Chuck Norris can divide by 0.
Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.
Chuck Norris destroyed the periodic table, because the only element he recognizes is the element of surprise.
Find out more amazing Chuck Norris facts, before he roundhouse kicks you in the face.
]]>]]>Dude 1: Dude, check it out. The newspaper says 85-year-old woman gives 100 liters of blood.
Dude 2: At once?
This can be partly explained by the fact that I lived most of my life in California, where the Fourth of July is typically celebrated by the cooking of hamburgers, the imbibing of beer, and perhaps by the watching a brief montage of fireworks wedged into the midst of the Twilight Zone Marathon whilst simultaneously singing Lee Greenwood’s Proud to be an American or Niel Diamond’s (They’re coming to) America in a drunken fit of patriotism. Actual live fireworks were always banned, since they involved heat and explosions and Southern California consists entirely of kindling, charcoal briquettes, plastic surgeons, and smog.
I remember one year as a kid we celebrated Independence Day as a family at my grandmother’s house. After the sun set, one of my uncles revealed that he had smuggled in sparklers from Mexico, and promptly handed them out to the children so that they might know the magic of multicolored arson. We promptly lit them and watched in fascination the showery explosion of light and sparks that flew off the end of the stick, which promptly burned my grandmother’s house to the ground and inconveniently forced us to watch the rest of that year’s Twilight Zone marathon at the neighbors. The following year, that same uncle smuggled in some Flowers, and no sooner did he light them that the little cylinders scuttled across the street in a blaze of multicolored light and burned the neighbor’s house down instead. The year after that, we stopped doing Independence Day as a family gathering.
Simply put, I don’t understand risking life and limb — well, mainly limbs, I guess — to play with explosives whose only purpose is to make a razzle-dazzle display of bright pinpoints of light and percussive blasts of noise, particularly when I can reasonably simulate that effect by, say, rubbing my eyes particularly hard while listening to Aphex Twin.
Of course, it’s different in South Dakota.
In South Dakota, by contrast, the only point of Independence Day is the intoxicated igniting of dangerous incindiary rounds. Now while live fireworks are banned within the city limits where we live, in neighboring Rapid Valley the lighting of fireworks is not only permitted, but is in fact a standard CC&R in most suburban developments. Coincidentally, it was in Rapid Valley that the Queen B, the Ladybug, and I went to an Independence Day party with friends and friends of friends, and so I made it my point to understand the appeal of lighting fireworks.
After an evening of pleasant conversation and all manner of consumed meat animals, we moved to the drive way to commence the pyrotechnics. As the sun dipped below the horizon, people up and down the block emerged from their homes like freshly risen vampires, clutching bags of multicolored bombs and rockets the likes of which would almost certainly lead to UN sanctions if they were discovered. Withing minutes, the sky was alive with fiery explosions and sonic blasts so loud they felt like stakes driven into my ear canals. Sure, the lights were pretty, but they’re just as pretty when you view them at, say, a professional fireworks display at the Civic Center — and here they were a helluva lot louder, and after a few minutes of it, then entire street was basked in an eery asthmatic funk of gun smoke. The Ladybug, who was initially delighted by the lightshow, quickly tired of the noise and smoke; clearly that could not be the appeal of fireworks.
I decided instead to ask around. It did not go well, initially.
Most of my initial requests went something along the lines of “I’ve never lit fireworks for the Fourth of July… What’s the big deal?,” and these were greeted either with incomprehension or patriotic indignation. As one partygoer announced between angry chugs of his Budweiser, ”Fireworks are our Second Amendment Right, man! [ Chug ] The Second Amendment grants us the right [ chug ] to bear arms [ chug ] and by arms [ chug ] they refer to all manner of explosives [ chug ] then it stands to reason that it ought to grant us also the right to blow off our own arms with said explosives. [ triumphant chug ] God Bless America, and give me another Bud!”
In fact, after watching the haphazard fireworks show for a while, I realized the he had in fact revealed the main appeal of fireworks…
Beer.
