Traffic is awful and a waste of time.
That's not true; you can do the crossword if you drive with your knees and it gives you time to text your friends or order shit from Amazon.
But it also makes you think. And observe. For example if you observe your speedometer closely, it may give you some helpful clues about the type of traffic you may find yourself in.
0 mph
Your car is stopped. If you're on the freeway, then that means you're stopped in traffic.This is handy if you're driving blindfolded and cannot see the traffic around you.
...
Although, in that scenario you wouldn't be able to see the speedometer either.
At any rate, you're at a standstill. If it's August, you're probably also sweating through your dress shirt so don't forget to freshen up before that big interview. Also, the speedometer is telling you you're going to be late to your big interview.
Stop sweating.
5 mph
You're still in traffic, but it's probably raining. Everyone on the road is an idiot and doesn't know how to drive in the rain.
Except for you.
The constant white noise of rain drilling the roof of your car is like one of those zen fountains as re-wired by Tim the Toolman Taylor.
Try not to brake too hard because all of this traffic is going to make it hard to execute a proper hit and run.
30 mph - Speed Limit
If you're driving this fast and you're not in a school zone, then you're probably facing a regular commute. Find someone driving more dangerously than you are and follow that person. They'll identify all the openings in traffic by allowing their turn signal to blink once and then shooting the gap.
If that person is on a motorcycle and you are not, please see above for "0 mph" or prepare yourself for the previously mentioned hit and run.
This would probably be a good time to execute the dreaded "Swoop and Squat" that that State Farm guy talks about. Insurance fraud can be a lucrative hobby.
10+ mph Over Speed Limit
Congratulations! You're zipping along through a total lack of traffic. This is your new Christmas break and your new summer vacation.
Your victory is hollow, however, for two reasons:
If no one else is on the road then they're on vacation and not at all on their way to work. That means there's probably more people laughing at you than you're laughing at. Now you aren't just commuting; you're commuting as Carrot Top.
On account of everyone laughs at that guy but in a bad way.
Also shitty: You will miss that part on the morning drive show where they call someone and fake-deliver flowers to them to fake-expose a cheating significant other. You love that part. But you'll be at work when they do it because you're making such good time.
20+ mph Over Speed Limit
Uh oh! Where is everybody? It could be The Rapture, or they could have been methodically slain by robots. The end result is similar.
Suddenly a wide open freeway seems less than appealing. But don't fret! Turn around and go home - you now have the rest of your life to start a (one man) band or master oil painting. Maybe learn French like you always meant to!
The best part is that no one will be able to critique (or view or appreciate) your work! You better quickly find contentment in spending the rest of your days eating canned food and writing symphonies that will never be heard by another human. You may also want to grab a few books aboutthe slow food movement; so you don't die of starvation over a lifetime of winters without functioning supermarkets.
Also, stop sweating.
I guess though sometimes there's just not that much traffic on the road and that's so weird but it's probably not because everyone disappeared.
had better watch out.
20 December 2011
21 October 2011
Rememories
They say to keep a notebook by your bed so when you think of something great in the middle of the night you can write it down and not forget it.
People also recommend this for remember dreams and subsequently enhancing your ability to recall further dreams.
I have a notebook next to my bed.
I used it once to write down this really great idea that was keeping me up. When I revisited it to flesh it out I realized it sucked. Actually that's happened twice that I can remember.
It may have happened more times than that but I haven't kept track of good ideas that actually sucked in the notebook I bought for that purpose. It's a bad habit.
Then the other night I had a really good idea for a post. It involved an extended metaphor wherein I drew a parallel between Dr. Doom and someone else. It was going to be great.
I forgot it. Because I didn't write it down.
So in the absence of a funny, substantial post filled with misdirection and simile please imagine something clever involving Dr. Doom.
People also recommend this for remember dreams and subsequently enhancing your ability to recall further dreams.
I have a notebook next to my bed.
I used it once to write down this really great idea that was keeping me up. When I revisited it to flesh it out I realized it sucked. Actually that's happened twice that I can remember.
It may have happened more times than that but I haven't kept track of good ideas that actually sucked in the notebook I bought for that purpose. It's a bad habit.
Then the other night I had a really good idea for a post. It involved an extended metaphor wherein I drew a parallel between Dr. Doom and someone else. It was going to be great.
I forgot it. Because I didn't write it down.
So in the absence of a funny, substantial post filled with misdirection and simile please imagine something clever involving Dr. Doom.
 |
| NEXT TIME WRITE IT DOWN! |
19 October 2011
Fortune Favors the Bold
"He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."
So say Jonathan Swift, long-dead professional satirist and author of future Jack Black movies.
