Semi-Dried Gravy As An Art Medium

I had noticed several months ago that the gravy dried out faster on the edges of my pan, and that if the gravy stayed in the pan for a considerable length of time, that it would just peel right off the Teflon surface probably in excess of probably 99% if you catch it at just the right degree of dryness. The other day I was making some gravy in a pan that had ridges across the bottom, and after most of the gravy was consumed, it still left just enough gravy "connected" - still in liquid form - to form a contiguous mass but still have gaps for the holes of the "grill mark grid".

My first attempt at making a piece of dried gravy sculpture resulted in broken pieces. I decided to let it go several days to get really dry, and then work backwards with varying the drying time. So I had to hide that particular pan away from my wife or my housekeeper. So after 4 days, the side was too dry and removed with some difficulty and was too brittle. I was able to remove it completely from the pan without too much damage, but then decided to put it back to start shooting some pictures of it. When it landed back in the pan it broke apart into several pieces. So, 4 days appears to be too long. I will get some bacon cooking soon to get a fresh batch of gravy going and try for a shorter time period. I plan on draping the next trial piece on something, and also go for a smooth bottom pan as well. I think the 4 day test piece would have made an interesting wind chime maybe if it had a tough transparent coating spray to give it some support. So I am off to the hardware store to ask if they have anything that would work as an SRGRS - Semi Rigid Gravy Reinforcing Spray.

Update: The smooth pan really isn't smooth - it has a surface similar to a golf ball, so once the gravy dries on this surface, an interesting "inverse FLAT golf ball surface" will result.

Pans: QVC Cook's Essentials Hardcoat Enamel II 2pc SquareSkillets, Press
Part number K7585

Notice to Strawberry Twizzler Addicts with Poor Math Skills: WMT is Not Your Friend

Current mood: ninja

The pricing for strawberry flavored Twizzlers® candy at Wal-Mart doesn't seem to follow the "If The Package Gets Bigger, Its Cheaper by The Serving" logic. You can buy the same product in 5 different sizes ranging from 4 pound tubs down to tiny packages of assorted flavors contained in a colossal 60 oz Snack Mix bag. 4 lbs - $6.97 2 lbs - $2.88 1 lbs - $1.68 5 oz - $1.00 60 oz - $7.64 But these were the prices I found in Amarillo on Wednesday at a superstore and I thought that the prices here in Borger were different, especially the 2 pound size - hmm, I will try to get that confirmed later today. Just doing a little mental math of 5 x 12 = 60, the 5 oz is a 12 to 7.64 ratio times more expensive, BUT this article is about strawberry flavored Twizzlers, and meant as a help to their addicts, so if you were going to throw all the other flavors away in the 60 oz size that were not strawberry, or give them to OFA's (other flavored addicts), and I have no idea of the mix/ratio of the candy in the 60 oz assortment bag, (sorry, I didn't take the time to rip a bag apart in the store and count, or better yet, do 6 bags and get a better statistical view, larger population, ran-dumb-ness - "Clean up on aisle 5!"). So the 5 oz size beats the 60 oz on a price per ounce basis using some fuzzy logic. Now onto the 1,2 & 4 pound size comparison, easy math. 2.88 is less than 2 x 1.68 = 3.36 when comparing 2 versus 1 pounds, so 2 wins that round. Next, 2 x 2.88 = 5.76 is less than 6.97 when comparing the 2 versus 4 pounds, so 2 pound wins again! So far, 2 pounds looks the best, with more math later today and some sneaky foolishness about serving size. .............more to come, stay tuned! "Twizzlers" is a product of Y&S Candies, Inc, a part of The Hershey Company of Hershey Pa since 1977. The trademark(s) appear to be actively held by: HERSHEY CHOCOLATE & CONFECTIONERY CORPORATION CORPORATION DELAWARE 4860 Robb Street, Suite 204 Wheat Ridge COLORADO 80033

How I Will Know: Ab-Do-Wo-men

Current mood:Just Listening To My Heater

Feb 6^th, 2009

How will I know when my wife is well from her big bad incision and abdominal revision?


I have several ways of monitoring her level at achieving success at lap happiness (and less pain duress). The best one is : She will resume singing the opening theme song of the sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory' on CBS evening television.

Feb 10^th, 2009

Yea!! She resumed singing the theme song from ‘The Big Bang Theory’ - she is getting well! We have proof! She was laughing so hard last night that she was hurting herself.

(So I wrote this poem to celebrate my wife’s pain)

Ab-Do-Wo-Men

When do men hurt your fem abdomen

. . . but still you hang around for more?

and its just a touch of that good warm kinda of pain,

the kind that only makes you sore.

Its when TV sitcom geeky men do and say

those absurd & funny, silly-silly things,

that almost send you laughing from chair to floor,

that results in abdo-women wiggle giggle strain,

(but still you just gotta hang around for more)

So the success of all our abdominal medical procedures will
involve a period of induced absurd silly stress,

which can be measured & monitored in the following manner

of tele-visual & chronological progress:

Is the patient able to watch a complete episode of the

odd ill-logical science goofiness,

called the 'The Big Bang Theory', on Monday eve, over on
their channel called CBS?

"Is Stan Back from Uzbekistan?" - The Saga of an Exotic Pet Broker in the Middle East

This is the rough draft of a poem I started early this morning.

Give the Uzi back to Stan so he can safely go backpack through the peaks of Pakistan, searching for strange and many a wonderful pet, things our customers are unlikely to forget. But knowing him from previous trips, and how his brain has been known for its “skips” like that trip one time, he wound where? We found him crashed in a pub of Tashkent in The Republic of Uzbekistan, singing on and on cheery bar songs about Norm and Cliff and confused them with hiking trips he had taken in his youth near the French Normandy cliffs.

And if he loses his visa, and has to pay, that might not teach him a lesson or it possibly may.

And if he gets lost in Turkmenistan, then send again in our Armenian men from the home office of Turkey to find Stan our man, and remind him again to stick to his agenda: ‘Find Exotics For Us Plan', please Stan.

But don’t be surprised if he gets lost again, and if Stan’s ‘mental compass’ fails in a forest, and there's no one there to hear our man, when he fails, when he falls or even if he calls, will there be a hero for our Stan man?

And if Stan again gets another dog in Afghanistan, smuggled in from the East of Iran from a clandestine not-so-sure he’s was such a reputable man, who tells our Stan, “Oh, you’re a big canine fan, and Poochie is the finest Afgan best-friend-of-man”, and he hounds Stan until he not only buys just one pooch Afgan (that's really a French poodle with big aft gams) that strangely resembles a wooly on-steroids baby lamb, (baa-ark!), but the seller misunderstood the Stan order as “Okay, nine is fine” and then suddenly everyone hears our German friend Stan the Shepard arrive on the unloading dock with a flock of dog-sheep-dogs, just please, just please don’t have any one back at the exotic pet store roar, “oh, man, oh, man, he’s flocked up again!” as that will just confuse and anger many a man, and especially the Sultan, the top guy on that eastern tip of Arabia, known as Oman.

The Thoughts From A Week Minded Person

My aunt was wondering where everyone was (online) and mentioned it must be a busy day.

I was the first one to respond to her "chat" request, and I told her just a few minutes later that I had just got up from a nap, after all, it was Sunday afternoon with a tiny amount of rain and a chill in the air, I am old and retired, stayed up to late and really just tired, but it has been nice February weather, too.

Then she asked me if I had my days and nights mixed up, to which I responded,

No, here they are from the beginning of the week in the proper order using a 'Mon' comes first in the manner of a European calendar.

• Monday
• Monnight
• Tuesday
• Tuesnight
• Wednesday
• Wednesnight
• Thursday
• Thursnight
• Friday
• Frinight
• Saturday
• Satrunight
• Sunday
• Sunnight

Now I am just waiting for someone to notice the "typo" I inserted on 'Satrunight'. It actually isn't a typo, for I was using the 'T9EAb' built in dictionary of my mobile internet device, and as soon as you key in the first five letters on the numeric keypad 7-2-8-8-7 the device thinks you are trying to spell the word 'Saturday' and displays 'Satur'. And I was using that feature to spell all the names except I wanted to insert a typo in a strategic place, preferably not at the end of the list, or close to the top, and not on a 'day' word, but rather a 'night' word, which are really my invention as far as this story goes, so is it really a typo? No, so as I was typing the list I could see that 'Satur' was perfect as an optical-linguistical-mental endurance test. It has the u and r right next to each other and both consist of a curved piece and straight piece, with the straight sides of the letters right next to each other in the "ur" order, and "ru" isn't a whole lot different. It would have been nice to have an Arial font, too, instead of a Times New Roman, to help blend into the background. Beggars can't be choosers though. Wait, yes they can, they can choose to not beg then they are no longer beggars, but negotiators. "Say buddy, can I negotiate with you over about a loan to help fund an overseas relief program dedicated to helping underpriviledged coffee growers in South America?" instead of, "Say buddy, do you have $5 so I could get a caramel macchiato with whippied cream at Starbucks?"

So hopefully my aunt doesn't have a MySpace account and come over here and read this before I can get a interesting response to my list. So all the people who are common to me, between MySpace and Facebook, "Shhhh! - don't tell her, its our little secret"

;)

I almost forgot one thing. Yesterday (?) I created a new word 'typoing' completely by accident, it was a typo as I really meant to type the word 'typing' while I was typing a letter to a friend. SO now she has challenged me to try to use that new word often enough so that it eventually becomes part of the standard lexicon and gets put in the Merriam-Webster dictionary within 5 years. Hmm, I have bossy demanding friend, huh? (Don't worry she will read this and giggle. Hopefully it is like that one time where she read a funny thing of mine - 'Hall's Mental Liftus' - and a carrot of her split pea soup went up her nose. That was cool - here I am making women choke and cough and sputter from thousands of miles away over on the East coast of the United States of A-miracle)I know, I know, she is just trying to make me famous. But its Sunday and I wanted to sleep a bunch and its raining and blah blah blah blah BLAH blah blah. Blah. So I need to get everyone to start using 'typoing' really often as needed in the proper context and get her goal for me accomplished. That's what younger pseudo-twin sisters are mainly good for anyway, isn't it?

Super Sized Bowl of Eggnog Irritation Day

My Thoughts On A Cold Winter Evening
After Having My Son Stolen From Me
By The Federal Government
of
The United States of America

Out of all the people in the United States who have the control of what their eye-balls get to see on TV (for instance, old people in rest homes and tiny children may not get a choice), I am probably one outta the extremely small group of 14 to 17 people of the 300 plus million who live in our entire country who didn’t watch BOTH the Presidential EggNogIrritation© AND the Final Football Game of the Season (you can’t really say year because pro football is stretched across two separate calendar years), The supersized bowl of hype. I did record the game on DVR so I can go back and watch the commercials. So be sure not to tell me who won the game, as I have not got around to seeing the game or commercials yet. I have been busy.

How could Barack Obama even claim to be the president of the U.S. of A.? He didn’t create an election controversy like the last two prez elections, which I, along with everyone else, figured they must have changed the rules on how you become president. I didn’t bother to watch the Eggnogg Irritation because a piece of the Federal Government had already got around to stealing something very precious to me, my younger son in the cult referred to as the United States Army, which I will refer to as “U-Swarmy”®, who is now off in Georgia somewhere at this moment in “basic straining”® learning to be violent and kill people and get paid to let people yell at him and learn to enjoy those things to some degree. Hmm, somehow I think I tried to make his childhood a LiTTLE different than that...(I think I remember telling him that I loved him practically every chance I could, practically every day, practically every time we spoke, and said 'good-byes')...And now several days later I find out about an absurd by-the-minute additional cost. The part on my most recent phone bill, a section of MCI charges, shows where he tried to make contact a few times with the worst possible telecommunication equipment known to man that is still actively hooked up and running. I’m thinking, are they using telephone equipment down in Georgia held over from the days of Andy Griffith in Mayberry or possibly the style used by Oliver Douglas when he climbed the pole outside his house in Green Acres? (No offense to the good, fine people of Georgia, except those tiny few who are in charge of this particular phone-y-quipment.)


Note: some private information hid from view - all other information is (charges and times) exact and is tied to the bill of my private phone number which can not be deciphered from the above information.

