Category Archives: Tourette’s Apprentice

Rants and Raves and all things Vile.

When Is Rapid Not Rapid?

Someone on Fb was giving away a Dash Rapid Egg Cooker.  I don’t go in for kitchen single-use gadgets but I hit the search engines to see what rapid could mean since a hard-cooked egg only takes ten minutes in boiling water.

I found this video of someone praising the utility of the device:

So, you see from the video that this device will hard-cook eggs in a little more than sixteen minutes.  Very impressive.

JamesIsIn

Plural Pants

As you surely have noticed, folks usually have two arms and a single shirt; folks have two legs and a pair of pants.  What the hell?

Have a look at this list.

  • Pants
  • Pantaloons
  • Breeches
  • Trousers
  • Shorts
  • Drawers
  • Trunks
  • Briefs
  • Boxers
  • Thong

You have to reduce the two-ness all the way down to the level of the thong to get to the singular!

Enjoy!

JamesIsIn

Contemplating Dreadful Experiences

We often forget that we are not the one who commits suicide but only the recipients of realizations relating to the other’s decision to leave us.  It’s easy to forget.

The media, as a general rule, does not report on suicides.  The reason for this is that when the media reports on suicide there is a corresponding uptick in the suicide rate.  We might think of this as a sort of permissions slip passed around the news rooms and living rooms of this Earth.  However, when the person who commits suicide is a celebrity there is little avoiding that reporting:  we all want to know what has happened, the consequences be damned!

Last night one of my all-time favorite bands lost a singer and friend.  Let us take a moment.

That angelic voice, you will note is silent.  This is the future echoed from the past.

Please take some time out to say hello to your old friends.  They may appreciate hearing from you.

Good-bye, Chris.

JamesIsIn

Physics Is Hard but Not that Hard

Not everyone gets to have a solid foundation in physics.  It is a complex science with a heavy reliance on advanced mathematics.  This can be a difficult combination.  Setting this aside, we can certainly all enjoy a little basic physics.

Here is a primer.  Some radiation is bad for you because the particles emitted are energetic enough to at least break chemical bonds.  Some radiation is, by comparison, super whimpy.  Mostly we encounter the latter.  Our most dangerous daily source of the former is typically the sun.

Ok, now you are ready for further reading.  Go read this article on the latest craze in mistaken causes for medical ailments sweeping the globe: electromagnatic sensitivity.

“Electromagnetic hypersensitivity” and “wifi allergies”: Bogus diagnoses with tragic real world consequences

If you are still concerned, build yourself a Faraday cage and leave the rest of us alone about it.

That is all.

JamesIsIn

A Good Laugh

A friend posted this linked test on her social microblogging area.

My answers to the questions were as follows:

  • Who are you walking with?
    • Solo (keep in mind the photograph shows one person in the woods)
  • What kind of animal is it?
    • I shouted “kumquat” but was envisioning an animal somewhere between a meercat and a koala.
  • What does the animal do?
    • It splays itself open displaying a sort of doll-house interior alloted with organs and says “try my sausages” (thinking of the sausages described in Tampopo of yams and wild boar casings)
  • How big is it?  Is it fenced or no?
    • “What?  Fuck no!” (truth be told I was thinking of the meerkoala but the same would hold true for the small house)
  • Describe what’s on the table.
    • There is a note on the table.  (of important note, the house is not described in the description as “your house” that only come in the explanations set)
  • What is the cup made out of?  What do you do with the cup?
    • Brass or perhaps gold.  I look inside the cup.
  • What kind of body of water is it?  A lake? River? Pond?
    • A lake.  Not unlike the lakes you might find walking through the woods in the Pacific North West.
  • How wet do you get?
    • Fully wet if I swim but only under my knees if I follow the coastline.

As a way of telling their version of my tale, I will just turn these answers into a narrative based on their answer parameters.

I am the most important person in my life.  Then again who isnt?  My problems are about the size of the illegitimate love-child of a meercat and a koala bear.  I have the appearance of aggression because I splay my innards open and offer my organs for perusal, but there is no pain involved and I can close the case and return to my peaceful existence in a blink.

My home is of an ambiguous size because I never saw the exterior but only saw the room I entered with the table with that note.

No fences.  I am open.  (I splay myself, remember?).

