Let's Take a Quiz!

I haven't put out a quiz in a while. Not sure what to call this one. Let's go with “The Smurfducken Quiz”. Enjoy!

1) Gargamel finally manages to catch a Smurf. What sort of cooking preparations would you recommend to him?
a. Boil it like a lobster, serve with drawn butter.
b. Rotisserie-style with garlic rub accompanied by a nice Chardonnay
c. Raw (to preserve the vitamins and minerals)
d. Smurfducken – chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a Smurf

2) Who would win in a fight?
a. Flash from the Dukes of Hazzard
b. Fred from Smokey and the Bandit

3) A giant, no-holds-barred melee between the following groups breaks out? Who wins?
a. Doozers
b. Fraggles
c. The vultures and crows, as usual.

4) Two hobos just started waling the bejeezus out of each other with full Diaper Genie bags! Your reaction, please:
a. Gross. What the hell is the matter with you?
b. Meh. Just another day at the office for me.
c. Awesome. Let me know when it's on Pay-Per-View.

5) “How It's Made” is a show on the Science Channel that details the manufacturing process behind lots of common items. Pick the most ill-conceived topic for the show:
a. Sausage
b. Babies

6) Poof! A genie grants you a vineyard! All you need is a name. Pick one word from column A and one word from column B for your super-trendy label

Column A          Column B

Three-Eyed        Weasel
Snazzy                Carburetor
Corky                 Rattlesnake
Manic                 Dragon
Wacky               Angel
Blue-Collar        Clown
Slippery             Toadstool
Crestfallen          Sandwich

Best Loophole Ever

A friend of mine had his favorite wineglass destroyed under what can only be described as suspicious circumstances.  He has somewhere between three and twenty-seven kids so it's probably not so much of a mystery what happened.

He ordered another - I'm not sure from where - but he thought it was awesome enough to buy one for me and another wine drinker.

The XL Wine Glass proudly claims on the box "Holds a whole bottle of wine!" It works exactly as advertised. 

I look forward to belligerent, slurred arguments with my physician that go something like "You Shmartypants quacks shaid to drink one glash of wine a day... No, buddy, YOU have cirrhosis of the liver!!!  Hawhawhaw... you 'membr that epishode uh Bugsh Bunny with the Shir Osis of the Liver?  That wash awesome! Dude... ya need to looshen up, yer too uptight.  May I pleash throw up in your medical waste bin?"

I also look forward to taking this puppy out for a test drunk as soon as possible.  Thanks, dude!

New Puzzle Hint - Art Table Puzzle

Time for another Puzzle Hint!

This time it is for the Art Table Puzzle:

Hint #2 (Posted 030811): Nyy lbhe onfr ner orybat gb hf, fher, ohg jung onfr?

What is this?  Check out the Secret Puzzle Page in the sidebar on the right.  Good luck!

Johnny and the Incompetent Money Wasters

I picked up my two-year-old from daycare today, something I don't usually do on Mondays. He asked “Why are you picking me up today? Where's mommy?” I said, without thinking, “Mommy is paying our taxes”. He replied “What?” which is his Eskimo-snow-word that can mean “What”, “Where?”, “Why?”, “I didn't hear you”, “What do you want?” or a number of other things, but in the tone he used this time he actually meant “You don't say. Do go on.”

I was about half a heartbeat from saying “It's complicated” and stopping the conversation right there but that is a total cop-out. Plus, to the limited vocabulary of a two-year-old “It's complicated” is basically the same as “Go away, kid, you bother me”.

Significantly worse would be to chuckle darkly and mutter “I say the same damn thing every April”. Unless you are in a sit-com and are counting on the scene to fade to black and the credits to roll while the studio audience guffaws at your closing bon mot, you aren't being funny – you are just sowing seeds to turn the Information Sponge in the car seat behind you into a bitter, resentful adult. The meaningless words will be forgotten, sure, but not the hate.

He is cool with the concept that “paying for things” happens before “getting things”, but not when the “things” are not as tangible as the plastic car in his Happy Meal. So what do you say? How do you couch “taxation” in terms that doesn't make it sound to a toddler like some monster somewhere is picking his/her parents by the ankles and shaking them until their piggy banks are empty?

