WombatNation

Whenever I’m looking for a drink recipe, I first seek out my trusty Mixology pamphlet, courtesy of the Southern Comfort Corporation, ca. 1974. What better source could there be for cocktail recipes than a pamphlet that mixes astrology with photos of swinging dudes in gaudy polyester leisure suits accompanied by the smiling Stepford wives. Sure, this guy is in a pretty reasonable looking sweater, but steel yourself now for what is to come.

Back in the 70′s, subliminal messaging was a controversial topic. I remember running across a book from that same year called Subliminal Persuasion that had a lot of images from advertising and movies with supposedly embedded suggestive words and images, primarily of a sexual nature. Check out the Subliminal Manipulation blog if you don’t sex believe me.

Take a closer look at the hair of the guy on the Mixology cover. Now, think about other parts of a man’s body. Good luck getting this image out of your head (no pun intended) anytime soon. I’m really, really sorry.

Next up we’ve got a dude confidently sporting a pink suit. The previous sentence is the only known sentence on the internet including the words dude and pink suit, but not the word pimp. Ignore the faint yellow polka-dots. I double-checked the pamphlet and they must be a scanning artifact. I was so hoping they weren’t, though. I think my scanner understandably puked on the image.

Almost everyone knows his Zodiac sign today. But few have any real knowledge of astrology.

Intent of astrology data herein is simply to inform, not to advise. Therefore any personal application is the individual’s responsibility.

Check out Mr. quilted pants on the left. What grandmother wouldn’t want to see her granddaughter coming home with a nice boy wearing a handmade quilt? OK, besides any grandmother with something against hobos. Those pants are so appalling that I almost didn’t notice the crazy blue plaid suit in the back. He’s channeling Rodney Dangerfield from Caddyshack, but coming up well short. Powder blue cardigan boy looks positively normal in this photo.

If your party kilt is at the drycleaner, a full tartan suit is always a great substitute. It’s a little hard to see, but, yes, those are matching pants. Fortunately, I don’t think it’s the royal Stewart tartan. Too bad his promiscuous plaid partner up front isn’t in a matching tartan. I can’t identify the tartans for certain due to the cumulative retinal scarring, but I’m suspecting they’re variants of the Montgomery Ward tartan.

If you’re daring and desperate for the full pamphlet in a high enough resolution to actually read it, download the 2 MB zipfile.

The competition for toilet supremacy is heating up. The NY Times has a great review of Kohler’s Numi, which opens up like a Transformer to accept your tributes. Someone should hack the opening chime to play a recording of Optimus Prime saying ”No sacrifice is too great in the service of freedom.” And I would love to see it do battle with Toto’s Megatron, I mean Neorest.

When I first glanced at the image of the remote control, I thought the bottom left button said “Lasers”. Now, that would be freaking awesome. Whether as a laser light show to accompany the event or as a modern alternative to the incineration of your contributions, I’m all for it. And surely a couple frickin’ lasers would come in handy when kicking some Neorest butt.

While it was tempting to write this post in all caps, that would cause me too much pain.

Yesterday I received my first ever 419-style spam/scam by US Postal mail. It was actually posted from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with a cool rhino stamp that cost somebody 800 Tanzanian shillings, which is currently about 55 US cents.

My correspondent is allegedly CHARLES TAYLOR (JNR), son of Liberian strong man Charles Taylor. Daddy is now locked up in The Hague awaiting trial for his role in the civil war in Sierra Leone. And, no, he did not have a role in the design of the classic Converse sneakers, though it hasn’t been proven yet that Naomi Campbell didn’t decorate her chucks with sanguine diamonds courtesy of the Chuckster. Seems like Chuckie, Jr., is reaching out to people in Spain, as well.

It’s a pretty sweet offer, as I would be in line for a minimum of nearly $90 million USD.

A few months ago, the instrument cluster on my Audi TT started behaving very oddly for the first twenty seconds after I started the car in the morning. As time passed, twenty seconds became thirty, forty, … and then up to two minutes before returning to normal behavior. The colder the weather, the longer it lasted.

So, exactly what do I mean by oddly? Well, the needles on the temperature and fuel gauges would slam back and forth wildly. The tach and speedometer gauges would jump from zero to very high RPMs or speeds, respectively, then fall back to zero. Diagnostic lights would come on and go off, with their accompanying beeps. See for yourself.

It got so bad that finally the instrument cluster stopped talking to the immobilizer. This caused the immobilizer to think the car was being stolen, so it kept killing the engine when I tried to start it.

At that point, I had to have the instrument cluster replaced. Although this is a common problem with TTs, Audi has yet to issue a recall in the US.

And, no, the mice had nothing to do with this.

This image was forwarded by a cousin, who is a medical doctor, with a suitable warning that the CDC does not condone, encourage or reward the above activity.

Some of my vegetarian friends say they won’t eat anything with a face, thus allowing them to opt out of fish, but still snack on oysters and clams. Well, I will eat things with a face, but not if the face is still smiling at me. Maybe I’m crazy, but doesn’t this look like a ploy to convince kids that cannibalism is okay? Eating clowns, sure, but other kids? I don’t think that’s right.

