Category: Life

I know, you’re saying, Brian J., you Lothario, did you woo that beautiful wife of yours with an awesome mixed tape back in the day?

You bet I did, son. You bet I did.

I found this in the cassette holders that adorn her office walls. The label, “Lil Didde Mix”, refers to the Didde-Glaser printing press I was operating at the time.

Something like fifteen years later, my taste in music hasn’t changed. My taste in a woman, either.

So Zero Hedge warns about the impact of changing diets on the global food supply:

Beginning with Malthus’ warning to the world and the Great Irish famine, David McWilliams (of Punk Economics) provides his typically succinct, profoundly fascinating, and graphically pleasing insights on the state of the global food economy. “What happens when hungry people panic?” is the question McWilliams poses; “they move to other parts of the world,” he rhetorically answers, adding that this could well be the story of the next 50 years on Earth as the rock of the insatiable demand of seven billion (soon-to-be-ten-billion) people smashes into the hard place of the planet’s limited resources to produce that one thing that keeps us all alive – food. The food dilemma is more complex though as it is really an energy dilemma – one that is not going away (on the downside). On the bright side, Malthus’ nightmare has yet to occur thanks to the ingenuity of humans. However, if all the world’s seven billion people consumer as much as the average American, it would require the resources of over five planet Earths to sustainably support all of us. So either the rest-of-the-world eats less to allow Americans to eat more or we are stuck! But it’s not just how much we eat, but what we eat…

They’re talking about one of those whiteboard cartoon YouTube videos which I haven’t yet had time to watch.

If only those guys at Zero Hedge made the mistake of reading the letters to the editor, where the real SCIENCE! occurs. I made the mistake of glancing at the Wall Street Journal letters to the editor page yesterday, where the normal lunacy occurs with bigger words: Organic Farms Can Feed the World:

While most studies show that certain organic crops, such as corn, would have slightly lower yields and lower total production than conventional crops, the studies also show organic farming can feed the world, and in developing countries organic methods would increase food production and self-sufficiency.

Both of these things cannot be true. Well, they cannot be true unless there’s an unspoken premise in the second that the world eat organic bean burritos per day and give up their steaks and chicken. Which is not so unspoken in other parts of the movement.

But one of the things about organic farming and sustainable living lifestyles is that people who embrace them already have a pretty high standard of living to maintain and can afford to tut-tut the people who shop at Walmart to get a bit of what they get at Crate and Barrel.

(Zero Hedge link via Instapundit.)

Working as an independent IT contractor from my house leads me to some weird weeks, such as this one, which seemed to be composed of four Mondays.

Monday: Seemed like Monday for obvious reasons, as it was a workday.
Tuesday: Seemed like Monday because the previous night saw late-running recreation, and then I had to work.
Wednesday: Seemed like Monday because it was the first workday after the break which was not a break, but other people were in the offices.
Thursday: Seemed like Monday because the kids went back to school, so I had to prepare them lunch and whatnot before they left.

Maybe tomorrow we can make it five for five. Tomorrow is Friday, isn’t it?

Children, do what the little bags inside your games say and don’t put them over your heads.

Do not do what the little bags in the games actually do:

Only the hippos can play spaceman with the plastic bags.

So the National Weather Service had a little extra budget extracted from the invented money of the Fed, and they decided to engage in a bit of weather self-importance inflation of their own by naming winter storms.

Frankly, I look forward to the day when they give names to individual summer breezes. A’ course, they won’t go very far through the alphabet here in the Ozarks, but still. Summer Breeze Aidan can cool me for a second some July.

that ain’t me, babe, in the image for the UPS Store mailbox services:

I wear a black fedora.

And I don’t wear the damn brim up like a native hipster.

Please, be sensitive in your writing and right-thinking, and do not use the offensive term indie any more as an adjective, such as in indie movie.

They’re Native Hipster movies.

Highlights from Christmas 2012 at Nogglestead:

• Ammunition was given as a gift, ammunition was received as a gift.
  This….is….. SPRINGFIELD! Of course it was. Earlier this year, I accompanied my mother-in-law to the gun range so she could become familiar with her .38, so I got her a box of .38 rounds to encourage her to go in 2013. She got me a box, too, to encourage me to come with her. Her gift to me came in a bit of trickery; I had asked for a woodworking router for Christmas, and I unwrapped an Asus wireless router box, at which point my wife said, “Mom, that’s the wrong kind of router!” and they played it up as though it was a mistake. After they led me on for a bit, my mother-in-law told me to open the box, and inside was another wrapped box with a distinctive jingle of brass. At which point, my wife and I laughed harder because we had a box about the same size for her.
   
• Mizzou Leia
   
• My boys discovered that they could combine the marbles from their new Hungry Hungry Hippos game with the electronic car launcher from their new Hot Wheels set to create a devastatingly effective marble launching siege engine. That one chimp with the bone from the beginning of 2001? My direct ancestor, brother.