If you look at this bill carefully you can see that these phone calls, a total of $143.41 for 58 minutes come out to a little more than $2 a minute. They were placed by my younger son who is away at basic training for the United States Army. That amounts to about a tenth of his monthly salary. The sound quality of these calls was ridiculously poor. We couldn't hear each other very well for the vast majority of calls. And then we get this bill in the mail yesterday for this amount, and after reading it, I suddenly remembered that he started using another form of payment in order to be able to call cell phones, and I see on that card another AT&T charge for $20.26. I can not see the number of minutes, but I do know the destination phone number (its a number in my cell) and the origination number is simply an 800 number, with an "NJ" at the end of the credit card line entry. So most likely that was a single phone call from my son to someone important. But still it was twenty dollars for an unknown length of time. Just curious. Hopefully the sound quality was better than the tin can and a string MCI mess that we endured. MCI sure knows how to put the mess in message.

Here is a suggestion to the U.S.Army: Skype - put it on a computer, and let people make personal phone calls for 2 cents a minute to anywhere in the United States OR FREE!!, yes free, if its a computer-to-computer, Skype user to Skype user. It is bad enough that the Federal Government stole my son from me and isolated him away like a d@mn religious cult in their basic straining and proved again how "family oriented" they are NOT and I just now, almost a month later, finally received a mailing address for him. I have no convenient way of talking to him, or the other direction at this point in his training. So I have a huge stack of letters to send to him and a few other things to share. Oh, and I need to get his address to a close friend in Afghanistan, someone who wants to encourage him to hang in there and make it though basic straining. But I am tired now, it has been a long hard felt-like-more-than-one-day day, so I'll come back tomorrow and look for typos and I think I duplicated some things etc, and there are probably typos and I think I duplicated some things etc.

My Modified Army Slow-Gun

“You May Have Raised Your Son or Daughter Wrong; We’ll Make Them Army Wrong”®

All content of this blog is protected by various laws of the United States of America and other governments and may not be reproduced or distributed without the express written permission of the owner, ‘Quinn Studio and Gallery’ or assigned agency, with no reproduction of any kind allowed except online distribution through MySpace for personal viewing, and various assigned companies for indexing services.

My Second Set of 100 MySpace and My Other Place Headlines

My Second Collection of 100 Headlines

from

MySpace, Facebook and Twitter

Come visit my other blog of cartoons !!!
Tiny Pictures From My Brain

200: The next time you are in the market for rhinoplasty, remember this piece of add-vice: You can pick your nose, and you can pick your girlfriend's nose, but if you happen to have a gorilla for a friend, you can't pick your gorilla friend's nose.

199: It appears that Facebook can't handle the word 'Facebook' in it's spell checker for messages

198: I know that Islamic Iranians don't believe in reincarnation, but it appears to me that the whole of the East Bloc communism, secret police, etc, ran downhill and resurfaced in Iran.... RomANIa .. RomAN..I.a.RomAN .... I...r..a.n

197:I am preparing for the coming nuclear holo-caustic end-of-times by backing up everything on the Internet to my hard drive in order to rebuild human civilization. Don't worry, I'm making a paper copy as well. 3 hole punch'd. In binders. Alphabetized. No porn.

196: My bio for the twitter profile display starts off with : 'Bio chemist ..." - its a good thing I didn't put down 'logist' as the first word, because I am certainly not a bio logist, much less a bio chemist. Just a scientific gardener. Mmm, tomatoes ....

195: Its seems that my world is getting wetter. And there are more frogs appearing. And supposedly there is global warming. So combined together - wetter, frogger, warmer - Global Warting !!!

194: I took one look at my wife's new wicked looking electronic facial equipment and said, “Wow, with this stuff I could get a job at Guantanamo Bay. 'Vee haf ways uf making you talk, bud virst vee vill make you scream vile vee laugh'

193: Ernest is watching a bird and squirrel fight for a spot on a phone line. Bird won, Squirrel zero.

192: I have reached the outer space limits. Of my wireless optical mouse. With rechargeable batteries. So I rearranged the furniture in my living room to compensate for the lower voltage rodent.

191: So it seems twitter has reduced the 'sound byte' to a 'sound bit'. Let me know when someone comes out w 'TwYTE-r' so I can have a longer msg

190: How do I handle pork at the Federal Gov't level? I have a separate special Spam folder dedicated just for the e-mail messages from my congressman.

189: Okay. I did it. I gave fair warning to the frog on my back door step. I told him it wasn't a good place to sit. I already stepped on him once this evening - yes, I felt horrible about it. And Cooper's training of "Mr Froggie Is Our Friend" only seems to work while I am within eyesight.

188: DPRK is so close to DORK and DARK

187: I thought that Iran's Prez Ahmadinejad wore a 'Member's Only' jacket until I saw NoKo Prez Kim Jong Ill wear one too, so it must be a 'Dictator's Only' model

186: Ghandi: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" Ernest: ".. and puts all the optometrists out of business, leading to a world ruled by a master race of German Shepherd Dogs"

185: I got my new handle for FaBo: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvuuxyz (I like my Double U)

184: Today's Life Lesson: Its a good thing carpet comes in a lemonade color.

183: I checked my earnings from Google advertisements from writing on the Internet. So far I am up to 13 cents. At this rate I will be a millionaire in about 44 years if I can get it to double every 23 months.

182: The irony of war: Most wars are fought about dirt & people. They die & get put in dirt, consuming more dirt & having less people. Lose-Lose

181: "Yes, Cooper, I realize I should be outside enjoying the coolest part of the day instead of working on this complex Excel function"

180: () If you think o herding cats O is diFFicult, you % should try teNNis baLLs ..0oO@8..

179: Does your wife know 'Hindi'? No, her do know 'Urdu'. Well, a few of words anyway. Like 'Happy' and 'Christmas' and 'Hello'. 'Hello' is 'Helo' and 'Christmas' is 'krismas' and 'Happy' sounds like the last name of the President of Egypt, so that will make it easy to remember. Everything else is harder than that.

178: PPOOP - A new acronym I created about an hour ago just as I woke up: Political Prisoner Of Office Politics

177: The ads popping up on my web browser are starting to get more personal with a change from "Get A Car Loan Even With Bad Credit" to "Get A Car Loan Even With YOUR Bad Credit"

176: A friend of one of my friends in Facebook mentioned that he likes having a 'Like' button but it would be nice to have an 'Unlike' button as well. But because it was a friend of a friend, I did not even have the option of registering a 'Like' for his 'Unlike' idea and I did not like this non-feature. Facebook - The UnLike Unable Place

175: Interesting: I started a fresh note in Facebook yesterday about how the government of Iran was blocking Facebook right before the national election. I left it in the system as a rough draft. Now I can't find it. Hmmm....

174: I wonder how many times I will have to tell MySpace NO to their stupid pop-up screen for the same &@^^')) irritating question over and over and ....

173: Don't mistake my kindness and patience as a sign of weakness. You won't enjoy the consequences.

172: I wanted to send you a card the other day, but they were out of the 'Please come home from the Army before some psychopath kills you' bin at the Hallmark store

171: My early morning not so dark sky has gone from a few noctilucent clouds with moonshine scattered across full force on my turf to cloud cover translucence on edges of a rolling roiling not really boiling lunar glow as everything near ground level that could be closely considered white responds echoishly with its w-light from the hardened dirt path resembles Milky Way to the dog treat pile scattered pieces The Pleiades

170: Ernest wonders just how much longer it will be before China tells N-Korea, "Would you just SHUT up! You are embarrassing the neighbors. Do you want to be 'Tibet-ized' ?"

169: Yea! I saw "My First Tomato of The Year" when I went to turn the lights off in the kitchen. It is almost time to move most of the moist tomato garden in buckets from by the back glass door to the glorious more solar outdoors. Solanum lycopersicum. Spring. May. Here we come!

168: Today was "Take Your Fake Sister To Work Day" so I had a great time with two of them.

167: I just noticed that actor Mel Gibson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look very much alike, or maybe I just need new glasses. One of those guys keeps appearing in a scary ad in Facebook
(It was Mel G. in a beard)

166: T-"It is only 9:47 and it feels more like midnight" E-"Yeah, it feels more like 9:53 to me" T-"But you slept all day" E-"Honey, that's only 6 minutes difference" T-"Oh"

165: Children need to learn the subtle differences and the dire consequences of when their parents say "no", "No", "NO", and "NO!!!!!". And, "NO!!!!!", those were not 'happy' exclamation marks just then.

164: Ernest is wondering which is more difficult: To disagree on how we agreed to disagree in the past, or to agree to not disagree on how we are to agree in the future?

163: I just heard yelling and screaming outside my house. I looked out the front window to see "children" playing in the street. One "child" was sitting in the wheelchair and the other "child" was standing on the back part as it came down the hill. My dog was not amused.

162: There are just only so many things worth thinking about, and if you tried to think about all of them AND you wanted to know the exact number of things out there that were truly worth thinking about, well, then you would be thinking about one thing too many.

161: All Interrogators of the Justice Department (I-Men) know in the summer time to offer just mint flavored ice as a favorite favor treat meant for bribing the soon to be deported Sunni men in their snow cones instead of using terror or some times, alligators during interviews.

160: Just thinking about building an igloo soon . . . . . . . only I have no igloo glue or own nails made of hailstone.

159: Do you know what it feels like to be totally crushed beyond belief, relief, grief, and at the mercy of some shameless nameless faceless thief? Well, that isn't me at the moment. But the morning is young.

158: I was wondering this: If Meryl Streep had peeps, and those peeps had peeps who didn't know Meryl and Meryl didn't know them, would they be known as non-non-peeps of peeps of Meryl Streep? And if you alphabetized and ranked your peeps and had 12 of them, would the last one be known as peep L? If so, Judas was Jesus' peep L.

157:I was watch-ing a kind-of screen saver at MySpace when suddenly the real screen saver on my computer starts running, only it was just slightly different, as that picture show has almost the same ones in a slightly different order. But my pet owl kept saying "Who?" and I would have to explain things over and over and ov..

156: I am a man soon to get salmon !!!

155: The headline today was 'Obama Wants High Paying High Skill Jobs in the Future (AP)' - and I am thinking to my-unemployed-self: Doesn't he already have a pretty high paying complicated job as President of the US of A?

154: Now it seems to me that the process of parenting was a big giant waste of my time & $$$, especially now that the U S Fed Govt has got involved trying to undo it

153: I wished we were a wee bit Irish, are we?

152: If you think that it is interesting/strange/bizarre that I work on a dozen languages and several writings systems, just think what my dog has to put up with from me.

151: Ernest has just discovered the interestingly shaped typos of the word 'suddenly': suppenly, subbenly, and suqqenly.

150: I have been training my wife on some Eskimo skills (such as cleaning food off a sharp knife with just your tongue) just in case we have to relocate to the Arctic for employment. She is a slow learner and refuses to try this 'dishwashing' technique.

149: Ernest is just experiencing a typical day of being invisible, saving private chicken (plural), and finding a big shiny pretty $4000 rock (on sale!!!)

148: I think that most of the people around me live in such a tiny world (or the crazy ones - a luna) that they have no idea or can even begin to comprehend, my Jupiter existence

147: Sometimes in the course of human events, some humans get off-course and become coarse and then untimely and inhumanely vent and curse. It's like they switched courses in midstream.

146: Ernest is just sitting back watching good vs evil play out before his eyes knowing that evil people eventually dry up and blow away and to just have patience

145:Ernest is writing a poem about the purchase mixup of a 'Bullet Proof Vest' & a 'Pullet Proof Nest', a device he just invented to get young chickens to leave home.

144: Ernest is in a state of shock. A terrible thing has happened in his life: I needed to know the cube root of 2 just now and suddenly realized I didn't know it. I just felt so cold inside, so numb; numb~b~r~r

143: Ernest is free !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!:

142: Ernest noticed that it doesn't take a village to raise an idiot, but they keep appearing. Where do village idiots come from?

141: Ernest just created a new word. "legally" it is pronounced 'leg' 'all' 'eeee' - it means when everyone has their legs pointed in the same direction.

140: It takes considerable talent to turn a win-win situation into a sin-sin situation. (Note to math people: that was not trigonometry just then)

139: Ernest is shutting down for a very long time. Goodbye.

138: Ernest is a dog massage-by-feet therapist in training. Yes, thats 'feet' not 'foot'.

