Friday, February 25, 2011

Friday Pity Party

This week in Fuck You

Well lets look at our big book of fuckyou and se what was on the charts for this week, shall we?
Feb,feb,… there it is February the twenty-fuckin-oneth!
Sunday – lets just go ahead and mark that one down as “spent the day trying to keep the brain from coming through the skull. Finally gave up and said “fine! You want out so bad? Then just go.” Brain spent the rest of the day sulking and kicking side of cranium.” Stupid brain.
Lets take a look at the rest of the week? Shall we?
Oh! here is one! question: what is worse than a flooded basement?
Answer: A SEWER water flooding the basement.

And lets go ahead and add in some stressers hmmm. I think I will add a pinch of “trying to get a lower mortgage rate” with just a dash of “daughter getting an MRI on her knee”
Oh and just a strong hint of “probably surgery involved” as well. That was before friday, right at the last minute they called and said just torn cartilage.
Still too normal of a week, not quite “me”
Let’s add in a terabyte hard drive fail, to which the wife blames me somehow… just grand!
Not even Thursday yet. What can I do to make Thursday special..
I know!
Wife is now laid off and… as a garnish, lets go ahead and kill off one of her cousins (just 3rd or 4th though, nothing fancy.)
Then today I run by the house after work, grab a deposit slip and dash back out the door.
I can JUST make it to the bank in time.
Well yes and no.
You see this coming dont you.
Yup I crested the hill 3 blocks from home and... stared straight at the cop waiting for me.
Ugh.
I looked at the cop, then the speedometer, then the speed limit sign and back to the speedometer.
Fruckles!
I slap the steering wheel in frustration and BEEW-WHUP the pretty lights came on.
He was pretty cool about it though.
I apologized and told him you got me dead to rights. I was just trying to make it to the back in time.
He chuckled and gave me a warning.
First time for everything I guess (and yeah I made it to the bank with 5 minutes to spare.)




Being drunk

AHH the good ol' days of excessive drink.
yup. gotta say, that's a pretty good representation.



Monday, February 21, 2011

10 MORE things learned the hardway

  1. There is no such thing as “luck”.
  2. No matter how good you are at something, there is always someone better.
  3. Nothing that happens is high school is permanent but can leave permanent scars.
  4. Ask. The worst thing they can do is point and laugh.
  5. Remember the past as a lesson, prepare for the future as a battle but actively live for right now.
  6. It doesn’t matter one whit what someone else thinks of you, just as long as you like you.
  7. Pain is your body’s way of saying something is wrong. Do not ignore your body.
  8. Love is just a word. Easier to say then it is to do.
  9. A man who says he fears nothing is a fool.
  10. Putting a label on something works great for anything but people.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

You have to watch a whole marathon of a tv show, which show do you pick.

You have to watch a whole marathon of a tv show, which show do you pick.

Answer here

Space Shuttle

Where were you when the Space Shuttle blew up?
I remember I was in High School.
sophomore I think.
Yes I could look up the date and extrapolate from there but I don’t feel all mathy right now.
I was in classes that were in “The Annex”. The Annex at the school were a small pod of single wide mobile homes that sat in this disused parking lot across the street from the school.
The class was some kind of real world business class but that is really irrelevant.
I was just out of this 3rd hour class and walking back into the building when my best friend in High School came up and said “Did you hear the Space Shuttle exploded?”
I paused with a stupid grin on my face waiting for the punch line.
He stood there, looking at me, waiting for an answer.
We stood there, in the middle of the hall, staring at each other.
(a couple of dumbasses if you ask me)
That was it though.
No joke.
Read an interesting article about this though.
It seems that the Astronauts were more than likely still alive afterward.

From the video footage it may have looked like an explosion in the traditional sense, but there was little in the way of combustion (fire). What occurred was a failure of an O-ring on one of the two solid fuel booster rockets. When launch occurred, escaping gases from the malfunctioning O-ring heated the huge liquid fuel tank on which the shuttle rides during its ascent.
At 72 seconds after liftoff, the lower strut linking the right booster to the external tank broke apart. The booster pivoted around its upper attachment, causing its nose cone to smash into the liquid oxygen tank. Once the liquid fuel tank was ruptured, rapid expansion of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen ripped apart the shuttle, sending the seven crew members to their deaths.
The crew was probably alive, but unconscious, when the virtually intact crew cabin impacted into the Atlantic Ocean several minutes after the catastrophe. [Source]

It had to happen though.
Just a matter of time.
Delicate meatbags sitting on a controlled explosion, trying to break the grip of gravity?
Gravity is a law and you should obey the law..



Monday, February 14, 2011

10 Things I have learned the hard way



  1. Everyone lies.
  2. No one has your best interests at heart above their own.
  3. You can love friends more than family but your family loves you more than anyone else.
  4. It hurts to fail but you don’t learn anything by doing it right all the time.
  5. The future is a really scary place no matter who you are.
  6. A person’s opinion means more to them than yours does.
  7. Someone else’s opinion should never supersede your own.
  8. Life is hard, dying is easy.
  9. Life is rarely, if ever, fair.
  10. Life does not come to you, you have to go to it.




Thursday, February 10, 2011

Brain and Brain! What is brain?

Stupid brain.
Why is it you can recall the hosts of “Real People” and “That’s Incredible” from the 70’s yet when I got dressed this morning you could not discern between the boys boots and your own?
I had to get all the way to work (30 minute drive) and was out walking to the building thinking my feet had swollen before I realized that I had taken my boots off last night and placed them out of the way. The boots you so readily jumped at were lying in the middle of the room.
NO, you stupid lump of gray matter, just because the look exactly alike is no excuse. Size 10 is a hell of a lot more comfortable then size 7. Do you realize that the feet are now planning a class action lawsuit on you for pain and suffering?
You need to think before you think
I was going to say act but that dos not apply to you.
Shape up or I will stab you with Q-tips.