I've seen variations of this quote all over the place (occasionally with better verb tenses) and I get what he was saying. Oysters don't look like a thing you'd want to eat. They're quite gray, and wet. If you were coughing up sea life, the things that came out might look like the inside of an oyster. That means that someone, somewhere, decided that they were hungrier than this beach garbage looked bad and decided to smash one open and give it a go. Raw.
Wonderful for them -- and for the eminently quotable Smith -- that their accomplishment would go on to give us the much more eatable Oysters Rockefeller.
You may recognize them as:
Cheese & Bacon in an Oyster Shell 14
I think what Jonathan Swift failed to do is give credit to all of the other gastronomical astronauts (gastronauts?) who also came between him and the Bravest Oyster Eater.
For the record I feel bad for using "gastronauts"; it seems lazy.
I think picking a bivalve up off the beach and eating it raw is far tamer than the legions of people throughout history who have done so much more with so much less.
An aside: I'm fascinated with the thing inside of us that recoils in horror when we smell something terrible, and then immediately sets us to finding someone else to share in that smell. I expect a lot of these hypothetical food proto-scientists did the very same thing right before declaring their invention a "delicacy".
Cheese
The innovators of the first cheeses deserve some credit. Adding acid to milk creates a pretty basic cheese that's present in nearly any culture that had ready access to dairy. Farmer's cheese, queso blanco, Paneer, and so on. Good on them for deciding to roll with curdled milk instead of throwing it out but the whole process is pretty tame. If you're set on using up your milk I don't think it's too much of a leap to strain the lumpy bits out and see how they taste on their own. These innovators are noteworthy but I don't believe they are trailblazers.
The real pioneer of cheese is the guy who opened his cellar and noticed that his carefully hoarded cheese wheels had hideous bleu veins running through them. It would have looked a lot like any other thing he had ever tried to eat that had become, over the course of days or weeks, lousy with mold and inedible. On top of the visual warning the smell (mildew mildew mildew mildew) would have hit him first. He should have thrown it all out. He should have tied une bandana around his mouth and burned it in a trash heap downwind from civilization. He should not have eaten it. No one was there to say, "This is a thing and you'll be ok after you eat it because it is not, as your nose would try to convince you, poison." Being the first person to eat bleu cheese (or gorgonzola, if you're fancy) is very much a "roll the dice" situation.
Lucky for fans of buffalo wings, then, that the dice were rolled and people across the world decided to pretend that bleu cheese was food and not garbage.
Of course, this is not to say that bleu cheese is the only thing that eating garbage has given us.
Pickled Stuff
I try not to be too quick to discount the intelligence of people from olden times. They built pyramids and boats and castles and all kinds of other crap I don't know how to do. Clearly they pushed the bounds of the technology they had at the time. I'm typing lazily researched words about food on a machine that's ten times suited for the task. I'm hardly pushing any boundaries here. With that in mind I think it's not too much of a stretch for someone to have noticed that this vinegar they had on hand was great for all kinds of shit and was actually kind of handy at preserving food too.
I realize now that someone had to forge ahead with turned wine (vinegar being derived from "sour wine" [vin acre]) but that's more than I'm really going to be able to write about.
So they've got this jar of vinegar and these vegetables (cucumbers, cabbage) and some spices and salt and they figure if they throw it all into a pot they're ready to go with some edible vegetables during the winter when everything's dead. That makes sense. January rolls around, they pull the cucumbers out of the brine and have this "Oh shit!" moment when they realize what a tasty snack they just created. I have to assume that the next step was inventing hamburgers and hot dogs to have something to use the pickles on.
But that only covers one kind of pickles and leaves out a whole swath of delicious, preserved stinking crap. Someone had to try it without vinegar; just salt. Once again, I'll tip my hat to their likely knowledge that salt's fine for preserving meats and whatnot. So maybe it was out of necessity. They had too much cabbage and they just used all their vinegar on the pickles and they're just trying not to starve. Boom. Brine, cabbage, and fermentation. Fast forward to winter (again) and it smells like a raccoon certainly crawled into their root cellar and died there, possibly many times over. The cabbage they've been steeping with a bunch of other spicy stuff in Asia (kim chi) or basically unadorned in Germany (sauerkraut) has turned. It smells a lot like something awful and indistinct but wrong in a very visceral, evolutionary way. Once again, no one showed up and told them that in spite of what their nose and eyes were telling them, everything was okay. I can't speak to kim chi; it looks delicious I've just never tried it, but I can say that eating sauerkraut had to have been an alternative to starving to death. That sharpness of fermentation really strikes the nose in a way that lets you know something went wrong.
