1. I got a flu shot today. My wife went first and raved to the nurse, “That was the best shot I have ever gotten. I didn’t feel anything!” This both pleased the nurse and made her nervous. She seemed to feel this was a lot to live up to and stuttered a thank you as I sat down to get my shot.

   I barely felt the needle go in. I too was the recipient of the greatest shot ever, for about half a second. Then, as she started to push down the plunger the nervous nurse somehow pulled the needle out of my arm and sprayed the rest of the flu shot on my elbow.

   Her second attempt was not the best shot of my life; it was awful. I think she hit a nerve. What happens when you get 1.5 flu shots (and .5 topical application of vaccine)? Am I going to die? Or never get sick again?

2. At lunch today I turned and bashed my head on a lamp hanging from the ceiling. A metal lamp, shaped like a cymbal. A heavy metal cymbal that left a lump on the side of my head and made an enormous gong sound alerting the entire restaurant to the fact that I had just bashed my head in.

“Mommy, the sun is in eyes. Turn it off! Turn it off!” – My daughter from the back seat of the car this morning

• Thermite and Liquid Nitrogen (Braniac)

  This reminds me of the time a few weeks ago that Reese (age 4) asked me, “If water melts fires, how come the sun can melt ice?” I just wish they had tried a better ratio than 6000lbs of thermite to 1 cup liquid nitrogen.

• MS speech recognition

  “Dear aunt lets set so double the killer delete select all”

• Fan Death

  “The belief is that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside.”

• Japanese Game Show – Old Man Bites Tenderly

  This is the best game show ever, I am just glad I am not a contestant. The best part is how they have to stay quiet because they are in a library. But, “Old Man Bites Tenderly”?! I am afraid of whoever thought that one up.

• Why not take a couple of classes before you fully commit to going back to school?

• Why not take some career aptitude tests? I am sure there a million other jobs you would enjoy and do well at.

• You should push for more money; I really think you are undervaluing yourself.

• You should test your car to see if getting struck by lightning gave it super powers. I recommend driving it off a cliff to see if it can fly.

• Bouncing here and there and everywhere!

  “When I was little my dad would catch gummy bears for us. He would spot them buzzing around us like flies and grab them right out of the air. As I got older I figured out that he kept a bag in his pocket and was only pretending to catch them…Thus started my love all gummy candies. Here I give you my list of the top gummies. Feel free to disagree, but know that you are wrong. Did you grow up eating fresh, hand caught gummy bears? I didn’t think so.”

• Venezuelan centipede of death

  I was a missionary in Venezuela from ’94-’96. I saw bugs that still give me nightmares. Luckily I never saw this one.

• TEDTalks: Hans Rosling

  “Hans Rosling is a public health expert, director of Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the ”developing“ world. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)”

• Bullet vs. Sword

  If you can resist clicking on this link than you are no friend of mine.

• Candy Addict

  “Candy news, views, and reviews. All the candy that’s fit to eat, and some that isn’t. All candy, all the time. Addicted to candy.”

I went to Seattle for work and visited my brother Joe while I was there. You will be shocked to know that it rained while I was there.

It had been a while since we had seen each other, so it was great to hang out, but it was also a little upsetting to discover he had been ripped off. If you look at this picture you can clearly see that Joe thought he bought a digital camera but was in fact sold a medium-sized toaster.

It takes pretty good photos for a toaster but I still hope they catch the guy that sold it to him before he tricks someone else.

I had to go to Boston for work again last week and once again I loved it.

Having lost my driver’s license before the trip I discovered that you can travel, at least domestically, without picture ID as long as they send you through special security. In the Salt Lake airport that included going through one of those new “puffer” bomb detecting machines. You step into a booth and then blasts of air assault you. The Boston airport doesn’t have the “puffer” machine, so they have really rude security people to make up for it. Yelling every instruction in an angry angry voice ensures our safety.

I was traveling with 4 coworkers and we had to drive all over Boston. If I had been the one driving I may have lost my love of the city. Seriously, that is not an easy city to navigate! We had to pass around the map and give everyone a chance to get us horribly lost so that we could have proper respect for the job of navigator. The fact that the person driving, who happened to be my brother John, didn’t have an aneurism or any serious road rage incidents is a miracle. We finally succeeded in navigating by using what we called the “cartoon map”, a cheap little map of tourist attractions that for some reason was way easier to use than the serious map. Though it did cause us to give directions like, “Turn left at Bunker Hill” and “Turn right just past where John Hancock battled an army of mercenary polar bears”. Little known fact, Boston was actually designed to be confusing in an effort to repel the Visigoths invaders.

OK, all the fake historical sites we invented did not help navigation, but really kept us entertained. I would love to rent one of those Duck Tour cars for a day and drive unsuspecting tourists around making up an alternate history of Boston. “If you look to your left you will see where George Washington and Charlemagne signed the Geneva Convention.”

