Deep Fried Puppies

Link is here.

Last night was the “Night of Power” of the Muslim faith. If they die killing infidels on that night, they get super virgins. We expected to party hard, but it was a quiet evening. My point is, why don’t any other religions have Nights of Power? Maybe Afternoons of Awesome or Evenings of Asskickery? Come on. All religious history is filled with unstoppable badasses wailing through hordes of people, smiting like they’d gotten prosthetic fists from a vengeful god. I was reading this other site Badass of the Week that lists quite a number of them, and does a surprising job of being inclusive. Though the description of Archangel Michael is pretty much tops. Michael, Patron Saint of Getting Shit Done.

I have a deep appreciation for normal inclusion of celestial and historic beings into daily life. It works for me. I knew a crazy old nun back in high school who did it all the time. She’d stop what she was doing and make dire threats against various saints if certain things were not done, like her keys being found or rain happening/not happening as she wanted. Crazy as hell, but interesting lady. Hit me with a dog bone once, and too this day I don’t know if I deserved it. I’m perfectly willing to believe I did, but I don’t recall doing anything at that point. Her thoughts on the matter were what was I going to do, sue her? She’d taken an oath of poverty. I remember talking to her one time, and she recounted everything she owned. It took about a minute, and didn’t go much beyond her tooth brush. Sister Mo, we called her. Great lady.

Life continues apace. Mia hacks out fiction with twisted abandon, fueled by family style coffee, which serves the double purpose of caffeine applicator and engine degreaser. You know how sometimes you swill the coffee in your cup, and it creeps down the side in viscous slowness? That’s how I like it. I’m also very twitchy, why do you ask?

Been listening to a lot of George Acosta. I’m getting in touch with my musical roots, and going after big dumb techno like there’s no tomorrow. It’s extremely relaxing. It’s also good workout music. Since I’ve got a lot of time on my hands, I do the whole gym thing regularly. Yay! Lifting heavy objects over my head. This leads me directly to the grunters, those people who have discovered that deep grunts, similar to the sounds of wild boars passing kidney stones allow more rapid development of muscle. See, I hadn’t always known this. But if you strain and gurgle vaguely disquieting biological noises while pumping iron, not only do those around you wonder if they should offer you a sanitary towel, but your body triples muscle mass gains. You instantly become svelte and masculine. This is because the Herculean efforts the grunting allows you to undertake are more manly than lifting within your capacity. Fuck knowing your limits, grunt your ass off. Or your gut fat, or whatever works for you. Hence ear buds in ears, with Tiesto wailing. Just saying.

I get spoiled working on my personnal computer. I’ve got OpenOffice, which spares me from the horror that is Office 07. It’s ghastly. Vista level ghastly.

We had some hosting issues and the site was down for a few days this past week. But we are now back and better than ever. Apologies to anyone who was adversely affected by the lack of frying puppy noises in the background while surfing the web. If you complain extra hard, we may feel very sorry for you and send you a do-it-yourself puppy frying kit. Or not.

It amazes me sometimes that my job can take something I enjoy as simple as running and make it hateful to me. That’s probably my own anger getting the best of me. I’m sure that if I kept calm enough, I could still enjoy the little things through the clouds of bullshit. It might be a simple matter of reminding myself to be grateful for what I have. That’s usually a good way to stay mellow. Hard to be screaming, red in the face furious when you’re being grateful. But it’s also hard that one of the ways I control my stress is steadily being turned into the cause of that stress.

I think it’s important to stay calm. Anger isn’t going to be productive. A certain detachment seems called for.

You know that song, “What if God was one of us?” I was thinking about that last night and decided I’d probably punch him in the dick. I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed by any theological law to have that intent. It would seem to be frowned upon, especially were I to meet an untimely demise and come before my final judge.

“Ah yes, Mia. I see here you’re asking for your sins to be forgiven and granted access to Heaven.”

“Yes, St. Peter.”

“What would you like to do upon entering?”

“Punch God in the dick. Seven or eight times.”

“… Hell it is.”

“That’s fine. Satan’s getting curb stomped until I feel better about Vista.”

What if there were no curbs in hell? My final punishment is irony.

Or maybe it’s Vista.

Anyway, so much for that.

I saw some guy walking home from the grocery store the other day. He had a double handful of bags, so I stopped and offered him a ride. He thanked me but declined. Said he lived in the next building, which was less than fifty yards away. I shrugged and drove off.

Sometimes I worry that upon dying, if there is an afterlife, it isn’t going include divine understanding of what the hell was going on while alive. If we’re left only with the lessons we learned, we may never understand why. I think I’d be pretty upset in that case.

Still haven’t played SF4. Damn eye surgery took all my money.

