Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Shitty game still generating feedback

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For those of you who may not have read any of my previous posts about it, I made a silly game in Java several years ago. It is called Lightz Out. I ripped off everything about the game directly from a handheld toy called Lights Out, which was manufactured by Tiger toys. When I say that I ripped everything off I mean it quite literally. I copied all fifty of the boards (which was quite a challenge, as it required that I solve them all), the audio on the applet was recorded directly from the game, I even programmed the same first two moves for help.

I did that all just to see if I could. I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination. In fact I knew so little about how to do it that everything that happens in the game is handled in the paint method. That meant that I actually programmed probably at least a thousand lines of code that would not have been necessary had I actually known what I was doing. But, I did make it work, and people are still playing it, and emailing me about it. I doubt that will happen for very much longer though, as even on my PC it is no longer playable, since everything is happening in the paint method, and since this computer is so much faster than the one I used to program it, the lines all blur when I try to screen it into the picture, and they never come back. I guess if I was viewing it in larger resolution that wouldn’t happen, but even at that I would probably go blind from the incessant flickering.

Usually when people email me about the applet it is because they have to program something for a computer science course in college and want to see the source code. I am almost embarrassed to send it to them, even when I do it is with a huge caveat. They still probably just look at it and wonder what in the hell I was thinking when I tried to do it the way I did, that is what I think when I look at it most of the time.

The most recent email I got about the game was yesterday. This one was unique in that the person enjoyed the game, but thought that I had made it far too easy. He was wanting to know if I had plans to add more difficult boards. I sent him a lengthy email that basically said no. The entire point of the applet was to see if I could make an exact online copy of the handheld game. I succeeded in that (well to a point, as it doesn’t seem to work all that well with faster computers) and have no intentions to ever look at the source code again, it depresses me.

The next thing that I decided to program in java was a cribbage game. I got as far getting images for all of the cards into it and the initial deal. It was at precisely that point that I realized I would have to program AI for it so that you could play it alone. This meant two things, first the computer would only be as good as I am at cribbage, as I would be programming his choices based on the cards he was holding. Second, there are 14,658,134,400 different ways the six cards can be dealt to the computer, that is a lot of possible hands to program. Even after assigning numbers to the cards based on suit, possible 15s, possible flush and possible run, then making it line up the cards based on the highest possible point value, I was still left with millions of possible combinations to program. Not that I am a quitter or anything, I didn’t actually give up on it, no, no, I have just put it on the back burner for the last five years… I wonder if I actually even have a copy of the source to that one anywhere, the unfinished code for that one was at least five times the size of the finished code for lightz out.

Let this be a lesson to me you; never decide to become a programmer if you have never had a day of training in your life. It will save you a lot of headaches and wasted time.

Proud to be an American?

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So it turns out that the state of Mississippi is no longer racist. Really. Check out the headline:

Ex-KKK Member Convicted in 1964 Killings

So, forty-one years after the crime they finally came up with enough evidence to convict one of the killers! That is great news! Unfortunately that is not the news at all. According to the article the same man was tried for the much lesser crime of violating the civil liberties of the victims in 1967 and walked away without a conviction.

I know this all happened a long time ago, at a point where the south was still pretty pissed off about the abolition of slavery and certainly not ready to treat people of color as equals. I will go one step further to say that I don’t think they are any better today than they were in the ’60s. That being said, you would think that there was some sort of concrete proof in this trial, right? Nope. Most of the people who testified in the ’67 trial are dead so their statements, from the court records in that trial, were the only thing that it took to convince a contemporary jury of his guilt.

The thing that really pisses me off is that the asshole isn’t being put to death, in fact he was not even convicted of murder. Why? It seems that, ” Killen, a bald figure with owlish bifocals, sat impassively in his wheelchair, an oxygen tube up his nose, as he listened to the verdict.” Yeah, he is an old dude, he used to be in the KKK, he killed (or had a hand in killing) three people (two white, one black) but, he is/was a preacher, therefore it never really happened? I guess the jury must have conceded that it did happen but would the charges have been reduced to manslaughter if he happened to be younger, or, heaven forbid, a man of color?

Another wonderful quote comes from some guy that doesn’t live anywhere near Mississippi (like me), but who also doesn’t seem to know the story, “On the one hand, this guy needs to be convicted. And on the other hand, the state needed to present better evidence,” said Paprocki, 54, of Philadelphia. Great sentiment, except that they had all of the evidence when the thing went to trial in 1967, since they had to use the testimony of dead people to get a conviction today.