Lots and lots of beer.
Apparently, beer is crucial to the personal fireworks experience for several reasons.
First off, many of the fireworks launched require some sort of cylindrical “launch vessel” in which they can be placed to maintain a vertical orientation during the lighting of the fuse, and the typical beer bottle is of optimal dimensions for this task. Hence, if you wish to launch several fireworks in rapid succession, you need to have lots of empty beer bottles at your disposal. Thus, to adequately prepare for the lighting of fireworks, one must drink copious amounts of beer beforehand.
Secondly, the attending beer buzz not only heightens the aesthetic appeal of the lightshow (oooh! aaah!) and also conveniently impairs one’s judgment so as to make the lighting of potentially deadly high explosives seem somehow safe and fun, thereby allowing the process to continue.
Thirdly, it’s beer. Beer adds to the appeal of anything.
Satisfied with my conclusions — and recognizing that the Queen B was in the midst of an asthma attack from all the burnt gun powder in the air and the Ladybug’s ears were bleeding from the noise — the Komplexify family said its goodnights, piled into the car, and carefully drove off into the night.
As we drove through the neighborhoods of Rapid Valley, illuminated under the stroboscopic glow of a sky caught on fire, evading errant bottle rockets from the air and erratically exploding firecrackers and smoke bombs on the ground, I realized a second, and more profound appeal for fireworks: they reminded me of all the reasons I love living in the United States by making it, for one very special night, look and feel like Iraq.
]]>Imagine you have a time machine, but its only works sporadically, and at any given time you can only go back in time to a single, specific moment. That’s the basic premise of Chronotron, an addictive puzzle game in which you must complete levels back repeatedly going back in time and using the help of you “past doubles” (who live out their past timeline selves independent of your new arrival) to escape a number of rooms.
It’s like Primer, but without the headache.
]]>Well, a replacement for my old one, anyway. Somehow I’ve become the guru of effective Tablet PC use in the classroom, a title of dubious distinction that seems to have been conferred upon me by the simple fact that I carry my Tablet PC with me everywhere on campus, and I only do that because, well, it’s where I keep my stuff. Nevertheless, a perk of this conception is that I’m somehow at the top of the queue when faster, better versions of the Tablet PC become available, so I’ve swapped my old, clunky, chalk-dust covered computer for one that’s supposed to be sleeker, faster, and better.
It’s certainly slicker that my old one. It’s jet black with silver trim, and it has a fingerprint security lock, which allows you to bypass typing in usernames and passwords by instead swiping your index finger over a little scanner. The process by which it works is rather interesting: you place your index finger over this little red sensor and swipe it done, after which a small window pops up saying:
You then repeat this maneuver anywhere from eighteen to forty-seven times, after which you give up and simply type in your username and password. I live in fear of the time they decide to replace the fingerprint sensor with either a retinal scanner or a rectal probe. For all intents and purposes, they could replace all these high-tech features with the following extra key on the keyboard without sacrificing any of the functionality:
As with any upgrade, it takes a while to get everything set (or rather, reset) just as you like it. I’ve been mucking around the Control Panel, fiddling with security and power saving options, without much success. If only I could find this menu and disable it:
An added bonus is that this new computer comes equipped with Office 2007. Now, I hated Office 2003 for a large number of reasons, including (but not limited to)
that wretched paper clip.
Indeed, the only thing Office 2003 had going for it was its ubiquity: it was everydamnwhere, so that even if you didn’t like it me (Hi! Nice to meet you!) you were force at least to be somewhat familiar with its operations.
If you haven’t seen it, the 2007 version preserves all of the worst features of the previous Office suite while simultaneously eradicating the familiar interface, making it damn near impossible to use. I would be most obliged if someone would take Bill Gates out and shoot him. Twice, preferably.
However, in its favor, the new Tablet has a much improved pen-to-screen interface, which means I can play Line Rider with great fluidity, ease, and artistic expression, and really, isn’t that the only thing that matters.
