Coming out of hibernation?

Hey everybody. I know, I haven't written here since for like four months. And you know what? Only one of you, my favorite of all my friends both real and imagined, mentioned it. Bloggers feed on comments. They are like the water that makes the tiny foam dinosaurs turn into scary and disappointing monsters. That's what your comments do to my ego.

Maybe you've lost interest or I've started repeating myself. I don't know; I don't read my own stuff very often. I am a poor judge of my writing. Each blog entry is like one of my children: I barely remember any of them.

I do hope that I can put more effort into this in the near future, and that y'all do too. I am going to give you a few previews of what you can expect. Some of them are classic topics (like commercials I hate, comics I hate, and other things that begin with c that I hate), some will be new (like things I haven't decided yet, but I will probably talk about how much I like period hats), I still owe you a Graphs Aplenty (from my favorite of all friends both real and imagined), and I think there might be a visual redesign. I might lose interest, though, if you people don't step up your game.

Oh, and I have a beard now.

Graphs Aplenty: DOES NOT COMPUTE

This one is easily my favorite Graphs Aplenty so far. Venn Diagrams are almost inherently funny, but when paired with a dystopian future joke, that is a recipe for success every time. Come for the math, stay for the dystopian futures, guys! I miss the days I used to write about going to the bathroom.



This one is pretty self-explanatory, my favorite part is that our future oppressors will not only speak to us in a hybrid of the two most widely spoken languages in the United States now, but also a 30 year old programming language. So when the robots take over, programming technology will not have changed since you computer science 101 as a freshman in college. Although, to be fair, my roommate studied biology, which I'm not even sure uses computers.

Interesting side note: as a mechanical engineer, I would only be able to satisfy A and B of the diagram above. I never learned to program in C++. I know you are probably thinking, "How embarrassing!" Well, I speak Spanish and a little Irish and you're reading my blog, so I don't need your sass.

Interesting side note 2: my roommate is all grown up. He started his own blog! Go read it, the three of you who are still out there. And post comments! Comments are how we measure our self-esteem, like the way women do with their weight. Except more is better for us.

Graphs Aplenty: Matt Drudge

I myself am not an avid reader of the Drudge Report. I'm not a reader of it at all, I guess, avid or not. Do you ever describe anything as avid other than consumption of various sorts media? (I am an avid watcher of the news. I am an avid eater of salsa. I am an avid sleeper. Do those work?) I don't have a lot of personal insight to add to this graph.


It is important, however, to note that the Y-Axis shows Personal Anger at Matt Drudge and not necessarily at the content being presented. As my avidness in going to the Drudge Report is so lacking, I cannot provide stylistic input as to the potential source of the anger from a "factual" point of view, so I'm just going to speculate that Mr. Drudge is a jackass, and that clearly shows through in his writing. But I don't know that for sure; I need to stress how I am speculating that Matt Drudge is a jackass.

Graphs Aplenty: Death Wish

Charles Bronson is a Man among men. Of that, there really is no question. So it was really only a matter of time before my old roommate demonstrated, in graph form, just how that works out when his famed Death Wish movies are compared to one another.

This one took a bit more analysis than the previous Graphs Aplenty, and it shows in the confusing but scientific multiple axes. This, of course, is only a qualitative comparison because it is difficult to get hard numbers without including the various hypotheses on what sort of drunkenness was reached. You see, this was only testing the one variable, not severity of inebriation. That is clearly for further study. Please make whatever comments you notice.

Now Introducing: Graphs Aplenty

You know, for being an engineer, there has been a dearth of data analysis on this here blog. You know what? That ends here, right now. My old roommate, the one who likes both Vonnegut and Death Wish, started generating some graphs that needed a home (other than in the finest of scientific journals, that is), and luckily, I happened to have a blog that nobody reads. So, naturally, there will be more graphs in our future.

This, of course, is a Venn Diagram. I want to stress that this is not representative of my findings, and that this conclusion should be under the same sorts of review and verification that any other scientific result would be. There are plenty of other things that make me happily vomit.

I am trying to be a better reader

Over the weekend, I added to my collection of books. I say collection of books like I have a Scrooge McDuck style bin of them, which I, sadly, do not. I have maybe 20 on my bookshelf, unless you count text books. The two that I bought were Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut and Dracula by Bram Stoker. I just finished Cat's Cradle today, and I recommend it like I would recommend whole milk. (Which, by the way, I slipped and went back to after a noble experiment. It made me understand what it was like when smokers finally go back and have a cigarette after quitting for a few weeks. It was glorious. It was scrumtralescent.)

I was introduced to Vonnegut by my old roommate. He had a surprising appreciation for culture both high and low -- for example, his favorite movie was probably Death Race 2000, yet he frequented the ballet. (Interesting fact: He had a box of movies, in which was a copy of the original Batman. I thought he had stolen my copy, but he did not; it turned out we both owned the Adam West classic. He also hated Catcher in the Rye, as I did, so we got along famously. I really don't know in what other context famously works like that.)

Anyway, I didn't really appreciate Vonnegut that much at first. Breakfast of Champions was pretty dang weird. I really liked Sirens of Titans, though. Cat's Cradle is definitely worth your time.

The real reason I started to write this post, though, was that I wanted to say how awesome Bram Stoker's name is. Bram. Stoker. It sounds made up. I could see Javier Bardem playing a character in a movie named that, kicking ass while being awesome. Bram. I want to name my kid that.

Ain't I a stinker? No.

I have been a little bit worried that my roommates would suspect that I was out there smelling badly. This is in part because I have been traveling a lot lately. I have visited such exotic locales in the past few weeks as Atlanta, GA; Greenwood, SC; Ormond Beach, FL; Augusta, GA; New Smyrna Beach, FL; and Aiken, SC. Atlanta was the first stop on this magical mystery tour, and I realized upon arrival that my deodorant opted not to make the trip. I think it might be tragically claustrophobic and afraid to spend time in my travel bag. I can only imagine the psychological horrors it feels once it is actually deployed.

I, of course, replaced the deodorant with a more adventurous one on the road. I wouldn't want to be an unwelcome guest in all of those places, and since I knew that once I got to my second destination (where the mosquitoes are) I would still have many more places to see I decided to get the Bear Grylls of deodorants, one completely unafraid of travel.

As I was touring the southeast, though, my other lonely deodorant was lying on my otherwise empty side of the bathroom sink. So, here in C-Town, my roommates (I can only presume) would look at my antiperspirant and say to themselves, "He must be pretty ripe by now." I feel I need to set the record straight: I wasn't. I immediately replaced it as soon as I discovered it missing.

This does raise a rather difficult question, though. Which one do I use now? Should I alternate days? Or underarms? Or maybe create a delightful cocktail of fresh sport and cool active to get the best of both worlds? Would they cancel each other out in that case? I think some experimentation might be in order.