I am just a bit skeptical about whether Mississippi is really trying to show that they are now an equal races state. If they really are, why didn’t they try the guy again years ago, you know, before he appeared to be a decrepit old man? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, they were figuring that no jury would convict someone in that condition?

Would you, if you are/were (a la Michael Jackson) not white, be comfortable walking down the streets in any town in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia or the rest of the deeply racist states after dark? I for one know that I wouldn’t be. Hell, I might not even be safe since I am 1/4 Native American, makes for darker skin you know.

As George W. Bush would likely say, “God bless America, and all the white people who live here.”

Following suit

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Seeing the ease with which Flux over at BlackChampagne was able to integrate a blogger script into his existing page, I thought I would give it a try as well. It turns out that the ease of which I speak is not really easy, more a long and labor intensive game of guess and check (within reason) until things look more or less like you want them to.

I lost a few early attempts due to sheer idiocy, but I think this version is pretty stable and looks almost exactly like the previous page. Time will tell, as always. If you are reading this it is because I asked you to look at the page and tell me if you noticed any problems, if you do notice any problems (not counting the date being centered in the table instead of on the page type problems) please do comment about it.

Hopefully I will be confident enough with this setup to get it activated on the front page tomorrow. Notice the sheer confidence in that statement?

Hollywood movie porn names?; Onion horoscopes; Mom’s PC

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• This is something that I have been kicking around, inside my mind, for at least a month. Are film makers really trying to get Hollywood to start giving out Oscars for the worst named film? The summer releases this year seem to indicate that yes, they are. Or at least my assumption is based on the titles of said films.

Cinderella Man is the first up. It is a gay porn take on the original Cinderalla story. The prince eventually tracks down his lover, based on the size of his cock ring? No, it turns out it is a story about boxing during the depression. I know that you can only name one boxing movie Rocky, but come on, Cinderella Man? What the hell were they thinking? Of course the critical acclaim and box office gross for this movie seem to show that everyone other than me doesn’t think it is gay porn, I will attribute that directly to their lack of cynicism.

Next up is a movie called The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assume that this is supposed to be one of those chick flicks where women cry a lot. I don’t know, I don’t care. The title implies, to me at least, that the sisterhood that they speak of is not friendship, it is lesbianism. The traveling pants is a euphemism which implies that the women take turns being the dominant one.

Yes, I know that this is a very chauvinistic point of view, but it is so not my fault. The movie industry named the movies, they should have known that calling a man Cinderella might not be understood as a movie about a prize fighter trying to keep his family alive, and fighting only to meet that end. Similarly, using the word “Sisterhood” in the title of a movie sort of implies lesbianism, and when you throw in the “traveling pants” part of the title it really seals the deal.

I am certainly not a person that hates homosexuals, that being thin ice to skate when you have family members that are of that demographic, but were there no other titles available? Say, like, Dude That Beats the Shit Out Of Everyone, Helping To support His Family, well, that title seems a bit long, how about, “Poverty to Prince”? Why did Cinderella’s name have to come into this? With the crying chick movie it is not so easy. I can tell you right upfront, however, that most of the women would never fit into those pants even a year after graduation. Had they chosen a small necklace, or something of the sort, that would have been far more believable, and it would have added the bonus of being plausible. By that I mean that the women might continue to send a piece of jewelry around, while the pants that don’t fit would go into the recycle bin.

But, the big question remains. Which is the worst named movie of summer 2005?

It is Thursday, June 9, 2005

• I have been reading The Onion for quite a while, yet have never linked to it. Consider that situation remedied.

If you have never visited the site you should know that it is a must read. It is updated weekly, on Wednesday’s I think, with new content. It is news much in the same way that that George W. Bush is a level-headed leader with America’s best interest at heart: It is utter bullshit, but frequently hilarious. Some of the features may seem a bit campy, but when compared to what passes for actual news these days it’s not really that bad.