I stumbled for a bit and finally came up with “Umm, do you like to drive fast on the roads?” “Yes,” he said. “Do you like bridges?” “Yes,” once again. “Do like army guys?” “Yes,” for the third time. “Well, mommy and daddy need to pay for the roads and bridges so we can use them and the army guys keep us safe.”

“Oh,” he said. He then sang the Days of the Week song five times in a row then went back to drinking his juice box.

Just curious if he retained any of what I told him, about an hour ago I asked him “Do you remember why mommy and daddy pay taxes?” He said, predictably, “What?”. His inflection this time meant “I am temporarily paying attention to you in the unlikely event what you just said is more interesting that this episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse I have seen fifty times, but make it quick, please”.

I just said “Nevermind, buddy”, joined my son on the sofa, and watched Goofy crash his Upside-down Bicycle into a tree for the fifty-first time.

I'll ask him again later.

Site Update, Puzzle News

Made a few updates to the stuff in the sidebar this morning. 

• Added a section for 2011 New Year's Resolution updates.  As you can see, the only movement has been in the Run Two 5Ks area.  Back off - I still have nine months....
• Updated the Quote of the Variable Time Period.  Did you know all you have to type in to Google is "aim fo" - not even "aim for" - for the quote "Aim for the bushes" to pop up second?  Wow.
• Increased the Puzzle for Charity Prize Pool to $40.  I just felt like it.
• Updated the Currently Reading section.  Man, I am glad this book is short. 

That's about it but I have two projects in my queue that I will talk about later.  One is to build my son a desk to match his new non-crib bed.  The other is to refurbish his playset and put down six inches of mulch around the whole thing.

More later.

Oh, We Are Soooo Hosed

One of my favorite shows is Science Channel's How It's Made. In case you have never seen it, they pick an everyday (and, sometimes not-so-everyday) item and tell you, well, how it's made. The entire fabrication process is covered from start to finish, each step soothingly described by the best non-Morgan Freeman narrator in the business.

During their latest marathon (I think there are only about 300 of these marathons a year, so set your DVR) I was sitting there absolutely gobsmacked at the hugely complicated processes involved in making the simplest things. For example, it must take, like the GDP of Norway just to build/buy the equipment alone to crank out twenty-dollar extruded aluminum step-ladders: [Cut to huge hydraulic crushy-pressy thing] “Next,” the voiceover says, “the 19-foot aluminum billets are pushed through a steel mold into 137-foot lengths that will later be cut to size...”[cut to warehouse swarming with people and packed with even more baffling single-purpose machines]

Are you freaking kidding me? How does anyone make any money manufacturing anything at all? Volume, you say? Pfft! Unless some seriously non-Muggle stuff is happening off camera, it looks like you would have to sell a ladder to each and every one of the metaphorical Hamlet-writing monkeys to just break even.

If I had to make aluminum ladders starting with just a pile of aluminum beads (hey, never mind starting out with bauxite ore or, worse, a hill where there might or might not be bauxite ore), by the end of my lifetime I may manage to eke out one cartoonishly unsafe ladder and it would cost north of thirty-seven million dollars.

It's not just about the ladders, though.

The show got me to thinking (again) that no one really knows how anything works. Not from scratch. Not completely. Oh, you might be the world's greatest fill-in-the-blank, but how much unsung support do you actually use to ply your craft? Ok, fine, you are the world's greatest marksman but now you need to make your own gunpowder and shells. If you can't buy anything, you may as well use your rifle as a hammer or a shovel, because it sure as hell isn't a gun anymore.

Of course, your Macbook Air can be re-purposed to cut cake, in a pinch...

