Good advice

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Quite a few of these gave me a good laugh.

Kids, this is all the shit I had to learn the hard way. Now that I’m retired it’s time to pass it on, so you won’t have to suffer the same indignities I did.

Don’t use one of those little Handi-Vac things to empty an ashtray. Because the inrush of air could potentially reignite any fading embers. And, uh, a big jet of flame might shoot out of the thing, surprising you and making you scream like a ten-year-old girl. And you might knock over your beer.

If you’re ever fishing, and a poisonous water moccasin swims up to try and eat one of the fish on your stringer, and you think that maybe flipping the snake out of the water and onto, say, me is a good idea, please reconsider.

Just because you can stick toothpicks in your forehead and they’ll stay there and it doesn’t really hurt all that bad doesn’t mean you should go ahead and do it, at Denny’s or any other restaurant.

All those skinheads over there? They’ll beat your ass.

Yes, popping a paper bag in the mall makes a very loud noise. Yes, you can hear that shit echoing all through the place. Yes, rent-a-cops are all dicks.

Don’t try to pee and ride a bicycle at the same time, even if Jim Marburger can do it. Not that you were watching or anything.

The rash won’t go away on its own.

Should you ever decide to use bamboo sticks and stretchy, decorative string that’s designed to wrap presents to make a bow and arrow, and should you decide to wad up a bunch of duct tape on the end of your arrow and soak it with WD-40 so it’ll, you know, burn better, I would recommend not shooting the flaming arrow onto the roof of a house, or into the lap of your friend’s cousin. Even by accident.

There are no secrets when it comes to fucking. Everyone will eventually find out about it, and probably a lot sooner than you want them to.

God created assistant managers when he was in a really shitty mood.

Knife wounds inflicted on bodily extremities, such as hands, should receive firm pressure with a clean, dry towel or cloth. Elevate if possible. Remember, dry is the key. The wet washcloth is a poor choice for staunching blood flow, no matter what you’ve heard.

Be careful of what you headbutt. Some doors are not as sturdy as they might first look, and it can be hard to estimate your own strength immediately after inhaling nitrous oxide.

Wear the condom. No, for the love of Pete, not the mint-flavored one. Jesus, that thing burns.

Here’s a helpful tip for job interviews: try not to stab your future boss in the arm with a freshly sharpened pencil. If you must stab someone with a pencil, have the common sense to dull the point to a state where you can be sure it won’t easily break the skin.

Burt Reynolds? Nope. Tom Selleck? Uh uh. Try Chile D. Molester. Shave that fucking mustache.

If someone passes out on the couch and you want to put them in a figure-four leglock, ensure that the hold is correctly applied before they wake and fuck your goddamn knee all up.

Head wounds do tend to bleed a lot. Don’t panic.

Pajamas are indeed comfy, but society dictates we not wear them to school, work or the bowling alley.

For that matter, be aware that bowling alley employees may have a limited tolerance for other non-pajama-related behaviors, such as getting all loaded and pretending to be Godzilla and stomping on that windmill over there in the indoor miniature golf course.

You better ask before you try and stick your finger up there.

Socks should match your pants, and your belt should match your shoes. After that, if anyone complains, tell ’em they should be happy you’re wearing any clothes at all.

If you suspect someone likes to do a lot of cocaine, don’t let them “borrow” your CDs.

Try not to get too depressed. There’s always something to look forward to. Keep alert, and sooner or later you’ll see someone slip and hurt themselves.

Beat off enough and eventually someone will walk in on you while you’re doing it. When this happens, pause, look them directly in the eye and say, “You done ruined the romance, so go ahead and say whatever it is you want to say.” If they don’t immediately apologize and leave, run over there and put your hands on their face.

You should never put a string of lit Black Cat firecrackers in someone’s back pocket while they’re on stage playing bass guitar with their band. Even if they fucked your knee up by reversing the figure-four on you that one time. And even if you crack up at just the idea of someone with their pants are on fire jumping up and down and spinning around and around like a dog chasing its tail while trying to figure out what’s going on. Yup, someone could get their ass burned, so it’s wrong. Despite the fact that shit is really, really funny.

You can whoop those two guys easy enough. But what if they come back with a friend who’s big enough to lift you off the ground and pin you to the wall with one hand? What then, slugger? (You’re going to feel like a fucking idiot, that’s what.)

If, while chugging a beer, the phrase, “I bet this is going to be the last coherent thought I have tonight,” runs through your head, get someone to take you home. Now.

The cops never think it’s as funny as you do.

Be advised: the “Minnesota wristwatch” maneuver is correctly performed by using only the penis. The scrotum and testicles should neither be substituted nor included in any way.