The horoscopes are probably my favorite part of the whole site. Not because they are always funny, not because they are usefull, but because they are never vague references that could apply to anyone. There is never anything like “Venus is passing the shadow of Mercury, therefore a difficult situation in your life will become a bit less difficult.” No, no, they are pretty damn specific. I have chosen a couple of samples from this week’s horoscopes to give you an idea:

Leo: (July 23—Aug. 22)
You must learn to stop screaming “Rape! Rape!” at the top of your lungs. Everyone can see perfectly well what you’re doing without the grandstanding narration.
Aries: (March 21—April 19)
You’ll be forced to run more than 50 miles by some cruel bastard who’ll rig your hat with a fiendish device consisting of a candy bar, a piece of string, and a six-foot stick.

The rest of the site follows the same lines. If you have never been, you must go. Funny, funny stuff.

It is Sunday, June 5, 2005

Mom’s New PC

My mother finally broke down and (with a bit of help from me) bought a new pc. It turns out that even people who don’t spend an enormous amount of time online still want their machine to run faster. In her case, having a 366mhz processor and 192megs of ram, it was a fairly inexpensive venture, well in the grand scheme of things anyway.

I went through Dell to order her new machine, hoping to get the cheapest model available (as they have tv spots with 299 dollar computers). Turns out that there is a 99 dollar shipping charge on their pc’s if it is under 400 dollars, so I was forced to make upgrades. Which is good, I guess, since if you buy 100 bucks in upgrades you don’t have to pay for the shipping. The upgrades that I made were doubling the RAM (to 512mb) and adding speakers (so that she could still have sound on her old pc). Of course the advertised 299 dollar PC didn’t have an upgrade option on the RAM, so I had to use a 349 dollar model as a base. After doubling the RAM and adding the speakers, it was over 400 dollars, which qualified for free shipping…Golden…

There is one tiny thing that I misled my mother about though. I was trying to get her a pc for about 300 dollars, and failed by about 100. Yet, the pc that I bought for her came with a free 15″ flat panel monitor upgrade. I asked the sales guy and he said that it would cost 70 dollars for it if you were to buy it outright, so, I just knocked 70 bucks off of the total that mom owes me for her new pc. I was in need of a new monitor anyway, and I could get another one for the same price I am paying on her PC, so it’s really a wash (I also gifted her the 13.2″ monitor that we had been using on our old pc). Yet, I didn’t tell her about it in advance, and I kind of feel bad. But, if she wants that flat panel monitor, I can get it for her for the 70 bucks that I knocked off of the price when I bought it for her, so, no big deal.

I suck

The first week of the new posting type jobby has passed, yet I never added an update on any other day than Sunday. That means that there is no way I could possibly know if I like it better or worse than the old style. Oh well, I am about the only one that reads this anyway.

Decimate used incorrectly; Meta blogging

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This is just a little bitch that I have had for the better part of a decade. Why in the hell do people use the term ‘decimate’ to talk about mass destruction or large scale loss of life? I learned the word back in high school, it means (meant?) to eliminate every 10th soldier as a punishment for treason. The reason it sticks in my mind so well is that I envisioned a line of soldiers, standing at attention, watching as a guy counted each one, then lopped the head off of the tenth one; a game of duck, duck, goose gone wrong. I remember thinking that I would have tried to start counting guys between the executioner and me, then make sure I didn’t fall into the 10th percentile, if you know what I mean.

The word has been bastardized to the point that Jeff Probst, the host of the CBS show Survivor, used it to describe one tribe losing seven out of eight players. While none of the contestants actually died (being the first reason that the usage was wrong), they lost 7/8ths of their team. I am no math major, but I really think that 7/8ths is greater than 1/10th.

It turns out that I am the jackass though, to a point. It seems that the term ‘decimate’ is now recognized as a term to describe massive loss of life. You can find a pretty average definintion of the word here. I linked to this particular dictionary only because they have the etymology of the word, thus showing that it was never meant to describe the loss of 87.5% of your group (as Probst said on Survivor). It does say that the word is accepted for descriptions of massive loss of life, but it also says that any other use is not supported.

So, in order to say that you have ‘decimated’ anything, you must either kill every 10th guy in a group or wipe out millions of Jews in Europe, any other usage is WRONG! Which leads nicely into the crux of why I make the argument right now (since it has been pissing me off for a decade or more). Some guy on a tragedy highlight reel said that a speedboat, which turned into pieces as small as kindling when it crashed into a wall, had been decimated. It was not decimated, it was destroyed to be sure, You could probably say that it had been eviscerated, since it did throw all of its inner parts out during the crash, you could say that it had been demolished, which I think is the best description. That boat was certainly not decimated.