Sauerkraut is like one of those harlequin-bright rainforest frogs that will poison the living fuck out of you; they both tell you far in advance what you're about to get into if you proceed with your plan to eat.
It's possible, that in the process of not starving, the person who could not dispose of their brown, fermented vegetables grew to like this awful thing they had inadvertently created. And they decided that, after no one died from it, they could do it next year. On purpose! And then a name was bestowed upon it and you've created a fermented cabbage thing. Or if you were still on cucumbers you made sour pickles.
In Memoriam
To commemorate these long-dead unacknowledged food explorers I propose the following quote:
"Also brave were the people who ate this stuff that in no other context could be said to smell like people food."
Please join me in lifting a fistful of sauerkraut in their honor.
So say Jonathan Swift, long-dead professional satirist and author of future Jack Black movies.
I've seen variations of this quote all over the place (occasionally with better verb tenses) and I get what he was saying. Oysters don't look like a thing you'd want to eat. They're quite gray, and wet. If you were coughing up sea life, the things that came out might look like the inside of an oyster. That means that someone, somewhere, decided that they were hungrier than this beach garbage looked bad and decided to smash one open and give it a go. Raw.
Wonderful for them -- and for the eminently quotable Smith -- that their accomplishment would go on to give us the much more eatable Oysters Rockefeller.
You may recognize them as:
Cheese & Bacon in an Oyster Shell 14
I think what Jonathan Swift failed to do is give credit to all of the other gastronomical astronauts (gastronauts?) who also came between him and the Bravest Oyster Eater.
For the record I feel bad for using "gastronauts"; it seems lazy.
I think picking a bivalve up off the beach and eating it raw is far tamer than the legions of people throughout history who have done so much more with so much less.
An aside: I'm fascinated with the thing inside of us that recoils in horror when we smell something terrible, and then immediately sets us to finding someone else to share in that smell. I expect a lot of these hypothetical food proto-scientists did the very same thing right before declaring their invention a "delicacy".
Cheese
The innovators of the first cheeses deserve some credit. Adding acid to milk creates a pretty basic cheese that's present in nearly any culture that had ready access to dairy. Farmer's cheese, queso blanco, Paneer, and so on. Good on them for deciding to roll with curdled milk instead of throwing it out but the whole process is pretty tame. If you're set on using up your milk I don't think it's too much of a leap to strain the lumpy bits out and see how they taste on their own. These innovators are noteworthy but I don't believe they are trailblazers.
The real pioneer of cheese is the guy who opened his cellar and noticed that his carefully hoarded cheese wheels had hideous bleu veins running through them. It would have looked a lot like any other thing he had ever tried to eat that had become, over the course of days or weeks, lousy with mold and inedible. On top of the visual warning the smell (mildew mildew mildew mildew) would have hit him first. He should have thrown it all out. He should have tied une bandana around his mouth and burned it in a trash heap downwind from civilization. He should not have eaten it. No one was there to say, "This is a thing and you'll be ok after you eat it because it is not, as your nose would try to convince you, poison." Being the first person to eat bleu cheese (or gorgonzola, if you're fancy) is very much a "roll the dice" situation.
Lucky for fans of buffalo wings, then, that the dice were rolled and people across the world decided to pretend that bleu cheese was food and not garbage.
Of course, this is not to say that bleu cheese is the only thing that eating garbage has given us.
Pickled Stuff
I try not to be too quick to discount the intelligence of people from olden times. They built pyramids and boats and castles and all kinds of other crap I don't know how to do. Clearly they pushed the bounds of the technology they had at the time. I'm typing lazily researched words about food on a machine that's ten times suited for the task. I'm hardly pushing any boundaries here. With that in mind I think it's not too much of a stretch for someone to have noticed that this vinegar they had on hand was great for all kinds of shit and was actually kind of handy at preserving food too.
I realize now that someone had to forge ahead with turned wine (vinegar being derived from "sour wine" [vin acre]) but that's more than I'm really going to be able to write about.
So they've got this jar of vinegar and these vegetables (cucumbers, cabbage) and some spices and salt and they figure if they throw it all into a pot they're ready to go with some edible vegetables during the winter when everything's dead. That makes sense. January rolls around, they pull the cucumbers out of the brine and have this "Oh shit!" moment when they realize what a tasty snack they just created. I have to assume that the next step was inventing hamburgers and hot dogs to have something to use the pickles on.
