Restoring that Beautiful Copper Tone

Why don't we charter a C-130 to dump a few million gallons of Tarn-X on the Statue of Liberty? Think of all the shiny copper goodness.

And it would only cost $480 million.*

*($5.00/12 oz. Tarn-X)(8 oz. Tarn-X/ft.²)(144M ft.²) + ($4600/hour C-130)(1 hour C-130)
= ($66.67/gal. Tarn-X)(7.2M gal. Tarn-X) + $4600
= $480M + $4600
= $480M

The Captain's Cookbook, Part II

Ladies and Gentle Ben, it's once again time for...

THE CAPTAIN'S COOKBOOK
Applying a Services Oriented Architecture to Culinary Design Problems

Holy Hellfire Tacos
Prep time: 5 minutes (more if you like to rub spicy stuff in your eyes)
Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

Ingredients:

• Approx. 1 pound ground turkey, beef, chicken, pork, or Soylent Green
• 8-12 whole wheat or corn tortillas
• 1 package Ortega (or Old El Paso) taco seasoning
• 1 small bottle Ortega (or Old El Paso) taco sauce (try the green chili sauce for kicks)
• 4 bell peppers of varying colors
• 1 yellow or white onion
• 1-2 habanero peppers (2 = you're f'in crazy)
• 1 block of sharp cheddar cheese
• 1 cucumber, and maybe some tomatoes
• Some amount of lettuce, baby spinach, or other roughage

Cooking Instructions:

1. In some sort of frying pan that can also be used as a weapon, brown the meat and drain whatever fat is left from the pan.
2. While that's going on, cut the onions and non-habanero peppers into whatever combination of slices, chunks, and cubes you find most aesthetically appealing and sautee them for a bit. Whenever you decide that they're done, set them aside.
3. When the meat's all set and/or the spirit moves you, stir in the contents of the Ortega taco seasoning packet into the pan along with whatever amount of water it tells you to add (3/4 cup?), and let it simmer (covered) for 5-10 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, carefully cut up the habanero peppers into little bits, but for the love of God do not touch your eyes or any other exposed membrane for the next 48 hours unless you feel like entering a massive and completely indestructible world of pain!!!!(I suppose you could wear gloves while you cut the peppers, but that's cheating.)
5. Dump the habanero peppers into the pan and let everything simmer for a few minutes more -- maybe chop up some of the cucumber or try to discover a new prime number while you wait -- and then shut off the burner.
6. Fill the tortillas with some combination of taco meat, sauteed veggies, shredded cheese, chopped cucumbers/tomatoes, and leafy greens. Finish with taco sauce.
7. If you discovered a new prime number in Step 5, you might want to write it down and show it to someone.

John Edwards' Political Career - R.I.P., 2008

I'm sure by now that the Internet is rife with pundits and bloggers sounding off about the extramarital affair that John Edwards had with one of his videographers in 2006, so I need not waste much time discussing how unfortunate an act this was, for both the man and for what he used to stand for in American politics. (All I can add are my deepest sympathies for my lovely B&B hostess in New Hampshire who, in late 2007, became so smitten with Edwards and his message after he held a get-together at her house that she actually decided to pay attention to politics for the first time in her life. That's gotta be one hell of a comedown.)

However, as the hour grows late, my eyelids grow heavy, and NBC's Olympics coverage lapses into reruns that are still labeled "LIVE" for some odd reason, I'd like to add the following two-pence on the Edwards topic by referencing a clip from the AP newswire:

Former campaign manager David Bonior said he was one of the thousands of friends and supporters that Edwards betrayed, and he shuddered when thinking about what might have happened had Edwards beaten Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in the party's primaries.

"You can't lie in politics and expect to have people's confidence," he said.

My response: see Presidential Election, United States of America, 2004; results of.

Speaking Words of Wisdom

When you buy a book, most likely because you intend to read it, make sure that you remember that it is on your shelf after you place it there.

If you take a minute to look around, you will realize that most of the things in the universe are larger than you. Therefore, whenever you find yourself in doubt, assume that you are not fat.

Any musical composition can be enhanced by the addition of crash cymbals, tubular bells, and lightly-tapped bongo drums.

Every day presents a multitude of opportunities, and the most fruitful -- and challenging -- will often catch you by surprise. Be sure to enter up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right B, A, Start before taking them on.

If your state government allows it, keep your first set of license plates.

Avoid Scylla and Charybdis at all costs.

If you have an entrepreneurial mind, try to find a commercially-viable way to build a scale model of Crater Lake from a flooded football stadium. Optimize your business model to minimize operating costs and accidental drownings, and refer to the image at left when determining the correct placement of Wizard Island. The use of papier-mâché as a building material is not recommended, unless you are trying to decorate your habitat with gasoline-filled piñatas.

Most larger mammals are funnier on rocket-skates, especially grizzley bears.