Monday, February 7, 2011

Brain Lights


Scientists Capture 3D Image Of Brain In Highest Resolution Ever


A new brain imaging method highlights all the synapses in a mouse cortex, allowing scientists to count these connections between nerve cells in the brain with unprecedented detail. The high-resolution synapse map could help neurologists better understand how brain cells communicate.
A human cerebral cortex holds about 125 trillion synapses, which are connections among neurons, packed into an ultra-thin layer of tissue. That’s equivalent to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies, according to Stanford professor Stephen Smith. These electrical interfaces, found throughout the brain, control all our thinking, feeling and movement. The sheer number of synapses makes it nearly impossible to see them — even the best traditional-light microscopes cannot resolve them all, Smith explained in a Stanford news release. A single neuron might have tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons, he said. But his new method, which involves taking nano-thin slices of a mouse’s cortex, lets scientists actually count the synapses and catalog them according to their type. Called array tomography, it uses high-resolution photography, fluorescent proteins and a supercomputer to put everything together.
Smith and colleagues took a slab of mouse cortex and sliced it into 700-nanometer-thick sections. The sections were then stained with antibodies that would match 17 synapse-related proteins, and the scientists also added fluorescent molecules that glow in different colors in response to light. The antibodies were added in groups of three, and the brain tissue started changing colors. A computer took massive amounts of high-resolution pictures during each staining session, which were ultimately stitched together into a 3-D image. The result is a map of every synapse’s position in the cortex, with colors corresponding to different synaptic types. Smith, author of a new paper on the method that appears in the journal Neuron, said the brain’s overall complexity is hard to comprehend.
“One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor (with both memory-storage and information-processing elements) than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth,” he said.




Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Salt Cavern of Wonders.

Life just rolls along same ol’ same ol’
You know how it is.
Then KaBlammO….everything kinda hits at once.
Gots some stuff ta share but gotta spread it out.
I will start with Saturday

As you may or may not know, Boy is in Boy Scouts
(I would be worried if he was in Girl Scouts, However I DID put my time in there. This was back when girls were icky, weird and far from understandable. Now days they are no longer icky, but the rest stands true.)
We were afforded a chance to attend a scout event which was kinda unique.
Spend the night in an active Salt Mine.
In fact, the biggest one in the whole western hemisphere.
http://undergroundmuseum.org/index.php
Ok. This could be cool and you know me, whatever I can do that will elevate me in my child’s eyes I am going to snatch up. So we paid the $30 bucks each and last Saturday we packed up and headed out.
Oh what a beautiful Saturday it was too! 70 degrees and sunny in the middle of winter in desolate Kansas. We met up with the rest of the troop and some 2nd year Webelo’s and headed out.
(Ok here I could make a note on how I used to be rather anal about schedules and leaving when the afforded timetable said I would and such but… ah no big. Don’t really care that much anymore.)
After an hour drive we were almost there, like 10 minutes to go, and the weather did a Kansas Thing. Now unless you have been to Kansas, you can understand the concept but the actuality of what the weather does is rather astonishing to experience. The closest I can equate it with is the way Florida gets a sudden rainstorm out of nowhere, the only thing is, and in Florida you kinda expect a shower.
Kansas affords no warning to the weather. In the morning you can be wearing shorts and by the evening a parka and Visa-Versa. In fact, wearing shorts with a parka is a known look around here.
Anyway back to our story...
Ten minutes of from Hutch the wind picked up and roared, the sky clouded and darkened and the temperature dropped, bounced and rolled under the couch. It was like sunny, sunny, sunny, right turn, winters back.
OK enough of the piddly lil details…
Got there, got in and by 7pm we were 650 feet under the ground.
The mine has been active since, umm I know this, I think before the 40’s but the 40’s was where it became commercial. Anyway its size is about 980 Acres in size. The ceilings are 9’ to 13’ high and the tunnels are oh I would say 30 feet across.
Claustrophobia really doesn’t hit you at all.
It’s really hard to grasp the concept that you are further underground then the St. Louis Arch is tall.
We walked about a 10 mile hike, got to go places the general public didn’t get to go. We saw artifacts still laying in the tunnels from the 40’s and got to experience what “dark as a mine” really means. Let me tell you, closing you eyes in a dark room is still not as dark as mine dark. There is absolutely no light whatsoever so your eyes never adapt or become accustomed. It is so dark that just the glow from a watch dial can seem to illuminate an entire room.
It is as close to being blind as you can become.
The place is used as a storage facility due to its inherent safety and constant temperature.
Doctors and Hospitals from all over keep their old records in there to keep them safe. Hollywood sends all their storage stuff there as well. From costumes to scripts to reels and reels of films. In the museum part they have props from all kinds of movies, which give you an idea of what is stored down there. I was able to, with just a glance, to name the Clooney Batman suit from Batman III (the nipples are a dead giveaway) they also had some props ranging from the “noisy cricket” in MIB to a shirt for the movie Rebel with James Dean to boxes and boxes of old film from FRIENDS.
Another cool thing was they all got to sign these dynamite boxes that will be used as walls, to direct the air around certain tunnels. So he will be able to bring his kids down to the mine when he is my age and show them his signature from when he was their age.
Finally about 12:30 the tours were done and it was time to hit the sack.
The boy jumps in his bed and leans over to whisper conspiratorially to me.
“I am going to stay up all nighZZZZZZZZZZZZ”
I just grinned.
It was a good sharing this experience with the Boy.