I was shopping at the grocery store with my mother:

Me:  (picking up a package of DaVinci Pasta “Spinach Nests”)  I didn’t know that spinach built nests!  Did you?

Mom:  (laughing)  No.

Me:  Do you think they wait until the sprouts leave the nest before they…?

Mom:  Yes, I’m sure they do.

Me:  (placing the package in the cart)  Oh, good.

A letter to Marketplace responded to a segment about banks complaining that they own all these empty, foreclosed houses, and that deterioration due to lack of use and maintenance is costing them dearly.  And, of course, asking the government for more money to maintain them.  The author asked “Where is the entrepreneurial spirit?”  Noting a growing population of working homeless, he suggested the banks “clean the gutters, paint the houses, and rent them.  Banks could help their communities, help the economy, and help protect their investments.”

Great!  How about a step further?  The houses are sitting empty right now, yes?  The elements and — here’s a key point — disuse of systems in the buildings are causing them to lose value.  Why not move the homeless into the houses in exchange for the newly-homed conducting repairs, performing maintenance, and generally properly exercising them?

If the homes are losing value because people are not maintaining them and not living in them, and there are people lacking homes who would love the “burden” of maintaining one, then isn’t there a pretty clear solution to this puzzle?  At the very least, if the banks wouldn’t agree to this, let’s call their bluff.

A number of subatomic particles were at a table in a bar, being entertained by a charm quark, when the bar was hit by a meteorite.

• The photon made light of the situation
• The electron tunneled its way out
• The Higgs Boson wasn’t worried, given its divinity
• The tachyon was out of there faster than you could say “Jack Robinson”, or indeed faster than the light from a Batman-style projector with “Jack Robinson” stenciled on the front could reach Alpha Centauri, even if such a device had, for some baffling reason, been built and activated the week before
• It is unclear whether the graviton was there at all, but if it was, it would have treated the occasion with suitable seriousness
• Some particle somewhere was heard screaming “Oh My God Oh My God Oh My God!”, but speculations as to what particle it was that was screaming vary, with the most common guess being some energetic proton that happened to be nearby
• The up and down quarks thought that maybe 30 extra lives would come in handy and started cooperating, but were stymied after the fourth step
• The Tau lepton and the Z boson were already splitting some soup, and just continued their activity
• The neutrino chuckled ruefully to itself while reading an as-yet-unwritten issue of Pravda
• The dilaton by the better vazes preferring under their better icy magnanimity
• The strange quark took responsibility for everything following the up and down quarks bit, explaining that Joshua had run out of cleverness so it (the strange quark) had picked engaging, and puzzling, but ultimately nonsensical punchlines with the hope of stymying those readers intent on getting all the jokes, and was thereby attempting a sort of meta-humor at the expense of mcgees.org visitors
• And the muon might have commented on the paradox of the strange quark characterizing its own punchline as being fatuous when it actually made a certain amount of sense, and then it might have exclaimed that its own comment had introduced further paradox by adding another item to the very same list, but my assigning this to the muon would not really have made any narrative nor scientific sense, would not have furthered, let alone fulfilled, comedic logic, and, besides, muons can’t speak

For the record: In the setup for the joke, the “meteorite” element has no payoff beyond the market price of iridium.

Russian bears are among the large and growing number of species that have been observed to learn new techniques and teach them to conspecifics.  In the Russian Republic of Komi (Респу́блика Ко́ми), a scorching summer has led to a shortage of traditional food, leading bears to venture further into human habitation.

Bears dig very well.  And one bear learned a useful trick, which he or she taught to the other bears.  Namely, how to open a coffin.  Thus a new phenomenon: Arctic bears visiting village cemeteries at night, digging up fresh(ish) graves, and eating the well-refrigerated contents.

A representative of World Wildlife Fund’s Russian branch was quoted as saying  “The story is horrible.  Nobody wants to think about having a much-loved member of their family eaten by a bear.”

Huh.  Is that a given?

For the record:  If any reader is in the position of some day having to dispose of my remains, then after transplant surgeons, research scientists, and a wig-making charity are done salvaging anything of potential use, you have my explicit permission to feed anything left to a starving bear.  I could not be more serious.

Of course, the claim is that no one wants to think about a family member being eaten by a bear, and this doesn’t contradict that.  But if you use as a criterion whether I would be OK with my lifeless corpse being used to save the life of a wild animal?  Please know I would be.

UNIX/Linux trick with sed:  To strip blank lines off the end of all PHP files, recursively, starting in the current directory, use this script:

find . -name '*.php' -exec sed -i -e :a -e '/^\n*$/{$d;N;ba' -e '}' '{}' \;

This edits files in place.  It changes files.  Caveat.

