Daily Archives: February 19, 2012

As I stumble…

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I am a big, big fan of Internet phenom and time drain of the Gods, StumbleUpon. If you are not familiar with it, it’s basically a little toolbar with a magic button that you click and then it takes you to something random and awesome that another StumbleUpon user has submitted and which lots of yet more users have given a “thumbs up”.

Add in the fact that it only sends you places that match categories you choose yourself, and what it basically boils down to is a wonderful “show me something I will like” button.

The results are not one hundred percent, but they are not far off. I heart that little button very much. And it’s super addictive. You can sit there and click it for hours. Trust me!

This morning, I decided I was in a video mood, and told it to just send me to videos.

And before long, I had a bunch of videos I wanted to show you! Cool, huh?

So here we go! Let’s start with that crowd (and me) pleased, cute animal tricks!

Eye Of The Walrus

Question : How do you make your boring old Seaworld type show hip, cool, and awesome?

Answer : classic movie references!

Is that not solid gold entertainment? Total home run… it is funny, cute, and hip all at once. Out of the park, baby. Killer.

You know it’s brilliant because it creates what has to be one of the greatest audience reactions ever, the “revelation to laughter and applause at the same time”. The moment they realize what is going on, they are laughing and clapping. You just know that if you can get a reaction like that, your audience is going to remember that performance for a long time, and what more can you want as an entertainer?

Plus, of course, the walrus is a rather absurd looking animal, and lends itself easily to comedy.

Unlike, say, the majestic unicorn.

When Myths Can Sing

Juicy Fruit gum came up with what I think is a completely brilliant bit of viral marketing… the godo king, that is, the kind that actually creates something worth sharing and hence adds value.

Of course, I might be biased, because I am about to share it with you. But seriously… check this:

Just imagine losing your phone and having someone sending you that just when you are feeling really low! Would that not just make your day?

And I am very impressed with the quality. The puppet looks great, and the puppeteer obviously knows what he is doing. The set is amazingly rich and detailed. Everything about it just looks fantastic. The music is a little corny, but with that much charm going for it, who cares?

And they have a whole whack of them. There’s one for Happy Birthday, another for Let’s Hang Out This Weekend, and quite intriguingly, I Like You More Than A Friend.

You just know that one will make for an interesting How We Met story some day.

“Well, your father send me this unicorn that talks like Barry White… ”

Awesome stuff, Juicy Fruit!

Of course, some people do not need a whole elaborate setup to entertain you.

When Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

All they need is a deck of cards, a volunteer from the audience, a sharpie, and a pack of smokes.

Now, I was a little conflicted about whether I would link that vid for you folks. Not because it does not deserve it, exactly.

It’s just that I hate cigarettes and find them incredibly gross, and so I was not sure I could stomach sharing something so nicotine intensive with you nice people.

But this guy, Tom Mullica, is just so damn talented that I could not resist. His patter, his facial expressions, his audience rapport, and his absolutely exquisite timing all make me really like this guy, even if the whole cigarette thing grosses me out.

When I watched the clip, I was hoping against all reason that he was using sleight of hand, but no, clearly he is beyond superb at the always a little dubious “swallow” magic, where the magician learns to partially swallow, store, and retrieve objects at will.

Including lit cigs. Eww.

Still, I have to admire the guy’s showmanship. He really knows what he is doing. I tip my imaginary hat to his skill.

Because then I don’t need toilet paper. LOL. Eww, but… LOL.

And finally, a guy who has kept many of us entertained over the years…

A Savage Obsession

… especially those of us who like science and explosions!

You would not think someone talking about their obsession with making their own dodo skeleton and their very own Maltese Falcon would be so damn interesting and compelling, but when it’s Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame and he injects it all with his unique brand of breathless, infectious enthusiasm, you just can’t help but be swept along for the ride.

In many way, I envy his ability to be obsessed with things. I seem to lack that ability. All my fellow nerds seem to have their pet obsessions, but I have never operated like that. I tend to sort of take what floats my way and not aggressively pursue any one particular interest or another for very long.

Partly, that is just my passive personality. Another part of it is my tendency to resist anything that has no obvious end point.

But mostly, I think it is the way I go through live at right angles to everyone else. I drift sideways through channels, never staying in one for all that long, because I am more interested in what is going on in the next channel over.

It gives me a very broad point of view, but shallow compared to people who have certain things they know a great deal about.

I guess I am just into a little of everything. A dedicated generalist to the end.

So who knows what I will post next?