Yeah, I know Sid Vicious wore a lock on a chain around his neck just like that. But the first time you try and pogo with that thing on it’s gonna chip a tooth, Road Warrior.

Sure, she’s good-lookin’. She’s also crazy. Crazy as a shithouse rat. Run for your life.

Just because one of those made you feel nice and two of ’em made you feel even better, taking the whole bottle will not exponentially increase your good time. In fact, you may get dizzy, or throw up, or end up spending half of the next day wondering where the hell your pants are. Or die.

The bouncer at Mons Venus always knows best. If he says you should stop, then you should stop.

Strictly speaking, ranch dressing is not an ingredient.

Yes, you got grounded for having the very same porn stash that turned up in Dad’s closet six months later. You still can’t bring it up. The cosmic scales of justice will never tip in your favor on this one, trust me. Bide your time patiently, and one day you might get the chance for revenge. Like, by unplugging his dialysis machine. Or something.

Now that you’ve climbed up there, it’s a lot higher than it looks, isn’t it? Dumbass.

You can use Krazy Glue in lieu of surgical stitches. For when you’re, you know, too poor to go to the emergency room. Or trying to avoid explaining things to the police.

The Renaissance Faire may not be the source of all your problems, but it sure as shit isn’t helping any.

You’re probably doing something that bugs the next guy twice as much. Clam up and get on with your life.

Powdered cocoa won’t put out the fire.

If you accidentally rear-end another car while driving, Florida law dictates that you must stop and confer with the affected party. Turns out just waving to let folks know you’re alright while driving away is a little something the state troopers like to call “leaving the scene of an accident.”

When it comes time to pick out that first tattoo, remember: it doesn’t matter how much you like that one comic book. There’s always a chance that eight years later someone will make a movie of it that stars Sylvester Stallone. And you’ll be fucked.

You might not be able to remember it, but if you wake up the next day with a bloody nose, no money, barf all over your jeans and a finger or two smelling like poontang then you had a good night.

Always look behind you before you make that first cast. That boat may be smaller than you think. And Jim Marburger’s dad might be taking up more space than you think, too.

Dungeons and Dragons never goes away. Girls will still sense that shit 20 years later.

Last but certainly not least: if you don’t want Sweet Dick Willy to give you a lapdance, don’t sit so damn close to the stage.

(via Something Positive)

iTunes: “Faith to Believe” by Liquid Jesus from the album Pour In the Sky (1991, 4:55).

Relationships

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One of the things that’s always bothered me (and many other people) about social networking sites such as Orkut, Friendster, or any other *ster meme-of-the-moment is the binary nature of their setups — either someone is your friend, or they aren’t. That’s it. Those are your only choices.

My world just isn’t that black and white, sorry.

I was grumbling about this in #joiito last week sometime when Tantek pointed me to XFN, which looks very interesting. Essentially, it takes advantage of a little-used link attribute — specifically, the rel attribute — to define the relationship between the linker and the linkee. Various values have been defined, such as ‘friend’, ‘acquaintance’, ‘met’, ‘spouse’, etc.

For instance, while linking to Dad’s site, I can include the value ‘parent’ in the link (<a href=“http://www.hanscomfamily.com/” title=“The Hanscom Family Weblog” rel=“parent”>like this</a>); linking to Kirsten’s site I can use ‘friend’ and ‘met’ (<a href=“http://www.geekmuffin.com/” title="geek*muffin" rel=“friend met”>like this</a>), linking to Mike I can use ‘acquaintance’ (<a href=“http://mike.whybark.com” title=“mike.whybark.com” rel=“acquaintance”>like this</a>), and so on.

Now this, I like.

Of course, now I have to figure out how to work it into my site. It’ll be easy enough on posts such as this, of course, as I can code the relationship values in as I’m creating the post. What I need to figure out, though, is how I want to attack my blogroll.

Hey, Anil, Mena, Ben, et al — any chance of putting XFN into TypePad‘s People TypeLists? That would be enough to coax me back away from Blogrolling, even if I lose the recent-update highlighting! Currently I’m using the Blogrolling service, which has some definite advantages (easy to update, automatically highlights sites that have been updated recently, etc.). ~~However, there isn’t a way for me to add XFN values to the links there, so if I want to add XFN to my blogroll, I’m going to have to go back to updating it manually. A bit of a bummer, that (not least because quite simply, knowing me, I’m more likely to leave it as-is and forego the XFN niftyness).~~ [As it turns out, you can add XFN to a Blogrolling blogroll if you have a paid “Gold” account. Just go to the ‘edit links’ screen, and for each item, add rel=“whatever” to the ‘Extra Link Attributes’ field. Thanks to Dori for pointing that out in the comments!]{.underline}

Still, at the very least it’s worth playing with, and I’ll do my best to remember to do so on all future posts.