137: I was thinking about getting an iPhone, its pretty cool, but it sounds too egotistical, "I, I","me, me, me". Just remember, 'iPhone' backwards is 'enohPi', and when you Google that, you STILL get iPhone! Amazing................

136: I was going to change my MySpace headline to something really special but now I forgot what it was going to be so I typed THIS instead.

135: Ernest has learned how to make a survival tent out of his shirt. Was chilly. Now warm except where a wig would be if I wore one. So it is a non-wig-wa(r)m wigwam.

134: Ernest is saddened deeply by the tragic events of one selfish person in Covina CA destroying the lives of so many.

133: There have been extremely brief periods in my life when the only thing I think about are little tiny dots. (Oops! I did it again!)

132: You can tell he is a true computer geek: all his shirts are red, green, and blue.

131: I have learned that my wife really doesn't like some of my relatives, especially my father-in-law (YES, as always, I did get her permission to post this.)

130: Ernest is under at&tack from AT&T who are good at tacking on AT&Taching charges at&t an ear-ritating alarming hyperinflationary irrational rate; I irate > they pirate.

129: Ernest met a perplexed fan of his writings. The man asked, "Have you ever done CRACK?!?!?" - Ernest took it as a sign that his works were inspiring and motivational.

128: eXtreme: Your neighbor likes his old weathered fence### so much he carefully removes the dilapidated boards, Ab-Lincoln-esquely rail splits them[], laminates them back together with carbon fibre and coats them with a transparent fire-proofing.[|]

127: Ernest thinks that it is bad enough that airlines, his plumber and his mother overbook, but now he finds out his psychiatrist does two; oops sorry, too.

126: So, I have had this 'mood' thing all wrong at MySpace - I thought you were supposed to be setting it to how you WANTED to feel and it was like a thermostat for the HVAC system of my inner being. I should stop bothering my local Maytag repairman.

125: Ernest is maybe a little bit better. I did write lotza silly things earlier today; coming soon to a non-theatre near you (MyPlace at MySpace)

124: If you have to keep repeatedly telling yourself "I'm not suicidal", then maybe you're wrong.

123: Ernest is better.

122: How many people out there are in favor of changing the name of this holiday from 'Thanksgiving' to 'Thankstaking'?

121: Ernest just wants to say SHAME ON THE US ARMY RECRUITERS FOR PREYING ON PEOPLE IN DESPAIR AND VIOLATING THE SPIRIT OF THEIR OWN DAMN TV COMMERCIALS (paid w our taxes)

120: I do not want my son in Iraq; I do not want any American sons or daughters to have to be in Iraq; If it was up to me, Iraqis wouldn't even have to live there.

119: Ernest is recovering from the effects of too much Hall's Mental Lift-us, taken too often, & too re-scent-ly

118: Is this you: You are in a paradox with a pair of Docs about what appears to be meant in a pair of documents about a pair of drugs you are starting and ending issue?

117: I have just created a new pollen index for allergy sufferers: I count the number of times my dog sneezes in the morning during his waking up period. Today: 3

116: Ernest noticed that you can't spell 'Palin' without some 'pain' and you can't spell 'McCain' by using 'gain'. Yes pain, no gain.

115: The world is really flat! (In several large and small man-made places. If you make a flat place large enough, would rain collect in the middle because the earth will think it is a low spot?)

114: I spy with my little right eye a sty in my swollen left eye and wonder why and how it hasn't left by now.

113: Soon I will be the wealthiest person on the planet. My grand inventive scheme is to create a nano-technological system that puts the lint from my dryer back into the original places it came out of my garments.

112: Ernest just noticed on a product ingredient list : 'sin perfume' and wonders what on earth that could be! (more importantly, why it needs to be on/in his toilet paper)

111: Ernest is in the process of writing a new goofy song "Migraines", to the tune of "My Girl", sung by Kermit the Frog, inspired by the rain outside and the pain inside.

110: For all the problems and tense moments that North and South Korea have experienced, it is surprising that West and East Korea are never in the news. Let us all learn an important lesson in life from them, The Happy & Silent West & East Koreans.

109: Ernest just wrote a neat near mirror sentence: "Do not forget to get four donuts"

108: Whats the largest thing in outerspace? I think its all the 'nothing' part all hooked together.

107: Ernest has a wife who wonders when his singing as Elmer Fudd will finally end. His latest hit song is "You Waise Me Up (So I Can Hunt Duh Wabbits)"

106: Don't bother me right this moment, I'm busy playing Paw-Ball & Peek-A-BOO!!! with you know who (the doggie if you didn't) Is it Saturday? No, its DOGGER-DAY!

105: Ernest wonders if the pural of 'manatee' is 'menatee' which causes a more dangerous thought: Do 'womenatee' exist? Ah, mermaids!

104: Ernest thinks that amid the national massive monetary meltdown that being independently wealthy might be a good thing, but I'll stick to being independently healthy.

103: So I am all excited about my new cell phone and its features, but Cooper The Dog just sees a bright screen and thinks, "that makes a dandy flashlight" but other than that he thinks its just eating into our quality time. Outside? Now? Play? Ball? Ernie?

102: I have created new lyrics for an old melody: "Happy Autumnal Equinox Day To You", only my version has 8 part harmony and a string section.

101: Ernest realized early this morning in the darkness that out of all the 'dipity' words, 'serendipity' just happens to be his favorite.

IRelANd Band

I designed a multipurpose green arm band. In one position it reads "IRAN" and when you move the slider it has "IRelANd" - both green, of course. It sure was convenient for the protesters of Iran to pick the St Patrick's Day color.

DPRK is so close to DORK and DARK

DPRK
Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
The North of Korea

D ) Not very Democratic, really autocratic
P ) Not very people oriented - really just a single person oriented oriental place
R ) Republic? Not much "public" about it. More like they have invented a whole new twisted form of privacy - "Reprivate" maybe?
K ) Korea? No, not really, only half of Korea, not the whole thing

North Korea - The Semidemireallyautocratic Person's Reprivate of The Top Half of The Korean Peninsula

DRPK: So Dork, So Dark

Oh Know, Bono

From CNN:

Sonny and Cher's Child Transitioning from Female to Male

Chastity Bono, gay-rights activist and child of performer Cher and the late entertainer and politician Sonny Bono, is in the early stages of transitioning from a female to a male and will be known as Chaz, his spokesman said Thursday.

---end of partial article paste from CNN---

So, Chastity wants to chop off her "tity" part and turn the S around for a Z.

Hmmm

Later on in the article there was a quote from someone else who mentioned that most of the time there isn't surgery involved with someone wanting to change from one gender to the other. They just want to switch and start being known as a man or a woman.

WHAT?!?!? I'm sorry, you are defined by your genetics as to whether you are male or female. It is not a decision you get to make. You can ACT like you are something else, but again, it is just an act. Its not the real thing represented chemically at the molecular level deep down inside the real you.

Clarification: This article is not meant to be a statement for or against gay rights, transgendering, private activities between consenting adults, or other activities. There are enough people fighting those battles. Its about the very basic words 'know' and 'known' from a scientific perspective.

What makes it even harder for Chastity Bono is that she grew up in the spot light of television on her parents show as a girl. A Girl. A GIRL. Millions of people have known her as a female. She is now 40 years old. Her life is approximately half over. She will never really be known as a male. She will only ever be known as a woman who wants to be known as a man, which is not the same thing. AND every day for the rest of her life she herself will always know that she is a woman. And now she is asking the rest of us to think something else?

The basic word "know" means an understanding of acquired facts, hopefully something based in truth, experimental evidence, and or reality; a consensus.

You can do pretty much what you want to in life as far as your resources will permit and the laws of your society allow. But bear in mind that there are consequences for your actions. And living in a state of denial and unreality has been historically shown to be disastrous paths to take both for individuals as well as societies.

Chastity is asking us to know her as a man, a sort of Yentl for our mental, at the cross-dressing crossroads of her mid life crisis.

I plan to continue to 'no' her as a man.

Chastity: stick to being a woman - its really the better end of the deal of the human condition. By having practically all my closest friends and confidants be female, that's one of the main lessons I have learned in life as a male.

Facebook TooPointOh

Online chat between Ernest and His Niece M


Niece M - feels a little better :).




Uncle E -

My Comment at 10:02 AM....

Period. Cry.

Oh, you weren't crying?

When you look at the "News Feed" section of Facebook carefully, I think it always puts a period on the end of your sentence even if you don't want one there. This caused the smiley face emoticon at the end of your sentence to appear as (see examples below reproduced inside the square brackets [ ] )

[ :) ]

which appears to be crying

[ :). ]

with a big tear the same exact size and shape of your right eye-ball! So this whole time I just thought, man, she sure cries alot! Out of one eye. She musta-hadda a bad mother who beat her all the time. She should go to the 'optimist' and get that thing fixed. And lets start a letter writing campaign to get Facebook to stop jacking around changing our emotions. Ironically, with a name like "FACE"-book, you would think or hope they would understand the importance of the properly intended FACIAL expression, whether real with photons from a photograph or tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols.

;)

My Comment at 10:09 AM

Oh, that last part is so much fun to try to say really fast and repeatedly:

tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols
tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols
tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols
tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols
tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols
tiny teeny sideways silly simple symbols

say that with a straight face

:|

And here is ANOTHER thing I just now noticed! "My spaces"

I tried to format those six lines with [by] putting some spaces at the very beginning right before the word "tiny" in a certain pattern to make it look all "pretty-fied" and the Facebook REinterpreted those spaces as a complete new line! At least "MySpace" now when to leave MY SPACES alone!

My Comment at 10:26 AM

Here is something else fun to do to cheer you up on a boring Saturday mourning morning and get out of this crying mode, just take the TTSSSS words from above and try to sing them solemnly to the music of "How Great Thou Art"

(I was just teasing about your mom (my sister) beating you all the time. I'm sure she only beat you when you were awake)

My Comment at 10:45 AM

Oh, I found a typo on the previous previous comment, that last line should have been:

At least "MySpace" knows when to leave MY SPACES alone!

"Now" I'm hoping that the big giant behind-the-scenes-computer with arti-'facial' intelligence at Facebook isn't changing my words around with semi-conductors e-thinking, looking up in HIS book: "Lets change his word 'knows' to 'now', after learning how to do REpuctualization last week."

At least he didn't change my 'knows' to 'nose'. Maybe the homonym-swapping software upgrade is perfected just yet.

Facebook TooPointOh


Niece M - lol i dont even know what to say. but i never know what to say to your posts! haha! oh..and she did beat me as a kid...all the time

;)

My Favorite Fake French Words & Frases

These are some of my favorite fake French words and phrases. I know I have several, but these are the only two that I can think of at the moment. I promise to add more as I remember them and create new ones.

"Lezgowheat" - translated from Fake French into English is "Lets Go Eat".

History: I would say this when we would get out of the car headed in to the restaurant, ah, my favorite French word. My younger son, who had taken (not sure about the words "struggled through") French in high school, would say, "Thats not real French!" - "Did I say it was?" - and try to pronounce it as 2 syllables. "lez+gwheat", but no pause, with a trailing almost inaudible plosive "T" exhale as the tip of your tongue pulls down and back from your nearly closed teeth.

Straw-bear-eee-jo-lie - translated FaFr->En, is "Strawberry Jelly". The accent pattern is "XoXoX" and sounds a little bit like the name 'Angelina Jolie'. The 1st, 3rd, and 5th syllables are slightly longer than the 2nd and 4th.

History: One day I was grocery shopping and I gave myself this noble quest: "Try pronouncing everything you buy with a Fake French accent and see which one is your favorite." Strawberry jelly (the wife's, not mine, never touch the stuff on my tongue) won by a far margin.


Remember my main rule about spelling in authentic French: All French words are spelled wrong. There, now doesn't that lighten your load?

If Michael Jordon Was A Mouse

MJM

If Michael Jordon was a mouse,
and MJM lived in your house,
this is what you just might see,
what appears to be a white bright light of
very high intensity,
a doorway in the wall all aglow, I'm thinking
"how can this be?",
that suddenly appeared quite
unexpectedly!

(Remember this is just a piece of fiction,
and I don't expect a future expensive
restriction,
if my mansion goes up for auction,
and mouse haters arrive with false
expectations,
and they ask for complete X-rays of the
walls as part of the inspection.)