Here comes the rain again

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Or rather, there it goes.

Meant to write something a little more substantial and meaningful today (and for that matter, earlier) but my usual bad weather is clouding my mind and making it hard for any of my thoughts to stay dry enough to write down, so I am afraid all you are going to get tonight is a rain-swollen stream of consciousness and whatever thoughts have managed to find shelter, or at least a leaf to cling to while they float downstream.

I am talking, of course, about my bad sleep, and incidentally, my tendency to really put a metaphor through its paces.

I knew this was coming. I had been “up” for too long lately for there not to be a period of the deep dark intense sleep to follow. This is not fatalism, merely a sense of how things balance out.

So before I took a nap this afternoon, I said to myself “Well… here comes the flood. ”

And came it did. I seem to have this kind of bad sleep most often when I am asleep in the late afternoon. Don’t know why. Perhaps it has something to do with being asleep when the sun goes down. Or maybe that is simply my natural sleep schedule, sleeping in the late afternoon. Hard to be sure.

So as you might expect, I am all tried, incoherent, confused, dehydrated, and vaguely depressed right now. This too shall pass, I know. It always does. It always feels like it will go on forever, but usually I spring back fairly rapidly from it, in the long view.

It’s just that life sort of sucks until I do, and the obviously corollary to “time flies when you are having fun” is “time drags when you are miserable”, and hence, these periods of ill weather in my brain seem like they last a lot longer than they do.

It is the inability to concentrate that bothers me the most. It makes it so hard to get anything done. Even writing a simple diary entry like this one takes a certain amount of focus and attention, and when I am all scrambled up like this, where I have to watch that I don’t fall asleep in the middle of a sentence…… wait, what was I talking about? Whatever.

Point is, these times suck.

Life wise, nothing really special going on. Feeling the financial pinch due to recent expense adjustments pretty hard, and that certainly does not help things. It is not like I was rolling in the green before the recent reckoning, and losing another eighty dollars a month is just about a death blow for me financially, but somehow, I keep moving on.

Phew, almost feel asleep at the keys again. This shit is getting really old really fast, and I am not even half way done this diary entry yet. Rarely has a thousand words seemed like so many to me. And all I ca do is just keep plugging along and sooner or later, the storm will pass.

Let me tell you about my tasty if strang soup experience last week.

(Audience : “Oh boy, tell us now! TELL US NOW!”)

Maybe the free coffee for people in the lineup was a bad idea. OK, I’m telling it, I’m telling it!

When I was doing my post therapy grocery shopping last Tuesday, I decided I would pick up three potatoes and an onion, and try out my crock pot again.

Recipes? Who needs recipes? Add stuff and water, turn on, come back when it’s soup.

SO I pick up what look to me to be three really big but otherwise normal potatoes, and take them home with me, thinking nothing of it.

But when I decide to cook my little recipe, I discover something. Specifically, I discover that the “big potatoes” I picked up have very firm orange flesh.

Yup, I had gotten me three sweet potatoes instead of the usual white or yellow potatoes that I was expecting. Now it all made sense. That is why they were so big and heavy,and that is why they were not in the usual part of the produce section, but in the smaller section with the specialty items.

That would be a great big duh from big ol inattentive me, that’s for sure. I just grabbed three of the first things that seemed vaguely potato like to me, and did not even read the sign that presumably would have told me this was not a normal potato.

I even recall thinking “Wow, they are making potatoes really big these days. Must be genetic modificaion or something like that. ”

Uh, nope, ya big dope. It’s not a normal potato at all!

And I have no experience with sweet potatoes. I have never eaten them except as yam fries. (Are yams the same thing as sweet potatoes, or what?

But I figured, what the heck, so I just went ahead as planned. And it turned out quite nicely! All that I put in there was chopped sweet potato and onion, plus Italian spice mix and garlic powder and a little sel de mer, and yet a few hours later, I had some very nice soup.

The broth had a surprisingly dark color, almost black, but what the heck. It tasted good, and that is the main job for all food. And all this without starting with a soup stock!

And speaking of soup stock, in what I thought was quite an inspired move, I took some of the leftover soup stock and used it as part of the base for a batch of rice in the rice cooker, thus transforming the rice into a rice pilaf of the previous day’s soup.

And that turned out pretty nice too.

So as a cook, I am pleased with myself.

And as a writer, I am pretty pleased with how these are the last couple dozen words of my daily dosage, and how very soon now, I will be able to go back to sleep.

Seeya later folks!