Okay, you want to know what not to do? Mix absinthe and champagne. It’s not even so much bad as just straight weird. You will, however, have some of the most interesting dreams you can’t imagine awake.

On the subject of dreams, I spent most of the last evening not feeling terribly well. I doubt I’m coming down with anything, but I was in no mood to go out, and I missed another day on the mountain today. Hopefully I’ll make it out tomorrow. Not that a couple wasted days relaxing are a bad thing. They let the brain decompress in a way that doesn’t bother grad students.

In the mean time I’ve been polishing off some stuff I had lying around undone and surfing the web. My uploads directory is almost full now, so I’m going to dump it all here. Make a fresh start, or something like that. Here we go.

I like to write stories with a twist. Most of the time it isn’t terribly hard to see it coming. The twist can be unsettling, unnecessary, or simply incomprehensible without some prior warning. But I try to make it cool. Sometimes I succeed. And sometimes some twisted devil stops me.

There’s this thing on the web where I swear people have been traveling through time to capture images of my future progeny. But then, did not Stubborne describe me as the evil one? Even though I’m just trying to spread holiday cheer to one and all. See, I’ve always thought that my plans really weren’t so much evil as unique. Yes, by the way, that was exactly what you thought it was. You’re welcome. I hope I made you this happy.

If that doesn’t work for you, let’s talk history. Basically, history started with the vikings. After the vikings came the dinosaurs. Now don’t listen to any of that carbon dating crap. Some large headed scientists have pointed out that previously unanticipated fluctuations in solar radiation have rendered carbon dating unreliable. (This is true, by the way. The carbon dating thing. Google it.) Clearly, if you compare technology, you will see dinosaurs had to come after vikings.

But while we’re on the topic of the wonders of the natural world, we can answer another question. Why do elk have such big antlers? The answer suddenly becomes clear. It’s a wonder no one’s started hunting them or any other creature for their ornaments. Come on, people. You know I speak the truth. I would never lower myself to the level of international politics and lie.

You wanna talk vehicles? Because Xzibit couldn’t pimp my ride. He doesn’t have the cojones. Not like those guys at Lehman Brothers. Those guys know how to play the system, and do it with style. But I’m trying to keep politics out of this, so I’ll let that ride. Get it? Get it?

God, I kill me.

Anyway, I’m going to go run. Later.

And Lady. As in, let’s get down to them. By which I mean it is time to cut through to the deep, serious matters that this site was built to deal with. We’ve got a weighty issue you all need to establish the DFP consensus on.

Do bears scamper?

Fuck no, they don’t. Let’s cut the bullshit. Bears don’t scamper. They shuffle, shamble, plod, or charge. In some cases they can even run. But scampering is right out. Scampering is for small woodland creatures like squirrels, chipmunks, and the occasional fat man after a donut(fat men, with the exception of our sysadmin, aren’t bears). Scampering is like frolicking, only with more lateral motion.

Now some people have raised two well aimed special cases. The first is baby bears. Baby bears, being small woodland creatures, could potentially scamper. Also, there are some bambiesque videos on Youtube show them scampering. I hope they were shortly shot by hunters in a similarly bambiesque fashion, but the videos end without showing me gunfire. I can hope though.

I’m willing to accede this special case, because it doesn’t counter my primary point, which is the lack of scampering on the part of bears. The ability of the young bear to do something no possible to the adults is a special case, and irrelevant. Let’s say we were discussing can people talk. The common consensus would be yes. That being said, baby people can’t talk, yet they’re still people. Applying the transitive property to bear scampering, baby bear scampering does not equate to all bears scampering.

Secondly, we have pandas. Now pandas aren’t all bears. The red panda is a raccoon, but this confusion is mainly do to the tendency of dumb panda people to call everything a panda. They’ve got damn panda kittens. (I don’t want to pick on Asians, so I would like to mention that I’m just pointing out a fallacy of some of the less intelligent ones. They made a Fiat Panda, and if you think that in any way shape or form resembles a panda, you and I need a little talk out back the woodshed. Less intelligent Americans call psychology a science, but I’m not allowed to divorce them into Cuba. I tried. Freaking INS.) Anyway, pandas are certainly unbearlike enough animals to scamper, but they don’t. They’re too lazy. So they had the option of scampering, but lacked the motivation. Seriously, go watch some panda videos. Not much scampering. Plenty of eating, pooping, and falling out of trees onto their heads, but that’s it.

So, if we use set mathematics, the proper set of bears (B) is not a subset of the proper set of animals that scamper (S). B overlaps S in set BB (baby bears), but this isn’t enough to maintain bears scamper. And the rest of you can go eat some bamboo.

PS. There is only one aquatic animal that comes close to scampering, and that’s the dolphin, which frolics quite admirably. Sorry, not scampering. Thank you for playing.