels “without significantly reducing our standard of living“. Nice thought. I’m going to be spending the rest of my life watching America in the throes of this stage. Every huckster who pitches a way to get back to the old days will be lifted up and followed fanatically and then torn down in disappointment. The ancients used human sacrifice as a form of bargaining. Maybe we are indirectly doing the same thing today. If we can somehow trade lives for a few more years of air conditioning, it might be worth it. Me, I’ll just skip ahead to #6.
4. Guilt. Most Americans will skip over this one in favor of the more exciting stages that follow.
5. Anger. The root of anger is fear. We will take out our anger on what scares us. Unfortunately, things like the sun, the sea, the soil, and the bacteria can’t react to our anger in a satisfactory way, so we’ll have to use one another as repositories for our anger. This stage will be punctuated by anti-government, anti-corporate, anti-me-being-hungry-and-poor rhetoric and actions, much of it deserved. Evidence that we have reached this stage will be extreme levels of xenophobia.
6. Depression. This is a stage we’ll visit often and then switch back to one of the other stages. You will visit this stage when your grandchildren ask you to explain the concept of dieting to them.
7. Acceptance: This is when we say, “Ok, I guess we have to live like the Dutch. We are ready.” and then, having admitted that, nothing will be able to shock or depress us further. So, we won’t be too upset when told it’s too late to even do that.

Yesterday I took an old red onion, poked some holes in it and soaked it in Gatorade for 30 minutes. I then took a galvanized nail and a piece of copper pipe and stuck them in opposite ends of the onion. Frank hitched a buzzer up to the onion and we heard a faint buzzing. The buzzer is one way. That is, it only works if the red wire is hitched to the positive electrode of a battery. The nail turned out to be the negative electrode and the copper is the positive. I explained, hopefully correctly, that the copper loses electrons to the nail and the electrolyte and acid in the onion was enabling the transaction to occur.

We then hitched up a volt meter to the electrodes and recorded .79 volts, about half of what a D cell battery puts out.

Maggie then drank some of the Gatorade and gained the power of atomic greenbreath.

Today is St. Niklaustag. Last night, St. Niklaus visited our house and left treats in the kids shoes. I was awakened by a mouse trying to get those treats. It sounded like someone typing on a Mac.

After helping the kids appreciate their shoe-treats, I rode to work. My gloves, hat, jacket and shoes were all frozen in weird shapes on the porch, so I zoomed them up with a hair dryer. The combination of 29 inch wheels, studded tires and toe clips make most obstacles navigable. The thing I can’t navigate is snow that people have walked through. The packed footprints throw the wheels all over and interrupt what little momentum I have. Fortunately, no one had walked down the unplowed golf course path and I was able to ride it. Felt like my neck was going to explode. It was nicely plowed by the time I rode home in the evening.

The streets were snowy and scary the other night, so I was riding sidewalks. Most of them were shoveled, except for a former school building owned by Minneapolis Public Schools. There are several of these around the city and they are apparently low priority for shoveling.

Our charter school is looking for a larger building, yet none of these closed Minneapolis school buildings are available to us because Minneapolis has a policy against leasing their school buildings to charter schools.

Seems to me a stink might be raised. Who decides that these buildings will stand empty and give up this revenue source? The school board.

This is from an article this past June in the Star Tribune:

The previous search to find lessees, however, was not particularly successful. Only one group showed interest in Holland, for instance, and after several talks with district staff and one community meeting, the group cut off contact with the district.

“Last time, the vision was maybe not feasible. You don’t have a theater arts building in a modest residential neighborhood without some sort of zoning change, for instance. I think in many cases the buildings are just too big and their locations are not where people want to be. Most are nestled into neighborhoods, where zoning and regulations won’t allow businesses. We also didn’t allow charters or private schools, which would have been the easiest ones to put in these buildings.”

