Kablammo!

Call me crazy, and call me a huge nerd, but all of this stuff is fascinating:

• Wankel engine
• Reuleaux triangles
• Square wheels
• Dymaxion car

Two weeks from today, I sign a lease and move into my new apartment. Less than a week after that, I start my new job, which will be my first “real” job.

People keep asking me if I’m excited.

I’m not.

» » Continue reading . . .

No matter what my mood, Cherry 7-Up never fails to make me feel better.

Guess when the following photograph was taken:

» » Continue reading . . .

So not only have I taken up running recently, but today I finally got around to getting a new inner tube and fixing up the bicycle that’s needed fixing up for the past two years.

Quite strange, and I don’t know what to make of it.

As seen on Yahoo:

Everybody could use more coming, I figure.

berth (bûrth)

n.

1. Sufficient space for a ship to maneuver; sea room: kept a clear berth of the reefs.
2. A space for a ship to dock or anchor: a steamship moored to its berth at the pier.
3. 1. Employment on a ship: sought an officer’s berth in the merchant marine.
   2. A job: a comfortable berth as head of the department.
4. 1. A built-in bed or bunk, as on a ship or a train.
   2. A place to sleep or stay; accommodations: found a berth in a nearby hotel.
5. A space where a vehicle can be parked, as for loading.

» » Continue reading . . .

This is just too funny.

The National Flag established by the Congress of the CSA on March 4, 1865, is as follows:

The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That the Flag of the Confederate States shall be as follows: The width, two-thirds of its length, with the union (now used as the Battle Flag) to be in width three-fifths of the width of the flag, and so proportioned as to leave the length of the field on the side of the union twice the width of the field below it; to have the ground red and a broad, blue saltier thereon, bordered with white and emblazoned with mullets or five pointed stars, corresponding in number to that of the Confederate States; the field to be white except the outer half from the union to be a red bar extending the width of the flag.

Emphasis mine. (This is what that flag looks like, by the way.)

Wood chipper breaks free in Pa., kills 3

That’s a news story about a father and two of his four-year-old sons dying when their minivan collided with a 5000-pound piece of heavy machinery that was improperly secured to the dump truck towing it, which is pretty fucking depressing.

You wouldn’t know it from the headline, where the verb choice combined with the active voice gives the wood chipper an air of malevolent sentience. You might imagine a renegade wood chipper imprisoned, possibly awaiting trial, waiting patiently for his girlfriend to mail him a hacksaw or file baked into a cake. But then he remembers that he’s a 5000-pound wood chipper, so he just smashes through the bars and starts chipping the Sheriff and his deputies, Fargo-style, until the National Guard shows up and subdues him. Or something.

“Broke free” and “bounded across a highway”, in particular, really seem incongruous when applied to a big hunk of metal.

About a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine about my near-obsessive compulsion to download and buy music, when I mentioned that I was glad that I didn’t seem to like jazz. After all, just listening to rock and such can take up way too much time to begin with. Checking out new releases can be a full-time job, and that doesn’t even start to address the issue of back-catalogs. There are hundreds of albums that I own and hundreds more that I “own”, and I still don’t even know what Deep Purple sound like. Hell, two years ago I barely knew who David Bowie was.

I’m not an expert on the music I listen to, but I can drop some pretty obscure names if I need to, and I also have a decent sense of my failings as it were and what I really should get around to listening to. Jazz, on the other hand, I felt was a completely foreign and alien world, with such a ridiculously long and thoroughly-catalogued history that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I was thankful for my ignorance, shielding me as it did from the need to listen to and explore the world of jazz. (Lite-FM stations, incidentally, were also a big help in this regard.)

Sadly I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and for some stupid reason I decided to take a semester course on the history of jazz and the blues. Fuck me in the goat-ass; it turns out there’s a lot of this stuff that I really enjoy, and recently I’ve been purchasing a Horace Silver album a day. (In my defense, he was essentially Xploding Plastix 40 years before they were.)

Am I going to start seriously listening to classical music next? I don’t know if I could take that. At least I should have a steady paycheck (i.e. a way to subsidize this insane music habit) soon.

Song of the Moment: «Calcutta Cutie» — Horace Silver