Credit to @Ace_NoOne at jimbojw, who in turn credits unnamed users at freenode.

Here is the formal mcgees.org privacy policy, in case you didn’t see the link in the sidebar.  It is long, but I think it’s actually useful and readable (perhaps this is a new innovation!), and the key stuff (a handful of sentences) is in bold text.

Hey, that performer Gallagher?  Yeah, that Gallagher?  You’ve got to read this article.

According to the performer, he invented the mosh pit.  Also, there weren’t any amusement park “splash rides” before he started performing thirty years ago.  Performers used to be able to be able to do a two- to three-hour show without a water bottle onstage, but now it’s standard for a performer to have one.  “How is that funny?” he asks.

People don’t know how to behave in public any more (reminder: Gallagher).  And Bill Clinton “ruined oral sex”.  And “Barbara Walters [is] the kind of person you would [want to] have as an anchorperson,” but she didn’t get the job that went to Couric because Walters “doesn’t speak good”.

Comedians need meaning in their acts (yes, seriously, that Gallagher.)  Prop comedy has faded from popularity because comedy now has “an emphasis on the mediocre”.

He’s “pissed” because he “knows he is an “excellent performer”, yet he’s “been excluded from a lot of show business in America”.  But the fact that he’s “still in business 30 years later proves that [his] is the proper way to think about things.”  And he’s happy to express his thoughts because he’s “really not ruining a career that’s not really happening.”

And oh fuck my gun is jammed!  And there are all these salmon left in the barrel!  Well, minnows.  One minnow.  Floating belly up.

I’ve established explicit licenses for content on mcgees.org.  The link also appears (as of this writing) in the “Site” section of the sidebar.

Insectoid aliens attack Earth, but target the insects, both out of racial bias and (rightly?) considering them the apex creatures.  Humanity fights on behalf of them, realizing that if arthropods are eliminated, almost all (or actually all?) terrestrial multicellular life would disappear.

Fact 1

The program Fringe is not very good (except it’s now slowly getting great.  boy has this been a long reveal.)

Fact 2

I still watch it.

Explanation

Some years ago I saw an interview with the performer Madonna.  Some many years ago, methinks, given that:

1. Madonna still had an American accent
2. She was still vaguely interesting
3. I was willing to watch such an interview instead of autoocularly gouging

I think the interview was on MTV, and I further think it was even with Tabitha Soren interviewing.  My guess?  Soren requested the interview.  She must have thought “Once in my miserable career, let me interview someone stupider than I!”

Soren references Jennifer Love Hewitt.  Here’s the exchange:

Madonna:  [overplayed bewilderment] Who?!

Soren:  Jennifer Love Hewitt?

Madonna:  Who’s that?

Soren:  Jennifer Love Hewitt!  America’s sweetheart?

Madonna:  I don’t watch TV!

Then … how … do you … wait, what?!

I mean, OK: it is just within the realm of possibility that Madonna knew every vocalist, athlete, news hero, socialite, political daughter, and author in the country, but … oh, wait, no that’s not within the realm of possibility, is it?  It’s kinda like saying “No, I didn’t read your diary!  And anyway, it’s not like there was anything too embarrassing in there!”

I may have the record for “most views in the first hour”.  But we can beat that!

(Not that I’m needy.)

But Their Pride’s of the Summer. That Cometh First.

I must share this important information from a cantina in San Diego, learned from a white man who did not vote for Obama, a white man who did, and his Hispanic romantic partner who also did.

According to the first, Obama is Muslim, because “his name is Barack Hussein Obama”, and because of his “associates”.  The second, Obama is “probably Muslim”, because of his “advisors” and, if he were not, “why wouldn’t he just come out and say it?!”

According to the woman?  “It doesn’t matter what he is.  No one man can save this country, because only Jesus can save.”

I’m contacting the AP.  How much are they paying for story leads now?

Christine O’Donnell has won the GOP primary in Delaware.  And the GOP has said that they will not be spending money on the race.  And have Released The Kraken!

I shit you not, they sent Karl Fucking Rove onto Sean Fucking Hannity to badmouth Christine “Please Don’t Say ‘Fucking’ Around Me” O’Donnell.  Here it is:

This must be seen to be believed.  By that I mean that witnessing it is presumably necessary for belief, but has thus far proven insufficient for my own belief.  Seek to 3:11, or use this link.

