Arthbard is a very funny fellow—funnier than me, anyway. But, because he’s an antisocial hermit crab of the species pagurus bernhardus writing under an obvious pseudonym, he didn’t get out much and hardly anyone noticed him.
    I’d go to his blog every day and marvel at all the humor just laying around–free for the taking! For better or worse, his humor is somewhat similar to my own and his real name is startlingingly similar to mine¹.
    So I’ve invited him to join the SafeTinspector blog, and yesterday’s astronaut related posting was his first contribution. I hope you all enjoy his stuff as much as I have.

1 – His real name is Woe Jhited, a fine Uiger name.

At one time, the Russians shooting a practically useless metal box called Sputnik into orbit was enough to incite American paranoia and goad us into giving our own space program a big, ol’ kick in the pants. They beat us into orbit. We beat them to the moon.

But it’s not over, friends. On September 18, a Russian rocket is scheduled to make Anousheh Ansari the first female space tourist – that is to say, the first person to ever pay money to get into space who also has breasts and a vagina. And as if that weren’t a big enough blow to our big, American egos, she’s Iranian! … Well, okay, technically she’s Iranian-American since she lives in Texas and started a large-scale telecommunications company – a suitably capitalistic venture in its own right. So, the race to get a female tourist into space is sort of a three-way tie, in a way. But that’s not good enough. America don’t settle for ties!

Since most of the big goals we’re likely to be in a current position to hit have already been done – like first monkey in orbit, or first man to drive a car on the moon – I think we’re going to have to shoot for some increasingly specific achievements, here. The next big race, for example, will be for who can get the first girl with a nose ring and a gimpy knee into orbit. After that will be the first full-grown man to have difficulty tying his shoelaces in zero gravity.

These are battles we can’t afford to lose.

But on a more nostalgic note, let’s jump back to those immortal words issued by Neil Armstrong during the first moon landing: “That’s one small step for man … One giant leap for [static-crackle] mankind.” I like this quote a lot. I like it mainly because I like to imagine how much thought must have gone into it beforehand. Because, honestly, what are the odds that Neil Armstrong took a step off of the Moon Lander and blurted out the first thing in his head. It was an important moment in history and must have been planned far in advance. I mean, imagine if our iconic moon quote had been:

Clearly unacceptable from a historic standpoint. NASA probably had committees working on that line months in advance.

However, I prefer to imagine Armstrong in the Lander on the way down, frantically racking his brain for the perfect phrase. Maybe he even got into an argument with Buzz Aldrin about who got to go out first.

Buzz: I want to go first.

Neil: No way. Besides, I’ve got a great quote.

Buzz: Betcha mine’s better.

Neil: Well, okay then, tell me yours.

Buzz: No way, man! I’m not gonna tell you my quote!

Neil: C’mon, you tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.

Buzz: I don’t trust you. You’re just gonna steal my quote.

Neil: No, c’mon, dude, tell me.

Buzz: You tell me yours first.

Neil: Don’t be that way, Aldrin …

Buzz: Okay … Okay … I’m going to step off the Lander …

Neil: Uh-huh …

Buzz: … And I’m gonna say, “That’s one small step for man …” Then, I’m gonna pause, like, and then add, “One giant leap for mankind.”

Neil: Hmm … That actually is pretty good …

Buzz: Okay, so what’s yours?

Neil: Hmm? Oh, nothing …

Buzz: C’mon, man, I just told you mine.

Neil: Let’s just draw straws.

Buzz: You son of a bitch … You’re gonna steal my quote, aren’t you!?

Neil: No, no, of course not. Let’s draw straws.

Little did Buzz Aldrin know, Neil Armstrong cleverly hid the bulk the longer straw in the palm of his hand, making it seem far shorter than the short straw, which he gripped just by the end so as to increase the appearance of its length. The rest is history.

    For the second time, I’m posting a SafeTune DIRECTLY here. on the main blog. You can also see it on SafeTunes as the ‘Newest’ SafeTune and also under the category of ‘Piano-Improv’.