I am picturing scenes like this happening about one year after the lights go off for the last time:

[A few tired, hungry, dirty people are gathered in front of a looted, burned-out storefront. They warm their hands over a metal barrel in which a fire is barely smoldering]

Alan: This sucks. Doesn't anyone remember how to make toilet paper?
Steve: A rusted cotter-pin fell out of the old machine that used to make it but, since the cotter-pin making machine is broken as well, the solar-powered toilet-paper maker currently houses a family of six and their goats.
Alan: Can't the cotter-pin machine be fixed? Kevin, I thought you worked at the cotter-pin plant for 35 years before the Generic Disaster of 2011 hit. Can't you do something?
Kevin: Well, see, I was the foreman for the guys that drove the forklifts in the East Wing. Tell you the truth, I never even saw the contraption that actually made the pins – you needed a green security badge for that. Mine was blue. But I understand the device was glorious to behold. [pauses] I also organized the monthly potlucks.
Alan: Damn it. Ok, Steve, take this down. We all know paper comes from trees. We just need to pound some trees super-thin...
[Steve struggles to take notes on a deflated soccer ball when his pencil breaks. He stares at the broken pieces, wide-eyed]
Steve: Oh God! Oh God! Th... that was our last one, man, and now it's gone forever! Game over, man! Game over!
Alan: Calm down, calm down. I once saw an episode of How It's Made and I think I remember that pencil leads are made primarily from graphite, clay, and a binding agent. I'll go get whatever graphite is. Kevin, you secure the clay. Steve, you go find us a heap of binding agent. We'll all meet back here when the moon looks exactly like it does riiiiiigggghhhtt... NOW. Good luck, and Godspeed friends.

Yeah. We're all hosed.

Book Review: A Walking Tour of Lockport, New York

My sister was walking through Barnes and Noble and she said she saw a book on display about Lockport, NY. She couldn't remember the title so I tried to find the same one online but nothing seemed to match what she was describing. I did run into a title called A Walking Tour of Lockport, New York, though. It was only 99 cents, so I thought I would put down the book I was reading, download it, and give it a go.

What can I say?

First off, taking a “walking tour” of the area that is described in the book (Google Maps, btw) is probably not the best possible use of your time. Oh, I suppose if you chose a nice, brightly lit summer day and you were accompanied by several armed guards you might, just maybe, make it through the circuit without being knifed for your half a pack of smokes. The tour even tells you to duck behind the public library to basically check out what I will always consider “the abandoned Twin Fair department store”. Unless things have significantly changed my advice is this: DO NOT DO THIS! IT IS MOST LIKELY A TRAP!

The Kindle version is rife with typos (the city is called “Lockwood” at one point), accidental font changes, and other eye-jarring formatting issues. This almost, but not quite, distracts the reader from the gossipy, free-form writing style that runs throughout this guide. Conjecture and an utter lack of citations further give this book a panicked “writing it on the bus on the way in to school” feel that will have you rolling your eyes throughout the entire length of its twenty or so pages.

“Twenty pages?! I don't have time for that!” you say. Don't worry – its more like fourteen since the last 35% of the book is just a list of what appears to be someone's Architecture 201 final exam crib sheet. This “appendix” just lists every major American architectural style from “Postmedieval English Colonial (1600-1700)” to “International (1925-Present)”. Nicely done. I used to use the same trick in 8th grade to beef up my papers.

What really bothers me is the complete lack of actual things you would want to see or do. I mean, let's face it, checking out the ornate cornices on the old Main Street Bank is not exactly gonna make anyone's Bucket List. So you walk and you walk (and sometimes sprint making as much use of the natural cover as possible, I assume) and you don't chuck a bottle of dishwashing soap into the fountain by the Main Street parking garage or maybe chuck a stolen alley ball off the nearby 125-foot drop? You're right freaking there! Live a little!

There is a half-page entirely devoted to pseudo-history associated with the Masonic Temple above the Submarina, but absolutely no mention of how awesome the steak-and-cheese subs are at the pizza shop itself? Thirsty after your 20-block walk? This path has you strolling right past bars and convenience stores that used to have extremely liberal carding policies to the best of my recollection. Not mentioning that, my friend, is just plain sloppy.

In closing, a pointless read. It was not worth the 99 cents, but at least it gave me something to write about today.  My typos and bad grammar, as always, are free.

How Many Calories Does Mixing Messages Burn?

No joke, these flyers are on display where I work out right next to the some other flyers advertising the gym's "Beach Body Boot Camp" training sessions.

Apparently, I work out in the most passive-aggressive exercise facility in the whole wide world... You know, guys, I was just kidding about the Pizza Hut thing in my Is Tropical Smoothie Healthy article.

Ahh... who am I kidding? Screw the sit-ups - I'm gettin' me one of them awesome chicken fettucini alfredo pies.