Ever since I first saw this phenomenon, I thought Tilt-Shift Photography was cool. If you search the term, you’ll find that people are using certain lenses and/or Photoshop to make normal images seem like miniature models of the subject matter. Here’s a cool video found out there on the internets, it’s called Bathtub IV, by Keith Loutit…

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What can you do with sheep and christmas lights? Besides that, you sick people! Well, you can do this…

Popularity: 2% [?]

Way back in ’95 I moved from AK to Seattle. At the time, I thought I’d visit my buddy Zeno and his brother Brint in Florida. I had no reason to rush to Seattle so I hung out with them in Jacksonville for 2 weeks. At the end of the visit we took a roadtrip to Tampa and went to Busch Gardens. That was a blast and to this day I’ve never been on a bigger, faster rollercoaster. Definitely a fun place. While there, we decided to get a caricature done of us for no good reason and I brought it home and yippee…we got a stupid picture done.

This last February, Brint came through town and as we were driving around Seattle trying to find the Perfect Beer, that caricature drawing came up. “Where did that thing go? That was a hilarious picture. What a fun trip that was.” A bunch of crap like that.

Not even a week later, another friend called me to say that he was cleaning out his dungeon when he came across this weird drawing of what appeared to be me, Brint and Zeno. Dave had met both of them before, so he would know, and sure enough it was the very caricature that Brint and I had been talking about. Hilarious!

Today I was learning about PHP when I decided that I’d had it and needed to do something to expend mental energy. So I took a photo of the caricature, imported it to Photoshop  and colorized it. I’d gotten a ways into it, when I realized that doing the proper hair color was one thing, but I have no idea what color Z and B’s gorgeously dreamy eyes are…so I texted Zeno.

“What color are Brint’s eyes? Yours are green?”

Mine are blue.  B is hazel.

“Hazel?  You homo, what color are they!?”

His woman says they are blue but he was born with hazel eyes.

“Hazel…Are your sheets mauve and your thong peach?  Idiot…”

So…what the hell do I do with that?  HAZEL???  I’m a guy, I don’t know what the hell color that is, and besides, for most guys doesn’t it come down to the simplest box of crayons?  There are only 8 colors in that one: black, white, blue, red, yellow, orange, violet and green.  That’s it, that’s the whole rainbow! When another guy asks you about your brother’s eyes (THREE men in that equation), you use one of those 8 colors.  Actually, bloodshot would be a perfectly valid answer too, but that’s not the point.  The point is that we don’t do hazel.  And on top of all that!??!  This answer came from a construction worker in Alaska!  Holy crap!

I got so flustered I made B’s eyes blue and Z’s eyes green.  I thought hazel was a shade of blue…what?!  Whatever, it’s all good.  As always, click the image for a larger one.

Special thanks to Zeno’s monobrow for making an appearance. Good on ya, mate!

Popularity: 4% [?]

People who have their photo professionally done with their pets?  Dingdongs.  Sorry Beverly…that’s just how it works.

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Here I am, at Delta Foxtrot’s pad, waiting for their flight.  I’ve been housesitting for the last week and now I have just another hour before I need to go pick them up.  Can’t drink.  Took my guitar home, although that doesn’t mean much cuz he’s got, like, 6 in the jam room…  But the point is that I’m in Finished Mode.  I’m done with this place.  The cats are fucking weird.  One has stayed hidden for the entire week.  I give them the wet food from the can just to make sure that she’s still here and alive cuz she won’t make an appearance for the dry shit, while the other just lets you know that he is indeed here by meowing nonstop for the first 15 minutes after you arrive home from work or wherever.  Hell, he just meows cuz he’s a cat and he can, dammit!

So here I am.  Empire Strikes Back is on TV, but I could do a one-man play of that movie with no rehearsal, so it’s on strictly to keep me company while I surf the web.  Did you know that Han Solo thought that tauntauns smelled bad on the outside, and yet he found that they smell REALLY bad on the inside too?  Yeah, he did.  He was trying to save Luke’s life out in the icy wilds of Hoth after Luke didn’t report in after going to look after what he thought was a meteor, but it really turned out to be an Imperial Probe Droid, aka a Probot.

Holy crap.

So I’m surfing around and I find this little nugget.  This comes courtesy of The Stranger, an alt weekly here in Seattle.  They have their I Saw U ads where if you saw somebody interesting, but didn’t have the time/guts to talk to them, you can place an ad and maybe something will come of it.  In addition to seeing if somebody spotted you out in the streets, it’s also fun to see ads like this.