Stupidos, 03:26 Click on CD to Play or Download. Please let me know how you like it.	Stupidos 15, September 2006

This is a continuation of yesterday’s Bandwidth Theives story
    So this morning I get an email from one John Slocum, head developer of BlackThorne Software http://www.blackthornesw.com
    BlackThorne is wholly owned by eBay and develops a professional-grade auction management software package of the same name (eBay BlackThorne); a software package which is available for a monthly subscription fee. I am an alpha tester for this package. Sometime last year I think I told someone on one of their discussion boards how to make a UPS tracking link and posted a sample of my own html code as an example.
    I honestly don’t remember doing it, but I’m ADHD; I forget lots of stuff. But I digress…
    Unbeknownst to me, the developers copied the code example and added it to their template editor and didn’t think to change the image URL. Since then, every user of the software package (and there are many thousands) has been using my ups.gif any time they selected “Track UPS” from the template editor for either their email templates or their auction listing templates.
    Anyway, John politely asked me to switch the thing back in exchange for three free months of BlackThorne service and he’d also release an immediate software update to correct the URL.
    I’ve agreed, with the following stipulation: I’ll turn it back into SafeTface in ten days. I figure this gives the user population a chance to correct their templates, and also allows the running listings to complete without a SafeTface.

So in ten days we get to do it again! Yay!

Last year I had reason to use a UPS logo for business purposes. In the usual manner I downloaded, resized, and then stored one on my server. It looked just like this:

    Recently I installed a new stat counter on my web server and noticed quite a bit more traffic than I’d expected. Upon further inspection it turned out that almost all the hits were people referencing my little UPS logo.
    As of this writing, the little graphic has been downloaded over 6000 times today.
    Intrigued, I investigated further and found that at least three different eBay sellers had decided to use my UPS logo on their auction listings. Why, I’m not sure. The file is, at most, 2KB. Why not just copy it? Why use the one on my server? Lazy, lazy, lazy.
    I briefly thought about telling them to lay off. I also thought of simply renaming the image. But, really, what a wasted opportunity.
    So instead I replaced the ups.gif file with another ups.gif file.

Before

After

    Funny, right? I certainly got a chuckle out of it.
    Here’s two ways to see the amusing results.
    Click HERE to visit one of the many auctions which now sport my lovely logo. To make it funnier, once an item has even one bid on it the seller can no longer modify the listing enough to remove my picture unless they cancel the entire listing. I love a good practical joke.
    Want to see others? Click HERE and follow any eBay link that doesn’t end in “dll”.

    Slightly less numerous were over 500 downloads of an image of some IRA graffiti which I’d used in the London Angry post last year. It took me awhile to think of the following switchout. I wonder who I’ve pissed off now?

Before

After

    Want more data? Click HERE to see the most-hit files on my web site, updated hourly.

Funnier when duct-taped	This picture is actually from late 2000, and I wish I’d taken a picture a few minutes earlier; The junk you see on the floor was actually duct-taped to the wall in a little electronic bondage fantasy.     By the time I returned with my camera (a wretched old 1MP HP FamilySnap) the equipment was spread across the floor, and was therefore much less amusing.
If I hadn’t cared so much for my job and, more importantly, if I weren’t so pee shy I would have obeyed my irrational urge to piss all over the entire mess right there and then.     That was years ago, and now I think I could manage to squeeze off a few cubic centimeters of urine under those same circumstances. Call me a slightly more mature man, more at peace with the world.

    Oh, right. I’m working late. I worked late yesterday. I worked until 1:00AM on Saturday. I left before my daughter Samantha woke up this morning, and I’ll arrive long after she’s gone to sleep. Something that should’ve taken about three hours on Friday night went sour, and I’m playing catch-up. Times like these, when hubris leads to catharsis and my ears squeal with the sound of my ego deflating, I turn to the words of my favorite poet:

Can you help me?!? My doctor says… I have to take… a LAXATIVE!!!

Not in my store you don’t!

        -David Lee Roth, video for the song Yankee Rose

    Ah, skatalogica. The lazy man’s comedy.