Emanating from inside my wall,
It sounds as noisy as a pool hall!?!?!
I didn't remember installing this at all,
And you would think that I would remember
something quite that tall,
for the mice in my past were typically not size thrice,
but just the normal size "one",
brown & round, and nice & small.

And I thought to myself, say, isn't that an
outside wall?
Well, sure enough there are things a tall
rich mouse will install.
I checked it out and its luxurious, several
mousey (size 3) floors tall!
He couldn't get the building permits to go
north horizon-tal,
So he settled for what he originally wanted
after all,
straight up inside, a build between the wall
studs filled, all verti-cal.

MJM looked over this piece to see if
anything was askew,
as neighborly gesture, I thought, as a
poetical editorial review,
and he felt my rhyming patterns were
okay, as far as he knew.
BUT found it highly unacceptable in section
number two,
as he said whatEVer made THIS thought
appear in you,
to think that you could sell MY megamouse
size condo here at house number 102?

And on MJM went to clarify that "man"-sion
isn't quite the descriptive word for what he
had in mind,
but rather, "mice"-sion or "mouse"-sion,
(words in a human dictionary you are likely
to not find),
and these now seem to me, in better sight
hind,
to signify the more important occupant(s),
those of a rodentia kind.

It's 10:12 AM, Do You Know Where Your Coffee Is?

Several things delayed me getting my very first sip o' coffee this morning.



[[[->This list is in reverse chronological order, SO if you read it from the bottom upwards ^, .sing fus con less far is therefore and sense more far makes it<-]]]

Photograph TQBQT - "Turned Quasi-Burned Quattro Toast". (Can you tell I have been watching TOO much food lately?) I have devised a way to cook four pieces of toast instead of just two in my toaster. I put two pieces of toast in each slot and a few times throughout the cooking process (no exact number or times just yet) I reverse the two ZAP pieces of toast in ZAP each slot so that ZAP what was on the ZAP inside goes out to ZAP the outside and then ZAP receives an even amount ZAP of thermal radiation. SPRING-BING-DONE. Oh, SAFETY!!! I forgot to mention that I rotate the toast at a 45 degree so that a corner sticks out the top so that one corner remains cool and undercooked during the whole process, and doesn't damage my fingers which are needed for performing the Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And I noticed that it puts lovely marks on the toast at a 45 degree angle. Rotatoasterie!!! He, he, I just invented a new word, boys and girls, aren't you so proud of me?

Begged and pleaded with my wife to let me include the "Sumo" paragraph, and she FINALLY relented after going through an editing process where she got to pick and choose, so if children happen to read this; R->G.


SUMO: Helped my wife put a protective broad white band around her middle portion to provide post-abdominal operation support, only she looked like a sumo wrestler when we got finished. Then after she sat down I had to go through the motions of a S. Wrestler in the ring, sparring with an invisible partner, throwing the salt around, hands on my knees, complete with a "sumimasen" (excuse me) and a "domo arigato" (thank you very much) and some other Japanese I don't remember now because there was just too too much laughter interspersed.



Socked my wife. Socked my dog. Those are two completely different things and involve only a smattering of violent behavior, mostly from the dog. I helped my wife put on her socks, and just as soon as Cooper saw me fixing to do this, he saunters over and kinda stands there "playing dumb", ready to play one of our favorite games. Quick as a bunny, I take a sock (always clean, of course!) and cover up his eyes and try to hold it in place for 8 seconds (rodeo connection to mychildhood?) while he growls and tries to get away and bite the sock portion that covered his eyes, and I'm trying to make the same exact growling noises only louder than him. Of course, he naturally comes back for more....



The last thing I was doing as the machine Café do Senhor was making the last of his "hot water is still passing over the ground coffee" noises, was trying to find my coffee cup insulator because the house keep/rearranger had been there the day before.



Talking Korean Cow. In Korean with English subtitles. I know, I was as surprised as you. I was walking across the living room when suddenly I saw the last half of a TV commercial with a talking cow. Now I have seen plenty of talking cow commercials, but I am linguistically stopped in my tracks. The cow is talking in Korean with English subtitles. The cow lives in Korea (South probably) and would like to come to California where happy cows live and she would like for the viewers to vote for her in a contest at somethingsomething.com so she can come to America. So I asked my wife if she was watching something recorded from the DVR, and she said no, so I had to take the extra time to rewind the live broadcast to record that little segment. And watch the Kohler toilet commercial right before the Korean Cow where these spies are trying to find a place to hide something, but are foiled by the design of the toilet, extremely modern toilet. The spies were speaking in FRENCH with English words at the bottom of the screen! So I have transcribed the dialogue for you:



[Cancel Korean transcribing]



I helped my wife with her meds. She has gone from sharp pain to soreness, so that's a good sign.



I started working on a title for a blog in MySpace. I came up with:

"Up, Up and Away, By Trebuchet, My Trebuchet"

I am sure you can figure out what the musical tune that goes with those words without me telling you otherwise it would just, please, delay my 2nd cup of coffee.



Sidetracked imagining a conversation of mine 47 years from now in the old folks home at 106 (106 ? No, not my age, my street address if I buy the house to the south of me thereby allowing my average street address to go back to the original 104 [(106+104+102) / 3] where I am talking about my aunt from South Dakota making a fabulous meal for me once in May 2007 "Yes, she was a very pheasant person, and asparagus, too". I suddenly had these images and sounds of a geriatric Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Little Big Man", a 1970 movie which I never really saw, only a snippet of video probably during my cinematographic studies of 2007.



A musical moment with the dog. After I got out of bed I spent some quality time with Cooper performing this mainly instrumental (did he really mean heavy 'meNtal' music???) piece where I use my dog as a percussion instrument and mix in some sounds, usually going for a vocal combo of Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, and Jimmy Durante with a touch of gangsta rap/hip hop/boy band/Moron Tableknuckle Choir. Every once in a while I stop with my hands frozen in mid-air and question the dog, "whats the next line? [pause] Oh yeah" and continue....he just loves it!



Decided to try performing and filming a "Thumb Sync/Finger Sync" version of my hands performing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major, one of my favorite pieces of music. See next paragraph for more explanation or previous paragraph depending on whether you followed my advice to read this note/blog backwards. Of course, I meant backwards one paragraph at a time, so if you made it this far and you were doing it one word at a time, I am sorry for giving you a dyslexic-illogically induced headache.



I remembered a piece I wrote just before I went to sleep where I demonstrated how difficult it is to keep one thumb perfectly still, while moving all the fingers and other thumb very fast, and then stop and switch stationary thumbs, and resume. [9 - 1], then [1 - 9], thumbs out to the side. There. See? That's difficult. (Just for Brandon: 'Those aren't spirit fingers; THESE are spirit fingers')



I woke up

Ernest In Exile: Excuse Me, I'm Just Having An Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn Moment

I don't really know for sure what my true legal status is just yet, whether I'm 'fired', 'retired' or 'rehired', so let's just go with my new combo word of 'refthired', knowing in the near future some of those middle letters 'f-t-h' will be silenced/removed. I am sure there must have been at least one person who was 'ired' in order to get me 'fired'.

I woke up today in the middle of writing multiple pieces. My finger tips have been busy for the past 97 hours, banging away at a keyboard. I have a sitcom idea started based on the previous 3 decades of my life, letters to lots of people, several versions of the same letter to one particular person.

But for now I have to get back to the more important things in life, coffee, bacon, and biscuits. Man does not live by bread alone; there must be jelly, really good jelly.

..more.. later.. gotta .. go .....for ......now .......

REsume at 12:01 PM Central Time

I wrote about Iceland over in Facebook this morning, explaining the mysteries of the universe, a little, actually very little, and never got around to applying my answer to my high school chum's question about Hollow Earth, how protons, neutrons and electrons actually make up a very tiny fraction of the volume of an atom, so the earth because of its atoms, is actually very very hollow.

I plan to study the city of Baltimore today after a brief glance at the article in wikipedia and then go wandering around Baltimore later in the day using Google Earth.

I am going to see what hyperbolic functions are good for on my scientific calculator.

I am going to be at peace now that one of my favorite possessions of the entire earth has been returned to me safe and sound by a dear friend. My favorite screwdriver Stubby Jr., a Klein Model 603-1 IN 2 PT. On May XXth of the year XX-0V (thats my own way of doing Rowman Bi-nary-numberalls, not to be confused with Roman numerals or binary numbers, that I just now created while typing this sentence), for my XXVth anniversary of my employment, I decided to buy myself a new screwdriver with my very own money to replace the ailing missing tooth Stubby Sr. (and safely retire him and tuck away for safekeeping until I, too, could retire in the year XX-XIII) so that someday I could have a wonderful shadow box filled with a few trinkets of my 33 year and 11 day employment:

a)My two favorite screw drivers Stubby Sr, and Stubby Jr
b)A handful of various microprocessors
c)A syringe from an autoinjector of Gas Chromatographic Mass Spectrometer.

<<Sigh>>, I guess I'll never get my shadowbox.

.... more later today ......

Here is part of a poem I am writing about a friend's coastal house in southern Texas. Shortly after she got the property we looked and it was just a piece of unoccupied "dirt" on local live, a 'not quite as high as a satellite' view, but the other day when she mentioned that her business address had changed, I just happened to take a look to see if her new house was updated yet, and the answer was: almost. The static photo work of local live had captured the process of the condos in their almost finished state. The swimming pool wasn't finished yet, there was a giant trash lugger commonly used by construction companies, there were no vehicles around - there was plenty of day light - but nobody was home. I told her that I had found a picture of her house right before it was brand new.

Home, Home On The Beach

Before your house was new
It was being still being built for you.
There were folks a scrapin',
some of them a diggin', others call it landscapin'
Then somebody said, "you know what would be really really cool?
An in the ground, to be seen from ALL around, concrete swimmin' pool !!"
"You mean one just like Ellie Mae
of the Clampett's fame from out by Califor-ni-a?"
So they dug up all the dirt and had it hauled away,
and said there's a bedder place that you outta be
and so loaded up the rocks and they dumped 'em in the sea,
Gulf, that is, of Mexico.
Well the next thing know the price tag's just for billionaires,
And who could really afford to be a livin' over there?
So they chopped the giant home into pastel colored pieces,
with low innertrust or 30 year subleases,
condo's, that is, swimmin' pool, movie stars

She really has movie stars there??? No, I am just having trouble writing that last line and it is 2:11 AM and I am ready to quit for the day with DAY meaning yesterday, not the realy day which at this moment feels more like a tomorrow. Eyes getting heavy trying to explain some period of time when I am awake when at this very moment I want to be alseep or lasepe or lapees or asleep, there, I knew I would get it wrote right eventually. Well, to reanswer your question, it really matter sexactly what your definition of a 'movie star' is, for instance .......

Got Socks?

Now that I am retired, although it felt alot like getting fired, and I am not sure about ever being rehired, I have started doing a few new things, thinking about fewer new startling things and been thinking about starting to do a few new things, things that involve fire. (Cooking?)

I have started working on learning the Gettysburg Addresses. I am about half way finished. Since the populations are 558 + 7,490 + 1,352 = 9,400, I know exactly where approximately 4,700 "GbA" people live in 3 different states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, the ones that have got a burg named a Gettysburg.

I wrote a rough draft for this piece of humor while in the drive up window at the bank a few hours ago. (Actually I just wrote the third line which most of you may happen to recognize the first two lines but because my one MONSTER-o third line is bigger than the first two put together, I can probably legally say its all mine.)

GoSo?

I was sad because I had no shoes.
Then I met a man who had no feet.
Then I was no longer sad. Because I asked him, "say, buddy, you look exactly the same height as me from the ankles up, so I was wondering, before you lost your feet, what size were they? Were they anywhere close to my 11 1/2, 4E Wide and so I was wondering if you happen to have any brand new shoes just laying around you are no longer using from your old longer days, oh yeah, and socks, Got Socks?"

(Did you notice how I chopped the end of the words off in the title?)

So now there will be a plethora of sock advertisers stealing MY new GoSo slogan with super athletes wearing white socks to match their white milk mustache.

The Answer To This Question is Either '4' or 'Space'

Question: what is the difference between 1 1/2 and 11/2 ?