Also, it is important to note that I had to ride in the back of a Durango, which is horrible horrible car. Not many people know this, but the Durango’s seats were actually designed by the Marquis de Sade. I really hated that Durango.

While riding in the front seat of a cab, a much better way to get around Boston, our driver tried to change lanes without signaling and I was fortunate enough to be sitting between our driver and the angry Bostonian in the next lane who was yelling “use your directionals!” I grew up calling them “turn signals” or “blinkers” and I was going to make fun of “directionals”, but then I said “blinkers” to myself a few times. I may start calling them directionals too.

The angry Bostonian was right. How hard is it to signal when you turn? While I am talking about driving can I just say a few things to my fellow Utah drivers?

1. Stop driving once you reach 200 years of age.
2. You do NOT have to come to a complete stop every time you turn a corner. Your sedan is not going to flip over at 5 mph.
3. Pull out into the stinking intersection on left turns so that more than one car can get through a light.
4. “Use your directionals!”

Back to the historical sites; for a west coast guy like me, used to cities established in 1972, it is really nice to be surrounded by history. You would think I would hate history, being the son of a history professor, but somehow I was not turned off of it by having a dad that would answer a fourth grader’s question, “Why did the Pilgrims come to America?” with “Well, first you need to understand something about the religious situation in Europe, let’s start with Martin Luther… Oh, but don’t let me forget about the Anabaptists and the Dunkers!”

One of the customers we visited while out there lived in a house built in 1724. If you are a European reader please try not to laugh your head off that I thought a home built in 1724 was old. That goes for you too South American readers (If there are any of you out there, say hello). I lived by Coro Venezuela and it was established in the early 1500’s. OK, now that we have established it was actually a rather new little house… The owner warned me to watch my head in a very short doorway, which I did, but then I stood up into a short ceiling. I thought I broke my skull, but I played it off, “Ha ha, I am always banging my head on stuff, ha ha… someone call an ambulance…seriously.”

I also ate more seafood in one week than I had in the entire year to date. Maybe I need to visit Boston under some less ideal circumstances to know if I would really love it. I think that you could visit the worst place on earth in the Spring, eat crab and lobster, invent fake history, and think it was a great place.

There was one thing I found disturbing about this last visit. Someone tell me what kind of tree creates this killing-machine of a seed. That is not normal.

Update:
Neil has solved the mystery. The seed is from a water chestnut, not a tree at all. Also, it IS a killing machine:

“The water chestnut seed is a danger to bathers and beachcombers, its hard spikes capable of tearing through shoe leather.”

I was just reading about the bombing of al-Zarqawi and noticed that there was a team of Special Ops guys observing the house, and likely painting it with an laser target indicator. It would have been much cooler if one of the Special Ops guys had run up, rung the doorbell and run off. When al-Zarqawi said, “Who’s there?!” he could yell, “A bomb!”

Bonus points if they got al-Zarqawi to say “A bomb who?”

• The ultimate Diet Coke & Mentos fountain experiment

  So just how do you get geysers to go over 20 feet high?…

  The Cartridge

  The first big step is making a cartridge of Mentos. Holding a Mento with a pair of pliers, you can drill a small hole through the center. Do not drill a hole through your hand the way Matt did. Repeat: do not drill a hole through your hand the way Matt did.

  String together five or six of your new “Mento-beads,” onto a straightened paper clip or a piece of fishing line.

  The Cap

  Holding a bottle cap with a pair of pliers, you can drill a hole (say 1/4 inch in diameter) through the top of the cap. Be careful here. If you are under age 35, please get help from an adult. Don’t forget Matt. We want you to have full use of all your fingers for many years to come.

  Put the end of the paper clip or fishing line through the hole in the cap so that when you screw the cap onto the bottle, the cartridge will hang down inside, just above the soda.

  Different size holes in the cap will make different size geysers. A 1/8 inch hole will make a tall geyser that lasts almost 30 seconds, whereas a 1/2 inch hole will last only 5 seconds. A 1/4 inch hole can get a geyser over 20 feet high.

  I tried this a few weeks ago and got some smaller fountains, but I am going to try it again with these tricks.

• Shows up for job interview and gets put on live TV

  He wasn’t really a cabbie like the site says. He showed up for an IT job interview but happened to have the same name as an expert guest they were expecting to interview.
  See the video here

• The worst theme-park in the world?

• Buy a Baldy

  “The home to the Buy a Baldy fund raiser. Shaving our heads to help our sister pay for chemo medication.”

• Super Powered Nerf Rifle

  “This is my homebrew NERF rifle. It’s basically a potato gun that’s tailored to shoot NERF darts.”
  Video of Nerf dart destroying a light bulb

I am not a child America. I don’t need a biweekly allowance. From now on, I want my full year’s pay on January 1st. I am a grown up and you should treat me like one.