Boilerplate Karl Rove “or is that your real name?!?!?!” stuff.  GOP voters should avoid her because she … get ready … has a “checkered past”, “misleads voters”, and is paranoid.

Few notes:

1)  Mofo needs some new material, stat.  Citing “unanswered questions to voters” with vague allusions to misleading statements and paranoia is a good fallback line if there is nothing better to present as evidence.  But, dude: you can do so much better than that this time!

2)  I am curious to see what happens to the Fox News viewer’s brain when two pink-faces he is used to following without thought or reflection are, for maybe the first time ever, out-of-step.  Maybe tomorrow they’ll be in step again, and will just say they never disagreed in the first place?

3)  I offered this election issues cheat sheet in Twitter:  “An average American manipulating his dick¹:  Not Scary . A dick manipulating the average American: Scary.”  Pay attention.  This will be on the test, because this is already the test.

Gah, people: if this pisses you off: get active, OK?!

^1. “manipulating his dick”: Christine O’Donnell opposes masturbation.  You know this, right?

Masturbation, she argued, is not a moral substitute for sex. “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.  The reason that you don’t tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue,” she extrapolated [don't think this is the word they meant -JHM].  “You’re just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun.”

What can you even say to that?  What can you even say to a Christian who says that:

* not only has her god put people in a world in which they are subjected to immense feelings of lust as … as what? a test of faith?
* and not only are the actual consequences of giving into these divinely-given urges possibly lethal
* and not only is one apparently able to commit adultery while not being married
* but relieving these urge without the risk of disease, or pregnancy, or it seems any negative side effects whatsoever
* by oneself
* is a sin against your creator

WTF?!  Have you thought this through, woman?!  Let’s say I were really clever, and I programmed a biological implant.  I put a little computer chip behind my cat’s ear.  It gives him overwhelming urges to lick the walls.  Now, all the walls aside from those in his “cat tower” I cover with strychnine.  I tell him that he can lick the walls inside his little apartment on the tower, because I have not covered those with poison, but if he does so I will beat him.

They.  Would.  Put me.  In prison.  And you — yes, you — would agree with that ruling.

Chickadee, even if the god you describe did exist?  Which he doesn’t?  That god wouldn’t be worthy of my respect.  He’d be a psycho pathetic evil torturing fuck.

So, what can you even say to that kind of Christian?  Well, fortunately, in sane, professional, everyday American life, you don’t need to talk to them.  Which is good.  But this woman is a fucking major party U.S. Senatorial candidate.

Fuck you.  I want my fucking country back, you moronic motherfucking Tea Party lunatics.

When I was a kid, we outcast-feeling geek kids who had no luck with or understanding of girls related to the characters in Stand By Me.  Not only am I sure that kids these days can relate, too, but there’s an entirely new level to it, thinking about the actors.

So, kids, listen up:

The four boys in the film were played by River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, Wil Wheaton, and Jerry O’Connell.  Growing up, the “popular girls” I knew thought River dark and mysterious and gorgeous, Corey a pinup heartthrob, Wil an awkward overy-polite geek, and Jerry an awkward overly-polite fat kid.

Today?  Jerry is a movie star who has shed all the weight, become an über-hunk, and has two children with Rebecca freakin’ Romijn.  Wil is maybe the best-respected celeb geek in the world, a bestselling author widely admired for his writing, acting, advocacy, eloquence, and humor.  Corey Feldman, on the other hand, is the butt of many jokes and very lucky not to be dead or in prison for tons of poorly-thought-out choices in his life — of which the “popular girls” would have approved.  And River?  If you haven’t heard of him, it’s because he’s dead.  He died of a drug overdose, covered in vomit, in the middle of the night on a Los Angeles street, and people really don’t talk about him much any longer.

So, take comfort.  Geek power.

(Oh, and the girls who did find Wil and Jerry the cute ones back then?  Like us, weren’t popular either.  But they were the ones worth getting to know.  It’ll work out.  I don’t know the young stars these days, but, um: that-one-guy-from-Glee-or-Twilight (?) whom all the popular girls like?  Is going to end up silly or dead.  And that-other-guy-from-Glee-or-Twilight whom they think is a geek?  Is going to succeed.  So, hint: look for the girls your age who like the geeky boys.  They’re the winners.)

(Email subscribers, visit site to see the video blog post.)

(Email subscribers, visit site to see the video blog post.)