If there had been exactly ten boats in the race, and if another, much larger, boat had singled out that particular boat and killed it, then I would say that the boat was decimated. If there had been two million boats in the race, and if another, much larger, boat killed 40-60% of them, then I would say that they had been decimated (reluctantly though. The word has a specific meaning.).

That is all for now. Any new posts today will show up above this one. As always, Email me with any thoughts. I do love the feedback.

New Site Format Starts Now

Well, as mentioned in a previous post, today is the day that I am going to start my new updating system. This will mean very little to you, as when you enter the page you only ever see the index page, regardless of how I handle the updating portion of it. What it will mean, however, is that there will be every post that I care to write during the week on the main page (newer entries being on top of course), for your enjoyment?

What this means to me is a hell of a lot less work. The real reason that my posts have dwindled over the past few months is actually due to the amount of time it takes me to add the old pages to the archives, make sure the links work and the such. Of course if I were using the movable type that would all be taken care of for me, that is a different story entirely. At some point I will probably catch up on the last few months in the archives, giving a brief description of each, after which there will simply be a link to the weekly posts. I may put a description on the ones that I think are important, but I am still not sure on that one. I will use horizontal lines to end subjects and bold print to start new ideas.

You steal the pizza, you do the time

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Much like every other time I have made ultimatums regarding this site, today I had no intention of making a post, then along comes the following headline:

Elderly woman jailed over pizza delivery complaints

I can feel her pain, I really can. Pizza is made to order and then deliverd to your house. If the pizza joint doesn’t deliver then 1) they aren’t gonna have a whole hell of a lot of business, 2) They are going to rely solely on ‘walk-in’ customers, since 3) Why would you advertise in the yellow pages if people had to walk/drive to your place, while every other pizza joint on earth delivers. The woman in question, however, might have been a bit too nit-picky. (I am going to quote the whole story since it is short.)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – An 86-year-old North Carolina woman spent two nights in jail after police said she repeatedly called 911 to complain about pizza delivery.
Dorothy Densmore was charged with misusing the 911 system after she allegedly called the emergency line 20 times in about half an hour.

Densmore told police dispatchers Sunday she was angry that her local pizza parlour wouldn’t deliver to her apartment and demanded that they arrest the restaurant owner.

Instead, they arrested her.

But the five-foot, 98-pound woman wasn’t about to go quietly. She scratched, kicked and bit the hand of the police officer who came to arrest her, said officer Mandy Giannini.

Densmore is also charged with resisting arrest.

While it’s rare for someone to be charged for abusing the emergency line, Densmore kept calling even after she was asked to stop, said Giannini.

Giannini said the woman also complained to police that someone at the shop called her a “crazy old coot.”

Okay, seriously, the woman is well into her eighties (senility has probably kicked in a long time ago), but why didn’t she just call a Dominoes or Pizza Hut? If you call the loca pizza joint, and they say that they don’t deliver, they simply don’t deliver. Maybe if she was 22 and offering sex for a pizza delivery (and if she was you should be quite suspicious of S.T.D’s or A.I.D.S.) then the guy would think about making an exception.

The problem here is that the woman took on the whole ‘I am old, do my bidding’ persona. It might work with her family, but there is no sapient being on this planet that will do as she asks just because she is old…It seems to work inversely, in fact. Think about the options here, on the one hand you have the old lady that is mad that she can’t get a pizza delivered to her. On the other hand you have a nuclear (no it is not NUCULAR!) physicist who is trying to design a more efficient nuclear engine. Which person is more likely to get the pizza delivered to them? If you guessed Grandma you would be wrong.

Grandma needs to either put it back into her pants or show why she is the better bet for the long term. Unfortunately, Grandma just wants pizza, but they don’t deliver.

Old people suck. They vote Republican, almost invariably, then wonder why they actually have to pay for their meds. I guess, in a perfect world, once you are either diagnosed with a ‘condition’, or become really sick, you should definitely move to Sweden. Either that or vote for the guy that wants to help you. Never happens though…That damn, elusive, perfect world.

Police; Meta blogging; taxes in DC

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Yeah, it has been a while. I would like to spout out various excuses, but I can’t seem to do it. The act of simply posting a new update on this site takes me a lot of time and that is time spent without reward. It turns out that I don’t have nearly as much to say as I thought I did when I began this little venture. Who knew?