Now, let’s just take a look at this shall we?  Firstly, she thought the guy was incredibly, no, ridiculously hot.  That right there was enough to inspire her to place the I Saw U ad.  However, he’ll have to wait for a different life, because apparently having a job at Subway (during a recession, mind you) makes one a loser.

See how I did that?  I made a point of bringing attention to the fact that this person is an idiot because she’s making fun of a person who actually has a job during times of record unemployment in our country.  But then I silently went about spelling the word “loser” correctly without pointing out that this idiot shouldn’t throw stones at people with jobs when she can’t spell or use punctuation OR proper grammar in her ad that does nothing positive for ANYBODY.

Well, it does good stuff for me, cuz I get to call her an idiot on the internet, thus making myself feel better about myself, or something like that?  Sure, that.

Only one more hour.  I hope that this relationship between Princess Leia and Han Solo actually goes somewhere.  Her planting a kiss on Luke in the infirmary gave me the creeps for some reason…

Popularity: unranked [?]

There’s this thing going around Facebook right now.  What you do is you, well…here it is.

Album Cover Design Time

1 – Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random… Read More… Read More” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. (alternatively, if the first article you hit is short, hit Random Article two more times.)

2 – Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 – Use photoshop or Picnik.com or other photo editor to put it all together.

I went ahead and did it, but I can’t post it on Facebook, because they’ve changed their homepage/format and I can’t find any of the tools or see how to implement them anymore.  However it’s such an all-star that I’ve decided to post it here.

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Try this out.

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I got an email just now from my buddy Lotus. I read it and then replied back to all the recipients with my two cents, but good golly, I didn’t realize that I was going to get all worked up and shit. Here we go…

From: Lotus
Subject: The Doom Bunker
Date: Friday, March 6, 2009, 4:21 PM

Okay, on our recent trip my wife and I ended up in a PizzaHut, yes a PizzaHut, for dinner in Crescent City CA. Despite the rest of the beautiful northern Cali coast, Crescent City leaves much to be desired and hence, PizzaHut. Well, I sat across the table from the ol’ ball and chain with my eyes transfixed on the TeeVee above her. I was stuck, like watching baboons screw, reading the close captioning and watching what must have been the worst thing I’ve ever seen on that damn box. They had on Faux News. There was a show on called “The War Room” with this goofball named Glenn Beck. I was mezmerized by the stupidity of this show and couldn’t believe it was even on the air. But if anyone would give this show the time of day it would be Fixed News. I was speechless the entire time and I think I still haven’t told the Wombat why. I think at one point she looked at me with this concerned look, like I was vacant, and the thought crossed my mind of explaining what was going on on the boobtube above her. Then I realized there was no way I could convey what was on that piece of shit network just then.

Well thank you Steven Colbert for succinctly mocking what must be the most laughable god-awful pile of horsepiss to have ever run on tv. And that’s saying something. SO my dear sweet battleaxe, here’s why I was not quite “with you” that evening on our romantic PizzaHut dinner stop. It was Fox News hun. Like watching baboons screw.

Click here to see what Lotus was talking about

Well, after reading that, I thought I’d respond. So I did.

I saw the Colbert thing, and just about pissed my pants laughing.

Some thoughts that have popped into my head over the last year or so because of stuff just like that:

1) Colbert does a hilarious job acting like a right-wing megalomaniac that I didn’t get it at first, and didn’t like the show until that one day when I finally did get it. The actual right-wingers are trying to copy him or Jon Stewart’s Daily Show with their own show called Red Eye or something like that? This show isn’t funny at all. I mean, I can’t even view it and think, “Man, this would be funny if I were on their team.” So I see their show and I wonder if I’ve somehow lost part of my grip on reality? Did I ever have one? Hmmm… Seems like Sense Of Humor isn’t a Republican trait.

2) Faux News. Are you people for real? From the not-even-thinly-veiled hatred that spews forth from this channel to the cast of characters that are on it… AREYOUFUCKINGPEOPLEFORREAL!?!? For example:

3) Ann Coulter. Insanely out of touch, or marketing genius? I honestly wonder if she actually believes and means the shit that comes out of her horrible mouth, or if she concocts it strictly for headlines, or if she somehow thinks that “Teehee, it’s just television, how can people actually think I’m being serious?” Whatever the truth…she dies in my fantasy.

4) Our two-party system sucks. All it does is breed distrust and an Us VS Them mentality, so much so that legislation is often based on a strategy of “they want this so we are going to fight it, regardless of whether it makes sense or is better than our own plan”.