Following a link someone posted on Twitter tonight, I started thinking about my favorite speeches given by American politicians during this nation’s short existence.  And my favorites are those treasured, I expect, by many.  High on the list:

• Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg in 1863
• Lyndon Johnson’s address in 1965 to the joint session of Congress on voting legislation
• Robert Kennedy on the occasion of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968
• FDR’s first inaugural in 1933

And I realize that I now put Obama’s 2008 remarks on New Hampshire Primary Night on the same list.  I mean, it’s not just me, right?  Seriously, shit’s the shit.  Are kids memorizing it yet?  They should.  And if they’re not, they will.  Of that I’m certain.

I haz a new Six Minute Story: http://sixminutestory.com/read/loud-in-the-silence

Driving through a sleeping suburb last night, I saw a glowing “Open” sign in a window, not only long after what I would consider small-business operating hours, but in what I would have considered a residential community.

I was very curious, but more intriguingly, I had a chill run up my spine remembering something.  I started thinking about a fantasy short story I remembered reading some years ago, about a college student who found a glowing “Open” sign in the window of a business, late at night, in what he thought was a residential community.  He goes in, meets a quirky shopkeeper who collects barometers, has a long discussion about the phenomenon of good answers to bad questions, and ends up on a weird, mysterious path when he discovers later that the shopkeeper has bequeathed something to him.  Something something writing advanced queries to search National Weather Service databases something something dude’s a CalTech undergrad with a hot girlfriend something something a bizarre bit about collectible miniature elephant figurines.  The story ends in the dusty attic of a long-vacant house with a slightly-ambiguous ending.  And I remembered it rather fondly — like, that I had really dug the tone, felt entranced, that kind of thing.  So I’m driving, nostalgic, trying to remember what the story was, and I realize…

The story was written in 1998.  And I.  Am.  The.  Fucking.  Author.  It was the story I submitted for my “final” in a college creative writing class.

Gah.

Now if I can only inspire these experiences in other people?  Maybe I have a shot of “making it” as a fiction writer!

In the past few days, Vedder’s lines from the Pearl Jam song ½ Full have been replaying in my head.  It’s been “one of those few days”:

Climbing over mountains, floating out on the sea.  Far from lights of a city, the elements, they speak to me.  Whispering that life existed long before greed.  Balancing the world on its knee.

Don’t see some men as half-empty.  See them half-full of shit.  Thinking that we’re all but slaves.  “There ain’t gonna be no middle anymore”; it’s been said before.  The haves be having more, yet still bored.

Won’t someone save…?  Won’t someone save the world?

Civilians killed on U.S. soil in 9/11 attacks: 2,922 (all nationalities combined)

Civilians killed by Afghan government and military in 9/11 attacks: 0

Civilians killed by agents who can, in some fashion, be linked to Afghanistan, in 9/11 attacks:  as high as 2,922

Afghan civilians killed by U.S. government and military in subsequent invasion of Afghanistan: at least 5,791 – 9,060

Civilians killed by Iraqi government and military in 9/11 attacks: 0

Civilians killed by agents who can, in some fashion, be linked to Iraq, in 9/11 attacks:  as high as 0

Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. government and military in subsequent invasion of Iraq: 95,888 to over 1,000,000.

I just got punk’d by technology, and I don’t know how.

I tweeted last night (this morning, really) that I was meeting someone for lunch at noon here in San Diego, that this was in less than five hours, and that I should therefore try to get at least some sleep.  So I signed off, read a bit, turned the light off, fell asleep, aaaaaand…

Woke up.  I looked over at the clock at the bedside (more on this in a bit): 11:45!  I had overslept!  Why hadn’t my computer alarm clock program woken me?!  I had downloaded it yesterday just for that purpose!

I dashed to the bathroom, quickly dressed, and checked my computer to make sure I was using the best directions to get there.  My computer had gone into “sleep” mode.  Explains that!  When I woke it, the alarm sound (mp3 song, actually) started playing.  It also showed that it was two minutes past noon.  I got the directions, scrambled out the door, raced to the restaurant aaaaaand…

Skipping the hilarity, no one was waiting for me.  Because, you see, it was not 12:20.  It was 9:20.

WTF?!

OK, so, the bedside clock: it’s one of the “atomic clocks” — I expect that means that it resets the time, on a regular basis, based on a government-issued sync signal sent over (probably?) the FM band.  Whatever: government atomic clocks, timed reset, radio receiver, something something.  I would have sworn up and down that the last time I checked the clock, it was showing the correct time here in San Diego.  So when I drove home just now to kill time until noon, I tried to see what was up.  Fiddling around, I figured out the interface, and the clock was now set to EDT (UTC -5) instead of PDT (UTC -8).