And if that weren’t enough, Jonas pointed out that Tantek and Kevin Marks have proposed another use for the rel attribute called VoteLinks: using values of ‘vote-for’, ‘vote-abstain’, or ‘vote-against’ when linking to an article or post on the web to indicate your opinion of the resource being linked to.

Currently, any automated indexing application (such as the robots/spiders that Google or Technorati use) only see a link as a “vote” in favor of a particular resource — i.e., Site A links to Site B, therefore Site A believes that Site B is useful or provides an important resource of some form or another. While human readers can draw upon the context of a link to decide whether that’s actually the case (while I might link to a page about George Bush, for example, it’s extremely unlikely that I’d be saying anything favorable), the spiders aren’t able to do that — and that’s exactly what VoteLinks aims to correct.

Now all I need to do is come up with some simple “thumbs-up” and “thumbs down” graphics. With those, I can work VoteLinks into my CSS so that links that I’ve designated “vote-for” will get a thumbs-up appended after the link, and links designated “vote-against” will get a thumbs-down appended after the link. Will I do this? Who knows. ;)

Some very interesting toys to play with, each a worthy attempt to add a little more value to everyone’s travels around the web.

iTunes: “She and Mr. Jones (Uncensored)” by Lords of Acid from the album [R]Ejected Tracks (1998, 4:52).

Help the CIA find those pesky WMDs!

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How wonderfully thoughtful — the CIA has posted a handy little online form so that people can submit tips on WMD locations (and other Iraq-related intel).

If you have information relating to Iraq which you believe might be of interest to the U.S. Government, please contact us through our secure online form. We will carefully protect all information you provide, including your identity.

To help us confirm and act quickly on your information, you must provide your full name, nationality, occupation and contact information including phone number. This allows the U. S. Government to grant rewards for valuable information. We will maintain strict confidentiality.

On the one hand, it’s definitely an interesting experiment. On the other hand, you can’t really help but get the feeling that they’re really stretching on this one.

(via BoingBoing)

iTunes: “Everything’s Cool (Safe as Milk)” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album Two Fingers My Friends! (1995, 10:55).

Like, I guess I’ll just have to, like, get used to it now

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(Sigh) I suppose it was inevitable…

From the Fort Wayne Journal: Like, totally

Two decades after the song “Valley Girl” popularized it, a fresh effort is afoot to stamp out this linguistic quirk. The generation that grew up saying “like” is hitting adulthood – and the workforce. As a result, it is now in the lexicon of investment bankers, doctors and even teachers, where it can sound especially jarring. “I’m sure I say, ‘like’ a lot,” says Liza Sutherland, 28, a sixth-grade humanities teacher in New York. “I don’t worry so much about how my students speak.”

Like a verbal virus, this usage is also increasingly spreading to other English-speaking countries. British and Canadian kids now grease their sentences with the word. Sali Tagliamonte, professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto who has researched the speech of the elderly in the United Kingdom, found that they, too, have a surprising fondness for “like.” “If I showed you a written document of the conversation, you would think they were young women in North America, not 78-year-old ladies from Scotland,” she says.

[…]

Linguists say “like” has a growing number of meanings. It can act as a “hedge,” to tell the listener that what is being said is an approximation or an exaggeration. (Example: “She has, like, a gazillion shoes.”) It can also be a “focuser,” to declare that the next bit of information is important. (“He is, like, so hot.”) One of its most ubiquitous uses is as a substitute for “said.” (“So my mom was like, ‘Do your homework.’ And then I was like, ‘I did it at school.'”)

[…]

Defenders of the practice argue that these usages are just a natural evolution of the English language. Indeed, even some linguists say the word can be downright useful. When dropped into the middle of a sentence, for example, it gives the speaker time to gather his thoughts so he doesn’t say the first (sometimes insipid) thing that comes to mind. Studies also show that people who have learned not to use filler words are interrupted more often, and tend to use simpler sentences.

“It really is a wonderful, useful word,” says Muffy E.A. Siegel, an associate professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia, who has studied the use of “like.”

Personally, this drives me up the ever-loving wall — and, of course, it’s even worse when I catch myself doing it!

Aah, the times they are a-changin’.

iTunes: “Innocent Children” by Crack Machine from the album Freak Accident (1994, 3:56).

Brother for sale

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Many years ago, I might have thought that this sounded like a really good idea…

Barbara Bennett wanted to sell her Brother brand sewing machine, so she bought a classified advertisement under “Miscellaneous” and “Items under \$50” in The Columbian newspaper.