I did look into the possibility of going to a Movable Type format a couple of months ago, but I didn’t really like the features on the free version, and if the paid version is not better than the free version by one thousand times, there is no way I am going to pay for it.

The key features of movable type appear to be its auto-archive and cgi based feedback system. Of course since I never get any feedback, and don’t care enough about my old posts to take the time to make them searchable (or click-able for that matter) I really doubt that anyone who reads this page would. The free version that I tried allowed you to set a font, and that was about the extent of its features. Not for me.

With my posts becoming less and less frequent, however, I have decided that I am (for sure this time) going to keep a running front page, which I will update whenever the hell I feel like it, and save it to disk weekly. The difference between that and what I have been doing since I started the page is small, in theory, but larger in practice. Now I am going to type some shit down here, and upload it immediately to the web page. I will also probably quit trying to archive my older posts with description of contents.

The official “Weekly Post” will be made every Sunday, small quips will be added on a daily basis, in theory. That is all going to start this Sunday, be warned. I am not sure how it is going to work out but it has to be better than my current schedule.

• Have you ever been driving down a sleepy little street that doesn’t have such luxuries as stoplights, only to nearly crash into the side of a police car? I have, happened today as a matter of fact. I was on the major street (that being the one without stop signs) merrily driving home to lunch, when, out of nowhere, a police cruiser pulled into the street ahead of me. I had to lock up the brakes to keep from hitting his car, and I guess he knew he did bad since he just waved and smiled, as opposed to stopping me for reckless driving. So it is all good, I guess.

Here is the question: If I had actually plowed into him, would I have gotten a fair trial? I was obeying every law of traffic, going the requisite 25mph, looking at the crossroads as I went. Some cop drives through a stop sign (no siren, not going very fast) and makes me have to lock up the brakes to keep from T-boning him. He is obviously at fault, but would I actually be able to plead my case? I have no doubt in my mind that if I had hit him he would have said that I was speeding and driving recklessly (which I wasn’t, else I would have hit him), yet, he was the one that drove right past a posted stop sign. The cop would have been the one that broke the law (traffic law), but you don’t really get a trial by jury on traffic offenses. I would have likely been cited for reckless endangerment, careless driving and possibly other offenses.

What really, really, really pisses me off about the whole situation is that I really wanted to go down and report him to the police. Thing is that you can’t do that in a town as small as mine, else you will be on the local police shit list for the next…well, until the end of time, really.

Humorous aside to the story is that had I actually been speeding he would have T-boned me when he drove through a posted stop sign. I bet you can name your price when the cop T-bones you.

On a similar note, I have believed all of my life that it is possible to do a “citizen’s arrest” on anyone (including police) if they break the law. That (what I am going to call an urban legend) says that if you notice a police car that is breaking traffic laws (with the red and blues off), you can flash your headlights to pull him over, detain him, force him to call another officer and cite him for his folly. I still believe that this is the law, but if you try it, good luck on driving to work tomorrow. Those so-called “stupid cops” have really good memories.

• One other random thought. There are several fundamentals of American society, one of which is “no taxation without representation”, that’s a darn good ideal. Why, though, do the residents of Washington D.C. have to pay taxes? Washington D.C. has no senators, no presence in the house of representatives, yet they pay taxes. Where is their representation? Just curious.

New refrigerator; Hearts

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We got a brand new refrigerator this week! I have never actually owned a new refrigerator, and for that matter have never actually paid for one in my entire life. The ones that I have always had have been the type that are either too small or don’t work very well, so people just give them away. As I am sure you can imagine they have not been the most effecient appliances.

We currently have two refrigerators (well, three now) that aren’t up to par. One of which is a “Sears Coldspot Frostless” model. It is a full size unit and it works just fine, for about six weeks at a time, after which you have to unplug it for a couple of days to let all of the ice defrost. It should also be noted that this particular machine (by the looks and style of it) is probably at least twenty years old. I guess that the definition of “frostless” in the ’80’s was vastly different than it is now. Or it was just a gimmick name, either way that fridge is just a huge paperweight most of the time.

The other fridge that we have is an apartment sized one with a really odd name brand. I believe it is like “admiral” or “general” or some such, it always puts me in mind of the military when I read the name. It works fabulously all the time, the problem is that it has only two shelves, and all of the bars on the door that let you put jars there are long gone. Not to mention that the freezer space can be nearly completely filled with a single bag of ice, unless it was recently defrosted, in which case, with enough pounding, you might be able to fit two bags in. This one is porbably only ten years old, but it just doesn’t work for our purposes.