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Well, at the time I suppose it would have still been called an Alien, since the “xenomorph” term would be coined until Aliens six years later. It was a monstrous, horrifying thing that stood two feet tall, with another foot or so of convoluted, vertebral tail behind it. It was jet black all over, except for its teeth, claws, and tips of its four dorsal protusions, which were instead painted with in glow-in-the dark green. It’s elongated cranium had a small lever in the back that, when depressed, caused the xenomorph’s jaw to open and its secondary mandibles — the biting tongue — to extend out. It had posable arms and legs, but really, no matter how you move the thing, it always appeared to be hunched over and ready to pounce, flashing its eery green claws and homicidal grin.
God, I hated that thing.
It was creepy and monstrous, and I vaguely remember the box it cam in showing pictures of the chest burster and face hugger scenes from the movie, permanently scarring my five-year-old psyche. At night, it would disappear into the shadows except for the faint glow of its teeth and claws and spines. I would always catch a glimpse of its hideous form out of the corner of my eye in the dark, yet when I tried to look directly at it, it would almost disappear entirely, only to be spied out of the corner of my eye again moments later, which gave the uncomfortable sensation of being stalked by the thing. In fact, most nights I locked it in my closet, usually under a pile of day-glow yellow underwear so that I’d be sure to see it moving if it escaped. At least, I hope they were day-glow undies, but that doll scared the living piss out of me, so I can’t be too sure.
In fact, the only thing I did with the toy was make it attack my sister’s dollies, as she was the only person in the house more terrified of the thing than I was.
Eventually my mom surmised that I was terrified of the plastic predator, and she one day unceremoniously dumped it in the garbage, and I was inexpressibly grateful to her for soing so.
Of course, time passed and I eventually became of the fan of the Alien movies (well, the first three, anyway), and I find myself from time to time scouring old toy shoppes and kick-knack stores, hoping to find one of those classic Alien toys, although to this day I have been unsuccessful in my quest.
I do, however, think this is a pretty close second.
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Primer is not your average time travel movie.
It’s so confusing, so convoluted, it virtually requires a second (or even third) viewing to simply decipher it, much less enjoy it. That being said, I also found it fascinating, and it filled my head with questions and ideas for weeks after I first saw it. You should go out and rent it.
But I say again: it’s not your average time travel movie.
Most movies involving time travel are not really about time travel itself; rather, time travel is a nifty plot device used to address some greater issue of fate or destiny. Just think about it: in most time travel movies, the time device is already invented and perfected, and time travel itself is a breeze — an instantaneous push of a button away, and the mechanics of time travel are simple and straightforward. Sure, there are some mentions of temporal or causal paradoxes, but in the end the real focus of the movie — its eventual narrative purpose — is to establish some grander notion of fate or causaility, such as
In Primer, however, doesn’t play by those rules.
In it, the protagonists, two engineers called Abe and Aaron, discover time travel entirely by accident, a by-product of their otherwise unsuccessful attempt a building a room-temperature superconductor in their garage. Their time machine isn’t glamorous: it’s neither an ornate brass-and-crystal armchair nor hot-wired into a DeLorean, but rather is an uncomfortable smallish box filled with argon and built of metal and PVC piping.
Moreover, the mechanics of time travel in Primer isn’t glamorous either: you don’t simply pick a date and zap instaneously to it; rather, you can only back in time, only to the point at which the time machine was first activated, and — and this is the kicker — you have to wait for the time to “unpass.”
That is, if you wanted to go back in time to, say, six hours ago, you’d first have to make sure you actually thought beforehand to power up the time machine six hours previously and, assuming you did that, you’d then have to crawl into the little time machine box and sit in that cramped little thing and wait for those six hours to “rewind” — and assuming to missed the six hour mark, you’d need to stay in the box an additional six hours just to get out of it at the point at which you entered it. …And of course, if you actually did do everything right, then (oddly enough), the minute you first power up the time machine you’d actually meet your six-hour future self immediately exiting the machine, which explains why the guys in the movie actually set a timer-delay on their time machines.