11/2 = 5 1/2
Then 5 1/2 - 1 1/2 = 4

But also, take "1 1/2", eliminate the space character between the two 1's and POOF! you have "11/2". SO space is alSO the answer.

Its a slow cold night here in Texas. The dog and wife are already asleep. Whats a guy to do, except sit around and make jokes and riddles and puzzles about fractions? I know, I know, you're sitting there reading this wondering, is there enough oxygen in the air that boy is breathing right now???? Did they seal his house up a lil toooo tight?

In all seriousness, after the events of this recent weak week. for those people out there who are concerned about me and love me, we are doing fine, & the wife made it back home, safe and almost sound. Thanks for all the calls, texts and e-mails. We love you. Well, most of you, some of y'all we just tolerate! The "Toleratians" generally know who they are.

A Recent Interview of Mine

So, you had your purple glasses on while you watched the crippled musical serial killer movie???

Yes, I viewed the invalid violent violinist violate in violet on video on my Vizio tV

Who starred in this movie?

It was a remake of G.I.Jane only with Jane Fonda on a Honda with a Panda suffering from a pandemic sickness as eucalyptus (I can’t believe I spell that word right without looking it up) trees died of a non-diagnosable dendrite disease. That’s what he gets for trying to eat ukaliptuss, (now, how did I suddenly forget how to spell that word?) instead of bamboo.

Hold it, are we talking about the same movie?

No

Where did the movie take place?

In the south of France

The movie was shot in France?

No, I thought you asked me where the place was that I took the movie, where I stole it from, the answer to that question was ‘In the south of France” at some Bloque du Buster, where I go to steal movies. Its just like that sign on the back of school buses and tanker trucks filled with petroleum products “This Vehicle Stops At All Railroad Crossings” And it makes me ask the question that is on everyone’s mind right about now, do they mean every railroad crossing in North America or the entire world??? Cause that would take a very long time for each and every bus and tanker truck to go around and stop at each and every railroad crossing in just the SUSAN (Southern United States of America North), like from Texas to Florida in order to make the claim that they had stopped at EVERY single railroad crossing in the entire NorthAmerica. There must be at least maybe, I don't know for sure, 400 railroad crossings in NorthAmerica. And would that mean that they had gone BOTH directions at each crossing, hmmmm? I asked my 4^th favorite Stewart this question at work the other day and he said that on weekends and holidays and the evenings the school buses would be available to go around and find all the railroad crossings and stop at them. This was the piece of the puzzle that finally brought it to fruition and settled it in my mind once and for all. Thanks, 4^TH Fav Stew.

(He keeps gradually getting a bigger N^th number as I keep remembering about my relatives who have the same name that I like better than him and on most days (the ones I am at work) he is close to the bottom of the list of favorite Stewarts anyway, but don’t tell him that. Oh-kay, you can; he would be amused.)

Ernest - The Other White Meat

I have decided to change my life completely and spend all my time devoted to one thing, just a single solitary thing - making travel safer for people who look like me when journeying through the wilds of Papau-New Guinea. I have been told that the place is just chock full of cannibals. But don't worry about me, as always, I have a plan, and I am going to take care of this terrible problem.

Plan: I am going to take a huge dose of poison with me, and if Iam captured by head hunting cannibals, and they are fixing to "HAVE" me over for dinner, as in over a bed of coals, Rotisserie-Ernie with BBQ sauce, I will consume the secret stash of poison, then when they consume me, I will wipe out several cannibals. Then the word will spread far and wide to avoid eating anyone who looks like me. So slightly overweight, white NorthAmerican males with brown hair and glasses will be safe, and other white people will have an increased amount of safety.

(Of course, that might mean an increased risk to NELPs (Non-Ernest-Looking People), so that might lead to a sudden increase in the demand for plastic surgery for people traveling to P-NG to look more Ernestesque. Doctors, get ready for an increased work load, thanks to me. You're welcome. For a slight fee, $4000, I can provide you with photos of what I have looked like at various stages of my life, including that time I dressed up in drag for that "beauty contest" where the girls played football in high school and three of us guys - well, lets just say I won the contest and keep it at that. Special thanks to a dear friend named Palma who applied my makeup and provided the clothes, turning me into a winner!)

A Marital Pre-Blessing

When you have been married as long as we have been, somethings are automatic and somethings happen (ab)normally around our home in a semi-automatic mode. I will explain one in a very brief story that probably lasted less than 5 seconds. It probably happened faster than you can read it.

I am in the dining room area standing and my son passes between me and my wife who is on the other side of the bar that divides the kitchen and dining room. Just as my son passes between us, I say, "Bless you"

Puzzled, he immediately turns around and says, "Why did you say that???!!???" - thinking that I am talking to him.

I didn't answer him. I let my wife do it.

I just waited a few hundred more milliseconds and my wife completed her sneeze.

Salmon:1 Bears: A Bazillion

I was having a conversation with one of my children just now about a movie. He was telling me some of the scenes and dialogue from the movie "Strange Wilderness". Caution: I have not seen this movie so this is not a recommendation for or against it.

He mentioned a line from the movie:

"It is estimated that bears kill over two million salmon a year. Attacks by salmon on bears are much more rare."

My son mentioned that salmon have never attacked bears.

I responded that that is probably not true.

He adamantly defended his position that salmon have never attacked a bear.

I responded with, "I am sure that in the entire history of the earth at least one time a dead bear has wound up in a river and salmon have come along and ate it"

His response: silence - grin - more silence - "d_mn, I think you got me on that one"

Ironing The Ceiling

I decided to remodel the bedroom ceiling.

A thin sheet of iron was bolted to the ceiling and then painted sky blue. I gathered several photos of myself & family and then printed them in black and white. The pictures were then mounted on individual pieces of plywood with the edges painted white. Magnets were then attached to the photo-boards to hold them onto the ceiling. Experiments were performed so that just the right size magnet per unit size/weight of photo-board were used so that the photos could be easily moved with a long photo adjuster (old pool cue).

Now I can easily arrange photos of myself to look like clouds. This leads to sentences such as "look, honey, you look just like a cumulonimbus", or, "look at that cloud made from pictures of our 25th anniversary party, it has a silver lining"

On The 3.5th Day Before Christmas My Uncle Said To Me

Online chat between Ernest and His Niece M


Niece M - is excited there is only 4 days until Christmas :)!!!

Uncle E - Isn't it closer to 3.5 days?

Niece M - I know!! But if I did it that way I would have to change it like every hour and I just dont think I am willing to do that :) So I will stick to the rounded number! :)

Uncle E - I agree you should stick with "rounded numbers" anD my answer is mUCh more 'round', just look: 4 versus 3.5 - see how straight the '4' looks? How many round parts ->ZERO!!! Now look at my numero: 3.5 - its got all kindza roundies, two on the 3, the "." is completely round and the "five" - has one, so that is 2+1+1 equals "four" - notice how I spelled out MY four so that it would be rounded, it has 4 roundie parts. And to think I have a minor in math. My surely dead-by-now-cause-he-was-ancient-back-then first college calculus professor is probably rolling over in his grave right now.

Niece M - haha i dont even know what to say to that!!!

Oh, Christmas Two-ree

D
ec
emb
er 200
8

At the morning meeting a few days ago the supervisor of one of the maintenance groups said, "later today we'll be flipping a coin to see whether the plant Christmas tree gets installed downtown at the main corporate office OR stays here at the plant"

...... so when the meeting was almost over a few minutes later, there was the usual question by the meeting leader for any other items. I raised my hand and taking a cue from King Solomon, said,

"I think we should just cut the Christmas tree in half and keep the smaller ^top portion that still looks
(a few people now begin to giggle)
like a Christmas tree and let the folks downtown have the goofy looking _bottom portion
(more people smiling, giggling even harder, just barely contained)

THEN someone on the west side of the room immediately speaks up and says, "all in favor of Ernie's idea, raise your right hand!" and of course the entire room shot their hands in the air with laughter and said "aye".

I Name and Rename Two Teenage Girls at the Groc Store

Groc store shopping is one of my favorite things. The chemist in me loves to discover new things to cook and to taste, that Martha S side of me. I also enjoy my subset of friends, mainly women, who work there. My Groc Store Group. I never know who is going to be there; the mystery of which miss or missus I might meet that day.

About a month ago I was visiting two of my young teenage feminine friends, groc store checkers, a quiet one and a never very quiet one, short and tall respectfully. I suddenly gave them male sounding nicknames without warning. 'P???' and 'R?p???'. Little did I realize that they would actually begin calling themselves that. (The '?'s are hiding the real letters – just wait, there's more, and a reason for the mystery)

The Sunday before Thanksgiving my mother was in town and we made a quick trip to the store and I was hoping that I wouldn't run into these girls, because, I told my mother, I had given them nick names AND my fifty year old brain had forgot what the names were! I did say "Hi" to at least 14 people I knew during our short groc visit, which is about 1/10 of 1 percent of the 14,302 population of Borger. Luckily, 'P???' and 'R?p???' were not there.

The next visit to the store a few days later I saw the short, quiet, very tired 'P???' when I first came in and said "Hi" and a little more, briefly to her as she was busy checking out a customer. Then I heard the tall-not-so-quiet 'R?p???' a few aisles away, so I unsuccessfully tried to sneak up on her. Just as soon as I said "Hi", she said, "Did you see 'Pete' when you came in the store? She's working down there" -> pointing west. Ah, I suddenly remembered, 'Pete' and 'Repeat'.

So earlier today driving home from yet another groc store visit I decided to rename them, only I haven't told them just yet. I will have to catch together some time to make my proclamation. I decided to go with something a little more feminine and Italian sounding, so I chose 'Pita' and 'Repita'. (I have no idea if 'pita' is an Italian word. It just needs to sound Italian.)

Marked for Life

I am sitting on an I-beam 30 stories above much lower, Lower Manhattan in the midst of a cage of buildings rising around me in my early 30's eating my lunchtime poultry based deli sandwich. My fellow steel worker and best friend Mark and I are enjoying the spring day, watching bits of my flaky chicken leave my fingers as I declare with flair, "Fly, My Little Bits of Chicken®, fly!" in a wicked witch voice from The Wizard of Oz. We watch the flaky bird bits reach their floating version of terminal velocity.

I suddenly become curious of Mark's ethnic origins and heritage. He answers, "My parents were a dangerous combination of Mohawk Indians (well known for their balance and working high steel) and hippies. They tried very hard to be 100% of each and that's why I ended up with such a weird name"

I questioned, "Well, 'Mark' doesn't sound very weird or very Indian to me". He filled in by saying that Mark was only a piece of his middle name. On the way to the hospital to be born, they didn't make it in time so his father pulled the car over to a roadside park. So immediately after he was born, his father looked around to see what object to name his son after, and hence the name 'Historical Marker'.

I replied, "That is weird, even for hippies, and yet follows an Indian tradition."

"I do think I fared better than my sister Tab though"

"I don't think that sounds very Indian or weird"

"Its because it is just the first piece of my twin sister's middle name, 'Picnic Table'"

The Evolution of My Old and New Pen(cil) Names

The Old

Dr. Seuss was the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel, a beloved American cartoonist and writer. A pen name is something you can hide behind if you wish to publish anonymously or in his case, semi-anonymously. My first pen name was a play on the single word 'anonymous' busted apart into 'A. Nona Mousse', which I thought was interesting considering it had a feminine middle part and there was someone in my department at work with the same rare name as one of the three pieces. And when I wanted to attribute a quote at the bottom of my e-mails to one of my children, I would use 'A. Nona Mousse Jr'. Only that made it even more confusing as I would not distinguish between the two children, they both had the same pen name.

The New

One day at work I wanted a new name to go with a silly piece of Seuss-like poetry, and I created the pen name "Dr Suez", and I thought, hmm, that's cool. That has slowly changed through the following path of evolution:

Dr Suez
Dr Sue Sez - another feminine name?
Dr Soo Sez - no, already have one feminine pen name, lets sound a little more Oriental, which I am not, adds a bit of con^fu_sion.
Dr Sioux Sez - Oh! Lets go with a piece of my Dakota heritage even though I am not Indian, at least I don't think so, and surely not Sioux. No reference to the Johnny Cash song, that was 'A Boy Named Sue'
Dr Sioux Says - ah, yes, I like that, it sounds like a sentence, Dr Sioux is making a proclamation.......

(Do you shun vowel e-vol-u-tion? You do?!?!?)