“Oh, that’s easy, Joshua!” I hear you exclaim.  “You just moved out from Vermont!  The clock reverted to the old time zone / you never changed it / etc.”  OK, but: it’s not my clock.  It doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to the owner of the house where I’m staying, and AFAIK it has never been out of the state.  I had to “fiddle around” with the time settings, because I have never had cause to change the clock settings before.

My O.S.?  Sets the time off of a NTP (network timing protocol) server.  When I got back, I went into time settings and made sure the time zone is set correctly (to PDT).  It is.  I manually synced the time.  The time fixed to the right value.  Looking around, the timer app I installed yesterday to wake me in time?  Also syncs via NTP, and for some reason I haven’t bothered to investigate (was going to uninstall it anyway), decided I was in a different time zone, and used that belief for evil while I was asleep.

This has been very odd.  But it’s again one of those times I realize that a certain stripe of person would actually think many other things more likely than two unrelated technology failures: a practical joke by people who sneaked into my room in the middle of the night, say; or that I was teleported to the east coast during the night; or … well, something.  Something other than “Wow, I haven’t satisfactorily explained that yet.”

(So, the paltry 4.3 hours of sleep I thought I had gotten?  Was 1.3 hours.  I hadn’t even noticed.  Gah.  {drums fingers}.  C’mon, noon!}

Do you know that absurd “Cami Secret” product advertised on that even-more-absurd commercial?  No?  Well, neither did I, until I found out my In-Real-Life friend Allison Mosier stars in it:

Three days ago a hilarious spoof of the commercial was posted to YouTube:

In just that little time, it has almost surpassed the actual ad (there’s a term for this phenomenon that I’ve forgotten) and is on its way viral.

Allison?  Is not only an awesome sport about this, but would like to be the actual person to appear on SNL for the (inevitable) spoof.  There’s a Facebook petition to get this to happen.  Just go and “Like” it.  That’s really not a lot to ask of you, right, if you were tickled either by the original or the spoof?

Again, here’s the link!

Referring to my beard, that is.  The quote I gave to the original inquirer was “a full beard in two weeks and a very full beard in three.”  Use of the words is up in the air, but this is 22 days:

Take midnight on the day I was born, in the time zone I was born, as my personal “epoch”

As of this timestamp — 2010-08-19 23:51:40 UTC — I am one billion seconds old.  I believe that takes everything into account, including leap seconds and Daylight Savings Time; but if not, one might need to subtract 00:00:15 off the number.

Even measured in microliters, a DYA attempt would be very poorly-advised.  But if anyone has reasonable suggestions, I’m up for it.

New adventure time!  I’ve gotta be out of my apartment by the 1st, and I have NO PLANS yet!

“They said timing was everything. Made him want to be everywhere.”

and

“And my ties are severed clean.  The less I have the more I gain.  Off the beaten path I’ll reign.”

Eventually Galen will figure out where the bug in his Ruby on Rails code is that explains why each of my stories seems to get hugely more hits — and insanely quickly — compared to almost any other author’s, but until then, I will revel in the delight that this one — “A Tensile Moment” — seems likewise to be soaring in site views.

Enjoy!

When Niall was three years old, and he would be inconsolable, I would try picking him up, turning him upside down, laughing, and tickling him.  Low-tech, and sometimes it failed.  But sometimes it worked.

When an adult is inconsolable, the techniques that occur to me are not much more sophisticated.  Whether I do or not, I am tempted to try a joke.  Being inconsolable is scary for me.

But is that remedy or manipulation?  Am I trying to find purchase to generate enough leverage to change the other person?  Give me a place to stand and a joke funny enough and I will move his or her world?

Maybe.  Perhaps it is an attempted remedy for me, and my fears.  It could make things worse; I always fear that, too.  And would distraction be a remedy, after all?  Maybe it would just hide the sadness for a bit.

Well, maybe that’s the point.  If time heals all wounds, perhaps that time would best be spent laughing.

(Three Word Wednesday is an effort to create a distributed online writers’ collective by, once per week, giving a uniform prompt to writers.  This week, the words were joke, remedy, and leverage.)

My third effort at Six Minute Story is up, and is entitled “A Lonely, Lonely Wasteland”.  This strikes me as a bit of a weak title, and it’s moitié-moitié among the readers who have contacted me so far whether I made any sense in using the word “forked” as a metaphor.

One clicks a box, sees a prompt (in this case an image), and, simultaneously, a 6 minute countdown timer starts.  In the case of this image, what I thought was a forked stick was … um … a pair of legs.  So the story will make more sense if one “fixes” the image.  To match.