Also, I would prefer my year’s salary to be paid in gold coins. That has nothing to do with being a grown up, but it would make me feel like a pirate, and that is awesome.

We Threw Away the Dirty Dishes

My twin brother writes a bit about what it was like when we lived together in college.

Earlier I speculated that the new Animal Taser would not incapacitate ananimal long enough to make it useful. I thought of 3 possible outcomes if you found yourself tasing an angry bull:

1. Channel your inner-olympian and run like the wind. But since that bull was only down for about 3 seconds and is now insane with anger I think you are pretty much a dead man.
2. Stay attached to the bull and keep shocking it until the batteries, and you, die.
3. Operant Conditioning. Let the bull get up and start to charge you, yell “NO!” and then shock him again. Repeat this process until batteries run out. When the bull charges you again, yell “No!” If it worked he will associate your yelling “no” with the shock and will leave you alone for a while. If it didn’t work he will stomp you into the ground.

It turns out there was an option 4. Or maybe an option 2.b, Shock the bull “again and again” until it dies!

The Associated Press

Stray Cow Killed by Deputies’ Tasers

SPOKANE VALLEY — A cow that wandered into traffic near a freeway shopping mall was killed by Spokane County sheriff’s deputies who repeatedly stunned it with a Taser.

“We’re not cowboys. I don’t believe we have any rodeo champions on staff,” spokesman Sgt. Dave Reagan said of the deputies decision to repeatedly “zap” the animal Wednesday after efforts to restrain it failed.

The cow was among three that escaped from a nearby field near the Spokane Valley Mall. Two of the bovines were quickly recaptured by their owners, but one avoided capture for about four hours, eventually trotting onto a freeway ramp.

State law requires deputies “to do whatever you can do to keep somebody from dying as a result of collision with a cow,” Reagan said.

The cow was cornered by deputies about 11 a.m. between the mall and Interstate 90.

Several deputies who had seen a video of a Brahman bull being incapacitated by a Taser decided to stun the creature and tie its legs with a long leather strap ordinarily used to restrain kicking humans.

But the cow recovered before the strap could be used (emphasis mine) and deputies then zapped the cow “again and again” and the animal died, Reagan said.

No charges are pending against the cow’s owner.

Thanks to Shayne for the Taser update!

• The Speech Accent Archive

  “Welcome to the speech accent archive. You may need to get the Quicktime plug-in to play the sound clips. Each individual sample page contains a sound control bar, a set of the answers to 7 demographic questions, a phonetic transcription of the sample,1 a set of the speaker’s phonological generalizations, a link to a map showing the speaker’s place of birth, and a link to the Ethnologue language database.”

• Art-o-mat

  “Art-o-mat machines are retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art. There are 82 active machines in various locations throughout the country”

• Ask A Ninja

  “You got questions, Ninja got answers”

  I am so ashamed that I didn’t know about this site earlier! Thanks to Micah for pointing this out to me.

• LED Throwies

  “LED Throwies are an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. A Throwie consists of a lithium battery, a 10mm diffused LED and a rare-earth magnet taped together. Throw it up high and in quantity to impress your friends and city officials.”

  How to make LED Throwies

• The More You Know – Public Service Announcements from the cast of The Office

  “People may laugh at you when you put the word smell into everyday phrases like, ”smell you later“ or ”smello“, but I promise you it’s not funny, and they are just being nice to you because you maybe are their boss.”

I smell like a campfire. My wife is complaining and telling me to go take a shower. Such is the life of the volunteer firefighter. Ok, I am not technically a volunteer firefighter but I did voluntarily fight a fire today.

I was at Josh Callaway’s house for a birthday party. Josh and I worked together until just recently when he took a new job. I am so sad that I don’t get to work with him anymore that I have been finding little ways to keep working with him, like helping him put the pizza in the oven, or get candles for the cake, or brush his teeth…

Callaway and I were standing on his lawn talking when I heard a beeping noise and noticed smoke pouring out of the kitchen of the house across the street. I figured someone had just burned some brownies or something, but that sure was a lot of smoke. There were kids, a couple of teenagers and a preschooler, wandering around and walking in and out of the house and they didn’t look very upset about the smoke, so we weren’t too worried, but that sure was a lot of smoke.

Callaway and I decided to go over and check it out. The littlest kid mumbled something about a fire in the house and we didn’t see where the other kids had gone so we just went in to the house. The kitchen was full of smoke, but it wasn’t coming from the kitchen. We explored further and saw smoking pouring upstairs from the basement. We got about halfway down and started to rethink our plan because there sure was a LOT of smoke!