Squirrel Assassins

I have evidence that squirrels are trying to kill my dog.

a) I have no nut trees on my property.

b) Whole pecans are showing up in my back yard right under the "Squirrel Monorail" furnished by utility companies.

c) Squirrels sit on the SquirMono and see their deadly adversary (Cooper) jumping up and down barking and snarling and have watched his behavior to learn that he is a true omnivore - one squirrel told the others at an emergency local squirrel session, "I've seen him, he tries to eat basketballs and empty coffee cans and hippos - he must be 'elimi-nut-ed', do I see a show of tails wagging in agreement?",

A flurry of furry fans the meeting room,

"do I have a volunteer assassin?"

--silence--

"what a bunch of chickens"; exclaims the leader, "guess we'll have to get outside help for this job"

Yesterday’s MISTS-ery and Assassination Explained (It was just me messing around)

When I was younger I proved that the advertising slogan for the margarine product

" Everything's Better With Blue Bonnet On It! ™"

was not true.

a) Babies – Proof: 17 mad mothers at a day care center at the end of the day

b) Iced Tea – Proof: Numerous disgruntled customers at the restaurant that I only worked at for 3 hours mainly to do this experiment

c) The brakes on my sister's bicycle – Proof: The mysteriously dented fender of our car and dented forehead of sister. Don't tell anyone in my family about this.

Yesterday I finally got my MISTS (Make It Seem Time Stopped) machine to work. So if the day seemed kinda goofy for 7 minutes at 3:15 PM, it was just me. I also pushed the "Repeat" button, so today's tomorrow will seem like yesterday from now on, but only for 7 minutes which will feel actually like nothing really happened at all again.

Someone yesterday asked me 'what is the largest thing you've ever had thrown at you?'

Answer: Four E's - Once I was falling off from a building in Shattuck Oklahoma during a roofing job at approximately age 21, so for several milliseconds, 'The Entire Earth Except for Ernest'.

This is the most important question that someone asked me the other day: Why does your dog not like it when you blow on his face but wants to stick his nose out the window when traveling in the car?

Answer: Your dog obviously prefers carbon monoxide, diesel fumes, and ozone in preference to what on earth must be wrong with your mouth.

Second most important question: How important does a person need to be before their death is considered an assassination instead of a regular murder?

Answer: The main clues are A) notice that there are 2 "ass", and not just one, embedded in the word from which you can draw your own conclusion and then B) "nation" at the end which means that the death has to affect the entire country. Oh, I almost forgot C) the "I" in the middle is for conspiracy theorists who think that "I" might know what really happened or more importantly who didn't really die but just wanted to secretly sneak out of the country with lotza money and sit on a beach somewhere, quietly soaking up the rays and eating giant shrimp.

(Now I hope no one important, "A.A.", dies immediately after "I" post this, and then the whole nation gets the notion that I was in on it, especially if it seems to occur at 3:16 PM CST. Now, where did I put my emergency suitcase, tub of Blue Bonnet and fake beard?)

My German Slept-herd

I have trained my dog to do something very useful. Herd sleep. Sheep? No, sleep. I gave him a verbal request to get my wife out of bed to make us breakfast. This is more proof that he has learned the word 'bacon'. He not only went by himself and made his usual request "noises", but got his "nose" in on the action too, getting up on the bed trying to push my wife out of bed. I had been sick for several days with no end in sight, so I needed the pampering and he came to my, or rather, our rescue on cue. The wifey came through the living room grinning and asking, "Did you tell him to come get me out of bed ?!?!? I've never had him do that before. He was up there pushing me out of bed".

Now, I would only ever ask my dog to do something that I would do myself. I asked him to get my wife out of bed to make us breakfast. Licking her on the face was his idea, and it obviously worked.

A Question for A Confused Cooper

A poem for my dog and wonderful daily companion, Cooper

A Question for A Confused Cooper

In the course of every day
I ask my dog several questions
along the way,
Such as what he wants to eat
or what he wants to play.
But the one that was the funniest
from yesterday
Was when I asked him,
"Did you lose your hippo?
I think he flew (_from your ^mouth)
-> that a way"

Proving That Esfahan Is Not Half of The World

Today I learned that there is Persian proverb:

"Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast"

which mean "Esfahan is half the world". Half the world??? That is a very tall claim. So I looked up the city in wikipedia. Esfahan is a beautiful city that is in the middle of the country of Iran. It is located on the main East-West and North-South routes crossing Iran and was once one of the largest cities in the world. It was the capital of its part of the world a couple times, I believe. The pictures included in the wikipedia article alone show a city rich in culture and beauty.

Esfahan has a sumbol that seems to indicate that it is half of the world:

I would think that the left side looks like a globe with lines of longitude and the right side is the pretty part, so the right side must be the Esfahan part (?), I'm just guessing here folks.

So now we tackle my mathematical proof to see if Esfahan is truly half of the world.

I tried examining Arabic fonted words, but they were not much help and then I learned there is a language called Unipers which tries to take Farsi (the main Iranian language) and use a Roman font. So here goes my word math....

From the best that I can tell from the transliterated phrase, the word 'jahan' is the word for 'world'. I noticed that 'Esfahan' has some of the same common letters in a row, 4 of them, the 'ahan' part. So, doing some fractional math (don't get all 'I forgot that stuff years ago' math-whimpy on me if you have read this far), 4/7 of the word Esfahan is equal to 4/5 of Jahan. I guess (?) we should do fractional multiplication:

4/7 times 4/5 = 16/35 = or 45.714% of Esfahan is the World

So mathematically we half a proof that 'Esfahan' is a little less than half of the 'World'.

So I propose that this should be the new symbol for the city of Esfahan:

And if you want something a little fancier, I made this one too, as a gift to the people of the artistic city of Esfahan, a city well known for it Persian rug manufacture:

My New Occupation: Mitsubishi Dealership

Its not what you think, unless you know me really well. Its not cars or WWII aircraft. Its pens. Yes, pens. Probably the finest tipped pens in existence for the common man. Yes, there are Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph, but they are a pain in the &utt, and expen$ive (x10). These Mitubishi's write smoothly and rarely skip.

I just got in a new supply of Mitsubishi Gel Ink pens

This is my current inventory as of 2008.Nov.07:

Size 0.18 mm Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo Bit UM-201 $3.00 each

Black
Blue
Emerald Green
Light Blue
Light Purple
Mandarin Orange
Pink
Purple
Red
Turquoise

Size 0.28 mm Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo DX UM-151 $2.25 each

Black
Light Blue
Blue
Red
Emerald
Lime Green - New Color!

They are also available at JetPens.com
I just re-order in a large enough quantity to avoid their shipping ($25 minimum at jetpens.com) and then sell them at my cost. My wife says (loudly), "YOU AREN'T MAKING A PROFIT??? Whats the use in doing it?" ..to bring fine things to fine people, honey.

Desk 13 and Sponty

Desk 13

When Sister Mary Agatha would leave the room, I would begin. But first, the geography of our setting: The classroom in Parochial School had 25 desks laid out exactingly in a 5 by 5 grid and 24 were occupied. The distance from the desk to the walls and desk to desk perfectly matched occupying the square part of the room. Only the room was a rectangle, after taking a section of the front area for Sister MA's podium and circular trash can on one side and giant globe on the other. The lone desk in the middle of the 25, Desk 13 from the beginning or the end, had recently been suddenly vacated when the occupant had told her father that she wanted to be a nun, too, just like Sister MA when she grew up and the enraged father took his daughter from our midst forever.

0[_]0

x x x x x

x x x x x

x x o x x

x x x x x

x x x x x

Now I return to the word 'begin' near the beginning of my story. I would quietly count 1,2,3 after the door would click shut behind Sister MA. Then in unison all 24 of us would turn to the middle empty chair, together speak in monotone, each one slightly above a whisper but the collective voice was heard just outside by Sister MA in her current sister-sister chat through the ventilation system which made remarkable metallic reverberations as an intercom:

"And then there were nun",

followed by a brief 1200 millisecond pause and then two voices (always mine and Cindy, it was our idea after all), slowly shaking our heads,

" none? ",

and the 22 would chant, turning, breaking into 2 banks of 11 each for myself and Cindy, 22 index fingers in the air slightly blocking the passage of the their breath,

" not one "

Sister MA would open the door and poke her head inside to see us all motionless, turned back around with our heads forward and down dissolved into our books.

"Did someone say something?"

A silence on our part and then Cindy, our spokeswoman, would say,

"Not one person spoke"

Sister MA reflected a pause back, squinted while turning her head 17 degrees to the left in a manner later made famous by John Belushi, and then closed the door.

Sponty

When we were young and would get terribly excited, whoever was the least excited (LE) of the bunch would say,

"Stop, or you'll burst into flames with excitement",

and then whoever was the most excited (ME) would say,

"or what, I'll turn into ashes?"

and the LE would finalize,

"a dash of ash to stash in the trash".

And we would all fall down giggling in great excitement hoping not to catch fire spontaneously, and although we didn't know that spont word just yet, we just felt all sponty inside. And then we would sing our Dash/Ash/Stash/Trash song for the next hour or so and giggle until our faces hurt. Oh, that felt so good.

Hold it. In each of those memories I am a little girl with strawberry blond hair, dimples and freckles. Sorry, those must have been someone else's memories, as I am a 50-year-old brown haired man who has never been inside a parochial school; no dimps, no frecks.

Sin Perfume, Chapter Two

One day last week or so I had this for a headline in MySpace:

Ernest just noticed on a product ingredient list : 'sin perfume' and wonders what on earth that could be! (more importantly, why it needs to be on/in his toilet paper)

Well, The Wifey happened to come by and read this on the computer screen. She wondered what it meant. So she got some T-Paper and smelled it. She told me this later in the evening same day. I didn't smell anything she said. Then I explained to her the 'sin perfume' was just Spanish for 'unscented', 'sin' = 'without'. Which I already knew long before I wrote the headline in MySpace, just playing dumb as always, trying to sound ignorant. I didn't have enough space in the box to add what I originally intended. So here is the 'un-cut' version:

Ernest just noticed on a product ingredient list : 'sin perfume' and wonders what on earth that could be! (more importantly, why it needs to be on/in his toilet paper) It's probably nothing to worry about.

Isn't that so very pfunny? That is a new word I just created, contracting 'pun' with 'funny', combining their meanings equally. As in German, pronounce both the 'p' and the 'f'.

So La Wifey learned a little more Spanish this week. And I created a few new words. And the Dog? He has learned which one of us to pester to take him on a ride in my car. Guess which one? Why of course, the 'parent' who loves him more. Me. And I wanted so desperately to always have a clean car and have worked at it very hard for several months, winning the war against dirt and grime, too! Alas, there is Lassie type detached fur scattered throughout my vehicle.

So the next time someone starts talking about 'sin' around you, just riddle them this:

Where is a 'sin' nothing to worry about?

Answer: In Spain. The sin in Spain is nothin'. Actually if you look really close, you see that S-in is all around Spain, and 80% of everything right about Spain is 'pain', but on the brighter side, the 60% that is left is a 'Spa'. Ah, balance.

Oh, I giggle myself to sleep a-now, as you ponder anew: Spa and Spain, sin and pain.

ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Our Big Turtle Problem

No, the turtle isn't big; the problem is, for Mr. Turtle at least. Mr. Turtle, our semi-beloved semi-pet, has gone missing, but in a confined geographic rectangular region, The Garage.

We have been training our dog Cooper to leave Mr. Turtle alone. Trying. "Mr. Turtle is our friend" I know, it sounds dorky, but hey, it's me, the scientist, doing an experiment in animal behavior. Now it sounds cooler? Cooper doesn't seem to try to hurt him, just thinks maybe he is another squeak toy that doesn't work and carries him around like Kiboko and Elefante (our squeak toys have proper names, one from Kiswahili, the other French) You can see pictures of them in the blog "Froggie - The Forbidden Meat in the Garden of E-rnest-den" from a few months ago. "Yes, Froggie is our friend too." Yes, I agree, speaking that phrase to a dog does sound dorky.