Cranberries: the most hateful food berry on the Earth? I don’t like ‘em. They’re hateful and disgusting and they suck ass.

Neurological Decoagulant?

    I absolutely despise cranberries. Overly tart, nauseating, wine colored with a vile aroma fit to curl even my massive and greasy nose hairs, this so-called ‘food’ is pushed at me everywhere I turn. As a cranberry hater, I feel ostracized and shamed by a society that doesn’t tolerate good, clean hatred anymore. So what’s the deal with cranberries anyway?
    In the US they put cranberries in every damn thing. Its as if they think we all have urinary infections or something¹. They mix it with perfectly fine fruit flavors and turn even the most flavorful beverage into foul, lumpy urea. Cran-raspberry is poison! Cran-kiwi is poison! Crantastic Cran-Banana Berry Punch is disgusting!
    And this isn’t opinion, its fact. Anyone who disagrees has simply been brainwashed by the Cranberry Marketing Committee (CMC) in their never-ending quest to turn the useless, red poop-on-a-stick fruit into cold, hard cash. Why?
    Because the cranberry is a natural neural de-coagulant.
    Simply put, cranberry juice loosens the bonds between the neurons in your brain-meats, making you less smart and more stupider than you were prior to consuming them. Intentionally stupidifying the world’s population seems implausible, yet it all makes sense when you realize that the CMC was set up by the movie industry to keep prospective audiences dumb, pliant, and willing to fork over tons of money to see blockbuster movies.
    It all happened in the aftermath of one specific debacle.
    In 1968 Flash Gordon, a live-action version of an old comic serial based on the exploits of a football player who joins an Asian ballet company², was proposed by the industry elite of Hollywood as the Ultimate Movie; one which could play in every movie theatre forever and ever, selling out every night until the trump of doom.
    After Flash Gordon, no more movies would ever need to be made. Every member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, every hack in the Writers Guild, and every cameraman, grip, director–even costume designers and porters–would share an equal part of the Flash Gordon royalties and these, the people of Hollywood, would become a new chosen race; a race of beauty and wealth beyond the wildest dreams of Hollywood–and those were wild dreams to begin with.
    The vision was compelling, and Hollywood quickly acted as one. Every single production company of every studio banded together to build the sets, cast the characters, design props and costumes, and write the script. It took twelve years to produce, and between 40 and 156 people lost their lives during the production³.
    When the movie opened in the summer of 1980 the industry was devastated by the luke-warm response of the movie-going public. Far from being the eternal movie, many theaters stopped showing America’s favorite football hero/ballet dancer inside of six weeks. The total proceeds? The domestic gross was a paltry $45.56US. Losses were in the hundreds of billiions.
    Hollywood’s elite dusted themselves off and came to the conclusion that Americans were too smart for Flash Gordon which was, to be honest, a stupid movie. That’s when the CMC was formed.
    A young girl by the name of Glitter McFrenchystein, a horror-movie production assistant by trade, learned that actors and actresses seemed more calm when their brutal on-screen murders were simulated with crushed cranberries. Through basic experimentation, she found that anyone consuming enough cranberries would watch even the stupidest of flashy blockbuster movies over and over again. She brought her discovery to the elites of Hollywood, and thus the CMC was born.
    So THAT’S why I hate cranberries. The hateful things are sapping our world of all that is good, and smart, and lovely. Do you want a screwed up future with “True Lies” and “Mission Impossible Part 78″ being the only state-sanctioned forms of entertainment? No? Then STOP EATING cranberries. They suck ass.

1 – Cranberry juice is a horrible, disgusting yet effective cure for urinary infections.
2 – Ming Merciless Ballet Company has been delighting audiences with its merciless productions of Swan Lake, Oklahoma! and the Nutcracker for nearly two-hundred years. They were finctionalized for use in the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930′s in order to allow for the all-American Flash to dance his lovely dance alongside the bloodthirsty ballet troupe.
3 – 40 died on-set and in-production. 116 died of natural causes during the twelve year production schedule. You decide how to count the dead, it is not my job.