Instead, the words “sewing machine” were accidentally dropped, leaving a “BROTHER” for sale ad.

(via Prairie)

Sponsorship

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I’m experimenting with something that I found via Snowman on the TPUG — sponsored weblog entries. Three posts on my site now have small, fairly unobtrusive text ads at the bottom of the post, for which I get some small amount of compensation.

I debated a bit back and forth on this when I first read about it, but finally figured it was at least worth a shot. At least these are paid for up front and are given with my permission, rather than just some random piece of comment spam showing up more or less at random.

And I’m certainly not above trying to make the occasional buck or two on all of this (oh, by the way, have you visited any of my three CafePress shops lately? …[ahem]…)! ;)

Now, if only Google would let me into their AdSense program…

iTunes: “No Sense At All” by Khan, Praga from the album Pragamatic (1998, 7:09).

Wartime President

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I was listening to “Sunday Edition” on the way to church. There was a story about President Bush’s appearance on “Meet The Press.” GWB wanted voters, when they go to the polls in Nov, to remember he is a “wartime President.”

There is a dark joke in Courthouses about a man who killed both his parents, then asked the judge to go easy on him as he is an orphan.

Yes, we were attacked on 9/11, but not by Iraq. My sisters and brothers in the military are being killed daily. GWB would not be a “wartime President” if he had not declared war, and gotten us into this unjust and immoral mess.

I hope voters do remember the war in Nov, but aslso the reasons GWB is a “wartime President.”

— Dad

Star Wars Parts IV-VI on DVD Sept. 21st!

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The good news: the “first” three movies in the Star Wars trilogy (parts VI [A New Hope], V [The Empire Strikes Back], and VI [The Return of the Jedi]) will be released on DVD on September 21st.

The bad news: as has been rumored, speculated, assumed, and generally grumbled about for quite a while now, the DVDs will contain the newer, fancier, Greedo-shoots-first Special Edition versions rather than the original, unedited, like-we-all-remember-and-love versions.

The original “Star Wars” trilogy, comprising the 1977 movie, its 1980 sequel “The Empire Strikes Back” and 1983’s “Return of the Jedi,” will be released on DVD as a four-disc boxed set in September, Fox Home Entertainment and Lucasfilm Ltd. announced yesterday.

[…]

The boxed set will contain the special editions of the “Star Wars” trilogy released in the late 1990s and not the original theatrical versions.

Ah, well. Even with the Special Edition changes (which, to be honest, some I like and some I don’t), any of the first three films are still far better than the disappointing dreck of Episodes I and II.

And yeah.

I’ll be picking this set up on day one.

Examining Bush’s military record

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More and more, people are getting to the bottom of Bush’s military record — the real one, that is, not the glossed-over propagand-ized version he’d like us to believe.

The Columbia Journalism Review is calling for more detailed investigations into the “torn document” giving details of Bush’s service record:

The now-infamous “torn document,” which the Bush administration produced in the spring of 2000 is a statement of service credit that Bush apparently earned for guard service in 1972-73. However, most of the dates and Bush’s name, except for the “W,” have been torn off.

At first, this document was often included in media summaries of Bush’s National Guard service. However, it has been notably absent from many recent accounts, simply because most reporters find it so incomplete as to be useless.

…But now that Bush has gone on record saying that he will release all records necessary to settle this issue, it’s up to the press corps to decide just how high or low to set the bar of disclosure necessary to get to the bottom of things.

The mainstream media will be a bit late to the game, though, as Calpundit already has a good look at the document in question — not the torn version, though…

To make a long story short, Bush apparently blew off drills beginning in May 1972, failed to show up for his physical, and was then grounded and transferred to [the Air Reserve Force] as a disciplinary measure. He didn’t return to his original Texas Guard unit and cram in 36 days of active duty in 1973 — as Time magazine and others continue to assert based on a mistaken interpretation of Bush’s 1973-74 ARF record — but rather accumulated only ARF points during that period. In fact, it’s unclear even what the points on the ARF record are for, but what is clear is that Bush’s official records from Texas show no actual duty after May 1972, as his Form 712 Master Personnel Record from the Texas Air National Guard clearly indicates….

Bush’s record shows three years of service, followed by a fourth year in which he accumulated only a dismal 22 days of active service, followed by no service at all in his fifth and sixth years. This is because ARF duty isn’t counted as official duty by the Texas guard.

So Bush may indeed have “fulfilled his obligation,” as he says, but only because he had essentially been relieved of any further obligation after his transfer to ARF. It’s pretty clear that no one in the Texas Air National Guard had much interest in pursuing anything more serious in the way of disciplinary action.

Truly a sterling service record for our Commander in Chief.

(via Daily Kos)