It seems that Cooper had "transported" him into the garage and Wifey made him put him down. (I bet you didn't have problems with that last triple "him" sentence, did you?) When Wifey came back outside, the turtle had moved somewhere else. Unseen. The only problem though, the turtle is about "yay" high, and the concrete barrier at the bottom of the human back door is about 2 ½ "yays". I've seen Mr. Turtle in non-action. I don't think he's part Ninja, can pole vault or high jump, or for that matter, vault or jump in any non-Ninja manner, so at the moment he is trapped. Under things. A lot of things. Does this mean that someone is going to have to start moving (i.e. cleaning) the garage just to find & save Mr. Turtle? Okay, "clean" is too strong of a word, lets say, "rearrange".

Wifey asked me, "Is he going to starve?", to which I replied confidently (guessing) that turtles have a low metabolic rate and that they probably eat bugs, so "no". Winter is coming on soon so his only hope is the kindness of semi-strangers. After all he did come with the new house, we didn't ask for him. Judging by the number of scratch marks on his shell from being "transported" by Cooper, he has faired pretty well, knowing Cooper's past ferocity with other critters who are not his "friends".

So maybe Mr. Turtle will get lucky and while he happens to be out in the open in the garage sometime, a designated doggie delivery device will transport him back out into the semi-wild green yonder where he can wander back to his home underneath the utility building, recently renamed The Ninja Nook. And I won't have to "clean" the garage.

Join the MIRT Club Today!

MIRT is a conspiracy theory club I created today. I am not a member. MIRT stands for "Mars Isn't Really There". So if you believe that the planet Mars does not really exist, just leave a blog comment to say you want to join. If you hurry, you can be in the first group of 10,000 members to join. Actually, if you just take your time you can probably be the first person. Cost: $35 initial fee, and annual dues of $55. (But it is based on the supposed Martian year, which is longer than the earth year by 88%, so this is actually a good deal.)

Here is my previous daily thought: You could go outside, sit in your lawn chair and be hit by a 400 lb meteorite and not be killed. What??? How??? Well, to accomplish this feat you may have to wait 1.27 million years and by that time you would already be dead, most likely. And then you would need to arrange for your mummified remains to be carefully guarded and perhaps something a little more substantial than a lawn chair to support you. There is the matter of property taxes. It would be best to plan ahead and segregate that tiny piece of land as a sovereign nation. Or pay taxes ahead of time, whichever is easier. And maintenance fees. Maybe get yourself disguised as a statue. Bronzed. I believe the word for suntan lotion in Italian is "lozioneabbronzante", so that goes along with being bronzed. This sounds more like a project to be done in a country like Italy, all the ancient ruins, you might fit in better, maybe even avoid the whole tax issue. And they do have that little tiny country within a bigger country thing going already.

I had a previous daily thought that is more bizarre than these two combined and then multiplied by 17.34, but I think I should just leave that one alone, safely floating in the mind of Ernest. Okay here's a hint: It involves revenge on identity thieves. And their "suicide". Okay, here's some more: Well, it did start off as a single frame cartoon with the defense attorney explaining the concept to a jury. See I told you it should have stayed in my mind.....

Lets Give Mt Rushmore a Facelift or Four!

1. If you could pick four presidents to redo Mt Rushmore, only this time go for the worst, who would you pick?

Cheney, Nixon, Cleveland, & Johnson (he he he, which Johnson? Just morph the two together and make people guess. What, you don't think Cheney was the real President? What, you don't think Cheney was that bad of a president? What, you never heard of Cheney?)

Art work coming soon....


2. What is the most recent thing you have yelled?

OUCH! DON'T WALK ON THE ERNIE! (that's the name my dog knows me by)


3. What is the most recent thing you have killed?

A honey bee that was doing a poor job of imitating a wasp. Wait, it may not be dead yet, that's another blog coming soon....I should re-title the question "What is the most recent living thing you have most certainly trapped eternally?"

4. What is the most recent thing you have rescued?

Mr. Turtle in our backyard from you know who (Mr. Dog, if you didn't)


5. What is the strangest thing your spouse/MoSiOt does with food?

She leaves glasses of milk setting around so that the remnants turn into miniature yogurt factories (unintentionally, of course, don't worry Yoplait, there is no great annual solidified yogurt harvest). And if you include the coffee cups in the same category, the coffee flavored artificial yogurt factories.

6. What is the strangest thing you do with food?

Allow miniature yogurt factories to exist in my domicile

7. From recent conversations with other people, who do you think is the most evil person you have heard about yet you don't remember or never knew their name?

The evil sister of a woman who was telling me about how her sister had her transvestite cross-dressing male chihuahua put to sleep simply because she would not loan her car to the evil sister. (Wow, I just wrote a sentence that begins and ends with the words "The Evil Sister")

8. Which of the three ingredients of a BLT sandwich can you leave off?

The "L" one. Its tough, but I don't have to have the lobster every time.


9. Does your pet have any nicknames?

Bubba, Bubba Bear

10. If you could be magically transported somewhere, arrive naked, and exist there for only 15 seconds, where would it be?

The White House Oval Office during an important meeting the very first day of the new term AND be able to do this every four years. That would really make people think twice about running for president. I hope I wouldn't be confused with appearances of the Virgin Mary. Of course, I don't know if she arrives naked or last longer than 15 seconds. And I would probably want to go with the bullet-proof body option from what I know about The Secret Service. Or better yet, be invisible to the Secret Service Agents, yes, lets go with that option instead, more creative.

My Complete Lyrics: You Waise Me Up (So I Can Hunt Duh Wabbits)

You Waise Me Up (So I Can Hunt Duh Wabbits)©

Lyrics By Ernest S. B. Boston

(To be sung poorly in the voice of Elmer Fudd)

(Music to the tune of 'You Raise Me Up')
(Some syncopation is required; for a guide, just think and sound like Elmer Fudd)

When I yam down, and oh my so so wear-wee

When twumbles come, and my hard bird bwain be,

Den I yam shrill and wade here in the wabbit patch,

Untwill Bugs Bun-ny is in my sights again

You waise ^me UP!, so I can hunt duh wabbits,

You waise ^me up, to hunt in sto-my seasons;
I yam stwong, when I eat my wabbit stew-^ooo,
You waise ^me up, yes, I yam waised by you.

Dare is no wife – no wife wiff-out a hang-over

Each westless wife is so imperfect-wee.

But when it comes to hunt-twin or be mare-weed,

Sometimes I dwink, I dwink excessive-wee.

You wake me up, that why I bodd dis a-lumm qwock.

You wake me up, to hunt wheel er-lie-ee.

I yam stwong, when I eat wabbit jerky;
You wake me up, to hunt down bun-ni-eees.

You waise ^me up, to invent my wabbit sand-wich,

You waise ^me up, to butch-her dem wheel good.

Bah-bah-que knees of bun-nies in buh-uns,

You waise ^me up: (heh heh heh heh) To mow dan I can be.

Warning: For private use only. Federal law provides severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, performance or exhibition of copyrighted material without written permission/consent. Lyrics property of Quinn Studio & Gallery.

A Rabbit and A Noun

A rabbit and a noun walk into a bar.

They ask the bartender, "I think we are running late, we were supposed to meet our friend, a priest, here several minutes ago. Is he already here?"

The bartender turns to me, Ernest the Humor Writer, and whispers, "I'm confused, am I in the right joke???"

I just tell him to read whats on his cue card.

Reluctantly and slowly, he says, "I think one of you has an extra 't' and one of you has an extra 'o' "

And the rabbit says, "Oh, which one of us?"

And the noun says, "I'm thirsty, I'll take that glass of tea you mentioned"

The bartender turns to me, Ernest the Humor Writer, and grins, "I get it now"

Do I Have Guts? Why, of Course I Do!

1) Do you have the guts to answer these queries and post them as "The Controversial Survey?"
I have guts in my abdominal cavity, so yes (?)

2) Would you do meth if it was legalized?
I like to do math, it was one of my favorite subjects in school. I get paid lotza money for doing math.

3) Abortion: for or against?
Personally, I would never have an abortion, or liposuction, or anything else to my tummy


4) Would our country fall with a woman president?
Actually Fall is the correct term, because the presidential election is in Nov, technically a part of the Fall season. So all presidents elected in the Fall are Fall presidents. And think back to the Chevy Chase days on Saturday Night Live when he portrayed Gerald "Oops" Ford, he was always falling down, even though Gerald Ford didn't become president in the Fall season, but in the summer time on Aug something^TH, 1974

5) Do you support the death penalty?
Support, as in spend money to actually buy the equipment or be on the cheerleading squad? I have killed a few insects, but I usually take spiders and wasps back outside, captured with a saucer and glass. Big game hunting. Poetry. Yes, I wrote a poem about taking a bug outside.

6) Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?
Marijuana? Isn't that what hippies say when they propose, "Marriage, ya wanna?" So the answer is no, we don't want hippies getting married.

7) Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?
Having sex at the same time is an important part of marriage, otherwise, isn't that adultery?

8) A 12 year old girl has a baby..should she keep it?
Is it hers? Then "yes". If its not hers, she should give it back. If its like a baby bird, well, she shouldn't injure herself climbing the tree, that's where this subject matter gets difficult, when trees get involved.


9) Should the alcohol age be lowered to 16?
Yes, it should actually be lowered to 3 months instead of 16 months. When beer gets to be more than 3 months old, it isn't fit to drink. Some of the aged liquors actually improve over time, so waiting 16 months is okay. Oh, I forgot, I quit drinking almost two years ago, never mind.

10) Should the war in Iraq be called off?
No, we should keep calling it the "War in Iraq". If we rename it the "Off War" that would only fusecon, I mean, confuse people. See, I just confused you with fusecon. And if we call it the Off War then they might have to change the name of the country Iraq to "Off" and of course that would require changing the name of the country of Iran to "On". Aren't four letter words short enough already for the name of a country? When I think of Iran and Iraq, lots of four letter words come to mind, I just can't repeat them here, my mommy might read this.

11) Assisted suicide is illegal... do you agree?
Yes, I agree that it is illegal. You just told me it was illegal, why would I doubt you?


12) Do you believe in spanking your children?
Not now, they are taller than me and in their mid to early twenties with bigger muscles. I could probably still out wrestle them though, unless they begin to tickle me. Would I be required to spank them at the same time, it does say 'children'?


13) Would you burn an American flag for a million dollars?
Yes, because then I could buy 1,000,000 more flags at a dollar a piece.

AND (do you already see where I'm going with this?) burn a million flags, and get a TRILLION dollars

AND then buy one flag to replace the original flag I burned, and now I have $999,999,999,999

Then I buy the presidency of the United States of America, all the companies that make flags, and make it a law punishable by death to burn a flag, that way no body else can become rich like me with the same deal and buy the presidency of the ….

That was easy math, duh.

14) A mother is declared innocent after murdering her 5 children in a temporary insanity case, Do you agree?
Who was insane, the mother or the children or the jury? Always remember, there is always a difference between 'being declared innocent' and 'being innocent'

15) Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?

I never wanted to become a judge, but if it was going to be this easy to become one, wow, and I hear the pay is realllly good, plus you get to wear silly looking black clothes and have a funny looking useless wooden hammer. But you do get to have a bailiff. I have always wanted a bailiff, ever since I was a little boy, and if by "little boy", you mean 45 seconds ago. Because it has been a long time since I ate, so I am now smaller than I was right after I ate supper. Wait! I forgot I took a nap and didn't have supper yet! Instead I am hungry but not Hungarian and typing these words to you right now and you are reading them right now but they are not the same now, isn't that cool? So I have guts, but less in them than I should, so there, I have answered the first question adequately on an empty stomach (and guts).

High Velocity Lead Poisoning

"Friskie" - This is one of my oldest just barely intact pieces of writing. My mother sent this to me today (see photos at bottom). There were two pieces in her letter, the first explaining how she came across this famous letter of protest from my childhood (1969, age ~11) and got it photocopied for me. The letter expresses my feelings concerning the death of my dog Friskie from high velocity lead poisoning at the hands, no, trigger finger of my father. But the photocopy also has something that I had forgot about: My best friend Jody, from across the street, had also wrote a supportive claim. I believe that Jody lives in Las Vegas, NV. So if somebody out there can find him, please have him contact me.

Just in case you can't read the letters in the photos, I have transcribed them for you.