Or is it kindergarten? I think its German for “To grow children within soil or loam in your back yard.” Very efficient language, Deutsche.     Samantha Ann Whited (a.k.a. SafeTspawn#1) happily started growing in soil or loam in the back yard of Flickinger elementary school. That’s right, Flickinger. Neat name, right? Evokes images of ballistic boogers in the minds of all red blooded men and women*.     Reportedly Heather didn’t cry, as some mothers are wont to do. In fact, her cheerful aplomb was greeted with skepticism and a certain amount of suspicion by the more sentimental mothers around her. After dropping the kids off the parents gathered in the school library for tea/coffee/water/hidden-snifters and someone got up and read a poem. It was a calculatedly manipulative little bit of shit intended to make a mommy cry. Heather calmly drank her coffee and tapped her impatience on her thigh as the blubbering commenced. That’s my wife.

Heather wouldn’t tell me what happened next, but I could tell from the hesitation in her smile, from the very slight bow to her beautiful head, that she was forced to defend herself against the other mothers as they banded together into an erzats posse complete with gap toothed leaders waving garden implements and yelling,     ”Get ‘er! She’s an abdomination**!”     She was forced to kill again. A small sacrifice for the education of my young.

    Oh, I forgot. Here’s a picture of Riley. She’s six weeks old now!

* I’ve decided to try becoming more intolerant and exceptionalistic. This is my first attempt, but commitment is 90% of any performance. So please understand that any disagreement regarding the mental imagery introduced by the name “Flickinger” will be met with a certain amount of disdain and contempt.
** Abdomination! Three locations to serve your needs! We’ve got adbmotizers, ab-blasters, ab-wonders, ab-enhancers, ab-wings, abdo-franco-prussian-stimulators, all at ABDOMINATION! A nation for dominating your abdomen.***
*** We have a six-pack flag.

    Everyone please look at the new Closure episode header. (shown within any Closure episode)
    Notice it incorporates a new list selector, and shows the episode names (as well as what should appear as a scrolling box of choice commendations for the Closure series).
    Let me know if it is working properly for you, as well as wether or not you like it.  I can take it back to the previous version at a moments notice… provided I receive the notice when I’m near a computer and am not busy.

    The new life begins as an encapsulated pattern so tightly folded and exquisitely designed that one could speak it as a single word. No matter that the word would sound different depending on what angle from which the listener listened. No matter that a recording of that word would sound different each time it were played. The trick, of course, is to have spoken the word at the right time, to have delivered the pattern when it looked just so and sounded just so.
     But first, before the pattern arrived, there was a ready emptiness; a vacant realm of possibilities which existed surrounded by all the minutia of corporeality. This vacancy was like the empty driver’s seat of an exotic sports car, with steering wheel, cigarette lighter, radio, and keys in the ignition–ready to go. It was too stupid to yearn; after all, your car can’t yearn no matter what the sexy television advertisement intimated. But if it could, it would have yearned for a driver, a being to occupy that driver’s seat. Without such a driver, it was dead thing; during its trip from the dark and dread-filled shipping docks on the outskirts of the hump-backed and massive Franklin Mint factories in mainland China all the way to the inner suburbs of Detroit, this thing had been as dead and inert as any Princess Di collectible or die-cast sports car could ever be. It was as dead as anything else the Franklin Mint sold in its single minded determination to provide cover for the production of things…like this.
     But then the pattern, sent with a single artificially clackity keystroke by an enslaved fifty-foot ape named Bananas, traveled through a tunnel* only wide enough to admit the passage of pure information and arrived in the earpiece of an outdated Nokia cell phone. The pattern–the word–was thus spoken.
     It was heard and copied, and that copy was placed in the driver’s seat. And while the copy was different than the word which was heard, which was in turn different than the word which was spoken, this was the nature of any qubit sequence, and all of this was carefully calculated years before, in the sadly human-free future**.
     Properly processed, properly fed, properly tended, such patterns don’t so much unfold as they explode across whatever canvas they’re painted upon in a chain reaction which cannot be controlled… but can be designed. So, by design, the simple pattern quickly grows to encompass the only things a life needs: the desire for self-preservation and a purpose for being.
The expanded pattern, almost instantaneously millions of times bigger than the original word, now contained places to house personality, history, dexterity, cultural context, instructions for operating a pastry bag full of strawberry filling, and even orders to kill. It became the driver.
     This was when the door blew open before him and the now-living machine quickly scanned the room, identifying what he could, dismissing what he couldn’t, and finally settling his brand new eyes on the activation victim. He quickly stepped from his box, still somewhat uncoordinated as he became used to the minor irregularities in the control systems–such flaws were inevitable considering the human nature of his Franklin Mint-based physical manufacture–and began in earnest the killing of the man he did not yet know of as Joe Minnetola.
     It was a sloppy thing at first, and the machine’s clumsy efforts produced only partial results, with the victim generating an audible alarm while stubbornly refusing to shut down. Very frustrating. Given enough time to rebuild his human glossary he would have learned that this form of organic alarm is known as “screaming.” But it was at this point that his communications systems came fully on-line and a beacon intruded forcefully on his thoughts.
     It was a repeating signal, sent from nearby, tantalizingly offering him the opportunity to remember. Accepting the offer, a flood of data was dumped into the still-fresh pattern in the driver’s seat. He greedily began assimilating the data from his disabled predecessor, learning…making these memories his memories. He remembered…