Things Are Better When Multiplied by 1000

Move Over, The Fast and the Furious, there's a new king of the racing movie genre in town:

Note that this movie is not a remake of the 1975 Sylvester Stallone classic shown below (but does seem to draw on it for conceptual inspiration):

Incidentally, the latter flick makes me wax nostalgic for the twilight years of the 20th century, when arbitrarily appending a large multiple of 1000 to the title of something was a trendy way to invoke futurism and instantaneously imbue said something with highly sophisticated, larger-than-life qualities that vaguely suggested omnipotence in a dues ex machina kind of way.

Notable examples of this phenomenon include the following:

• As the great Local News Wars of the 1990s reached their glorious apex, Channel 8 of Portland (Oregon, naturally) decided to christen one of their weather maps Doppler 8000 in an attempt to convince people that they possessed a technologically superior way of forecasting precipitation in the greater Portland area (which, as any resident of that city knows, is extremely challenging, inasmuch as you don't know whether the rain will arrive before or after noontime). In response, rival Channel 6, taking a considerably more comprehensive approach, renamed itelf to Channel 6000. This change may have been confusing to some viewers, as 6000 was not a valid channel on anyone's cable box.



• In 1999, as Microsoft prepared to release the successor to the Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems, a savvy marketer observed that neither "Windows 00" nor "Windows NT 5.0" were very inspiring names; thus was born Windows 2000. To appeal to less sophisticated users (who might be put off by the added sophistication of a 1000-level version number), Microsoft in parallel launched a dumbed-down, friendlier-but-still-futuristic-sounding version of Windows 2000 called Windows Millennium Edition (or "Windows Me"). However, Windows Me's lack of support for popular legacy hardware and software (sound familiar?) and its general inability to connect to the Internet doomed it out of the box -- why wasn't it called Windows 00? -- and it was quickly buried two years later by the widescale adoption of Windows XP.



• In The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XII, the Ultrahouse 3000 (voiced by Pierce Brosnan) pays homage to the line of homicidal computer systems that started with the HAL-9000 found in Arthur C. Clarke's signature work, 2001: A Space Odyssey. This example provides an excellent opportunity for me to mention that my refrigerator is adorned with a circular magnet fashioned after one of HAL's eyes, so that I can derive considerable pleasure from shouting "Open the door, HAL!!" whenever I want a beer.
  
  
  
  
  (It's probably worth noting that my fridge has yet to respond with "I'm afraid I can't do that.")

So, marketing professionals of the world: when you're feeling uninspired about a brand name and your deadline is looming, just multiply your best idea by a few thousand and call it a day. If you need some extra oomph, try adding a random Greek letter or two. And, when in doubt, finishing everything with bunch of exclamation marks never hurts.

This summer, slow and steady will not win...
DEATH RACE 8000πΩθΔβ!!!!!

3:23am

Bose makes an excellent set of earbuds shaped like jet engines that deliver premium-quality sound directly into your ear canal with the acoustics of a home theater surround system. The only problem is that the buds are constantly falling out of your ears, even if you're completely motionless. That sort of inhibits your listening experience.

Some limoncello on the rocks would be just smashing right now. Apparently it's not too hard to make.

This is indented
and italicized
text
broken up into
several lines
like a poem perhaps...

Does it sound different
in your head
when you read it?

It does for me
and the voice is softer
more ethereal
androgynous
like a stoned fifth grader

this->must_be_getting_annoying();

so I'll
STOP

Here's a stack of watermelons exploding in slow motion, set to a version of the 1812 Overture that has been transposed down a couple of keys for some reason:

Why do I still have this lava lamp from high school that I never use? Maybe I should plug it in before I go to bed. Then, when I wake up in the middle of the night bathed in purple and yellow (wasn't there some weird banana-grape chewing gum back in the 80s? I'm sure it was gross), I'll be quite confused and disoriented. Except that the sun is going to rise in a couple of hours, so that will kinda ruin the effect. Oh well, let's see what happens.

Help Me, Dr. Zaius!

Well, I don't know about you, but I had a damn fine weekend, with the centerpiece being a brilliantly conceived and executed breakfast-for-dinner party, hosted at ThongCharm's Boston headquarters.

At said party, under the influence of an espresso martini that needed some serious tinkering (um, like, there needs to be SOME sort of dairy in there, no?), my good friend the Hornett and I spent a good 40 minutes or so (give or take a standard amount of exaggeration) raving extensively about the pristine, distilled comic genius contained within this clip from A Fish Called Selma, a(n) hilarious episode from the seventh season of The Simpsons:

(click to watch video)

The Hornett went so far as to theorize that the entire episode was written around a this one sketch, wrapping some semblance of a plot and other storytelling constructs around this single, juicy kernel. Regardless of whether or not that was the case (and I wouldn't be surprised if it were), I can say one thing for sure: I've had these songs stuck in my head for over a week, and I can't see them going away anytime soon.

Unless, of course, I were to subject myself voluntarily to the ∏th circle of hell (and yes, I believe that is a capital π):

(BTW, in case anyone out there is waxing nostalgic for the original Falco video, this link's for you. For all the kiddies in the audience, maybe you'd prefer this remixed version featuring The Simms.)