It was a walk-out basement and we could see the open back door so we figured we could get out if we started to choke to death. We fully expected to find a couch on fire or something, but it turned out to be a smoldering fire in a fireplace that must have had the damper shut. We ran into the other kids and explained what we were doing in their house and told them to stay outside.

We ran in and out several times making attempts to get the damper open. We wrapped our hands in a towel and reached up into the fireplace, but neither of us could find it and the smoke was choking us. By the way, that whole “stay low to the floor if your house is on fire” thing totally works. Though eventually there wasn’t much air down there either.

We didn’t want to just dump more water on what turned out to be a big pile of pine needles because there was already enough smoke, so we went to the neighbors’ homes and asked for fire extinguishers but there wasn’t a fire extinguisher on the whole block. We had looked for sand and couldn’t find any that wasn’t full of leaves and such, and then Micah fortuitously found a couple sandbags full of wet sand. We cut them open and I made a few more runs into the house tossing big scoops of sand on the fire. The smoke stopped almost immediately.

The girl that started the fire was pretty upset with the prospect of being grounded for a month, but there was nothing we could do about that.

I’m off to take a shower.

1. Crown for tooth (crown for head would be totally satisfying)
2. Tree removal (My son thinks I am evil now. He is the Lorax, he speaks for the trees)
3. Vinyl Fencing (I don’t think it would be satisfying even if it weren’t vinyl)

How To Make An Angry Bull Angrier

If I were Taser trying to market my “ADVANCED TASER® M26 MODEL # 88000 — High amperage MX Animal TASER for animals only” I think I would choose a different video than this one where they zap an agitated bull and it falls down for a few seconds only to jump up 83.7 times angrier than before.

I would love to read that bull’s thoughts, “Ouchie. Now I KILL!”

Anyone who buys an animal Taser should watch this video. It will save you from the unfortunate scenario where you taser the raging bull and say, “What’s up now bull!” and then turn to your friend to explain how you kicked the bull’s butt, just in time to have the bull level you from behind and do a dance on you.

If you know how a Taser works you will be as baffled as I am about how this thing could actually help you. The Taser fires two barbed probes that are connected to the gun by fine wires that trail behind them. It has about a 25ft range or so. So basically, you can drop the charging bull, and then you have three options:

1. Channel your inner olympian and run like the wind. But since that bull was only down for about 3 seconds and is now insane with anger I think you are pretty much a dead man.
2. Stay attached to the bull and keep shocking it until the batteries, and you, die.
3. Operant Conditioning. Let the bull get up and start to charge you, yell “NO!” and then shock him again. Repeat this process until batteries run out. When the bull charges you again, yell “No!” If it worked he will associate your yelling “no” with the shock and will leave you alone for a while. If it didn’t work he will stomp you into the ground.

Basically, they should rebrand this thing as the “Taser Animal Enrager” or the “Taser Extremely Dangerous Device for Training Animals”

Regardless of how useful it actually is, I would pay for a video of someone shocking an angry grizzly bear with one of these.

Check out the video:
» How To Make An Angry Bull Angrier (1.8mb mov)

The scar from my back surgery is itching. I’m still glad I have it though because chicks totally dig scars. Granted, mine is on my lower back and I have had to start wearing half-shirts to show it off, but chicks dig half-shirts too. The problem here is that I have read enough Harry Potter to know that the itchy scar means the surgeon is plotting my destruction. You won’t get away with it Dr. Bacon! My little gang of friends and I will stop you!

I am a little bit conflicted though. The other thing I learned from Harry Potter was: when you find out that someone is plotting your destruction you should carefully avoid telling anyone who might help you because that could cause the book to end in the first chapter. Though I don’t want to be destroyed by Dr. Bacon, I don’t want my adventures in battling him to end before I get to come up with some cool spells either.

Spells are awesome. All you have to do is yell what you want to do, but change the words so they sound like Latin, “Stethiscopium Strangulare!” I just invented that spell to take out evil doctors, feel free to use it.

I have to admit that Doctor Bacon has the advantage here since pretty much every illness is named in Latin– “Conjunctivitis! Tendonitis! Mononucleosis! Tonsillitis! Halitosis!” But I think if you use all of those together it is an Unforgivable Curse.

Aargh, I don’t want to miss out on all the fighting with magic stuff! I guess that leaves me with sulking and pretending that nothing is wrong. I can ignore the itch.

Forget I wrote any of this.

PS – You might enjoy this song from Harry and the Potters:
Save Ginny Weasley

The following are fake names used in spam I have received. Well, Flavius Watsenbarger, my favorite one, actually was received by my friend Chris Willis.

Ridiculous fake spam name generating software, I salute you!

• Flavius Watsenbarger
• Gunshots Q. Aspirant
• Serpents G. Tegucigalpa
• Killing A. Fingernails
• Shriven V. Hotheadedness
• Poisons E. Familial
• Rigoberto McMillan