Yet, my table only contained a note.  There was no food on the table (of course I just ate).  There were no people on the table (of course people don’t spend so much time on tables these days).

There were no flowers on the table.  I am now a little sad there were no flowers with the note.  But there was a note.  Presumably that note was from a person.  I feel good knowing that but I must make a mental note to complain about the lack of flowers.

There is a brass cup, a challice ifyou will, which has survived aeons of abuse and still rings like a bell.  (Side note: it might be gold.)  In short, I love me.  And I love looking deep inside of me.  (I love it enough to splay myself open, remember.)

There is a lake that is about the size of my libido.  I love to go fishing there.  For no apparent reason I have never built a path to circumnavigate this lake beyond which I live, so I sometimes swim across.  But if I don’t want to get soaked, I can stick to the shallows and wade the whole way ’round.

(Which I suppose can only mean that sex is both extremely important and only up-to-the-knees important to me.)

Fuck, I laughed my ass off.

JamesIsIn

A Brief Emotive Rant

Ok, look… it was bad enough when everyone was using various keyboard emoticons.

Then everyone was all “ooh, let’s make pictures out of them” and we saw a wave of goofy pictures ostensibly relating to the various emotional states common in the human condition (except the real ones like despair and orgasm).

Now we have taken to writing out those emoticons in plain text?

Instead of typing “smiley face emoticon” why don’t you just type “smiling”?  Or better… don’t.  Just say what you have to say.

You can lay down a wink when you join Monty Python.

JamesIsIn

The Global Hair Conspiracy

We’ll just skip over the part where it’s an article from a source known as “spiritscienceandmetaphysics” and just head right into the…

Well, wait… we also have to ignore the utter lack of citation and reliance upon “this guy I knew who dated another guy’s first cousin who was married to an expert”.

Ok, now we can get to the meat of the matter:  The Global Hair Conspiracy.  Obviously that’s true.

Hear ye!  Hear ye!  Read all about it!  The Global Hair Conspiracy!

Maybe you don’t know about this but hair is dead.  There is nothing living anywhere in hair.  Even the hair below the surface of the skin (below the dead layer of skin down into the living layer of skin where the hair is manufactured), even down there the hair is dead.

Sure some hairs can transmit small amounts of data into your skin, but the longer the hair the less the data transmission success.  So if you have hair like me, almost no data whatsoever gets through.

Good Hair Day
Good Hair Day

Yet according to this author I should have psychic abilities, spider senses, I should be a fucking superhero.  Well, except I shave my face.  More or less.  Mostly less.  I don’t use a barber.

Barbers?  We Don't Need No Stinking Barbers!
Barbers? We Don’t Need No Stinking Barbers!

I just trim it with some clippers.  Short hairs.  More superpowers.  I don’t do it because I hate shaving.  I do it for more superpowers!  More superpowers!

You people are so lucky I’m not evil, because I would totally take over the world and mess with your shit.

But you might be wondering how we can hope to argue against “the document”, “a thick official looking folder”, or (of course!) “Samson and Delilah in the Bible”.

Don’t even bother.  I can feel your thoughts, Interwebaroonies.

JamesIsIn

I Asked the Magic Sky Man for a Favor and Nothing Happened—Again

Yeah, you know, when the Monkees sang about being a believer they were not thinking “… and my amputated limb will miraculously regrow itself”.  You know why?  Because even the Monkees weren’t complete idiots.

The alleged power of prayer in medicine has consistently proven itself to be equal to the placebo effect; in other words if you can get better by thinking about getting better and prayer happens to give you those thoughts, you win.  To my taste sugar pills are sweeter and easier to swallow.

When it comes to matters rational, the religious among us have given themselves a free-pass to be irreverently irrational.  This happens in spite of the steady stream of evidence against any position that the Magic Sky Man is looking out for anyone on good old planet Earth.

As a telling example we have Herbert and Catherine Schaible who have allowed their second child to die while on probation for refusing to seek medical care for their first child (already dead, manslaughter, guilty)—preferring instead to rely upon prayer and faith to heal their child.  The court had, as a single condition of their probation, ordered the couple to seek medical treatment for their remaining child should appropriate conditions arise.

They arose.

You can read about that here.

Can there be any doubt that at least some religious observance qualifies as child abuse?

JamesIsIn