Confused?
After my first viewing, so was I, but maybe this will help.
Similarly, whereas most time travel movies usually follow the perspective of the protagonists during their journeys through time — which means that the audience has as much knowledge of events as the main characters themselves — Primer does not do this. It instead shifts timelines repeatedly and without warning, and the effect is confusing and unsettling. For example, as the scene in which Abe explains the functionality of the box to Aaron, it becomes apparent to the audience that the Abe who is talking is actually from the future, and that the events unfolding are in fact from a separate timeline, one from Abe’s past. Even better, later in the movie, we find that the entire course of events has shifted into a new timeline — the past of a third character — afterwhich we come to realize that the original “explaining the functionality” scene was actually from a third timeline, one in which Aaron, supposed to be from Abe’s past, is in fact from the future, so that the entire scene is actually from Aaron’s past.
Confused?
After my second viewing, so was I, but maybe this will help (although it will does contain lots of spoilers!).
And when all is said and done, when the movie finally ends, it makes no grand point about fate or destiny, nor any assertions about the sanctity or unchanagibility of the past. In fact, by the end of the movie, Abe and Aaron take away entirely different perspectives on the past and their responsibility to it, leaving the audience to decide who is right and who is wrong… and who is who, too, since the final timeline of the movie is populated by (at least) two Abes and three Aarons.
Confused?
After my third viewing, so was I, but… well… I got used to being confused.
In any event: Primer is an unexpectedly good science fiction movie that skimps on neither the science nor the fiction, and I recommend it if you’ve got time to spare.
No pun intended.
]]>I love a good joke, and I love a bad pun, so I am particularly fond of “shaggy dog stories” and “feghoots,” the latter being good jokes based on a narrative punctuated by an exceptionally bad pun. For example, a well-known (and uncharacteristcally brief) feghoot is the Story of the Separated Twins:
A young mother gave birth to twin boys, but being poor she had to give them up for adoption. One boy went to a family in Egypt, where they named him Ahmul. The other boy went to a family in Spain, where they named him Juan.
When Juan grew up, he decided to send a picture to his birth mother. When the picture arrived, the mother was at first ecstatic, but then suddenly started to cry. When her husband asked what was wrong, she said, “Oh, I wish a had a picture of our other son too!”
The husband smiled. “Honey, they’re twins. If you’ve seen Juan, you’ve seen Ahmul.”
A very famous (and more traditionally lenghty) example, one invariably told by my friend The Glick at social gatherings involving alcohol, is the Story of Larry Lobster and Sam Clam:
Larry Lobster and Sam Clam where best friends. They did everything together. The only difference between them is that Larry was the nicest Lobster ever and Sam was, well, he was not so good. Larry and Sam did so much together that they even died together. Larry went to heaven and Sam, of course, went to hell.
Larry was doing well in heaven and one day St. Peter came up to him and said, “Larry, you know you are the nicest clam we ever had up here. Everyone likes you but you seem to be a bit depressed. Tell me what is bothering you, maybe I can help.”
Larry said, “Well, don’t get me wrong, sir. I like it up here and everything, but I really miss my good friend Sam Clam. We used to do everything together and I really miss him a lot.”
St. Peter looked at Larry with pity and said to him, “I tell you what, I can arrange it so that you can go down to hell tomorrow and visit Sam all day. How would that sound?”
This made Larry very happy and he got up bright and early the next morning and grabbed his wings, his harp, and his halo and got in the elevator to hell. When the doors opened he was met by Sam. They hugged each other and they were off. You see in Hell Sam owned a disco. The spent the day there together and had a great time. At the end of the day Larry and Sam went back to the elevator together said their goodbyes and Larry got back in the elevator and went up to heaven. He stepped off the elevator and was greeted by St. Peter who blocked the doorway to heaven. He looked at Larry and said, “Larry Lobster, didn’t you forget something?”
