Lee.org

A very good friend of mine reminded me of an experience we shared. She rekindled it perfectly in this email to me

lee, i can just imagine this conversation…
coworker: blah blah blah
me: grrr. i want a cookie
coworker: what?
me: oh, nothing, just that i want a cookie.
coworker: huh? what does that have to do with blah, blah, blah?
me: uhm, nothing, it’s just this line from a song by evolution control committee…

coworker: (response one) oh, that’s nice, now on to blah blah blah me – right, bleh, bleh , bleh

coworker: (response two) really – who are they – what’s the song like?

/me: (inside voice)well, you see, an ex of mine and i were way too drunk at a corporate party and were trying to orchestrate a hookup with two very cute party members, and well, it wasn’t going so well, so i looked at him and said, “i want a cookie” which is a line to this song they have about dissatisfaction, wanting, sex, cookies….
/
me: (outside voice) oh, ECC, a very cool music and digital manipulation group – they make their own instruments, and have a remix of dan rather’s voice that got them notoriety in the early 90s as well as a cease and desist for CBS. one of their other songs is called “i want a cookie” and it is about all the things we want that we don’t have, a better job, or sex, or something as mundane as a cookie, it’s all the same – the dissatisfaction with our lives and the desire for better sex and a cookie and a job, all come from the same center. voice trails off…

coworker: perplexed look

me.i should have used my inside voice on that and just told you they were a funky art band that makes their own instruments and resamples voices over music?

coworker : uh, yeah
me: about blah blah blah…
coworker – right, about bleh, bleh, bleh….

I’ve done a little practicing and I can now spot Black Rock City on Google Maps when you’re viewing just the map of the entire United States. That’s 4 clicks zoomed in from the widest.

I’ve got to say that it’s made possible by a trick. Google Maps has done increased resolution scans of BRC and the BR Desert so the color of the area stands out as slightly different than the surrounding area. Still, it’s quite a trick to find the one different pixel on a map of the entire US!

Can you spot it? I can. (click to enlarge)

I took a bunch of online quizes. Here’s what the interwebs think my politcal leaning are

http://www.blogthings.com/liborconquiz/

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http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz-score/quiz.php

Your PERSONAL issues Score is 100%.
Your ECONOMIC issues Score is 70%.

That’s a liberal libertarian

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http://www.okcupid.com/politics
You are a

Social Liberal
(88% permissive)

and an…

Economic Conservative
(80% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Libertarian

You exhibit a very well-developed sense of Right and Wrong and believe in economic fairness.

You are a Social Liberal (88% permissive) and an… Economic Conservative (80% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Fri
10-6 work (and some constructive commenting on TVR’s practices (I find that more rewarding than work))
6-7 commute home
7-7:30 freshen up & walk to Dark Room
7:30-9:15 Perform at the Dark Room
9:15-10:30 dinner with Crism and AJ at Cancun… and then dinner with the rest of the cast who strolled in as they were getting ready to leave
10:30-1… umm, those are the mystery hours. I have no idea what I did then.
1 sleep

Sat
10-12 futz
12-1:30 watch English Wheel video and clean house
1:30-2:30 lunch at Paplote, chat with a nice lady in line and then we decided to eat together. She loves doing stained glass art like I enjoy building giant art.
2:30-3 drive to Box Shop
2:20-6 bang metal and oogle at power tool drag racers under construction
6-7:15 drive home, freshen up, walk to The Dark Room for my performance
7:15-9:30 perform and hang out backstage
9:30-12 wander the streets, find a broken vacumm cleaner and drive it around. pizza at Arinells, look for but not find Michael (Improv classmate) at Uptown at 17th (not 16th!) and Capp
12 sleeeeep