5) TV sucks. All it does is breed an atmosphere of envy. Envy that the rich and famous people on TV have all these wonderful things in their wonderful lives that we are missing in our pathetic “normal” lives. The Dalai Lama said in a book that in our culture of excess, he sees more unhappy people than in 3rd world cultures. And one time I was in a bar and I was shooting pool with a stranger from Africa. He told me that Americans are crazy because we work too much. He’s right. And, of course, we work too much because we are a nation of Joneses, always wanting what we think that the other person has: happiness because of all the material things they possess.

Wow, I didn’t think I’d get that worked up, but Western Civilazition is doomed. The only thing keeping the machine going at this point is sheer inertia and with the stock market doing what it’s doing, it’ll be interesting to see what’s up in a year or 3.

And, of course, I forgot a couple of things to say in the email. One thing is that it is amazing what some people are saying about the Obama presidency already. Some Republicans are talking about Obama as if he had been in office for 8 years already and royally screwed up everything from our relationships with almost EVERY other country on Earth to our budget deficit. Uhhhh folks, Obama has been in the White House for all of two months. Give him some time. He’s a human, he will make mistakes, but NOBODY could make any more or worse mistakes than the guy who just moved out. zeemzane?

The other thing I forgot to mention to Lotus is that he (Lotus) needs to watch more TV. I never thought I’d say that to anybody, but I think that it’s true in this case. Here’s why: In order to combat whatever it is…be it the enemy or stupidity or what have you, you must know what it is that you’re up against. I told my father on the phone today, “How dumb is the average person? Remember that that is the average and that half the people are even dumber.” How painful is that? But all you have to do is watch most of what they put on TV to see that most of us blindly accept most of what’s put in front of us without thinking or questioning what the hell it is.

So from time to time I hear Lotus tell a tale of how he saw something in mainstream society which flabbergasted him because of its banality. Yeah…well, you watch more TV and see how fine folks like Paris Hilton and Bill O’Reilly are getting on and I guarantee that you will be less surprised in the future.

It’s all a bunch of bullshit. That’s what I gotta say about that!

Popularity: unranked [?]

Folks, if you ever look at the links page at this site, you’ll notice a link to Engrish.com.  This is a hilarious site where you’ll find hundreds of photos of signs where the English phrases have been butchered to the point of gut-busting hilarity.

Well, I saw one of my own this morning and I thought it good enough to send to the fine folks at Engrish.com.

Please to enjoy…

Popularity: unranked [?]

Today Dave and I went to a federal building where we had a meeting with somebody in the IT Dept of this federal agency.  The meeting concerned some kiosks that Dave had previously written programs for and we were stopping by to do some follow-up maintenance/upgrading of software for them.

Dave and I showed up at the building and, of course, we had to go through a metal detector and all that, just like at the airport.  The only difference was that the old guy who we were talking to was much more talkative and friendly, especially when telling us he didn’t want to have to shoot us like they did the guy with the hand grenade a few years ago.  All this he said with a smile, like he was offering us a plate of cookies.  ????WTF!  Uh, thanks dude…I think.

Dave and I headed upstairs and we had the meeting, where we were told that there were some concerns with this and that in the software and some of the kiosks had just shut down completely, so we’d need to take a couple of the computer boxes with us and troubleshoot them.  Oh yeah, we can do that…  Dave, you go get your car and take it to the loading dock and I’ll go with the lady here and get the towers and meet you down there.

Down in the loading dock, Dave called me to say that he was ready to come in, so the lady we had the meeting with told the security guys to open the door and let him in.  In addition to having the door closed, they also had those metal poles that were about waist height that would lower down into the concrete hydraulically in order to let a car in, or keep a car out, as the case may be.  It was a bit daunting, but it was kinda cool being behind the scenes in the loading dock of a federal building where they take security VERY SERIOUSLY, ya know?

As Dave was pulling in (after they’d conducted a search of his car), the lady who we had met with turned to me, “Oh yeah, we’ll email you the forms for the background check next week.  But you can take the hardware today.”  She said it with a wink, as though to say that she trusted us, but she had to go through the formality for the sake of protocol.

Hmmmm, that made me feel funny.  Partly because of my knee-jerk reaction to Federal Background Check, but also because they actually might find something.  For those of you not familiar with my Alaskan upbringing, there was an incident in highschool involving 8 of us and a bunch of beer and an FAA building.  In Round One, the building lost.  However, in Round Two: The Legal Round, me and a couple of the others lost.

After talling Dave about that, he said, “Don’t worry, it wasn’t a felony, so it’s probably no big deal.”  And slightly afterward, he added, “Way to go losing the contract for us, dingdong!  You’re fired!”

Well….we’ll see.  Now it seems there are TWO legal entities interested in me for various reasons.  What do you do?

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