But that only covers one kind of pickles and leaves out a whole swath of delicious, preserved stinking crap. Someone had to try it without vinegar; just salt. Once again, I'll tip my hat to their likely knowledge that salt's fine for preserving meats and whatnot. So maybe it was out of necessity. They had too much cabbage and they just used all their vinegar on the pickles and they're just trying not to starve. Boom. Brine, cabbage, and fermentation. Fast forward to winter (again) and it smells like a raccoon certainly crawled into their root cellar and died there, possibly many times over. The cabbage they've been steeping with a bunch of other spicy stuff in Asia (kim chi) or basically unadorned in Germany (sauerkraut) has turned. It smells a lot like something awful and indistinct but wrong in a very visceral, evolutionary way. Once again, no one showed up and told them that in spite of what their nose and eyes were telling them, everything was okay. I can't speak to kim chi; it looks delicious I've just never tried it, but I can say that eating sauerkraut had to have been an alternative to starving to death. That sharpness of fermentation really strikes the nose in a way that lets you know something went wrong.
Sauerkraut is like one of those harlequin-bright rainforest frogs that will poison the living fuck out of you; they both tell you far in advance what you're about to get into if you proceed with your plan to eat.
It's possible, that in the process of not starving, the person who could not dispose of their brown, fermented vegetables grew to like this awful thing they had inadvertently created. And they decided that, after no one died from it, they could do it next year. On purpose! And then a name was bestowed upon it and you've created a fermented cabbage thing. Or if you were still on cucumbers you made sour pickles.
In Memoriam
To commemorate these long-dead unacknowledged food explorers I propose the following quote:
"Also brave were the people who ate this stuff that in no other context could be said to smell like people food."
Please join me in lifting a fistful of sauerkraut in their honor.
Free Band Names (Take One)
Being clever is a lot of fun.
I don't know how it feels but I know that a lot of other clever people have spent many an hour on a couch with other people trying to come up with a killer name for a band.
Also sometimes they just pick a word from a dictionary (REM, Outkast, Incubus &c.). That's lazy but it seems to work for those guys.
I have found that not being in a band is no barrier to entry for naming bands. In fact, being freed from the creative input of other people gives you an opportunity to just say whatever you want and declare that it could be a name for a band. Even if time died and no one named their band "Disintegrating in Centigrade", then that just means no one got around to it. It was still a viable option.
In the spirit of volunteer work and helping one's fellow man I've decided to donate a magically ever-growing list of killer band names.
I'll update it every time I hear, think or see something bitchin' and say "That would make a great name for a band".
http://punchful.blogspot.com/p/name-your-band.html
I just did like ten off the top of my head so this list may quickly become bloated and awesome.
If you have a killer name for a band, and are not using it for whatever reason, let me know and I'll happily add it to my list and credit you and your very clever naming skills.
Post Script:
"Bloated and Awesome" is only an OK name for a band.
I don't know how it feels but I know that a lot of other clever people have spent many an hour on a couch with other people trying to come up with a killer name for a band.
Also sometimes they just pick a word from a dictionary (REM, Outkast, Incubus &c.). That's lazy but it seems to work for those guys.
I have found that not being in a band is no barrier to entry for naming bands. In fact, being freed from the creative input of other people gives you an opportunity to just say whatever you want and declare that it could be a name for a band. Even if time died and no one named their band "Disintegrating in Centigrade", then that just means no one got around to it. It was still a viable option.
In the spirit of volunteer work and helping one's fellow man I've decided to donate a magically ever-growing list of killer band names.
I'll update it every time I hear, think or see something bitchin' and say "That would make a great name for a band".
http://punchful.blogspot.com/p/name-your-band.html
I just did like ten off the top of my head so this list may quickly become bloated and awesome.
If you have a killer name for a band, and are not using it for whatever reason, let me know and I'll happily add it to my list and credit you and your very clever naming skills.
Post Script:
"Bloated and Awesome" is only an OK name for a band.
13 October 2011
IDK What R U Doing????
I came across this scan below in researching something else entirely (teletypes) and found it rather interesting.
 |
| Courtesy of this site. |
So the next time someone bemoans the fate of spelling "these days" you can kick their ass into your DeLorean and send them back to 1963, where people were already substituting "U" for "you" and "thru" for "through".
Thx!
Also, the joke here isn't that Kennedy was shot. It just so happens that those are the teletypes I found.
28 September 2011
Johnny Depp Disguise Kit
After a careful series of tests, the world is ready for the super-secret Johnny Depp disguise kit.
Here is a picture of present-day Johnny Depp to establish a baseline:
Here is a picture of present-day Johnny Depp to establish a baseline:
 |
Below, a young Johnny Depp to establish utility in disguising other Johnny Depps:
Still good. Now let's go nuts.
I believe I have proved, within reasonable doubt, that this is a foolproof disguise for turning any person or item into Johnny Depp.