Larry looked around him and found his halo and his wings and his… “Oh no!” he gasped. “I left my harp in Sam Clam’s Disco.”
I myself am especially fond of mathematically influenced feghoots (see here and here and here and here, for example), but I love the utter pointlessness of the stories involved to get to the painfully bad punchline that is the hallmark of any good shaggy dog story.
Well, if you’re a fan of feghoots or shaggy dog stories in general, then Tarzan’s Tripes Forever: the Web’s First Shaggy Dog Story Archive is for you. At last I checked, there are over two thousand of these stories, including the aforementioned Separted Twins (story 115) and a variation on Larry and Sam (story 155). Let me conclude with story 656, the Story of Nothing:
]]>A man travelling through the Orient passed a small courtyard and heard voices murmuring. He went in and saw an altar with a large stone O in the middle. White-robed people were kneeling before the altar, softly chanting “Nil… nil… nil…” while ceremonial priests sang prayers to The Great Nullity and The Blessed Emptiness.
Eventually, the man turned to a white-robed observer beside him and asked “Is Nothing sacred?
“Those Germans sure have a racket,” she commented on her return.
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, you can buy beer everywhere there — in taverns, in restaurants, in malls, at church, you name it. Excellent beer in giant glasses. And cheap, too.”
“How is that a racket?” I asked, thinking that such a description universally applied to the concept heaven might cause one to re-evaluate one’s stance on atheism.
She smiled wryly. “Because in Germany, you have to pay to use the toilet.”
She also sent me a picture of the sign for a German lingerie shop that translates surprisingly well.
As a result, the class is chock full of folks who, beyond being unfamiliar with a web-based software interface, in fact seem to have never seen a computer before. This class is like running a relay in which your teammates have not only failed to stretch and settle down into the starter’s block, but in fact are still learning to tie their laces. To wit, I submit the following moment from class.
The instructor has just logged everyone into their “sandbox” account, an ardulous task taking almost forty minutes. Once everyone is logged in, she shows off the welcome page and points out that it is divided into a number of cells that resemble the “windows” of Microsoft Windows. “In D2L,” she says “these windows — the cells that you interact with to edit the site’s content — are called widgets.”
“Why are they called widgets?” asks a student.
“Well,” the instructor replies helpfully, “a widget refers to anything that adds content to a web page that is not static. That’s technical mumbo-jumbo, though. Suffice it for us here for D2L, a widget just refers to any of the windows you see on the page.
“Why not call them windows, then?” another student asks.
The instructor smiles. “Because in D2L itself, they’re called widgets…”
A third student quickly interrupts. “Well, can we think of them as windows here instead of widgets?”
“Sure,” says the instructor hesitantly.
“Aha!” he announces triumphantly. “Then why don’t we just call them windows here instead of widgets too?” The student sits back with the air of a man who has just determined he can checkmate Gary Kasparov in three moves.
A pained expression brifefly flits accross the instructor’s face.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” she suggests. “When you go to set up your class page, you won’t see any options for editing the information in a window in D2L, but there are options to edit the information in different widgets, so…”
The first student blows a disgusted raspberry. “This makes no sense. Why not call them windows if they’re windows instead of wedgies or whatever you called them…”
“Wijjitz,” the second student adds helpfully.
“Right, wijjitz, whatever,” grumbles the first. “Stupid name for a window.”
“Why widgets?” ponders a fourth student, at which point a fifth student, evidently an economics professor, pontificates for ten minutes on the etymological origins of the term as a generic place-holder for manufactured goods, which in turn engenders a further forty minutes of heated debate on (in this order) the flaws of the capitalist system, the fault for the current state of the economy, the general political listlessness of the university community, and finally gun control, during which, unobserved by most of the class, the instructor hung herself with a makeshift noose fashioned out of her laptop’s power cord.
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