sun
10-12 wake slowly & futz around house
noon-2:30 power tool drag races and talking to Charlotte
2:30-3 drive to improv
3-5:30 improv class
5:30-6:45 hang out with improv classmates Michael and Harmony outside class, talking and balancing balls on our heads
6:45-7:10 shove dinner down throat having just realized that there is a $5 improv show at 7pm
7-9 watch improv with Michael and Harmony (oops! I missed Bad Movie Night! It was Battlefield Earth, which promised to be REEALLLY bad!)
9-9:30 drive home
9:30-10 try to make auto-darkening welding helmet work right, pretty sure I’m not succeeding
10-10:10 write this, invent new emoticon: :^9
10:05-sometime take a long bath
Then sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

weird: A woman I met in line at East Bay Rats Fight Night… Nina(?) is good friends with Alicia, who played Rod Serling.
I missed Bad Movie Night, Saturday Kite Fight, a gun show at Cow Palace, and Running of the Bullshitteers

Tonight through Saturday, I’ll be performing in “The Twilight Zone” Plays at The Dark Room! Last night was the dress rehersal and it went really well. The 2 episodes we’re performing are funny, intense, campy, and profound all in one show. And it’s only $15. You should go!

I bought a large backpack the other day to put all my disaster stuff in. It’s really a nice backpack… good zippers, strong material.. and an innovative design; it’s actually 3 bags zipped together… a fanny pack, small backpack and large backpack. So you can unzip parts of it for day trips etc. And all of the straps can be tucked away to turn it into a regular piece of luggage.

But what stuck me is the price. Not the price I paid… which was an astoundingly low $30 at a little shop at 23rd and Mission. The shop very much an independent business, the salesman an eager hispanic man with few English words and the cashier a Chinese man with only a bit more English. I’ve seen vaguely similar bags for $100. And a few years ago, that bag would have cost $180. What got me was the tag I just found attached to the bag. The price tag reads “888.00 Yen”. The Yen trades at 113 to the dollar. That means somewhere in the world, this bag sells for the equivalent of about $8!

Wow.

Here is a photoalbum of my recent Easter / Ostara / Chobunnpeggelly luncheon party. (the 2 videos at the end only play in Internet Explorer, sorry)

It’s not a party until someone loses a mind!

Ordered from Harborfreight Fucking Harborfreight!

I just ordered from Harborfreight.com:

1 91310-4VGA 100 PC. SECURITY BIT SET 9.99 9.99
because I always wanted to be able to get behind those panels that I wasn’t supposed to. Not because I want to do anything bad, just because someone said, “No, you may not look here”

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3 39440-5VGA PENCIL TORCH 5.99 17.97 I’ll be bringing the art of Peep Flambe to Burning Man. We had so much fun at the Chobunnpeggelly party torching peeps and making s’mores out of them, I thought the rest of the world might like to do so as well.

Update: 2 of the 3 pencil torches leaked. After the event, I tried the last remaining one and it refused to fill. I threw them all out.

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1 4807-0VGA 5 PC. PRECISION PLIER SET 9.99 9.99 I’ve misplaced a pair of pliers that my grandfather owned. They’ll turn up, they’ll turn up. But in the mean time, I need some needlenose pliers for all my working with model airplanes and such.

Update: The pliers suck. The wire cutters won’t cut even 28 gauge wire.

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2 42428-2VGA SPLIT LEATHER WORK GLOVES 0.99 1.98 Ninety-nine cent gloves! And they might be good gloves. They’ll probably end up being either alternative gloves for working in the shop (instead of always using my welding gloves) or go in my disaster go-bag.

Update: The leather work gloves are awful. They stink of some awful awful rubbery-chemical smell. I tried to wash the smell out and the sink turned black black for several minutes. Apparently, they hadn’t been dyed well at all. Now I have 2 pair of slightly damp, terribly smelly, color bleeding gloves. I put them in the closet inside a plastic bag to keep the smell at bay but the smell leached out and gave me a headache! I discarded them.

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2 3015-1VGA 80″ x 60″ WOOL BLANKET 5.99 11.98 I had said to myself that I’d just put my sleeping bag in my go-bag but then I remembered that it was snug -inside- my duvet cover… so I’m getting a spare blanket.