The wife and I had been discussing a new refrigerator for literally a couple of years before making the decision to buy one. After the luck that we have had buying used washing machines (we have two washing machines on the patio that were bought used, both of them crapped out long before they should have), we decided the refrigerator would be a new appliance. After having ogled many refrigerators in the stores over the last couple of years, we weren’t planning to be all that picky about it, we just wanted one that didn’t smell like mold even after you bleach the fuck out of it.

I actually did have two requirements for the new refrigerator, 1) It had to be full size, 2) It needed to have an ice maker. The latter was my justification for the purchase in the first place. My wife uses a lot of ice in her drinks, which she buys at convenience stores for anywhere from $1-$1.50 a bag. The ice is usually chunky little garbage that is hardly suitable for drinks in the first place. Now, if there is an ice maker in the fridge, and particularly since I have a 5 stage, reverse osmosis water filter which the water will run through, there will be good, clean ice on hand all the time without additional purchase. That will save at least $30-$40 dollars a year on ice alone (of course I still do need to buy the parts to hook the ice maker to the water system, hopefully tomorrow).

I have never really liked Sears all that much, mostly since almost everything they sell is horribly overpriced, yet this time that is where the appliance purchase was made…Well, kind of. The purchase was actually made on the computer I am typing on right now, but it was through their website. The refrigerator a Kenmore, 18.2 cubic feet, factory ice maker, and it has free delivery, if they make good on the rebate that is.

This brings me to the point of this whole story. If you have ever shopped for a new refrigerator you will notice that there are a lot of apartment sized fridges, and some even smaller, but when it comes to full size fridges there are ten 17.9 cubic feet ones to every one that is larger. Now I know why. It is all about math!

It seems that the advertised cubic footage of a refrigerator is the usable inside space of the refrigerator. Why is 17.9 so prevalent? Doorways. When I saw that I could get the 18.2 cubic foot fridge, with an ice maker, for about the same as it would cost for a 17.9 without an ice maker, since the former was on sale, I jumped on it. I didn’t even bother to look at the energy guide, since there is no way a new refrigerator can be less efficient than one that is a couple of decades old. I also didn’t look at the dimensions of the machine, that is where I ran into some problems.

If you have ever read this page before, you have likely seen me mention that nothing about my house is standard. The 18 inch thick walls are great for insulation, yet they make it difficult to standardize doorways; you try cutting through 18 inches of mud and stone to make a doorway one inch wider and tell me how it goes. A quick count while walking through the house shows that we have 16 doorways, of course only about half of them have doors on them, else you would have to open four doors to get to the toilet (no kidding). Only two of the doors are the same size, they are both outside doors (the front and side doors) and they are both exactly 32 inches. The rest of the doors vary from 26 inches (on a closet) to 36 inches (entrance to Arizona room). Keep in mind that the measurements are the actual openings, not subtracting for the trim molding.

If you have a standard tape measure around your house you can look to see that the numbers 16 and 32 are in red. 16 is in red since that is how far apart studs have to go when building. 32 is in red since that is the width of a standard doorway. It turns out that that is also why the standard refrigerator is 17.9 cubic feet, any larger than that and you can no longer slide it sideways through a doorway. My old refrigerator was 31 inches wide and 29 inches deep. I was able to turn it sideways to slide it out the door. The new refrigeratorw was 31 inches wide and 33.5 inches deep. My doorway is only 3/16 wider than 31 inches, and that is not counting the inch thick door or the hinges. There was no way to get it into the kitchen without some work. Thankfully, after taking the door off of the hinges and moving it aside, I was able to line the machine up in the doorway, leave through a different exterior door, come back in behind the machine and push it through. If it had been even 1/10th of an inch wider I am not sure if I would have been able to get it into the kitchen, even with a generous amount of vaseline.

Let this be a lesson to me. I should always measure my non-standard doorways prior to new appliance purchase.

• If you are not a fan of the card game Hearts you might as well quit reading now.