Still good. Now let's go nuts.
 |
| Johnny Deppley, Johnny Depp's co-star from the Pirates movies. |
 |
| Popular actress Johnny Deppschanel. |
 |
| The rare Johnny Deppberry. |
 |
| Johnny Depper. |
 |
| Johnny Deppen Forty Seven. |
 |
| Dooney & Depp |
I believe I have proved, within reasonable doubt, that this is a foolproof disguise for turning any person or item into Johnny Depp.
 |
| 300 ppi .png file on transparent background for use in Depping. |
Now go forth and Depp!
Pest Control
If you've ever talked to someone who's had an encounter with an opossum they probably called it a possum. I will also call it a possum.
Possums are terrifying night-scavengers with pointy teeth.
If they were a creature from a Russian fairy tale they would pluck the tongues from children who told lies.
Instead, they root through your garbage and startle you when it's dark outside. The best way to handle them is via laser whip but since you've usually left that in your night stand, making noise or throwing rocks to startle them may work as well.
If you have a persistent possum problem then you've just noticed how good I am at alliteration. You may also want to invest in fox urine granules, available in 20 oz., 3 lb. and 12 lb. sizes. The granules should rid you of those pesky possums but the scent of fox urine may attract other, larger predators to your home. This may includes coyotes, bobcats or depending on your local geography, timberwolves.
With your new wolf problems you may find yourself needing a harder-hitting predator to clear the area. Bear urine should do the trick and you'll quickly find your home free of possums, foxes, wolves and friends.
While wolves may think twice before coming around, you'll find you now have a rather large bear problem. Bears don't have any natural predators - but an unnatural predator's urine can be obtained to chase them away.
Obviously I'm talking about dinosaurs.
Then, to wrap-up this ridiculous game of animal urine one-upsmanship you'll need a beneficial predator (like bats, if you had mosquitos) to keep your T-Rex infestation in check. I recommend the Great White Hunter.
The most commonly available Great White Hunter is Muldoon from Jurassic Park -- although he may be engaged in a battle of wits and unavailable.
You may also want to consider the bad guy from Jumanji.
Now that your predators are under control your only remaining concern will be guys with ridiculous accents and giant guns wandering around your property.
You can keep them in check by making a few modifications to a basic deer feeder:
You may now go on about your life content in knowing that an unceasing slaughter-circle of wealthy hunters, dinosaurs, bears, foxes and possums will be occurring around you at all times.
Possums are terrifying night-scavengers with pointy teeth.
If they were a creature from a Russian fairy tale they would pluck the tongues from children who told lies.
Instead, they root through your garbage and startle you when it's dark outside. The best way to handle them is via laser whip but since you've usually left that in your night stand, making noise or throwing rocks to startle them may work as well.
 |
| Why did you buy it if you're never going to use it? |
If you have a persistent possum problem then you've just noticed how good I am at alliteration. You may also want to invest in fox urine granules, available in 20 oz., 3 lb. and 12 lb. sizes. The granules should rid you of those pesky possums but the scent of fox urine may attract other, larger predators to your home. This may includes coyotes, bobcats or depending on your local geography, timberwolves.
 |
| You'd have to live pretty far north. |
With your new wolf problems you may find yourself needing a harder-hitting predator to clear the area. Bear urine should do the trick and you'll quickly find your home free of possums, foxes, wolves and friends.
 |
| Do not substitute synthetic bear urine with synthetic motor oil when servicing your car. |
While wolves may think twice before coming around, you'll find you now have a rather large bear problem. Bears don't have any natural predators - but an unnatural predator's urine can be obtained to chase them away.
Obviously I'm talking about dinosaurs.
 |
| If Eric Kirby from Jurassic Park III is not available to collect T-Rex urine, you may have to improvise. |
Then, to wrap-up this ridiculous game of animal urine one-upsmanship you'll need a beneficial predator (like bats, if you had mosquitos) to keep your T-Rex infestation in check. I recommend the Great White Hunter.
The most commonly available Great White Hunter is Muldoon from Jurassic Park -- although he may be engaged in a battle of wits and unavailable.
You may also want to consider the bad guy from Jumanji.
 |
| His name is Van Pelt and no, I haven't used too many pictures already. |
Now that your predators are under control your only remaining concern will be guys with ridiculous accents and giant guns wandering around your property.
You can keep them in check by making a few modifications to a basic deer feeder:
 |
| I don't know. Were their accents even Australian? |
You may now go on about your life content in knowing that an unceasing slaughter-circle of wealthy hunters, dinosaurs, bears, foxes and possums will be occurring around you at all times.
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