Update: The wool blankets smelled like another kind of death. I tried putting them in a washing machine. The second they hit the water, the water turned bright red. The dye apparently hadn’t set. When I took them out of the machine, my hands turned red and they smelled just as horrid. I threw them out.

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1 46157-1VGA SELF-POWERED AM/FM RADIO/FLASHLIGHT 9.99 9.99
disaster go-bag. I’m a bit miffed that I recently purchased a $60 Freeplay radio that appears to do everything identically.

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1 47873-4VGA 16 OZ. RIP HAMMER WITH FIBERGLASS HANDLE 4.99 4.99 It’s good to have a hammer for occational tasks. It’s not a snazzy $30 hammer but an acceptable pound of steel on a stick. It’ll do.

Update: The hammer is a laughing stock. This is the pièce de résistance. How do you screw up a piece of metal on a stick? How?! I’ll tell you how. I can understand that the fiberglass handle transmits vibration poorly in a $5 hammer, I’m cool with that. But then, you make the head too convex and very smooth so that the hammer has no sweet spot; every strike glances off. You put the center of gravity far away from the head so it twists out of your hand when you miss the (non-existent) sweet spot. Friends have tried the hammer and they agreed with me.

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4 40030-1VGA 2 PC. COOLMAX(TM) DISPOSABLE RESPIRATORS 3.99 15.96 For my go-bag and to be brought to the playa.

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1 91214-2VGA BLUE FLAME DESIGN AUTO DARKENING WELDING HELMET 59.99 59.99 This is the only thing I -needed- in this whole order. Why did I get all that other crap? I’m getting this for my summer project MIG welding waaay too much this summer.

Update: The welding helmet works perfectly 90% of the time, making it completely worthless. 9 times out of 10 it auto-darkened instantly. That last time, it would take a full 1/4 second and I’d be fucking blinded.

Blogging has just taken a back seat lately to actually doing the things I might blog about :-)

When Charlotte was here, we went non-stop… From the 13th til the 22nd. I was -going- to chronicle it all for you my gentle reader but what do you care? So I’ll just blather about it randomly (isn’t that so much better?)

Shopped at Rainbow Grocery for like 2 hours for a fantastic Chobunnpeggelly Easter/Ostara lunch. Had fun frustration with all the fun things to buy… such that we needed to rest on that bench near the cosmetics.

Astounding Chobunnpeggelly lunch with 6 people in my tiny place (Crism, AJ, Vickie, Charlotte, Ion, and myself) with toys and eating too much chocolate and tremendous amounts of cheer and smiles and mimosas.

Tango at The Metronome, Tango at Cell Space… Drove around including Fort Funston… umm, what else.

This Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I showed up at The Box Shop (the home studio of the Flaming Lotus Girls and other groups). This was the first Wednesday I got around to showing up since Jessica Rabbit had invited me at Decompression last year. Wednesday was mostly talk about what’s going to happen and how work is being divvied up. I showed up Thursday because a team was meeting to make the flaming teeth of this 170′ serpent thing they’re making. Fire, fire, heh heh, fire! We played with propane and plasma cutting but didn’t get too far. I showed up Friday because that’s when the spine crew was meeting. Turned out that… umm, I think I was the only newbie that showed up. And after some time helping out I (foolishly?) committed to becoming a good enough MIG weldor to help put together the 116 or so 24 gauge sheet steel formed pieces into vertebrae!

Saturday I went to a Giants vs Diamondbacks game at Telephone Company Park with Barry and… oh my, I don’t know the relation… brother-in-law? and brother-in-law? It was a whole day and evening affair :-)

Sunday morning I went back to The Box Shop for MIG welding lessons but I could only stay til 2. I had an Improv class at BATS in Fort Mason. I spent much of the rest of the afternoon on the phone and catching up with little details like writing blog entries.

(via my good friend Eric’s TGIF Humor list)

Sandia’s Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

Sweet. But doesn’t.. err that imply that larger fusion plants already exist?

(check out the associated photo. It’s hella-cool.)