I have been playing the game Hearts (link neglected since I couldn’t find a site without a bunch of pop-up crap) for years. There are a lot of variations of the game, but they seem to follow the same guidelines. You want to take zero points. If you take a heart you take a point. If you take the queen of spades you take 13 points. It is possible to lower your score by taking points, however it is difficult since you have to take them all. This quote on the scoring of the game sums it up pretty well:

Winning the Game
When one or more players reach or surpass a score of 100 points, the player with the lowest score wins the game.
Shooting the Moon
Shooting the Moon is a special strategy in which a player tries to take all 13 Hearts and the Queen of Spades. If you manage to Shoot the Moon you can either add 26 points to everyone’s score or subtract 26 from your own.

Shooting the Sun
Shooting the Sun is even more difficult than Shooting the Moon: If you take all 13 tricks – that is, every card in the deck – you can either add 52 points to everyone’s score or subtract 52 from your own.

While my normal strategy in the game is just to not take any points, I have shot the moon a few times. I had never actually shot the sun though, and thought that it would be impossible. Again, if you do not know the game, you may not understand the difficulty. I have probably played tens of thousands of games without shooting the sun. Until today.

The sad part is that I didn’t have any idea that I was doing it as I played. I just wanted to make sure that I kept control of the cards so that I wouldn’t get stuck with the queen of spades and end up adding 13 points to my score. Oh well, I guess we takes ’em when we can get ’em.

Tune in next time to find out such fascinating things as how to treat a wart on your dog (use wart off), how to boil water (a pan and heat), possibly even how to cheat people out of a lot of money (email scams). Damn, I just gave away my next post…

Antenna-jacked!; The homeless Vs. High school graduates

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Yeah I know it has been a while since I slapped anything up around here. I will attribute that to the whole supply/demand logic, of course no one demands it, so I don’t supply it. I wonder if that would work the other way around?

• So, my wife got antenna jacked today. It is sort of like a car jacking, only with no violence, and she still has the car. It is sort of like stealing your car stereo, only she still has the stereo. Some dubious person ripped off her car antenna and nothing else…How sad is that?

I do understand that this is all traumatic and the such, but come on, it is a car antenna. It is not like there is a huge black market of car antenna dealers (is there?). I just googled it up and there are thousands of stores that are selling the car antenna in question. The car antenna black market had better be a heck of a lot cheaper than the going rates (I found one for $17 with a cursory search), which aren’t that high in the first place.

Perhaps it was a guy ripping off antennas to try to get his daily fix. Maybe he can sell them for five bucks each at a junkyard, still, that would take a lot of antennas (antennae?). I don’t know how much drugs cost, as I have never used them, but when I used to buy marijuana for a friend named Einnod (way back in the nineties) it would take about $35 to get 1/8th of an ounce of marijuana, and I don’t imagine the prices are going down. And that eighth of an ounce had better be an actual eighth Dammit! I ain’t paying $35 for a 3.2 gram bag! Quit pinching you Son-of-a-Bitch! An eighth is 3.5 grams! Sure I’ll smoke the first one with you, but I want the whole bag! Don’t make me kill you! I got a wood chipper that has your name on it, you cheating S.O.B.! So I have heard, having, of course, no personal knowledge of anything related to drugs. (as an aside, if you happen to be hiking in the hills of the beautiful state of Oregon, and you happen upon a skull, could you go ahead and bury it? Odds are that it wasn’t the guy that I killed That Oregon weather has a habit of unearthing things that you pray will never surface.)

• You know what is really sad, relating to the drugs? Your average junkie on the street can likely convert grams to ounces in his head, while your average High School Senior probably couldn’t (and if he could that would be the first sign of addiction). The junkie can’t read or write, but he damn well knows that there are 16 ounces in a pound and 3.5 grams in an ounce. The junkie probably also know exactly how many ounces of liquid are in a quart since he has limited income [stolen antennas mostly], he must know wheter a quart is larger or smaller than a liter (the quart being smaller by 1.6 ounces), whether a “40” is a good value based on price…I think that your average drunken, homeless person might have better math skills than your average high school graduate… I am basing this completely on conjecture, I have never met a real junkie, most of the people I know have at least made it to higher education (you know, junior high), but them junkies know from weights and measures.

Ooh, ooh, new idea. Let’s put the junkies in charge of the department of weights and measures. No one knows the conversions better than them. I guess the only down side would be when they start to sniff the fumes at the gas pump, then run away with the gallon of their new, best fix. Yeah, okay, that idea sucked. That would be akin to making Dubya preznit, oh wait…