I hope yours was just as good.

In the mail today, I received two t-shirts from organizations I’ve recently supported. They’re a juxtaposition of sorts:

A public radio station and the National Review. I’m pretty lucky they did not come into contact with each other and destroy my mailbox.

I was going to proudly not bid on this auction because I expected it would be one of the later editions. But according to a seller answer to a question, it’s straight Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. eBay auction: Play D&D at Detroit’s Immortal ConFusion with 8 Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors!

Join 8 Fantasy & Science Ficiton authors for a classic game of Dungeons & Dragons at Detroit’s very own Immortal ConFusion this January

Join eight other fantasy authors in a classic game of D&D at Immortal ConFusion this coming January! The players include some of the best in the fantasy world: Pat Rothfuss, Peter V. Brett, Diana Rowland, Jim C. Hines, Mary Robinette Kowal and Sam Sykes. Authors Myke Cole and Saladin Ahmed will DM the game.

Of course, it’s still in Detroit, so there’s my reason for not buying myself one of those for Christmas.

But what’s up with the $7.15 shipping on it?

Also on the heavy commercial rotation during football games is this gem:

I work in QA, so I’m not going to be an early adopter of any computerized gee-gaws inserted into my body.

But I can’t help seeing that infusion of technology into the human body and think about how something like the cyborgization of your cellular phone and body might give the government warrantless access to your body.

No, thanks. Cuh-reepy, and that’s saying a lot coming from someone creepy.

Watching football the last couple of weeks, I’ve gotten a heavy dose of this particular commercial:

Message: Chinese laptops make espionage easy.

Really? I guess Lenovo’s exciting ad agency doesn’t remember this:

The United States government is planning to spend roughly $13M USD on computers from Lenovo. The company, famous for buying up IBM’s PC manufacturing arm, is working on a deal with the US government to produce roughly 16,000 computers. Just recently, the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission (USCC) has requested that Lenovo be probed for any concerns about possible spying, eavesdropping or worse.

The supposed problem presented by the USCC is that the 16,000 computers are being built by a Chinese-mainland company. The USCC argues that a foreign intelligence like that of the Communist Party of China (CPC) can use its power to get Lenovo to equip its machines with espionage devices. Lenovo has strongly declined that it is involved in any such activities.

We bought a box of the miniature cereal boxes as a treat for the boys. It’s like a hotel minibar for children, and it yields the same gluttonous results.

My beautiful wife, who was once the Health Minister of the Alliance of Free Blogs, was astonished. “That’s six hundred calories,” she said.

Well, yes. They are boy children, and they consume about two thirds of a box of the new and improved 12 ounce boxes of cereal each morning, so, yeah. Wait until they get about twelve and fourteen.

Good god, man, the United States is an imperialist nation.

You don’t see us measuring things in kilometers, do you?

So I was discussing homonyms and homophones with the lad today, and I started thinking about words that are both homophones and homonyms. That is, words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings for the same spellings.

Speaking to a six-year-old, an early example that arises is butt which has two meanings (to hit with the head, the backside) and has the same pronunciation as a word spelled differently (but).

So I’ve been kind of zoning out of conversations and whatnot over the last two days as I run through words in my head. I got row (roe). My beautiful wife contributed ball (bawl).

A bit of a word on the homonyms: I disqualify slang words or meanings that are obviously related, like dough (doe), where dough’s meaning for money is because it uses bread as a metaphor or tie (Thai) because the men’s neckwear is called that because you tie it. Although one could argue that the Twin Ion Engine acronym is a different meaning, but it’s a fictional thing and an acronym and not a proper noun, which is okay. You see, the rules are in flux.

Sorry for injecting that virus into your brain’s clock cycles.

I guess I’m on a diet since I bought thin-sliced bacon by mistake. Some percentage fewer calories than the thick-sliced bacon I normally buy.

Why, it’s almost like health food.

I see Roberta X.’s moon over Roseholme Cottage and raise her one moonset over the Jones place:

I didn’t have time to mount my camera on a tripod for the shot as I didn’t have much time between deciding to take a photograph, getting the camera, and getting the photo, so it really doesn’t capture it adequately.

On the other hand, add this to one of my accomplishments in the 1:15 for this morning. If you can call it an accomplishment.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Ms. X.

Hey, readers of The Adventures of Roberta X., I have a novel available called John Donnelly’s Gold that’s exactly like I Work on a Starship, except it’s not in first person, the main characters don’t actually have a job, there are no starships involved, and it’s a comic heist novel where four laid off IT employees seek revenge on the CEO of the company that laid them off. So it’s exactly the same in that it’s self-published. Roberta X. herself said of the novel, “it, too is quite an adventure and one that will have you wondering how it all turns out until the very end.” Also, it’s the only place in the world where the names Brian J. Noggle and Larry Correia are mentioned together unless my nephew talks about his annual Christmas gift.