[Via TreeHugger via Green as a Thistle]

Sometimes there are obvious connections between the books I read consecutively, but I never expected a fistula-based connection. A month or so ago I finished reading the bicep builder Quicksilver (Volume One of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson. I don’t often read 900+ page books, but this one was worth it. Not sure I will make it through the similarly long volumes two and three, though. Life is only so long.

Quicksilver is a historical novel set in Europe covering a few decades around the year 1700. The Sun King, Louis XIV, plays a small, but very influential, role. Louis also has an anal fistula removed using state of the art medical practices for that time. That is, a doctor performing the operation the first time using a pair of scissors. Although based on historical events, Quicksilver is, of course, fiction. The retelling of the surgery is fiction, but the actual operation really did happen.

Next up, I decided to read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by fellow Oakland resident Mary Roach. So far, I’m finding Stiff to be even more enjoyable than Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.

Well, stuff my mouth with biscuits if not more than 28 pages into Stiff I’m reading about Louis’ anal fistula operation again.

By the way, I recommend all three books. While Amazon reviewers agree with me on Stiff, Quicksilver and Spook get only 3.5 stars. Poor Neal is condemned like William Gibson to get bad reviews for not writing every book to be exactly like earlier cyberpunk novels. Spook gets dinged for making fun of the people she interviews and writes about. Excuse me, but those people are looney. I’m amazed she gave them the benefit of the doubt for more than ten minutes. I think she did a great job with the topic.

My sister-in-law and her husband hosted a great pre-Christmas party with an excellent twist on the gift exchange game. The basic rules were the same, i.e. you can open a new package or steal something already opened, but on the third steal it’s yours to keep. In their version, though, everyone had to bring two gifts. One gift was supposed to be the best thing you could buy for $1 and one was supposed to be the tackiest or kitschiest gift you could buy for $1. We did a round with the “good” gifts first and then a round with the “bad” gifts.

The timing worked out perfectly and I was able to make the third steal of a stunning gift contributed by Craig’s daughter. This is the kind of diorama I wish I had built in grade school. I’ve enhanced it slightly with Binky, the three-eyed fish, and a little clay figure from China, but it was already amazing by itself. This beautiful seashore scene now occupies a prime spot in my office at work.

The red light district style illumination is courtesy of a Christmas tree bulb circa 1954 that is more or less stapled down to the base behind the clam shell. The wiring for the bulb is fairly terrifying. The wires on the plug end are completely exposed, making each act of plugging and unplugging it a game of Russian roulette shock therapy. So far I’ve managed to keep myself out of the circuit.

The Beach Jesus diorama was generally considered to be the best of the bad. Craig’s contribution of a cigarette burned Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus dancing on a plastic base that was wrapped with a tattered red-and-white checked cloth taped together with transparent plastic tape was a close second.

The New York Times ran a good article by Patricia Cohen on rats in cars with the headline “Under the Hood, a Cozy Rat Retreat“. The article mentions someone who had a problem with rats chewing on the knock-sensor wire on his Honda Accord.

Looking on the Web, he found other Honda owners complaining about rats nesting in their knock-sensor systems.

Hmmmm, where do you think that location on the web might be? I’m sure there are other websites describing this problem, but I would be surprised if any of them have as many independent confirmations as on that blog post on my site.

About eleven days ago I had a minor crash on my new bike (the acquisition of said bike remains to be blogged). Fortunately, my bike came out of it with just a few small scratches. That’s because my body cushioned its landing.

I got the standard hip contusion with the attractive purple and yellow bruise that rose to the surface after about a week. The worst damage, though was suffered by my forearm.

Although I was descending at a safe speed and being very careful in the corners, I crashed when I came around a sharp turn and ran over some rocks that had fallen from the hillside and rolled out into the road. My front wheel caught the outside edge of one of the rocks and twisted out from under me. My right forearm came down on and then ground across a rock, carving a small trench out of and a hole into my arm just below the elbow.

Fortunately, I was near the end of a two and a half hour ride with friends, so they followed me the remaining mile or so down the hill to make sure I could make it home. Still, I was hating life, specifically the part where wind blows past an open wound.

I was lucky that my wife was home, so I got help cleaning and bandaging the wound. My nerve endings were already on full alert, so thoroughly cleaning out the dirt and rocks didn’t really increase the pain much. Maybe going from an 8 to a 9. My doctor took a look at it the next day and said I did a good job of cleaning it up.

I’m on vacation now and just visited with my mother for a couple of days. She’s a nurse, so she did a good job of redoing the bandages and making sure my arm was healing. While cleaning it last night with hydrogen peroxide, she found two little rocks that I had been smuggling across state lines. The rocks had been ground in so deep into my arm that it took eleven days for them to come up to the surface.

Of course, when you tell people stories like this, you open yourself up to hearing their stories about bits of glass, ammunition, etc. taking years to come to the surface. But that’s okay. It’s not like I don’t do the same.