stoopid human, clever animals

First, some entertaining animal news ...

A cat chases a bear up a tree?
See photo here

A new snake was discovered in Borneo that can change colors like a chameleon.
Read it here

Thanks to my dad and National Geographic for those items.

Now for the stoopid human ...

It's funny how our brains can be temporarily shut off, or paying no attention to what our hands our doing. I was smashing open a coconut last night. Normally a hammer does the trick and a flat screwdriver it the optimum tool from getting the meat off the husk. Except when you slip and ram the screwdriver between two fingers and leave a little hole that stays open for a few seconds before figuring out, "Oh yeah, I should be bleeding now."

I'm pretty careful about always cutting away from my body with sharp things. It's the blunt ones you gotta watch out for. I had a funny slip last year which left the entire blade of an x-acto knife in the webbing of my thumb -- luckily that was such a perfect cut it went away like nothing had happened. Just felt neat, and I had a recording session right afterwards where I was flipping dials and pushing sliders while trying hard not to move my hand at all.

Make sure you tie up the loose ends at the end of any story.

During lunch we saw an episode of Andromeda where Dylan was playing with a kitten in one scene, then the ship started throwing people around in classic Rodenberry style, and the episode ended 40 minutes later with no hint about where the cat ended up.

And on Ripley's, one of those stories about a guy driving down a country road and ending up with four feet of rebar sticking out of his skull. Except that there were no bridges or trees or anything -- his medical story was great, but I wanna know where the projectile came from!

Now to leave a loose end of my own ...

around the block

There's a place in town where the propane trucks drive on the wrong side of the road. Witnessed 3 times now. Near a very flammable lumber yard.

Was walking around the block, pretending to be fit, and some neighbors were sitting out front of their house with a barbecue going ... except that it smelled like Band-aids.

Last night just before 9 there was a luminous blob of goo in the sky. Another launch from Vandenberg, about 150 miles north of here. Some kind of spy satellite. Yay, the world needs more spying.

Tonight we found someone's wallet, a big fat shiny thing strangely devoid of cash and credit cards. Found some contact info, called her, she's already making it a pain in the ass to return the thing to her. then she'll probably accuse us of stealing her money. I wonder if it's worth it trying to help folks anymore.

I got $10 for filling out an interminable survey about how biased the news media appears to be. Oddly, people trust the internet more, even though any given page is just as likely to be complete fiction. And now, people trust blogs more than the internet in general (recent blurb in Science magazine). Is it because blogs are more personal, and people never lie or make shit up when they're speaking to you in confidence? Apparently there are about 11 million blogs now, with a new blog created every second. Talk about hopping on the bandwagon. At what point does copying everyone else become the height of lameness? Digital sheep. Baaaa.

Unfuture chronicle?

Well, the blog went and mutated on me. I don't spend as much time pondering the future, since I can barely keep up with the present day. And much of the present day is distractingly weird and unbelievable, so that's where the flow is.

In a way, it's about weird viewpoints. And not the kind of "viewpoint" you see on the news, which is just people stuck with their own opinions of things. I'm talking about "viewpoint" in terms of where you put your mental camera and look at things. Looking down from the ceiling is a fresh viewpoint, especially if there's a ceiling fan.

What is "weird"? All we can really say about it is ... it's a weird word. After all, there's that pesky rule:

"'I' before 'E' except after 'C'."

Anyone remember the second part?

"Unless pronounced like 'A' as in 'neighbor' or 'weigh'."

I don't remember if there's a third part. If not, it should say,

"Except of course for 'weird', which is just plain 'weird'."

And that's how it is. I don't spend all day trying to be weird. I just sit here open to possibilities, and I don't discard them just because they're a little bit odd.

Finally, I've been staying on the light side. Silly bits. Since I'm sick to death of hearing about crime, I've nixed the "Underworld" part of the blog. It's now my personal "Unfuture Chronicle".

"Meet the new boss ... same as the old boss." (love that song!)

Weirds of wisdom

Things overheard or almost said out loud recently ...

You can't do #2 on a golf course.

Did his business card actually say, "Strawberry Orgasm Engineer"?

The problem with burning your trash, if it's full of cat poo, is that the nearest teenagers will complain that it smells like barf.

The castle was old, dark, and backlit in an ominous way, with three kinds of celery growing in a small patch right out front by the plastic gnome.

Meet Pus Bucket, the rather mean ogre.

I wouldn't say his hair is greasy, but the only thing missing are the croutons. (Okay - this was from Kolchak, the Night Stalker. He had some great sarcastic zingers, didn't he?)

Quit staring at those girls, they're nothing but trouble. Here's a paper towel already ... go wash behind your ears.

I think back to a lunchroom at a big company in Iowa ... everyone was complaining that if the corn doesn't grow fast enough, their marijuana plants could be seen from a mile away.

And the freakish PHP error of the year:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM on line 0 of ...

Yeah, that's what life is like right now.

Gerald Ford.

s'not funny already

We were driving home from somewhere odd. About four hours out of Paducah, we saw a curious sign at the side of the road. "World's Largest Booger - next exit." Now, who could resist that?

It turned out to be a monstrous thing in a glass case at the back of a convenience store. It even showed signs of intelligence -- when the caretaker pulled out a plastic separator, the thing would navigate through a small wooden maze and then the man would reward it with a few sprinkles from a cardboard tin labeled "POLLEN".

There was a donation bucket by the door. The guy asked us each to spit into the bucket as we leave. It was once of those things you probably shouldn't ask about, but I asked anyway. The guy said that once the bucket was filled, he'd tip it over, and the contents would shamble off into the wilderness and later run for Congress.

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dreams are funny. you just have to let them do their thing.

comically, I was coming down with a cold that night. and the maze thing was a weird anecdote I'd read about years before, showing that slime molds can navigate small wooden mazes looking for food. my brain is apparently a crock pot just waiting for spuds.