There was a new batch of board members elected in January and they might be more open to Charter schools. From the Star Tribune:

For years, Minneapolis public school leaders have wanted little to do with most charter schools. Of the city’s 30 charter programs, only four are sponsored by the school district. Viewing charters as competition and concerned about several high-profile charter failures, school board members have refused most requests for sponsorship.

To cement that distance, the board set a policy against renting space to charter schools. But the current board, with a majority of new members since January, seems more open to collaborating with them.

That’s a welcome, necessary shift in attitude. Several thousand students have left traditional Minneapolis public schools for charters; district leaders need to learn from the competition and replicate their successes.

In that spirit, the board voted this week to sponsor the Children’s Circle Age 3-Grade 3 charter, an outgrowth of a preschool program for American Indian children. The board also gave the green light to negotiate its first lease of district classroom space to a charter school.

So, perhaps they are ready to open up some more of these buildings. Here is contact info for the current school board.

Matt turned me on to a use for old sippy-cups.
They work perfectly as Neti Pots!
Fill with warm salt water (1/4 teaspoon salt to 1 cup warm water), lean over a sink, tip your head sideways and jam the nozzle of the sippy cup into the higher nostril and pour. You will feel the salt water fill your nasal passages and then it will fall out of your other nostril. It left me with feeling of cleanliness in an entirely new place. There are all kinds of purported benefits to this mentioned across the internet, some warning that the only true way to do this is with a $30.00 ceramic pot. Supernatural benefits may exist, but I just find it soothing, especially in the dry winter air.

Note. If water steadily rises across your vision in one or both eyeballs while doing this, or if more than two cups of water disappears into your nose without any exiting, cease immediately.

Please enjoy Teenage Witchcraft (mp3 7MB), one of my favorite tracks from the Teenage Machine Age series. I saw this live at 7th street entry in 1993 or 1994. I time-travel back to that show every once in a while.

I’ve been shying away from biking since it got cold, but last night I decided that my body has degraded enough. We are getting several inches of snow right now and the roads are insane, I’m told.

Like my co-worker said, there is no perfect tire for winter riding. One must contend with ice, asphalt, packed snow and unpacked snow. I put skinny studded tires on both front and back of my 29-er and they did fine. I was shaky at first because I didn’t know how my bike would handle the shifty street snow. I kind of think I would have done better with the fat tires I just removed. By the end of the ride I was enjoying every mushy snowbank. The golf course even plowed my favorite secret shortcut.

I was totally over-heated when I arrived at work. I look forward to when this transitional period is over and real winter, with its dependable solid ice, can begin.

So, now that rush hour is over and everything is dark and powder-beautiful outside, I will venture home.

I had a religious experience over the weekend at our friends’ house. I was sitting in a big comfy chair by a wood stove drinking wine and eating home made pizza and I had a very clear vision of the kingdom of heaven spread out upon the earth. My ego dissipated and all that existed was warmth. It only lasted for a minute, because right away I needed another piece of pizza and my ego came right back to get to work on that issue. I did try to get back to that state by drinking more wine, but that only made me talk louder.

They don’t know it yet, but their house will become a shrine. The first addition will be a dedicated wood-fired pizza oven so they can feed all the pilgrims.

I have shown my kids that ordinary tap water conducts electricity with a 12-volt battery connected to a small buzzer. The buzzer still worked, feebly, when running the circuit through a glass of water. It became louder when we added a tablespoon of salt. I tried to explain that tap water is a stew of minerals that contribute ions, which had extra electrons to be enslaved by the electric god and that the salt contributed even more ions.

Last night, we tried the same thing with distilled water and the buzzer made no sound. I added tap water and the buzzer made small sounds. Then, I added ginger ale because there happened to be an open can on the table. The buzzing became much louder.

“We made a POTION!” they said.
Now Frank not only understands that distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity, but that ginger ale has some extraordinary electrical powers.

For another experiment, I poured a new mug of distilled water and had Frank soak his hand in it for a few minutes. It then conducted electricity as well as tap water.