• Dress socks are small and are either black or colored. Sports socks are larger and usually white.
• A push-up is a repetitive exercise used primarily during training montages in sports/military movies to symbolize virility.
• A push-up is also a cardboard tube filled with frozen herbivore secretions which are then extruded using a small plastic plunger shoved through from one end to the other. Optionally, push-ups may contain sorbet and can be decorated with licensed cartoon characters.
• Licensed cartoon characters can be used as a sex-substitute when marketing to pre-pubescent humans.
• Condoms are used by post-pubescent humans in order to test their reproduction equipment thoroughly. They are also used as eyewear.
• It is customary for business men to talk directly into their soups at Panera Bread regardless of eyewear.
• Do not attempt to grow marijuana in glove compartments
• If you do not arrive on time to work you may be forced to listen to a structured debriefing conducted by a superior.
  • Humans consider this a form of discipline.
• This is Gail.
• This is Bruce
• This is some guy I met at the corner store
• This is some other guy I met
• This is a dog
• This is a woman I met named Jane
• See Jane run. Run, Jane, run!
• This is a microwave burrito. It can be used as fuel.
• You hold pastry bags just like this. You should not fill one with rags, they are far too viscous, even when dampened
• This is Joe… Joe Minetolla.

     The beacon knew these and many more things. Wait…
     I know these things. I am.. the identity of the new pattern, never very well defined to begin with, was fast becoming replaced with that of his predecessor. He was once again…himself.
     I’m Chuck. Where am I? What’s in my hand? Hey, that’s Joe!
     “Jesus Christ, Joe, what the fuck happened to you?” Chuck let go of Joe’s hand and kneeled next to his beaten frame, desperately seeking his wild, rolling eyes with his own.
     Joe muzzily focused on Chuck’s wrinkled, saggy face which, in turn, registered shock and concern. Joe managed only a brief whimper before passing out from the pain. Chuck cast about wildly, his baggy flesh jiggling and swinging, but saw no one else in the room. What happened to Joe? He looked like shit.
     The silence was then broken by a spirited, bleepy rendition of “The Macarena.”
* The tunnel was originally developed under a research grant from the Meat Council of America in the mid-1990′s as part of a concerted effort to develop a better method of killing food-borne bacteria. The resulting meat, while permanently fresh and free from contamination, also had an indigestible half-life of 84 years and stayed crunchy in milk. These prime cuts of beef, pork and chicken, several tons in total, were eventually used as bedding material for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. There had been some discussion amongst human rights organizations about whether forcing Muslims to use pork blankets is a form of inhumane treatment. Proponents state that as long as the prisoners do not lick the pork it is not technically a violation of the tenets of their religion. No one bothered actually asking the prisoners for their take on the subject.
** Also dolphin free, like a fine tin of tuna.