Friskie
One of the best fight
ing dogs a boy
could have.
Killed for no
reason in
1968. Daddy shot him
because he saved me three
times, all from John
Weaver, next door
neibor.
Dr. E. B. Boston <--- he he, children, ("Dr")
1969

And then the supportive piece from Jody Corean, probably about age 13. Notice that he spells my childhood name 'Ernie' wrong, twice. Thats okay, he spelled Friskie wrong too, 3 out of 4 times.

Frisky was the most
playfull dog in the Upper
Valley road. But there
was one thing nobody
could do to frisky, except
Erine, Jody. That was
Wrestling frisky.
If anybody touched
Erine be sides Jody, Friskie
would bit them. No
matter who it was.
Jody Corean
1969 <--- I like the emphatic touch of the double underline
____





Thanks, Mommy!

Captcha Interpretations

Here are some C_apt^ch_a words and my best guess at a hidden English interpretation. Various methods of analysis and computer algorithms running on a bank of supercomputers from Los Alamos NM were employed to decipher them as well as getting help from the NSA

(not really; I just made up some junk).

jpdewgj8g - John's poodle Donna exploded when Gypsy just ate grapes

xeyrugrwb - Xavier exclaimed, "your rug is really wet, bro'"

enwhbxx - "every night we hide behind Xavier." then a pause as the tour group in the very dark Carlsbad Cavern ponders out loud suddenly in unison as to the whereabouts of their spelunking guide: "Xavier?"

dewpaedy - does everyone whisper politely about elderly dudes yawning?

ns3aress - In sunlight, three ants are easily secretly stunned

aajehhju - American Airlines just evicted Howard Hughes Jr unknowingly (of course to be fair to American Airlines, Howard Hughes Jr has absolutely no clue as to who his real father is)

jtezfchep - Japanese - that's easy for chickens who eat pineapples (I know, I know, there are people out there right now screaming at the top of their lungs, 'UNFAIR! UNFAIR!, you used the word 'who' when there needed to be an 'h' word.' Settle down dear children, hush, especially you Albanians. Remember, I make up the rules for this 'game'. The word 'who' has an 'h' sound in English. Lets me say it really slowly for you: 'wwwwhhhhhhhhhooo' - see that, you didn't even hear the 'w' and its just barely visible)

bw3hwxk – But we 3 have worked exceedingly kingly – This what the Three Non-Kings of the Christmas song 'We Three Kings of Orient Are' put on their joint job application to be included in the aforementioned song when they lied about being three kings. I mean, who lets their king just wander off with two other kings and go on some reality program, "Go Find The Baby Messiah"? Most everyone knows that there are trained Baby Messiah Trackers out there, most with at least a junior college degree.

Brand New-bie:
nnysj4tny – Nostalgic New York suggests June for touristing Non-new Yorkers

Coming soon: sc3fa4hd nebxenc a DOUBLE C_apt^ch_a -cino!

Okay, somebody give me a new name that starts with 'X' besides 'Xerxes'. That has a Z sound at the beginning, no can do. We are going for phonetics here, folks.

Just a Minute or Two or Three

My wife sent me to the store for minute steak. On my way there I wrote this really cool sentence in about a minute or two. When I came home I added a few more words in under a minute. So I have invested less than 3 minutes of time actually writing the sentence. But its entertainment value keeps increasing, so now it can be part of your world too. It contains homonyms, synonyms and multiple word combinations of the word 'minute' and its phonetic segments as nouns, verbs and adjectives. But first some definitions and daffynitions:

• Minute – noun - 60 seconds of time – pronounced "min-it"
• Minute - adjective – small – pronounced "my-noot"
• Minute – adjective – a kind of steak with lotza funny looking tiny holes intended for tenderizing
  
• Men – noun – guys like me
• Ate – verb – consumed food
• Mute – adjective – doesn't speak

Knowing these words will let you express a complex scenario like this next one when you observe it happening near you in a restaurant:

"Adorable quiet male midgets consumed tiny steaks with tiny holes in under 60 seconds"

in a more interesting manner:

"Cute mute minute men ate minute minute steaks in under a minute"

Try to see how many times you can say this sentence correctly in a minute.

My Saturday List of Things To Do ..OR.. One Day in the Life of Ernestan Bostinovich

My List of Things To Do Today
Saturday
September 13th
2008

Notes:

These are not necessarily in exact order performed
Were created as the day went by
No order of importance

• Get breakfast for The Wife at McDonalds


• Come back to McDonalds to shoot the goofy looking Spanish version of the Big Mac slogan "Two all beef patties ...."


• Bank Deposit


• Groc store shop


• After talking to friend D@n@ from French TX, begin writing a short story about her rent house disaster where the landlord was supposed to move out to live with his mother and take care of her, but continues to sleep on the couch of her rent house and she winds up getting stuck fixing the place up and now that it looks better, the landlord wants to raise the rent. Yes, thats right, the landlord is still living in the rent house, sleeping on the couch and now wants more money.
  


• Get and mail BD card for friend Brandi H. Found a card where the doctor pulls a rabbit out of a guys knee and says "Are you sure you want to fix a trick knee that is this good?" Found another cool penguin card for my other friend in south Texas.


• Get Lotto ticket


• Avoid getting wetter


• Fix north screen door at the 102 house


• Strategically position toothpaste to bring it to work on Sunday afternoon


• Get bread later today as they are out at the groc store of our favorite


• Bring lab jacket home to wash tomorrow


• Ask niece if you can publish your picture of her daughter as she swings the plastic bat at the pinata but misses and you have captured the moment just milliseconds away from the bat hitting the little brother (its his 2nd BD party) in the face and the mother is bending down to try to get him out of the way. Yes, he did cry. Some. I titled the photograph, "My Brother, The Pinata"
  

• Write a blog story about your wife hiring a kid to pass out fliers for her new business. It is a story about how she creates her own form of advertising after thinking that the newspaper is a waste of money, a story of bettering, lettering, loitering, & littering, using a little boy to annoy the masses as he passes out papers and sticks them on windshields.
  


• Set up an experiment to try to extract the purple dye out of your onions and see if goes preferentially into the water or organic phase. (Experiment is finished Nov 27th, 2008- Answer: Bottom - Water)
  

The purple color may be this particular chemical called a 'flavonoid' - with all the -OH hydroxyl groups, you can see why it would tend to be a water soluble compound.

Quercetin

• Setup a Visa payment for Monday


• Take your medications and vitamins


• Do the dishes - scratch that - do more dishes than you make dirty


• Start a blog about misinterpretations. "Honk my horn at you? Why no, officer, my car horn just happened go off while you were driving in a stupid manner. As far as I know the sound waves radiated in all directions, up and away for the entire universe to enjoy."
  


• Shoot photo of the Christmas tree in this guys front yard over on Wilson street where he never takes the ladder down all year long and add it to the group of photos of goofy things you have found in Borger. (This turned out really cool - you can see the stars in the sky. I could actually pick out the Pleiades from a section of the photo that was cropped - otherwise you would have had to look at the left side mirror of my car. 30 second exposure at f4.5)
  

Perform a gastronomical experiment with two tomatoes. First, a store bought supposedly vine ripened tomato and the second from your wife's aunt's garden in French TX. Cut each tomato into equal pieces (4) and eat them in an alternating manner to extend/fool your mouth into thinking it is getting two garden fresh tomatoes. (Experiment was a success)

Try to come up with another song for the musical you are writing called "Wahoo! Nebraska" which is the story of a man who fails to write a musical about Wahoo, NE, a place he has never been before and doesn't even know where it is on the map, and instead the musical is about how wonderful his life and wife are, and of course, there is the dog Cooper, the central character. So far the songs in rough draft are "Wahoo! Nebraska", and "Chicken and Cheese, Please". I think there is already a third song that I have forgot about; have to go look through my notes later.

Create a new blog as a Tourism Guide to the hot spots of Borger TX that includes the goofy pictures you have collected so far. Later create a map to guide the pilgrimage masses to the exact location where the photos were taken. Try to get longitude and latitude coordinates from a GPS device or Google Earth at a later time.

Wanna Be My New Best Friend?

Organic Chemistry
by Robert Thornton Morrison and Robert Neilson Boyd,
6th Edition, HARDCOVER

If you want to be my new best friend you will send me a brand new copy of this book. Its only around $200, the HARDCOVER edition, NOT the cheap orange colored paper back version printed in black and white on thin paper in a country that rhymes with "Bindia" that somebody in Erie, PA fraudulently sold me on e_b^aY. Otherwise I'll just have to type the whole thing back into my computer.
All 1278 pages.
Draw all the pictures.
The back cover.
The front cover.
Lets not forget the preface, all 4 pages.
But I won't type in the index, that would just be silly and a waste of time.

• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 6 edition (January 17, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0136400612
• ISBN-13: 978-0136436690

Bush v Gustav (v Holland?)

(This story is older - (Sept 1st, 2008 - when the storm Gustav was approaching land )- than its 2nd publication at blogger )

Headline this morning:

"Bush heads to Texas as Gustav menaces"

I am thinking, with a headline like that, there's gotta be something funny in there somewhere. Maybe something about

"CDMA - Cold Dry Mass of Airhead - runs into a gust of a massive hot moist storm, as men ask, 'Where's FEMA?'"

My question, as always, 'why do people want to live below sea level?' Oh, The Dutch, blame them instead of FEMA, they can be such a bad influence. After all they roamed the oceans for centuries making colonies, enslaving people, stealing the resources of the indigenous natives; I don't think FEMA has been that bad just yet, well maybe. There was that whole trailer house thing. And FEMA did let the people back into N.O. With initials for a place like New Orleans being "NO", that should have been a subtle hint,

"Should we continue to live here like our Dutch friends do, with a menace of waiting warm water just miles away, The Sparkling Ocean Blue, held back by dirt and rocks and a little concrete for glue? Why, NO" Here's something else: I just checked wikipedia, and it was the French, then the Spanish, then the French again, who had New Orleans before us. So at least the Dutch were smart enough to never try to own the place. "No", the Dutch probably told the French emperor Napoleon when he put the place up for sale in 1803, "sell it to the United States, they're young and don't know anything about underwater real estate"

The Dutch As An Influence

by esbb

'Lets live here where the ocean wants to be, lets build a dike or two,

Reclaim this land for man (and money) and see what we can do.

If…

It starts to leak, just pile up some more bags of rock and dirt,

But …

Remember if you live here, water can kill, destroy and hurt.'

Martha S. and I Share Things

Martha S. and I have several things in common, several things not so much in common.

Martha S. and I share a common name which we each obtained from other people long after we were born. I got my "S" name from my mother's family at age 47, while she got the same name from an ex-husband she married at age 19. I believe she had a Polish last name before that.

I think she has around 2 billion dollars. I think I have less than that.

I live in Texas while I believe she lives in Connect-I-Cut.

For a couple of weeks in my life approximately, 28 percent of it ago (1994 and 1995), I went to school in the same town, Milford, where she would go to the gym. Only I found out about this gym-town connection a long time after I briefly attended the Connect-I-Cut school, so I wasn't able to stalk her while I was there.

I was a Martha TV Show fan for a while a very long time ago, the main reason: to be able annoy my wife as I would pretend to be deeply in love with Martha S even though she was older, quite distant and talked funny (Connect-I-Cut Connection?). "Whatever", was my wife's response.

A wikipedia article mentions that she intended to study chemistry in college but did not, while I obtained a B.S. in Chemistry.

Martha and I do share a love of being able to use a tool for something other than its original intended purpose.

Today I sent this note to my friend by text message:

"In an emergency, a steak knife can be used as a thumbtack. A very large effective, some might even say overkill, thumbtack.

Big job?

No problem.

Big thumb,

Big tack,

Steak knife to the rescue!"

(Notice that I put in the carriage returns to space the lines to make the text message more visually appealing, a very good thing)

She responded simply "What" with no question mark.

My answer back:

"I needed to leave a message near the backdoor to not let the dog outside because the lawn guy came by and would not be able to lock every gate from the outside when he left and then if I fell asleep and (my wife's name goes here) came home she might accidentally let Cooper outside w/o realizing the current gate situation. There is a piece of cardboard near the backdoor that serves as the thumbtack receptacle"

My other friend responded:

"Cool! I will add 1 to my duct tape, gorilla glue & zip tie collection!"

The third person I sent the text message to has not yet responded.

I would like to think that Martha would be proud of my improvisational thumbtack as a 'very good thing'.

How To Save Money on Your Grocery Store Bill

Eat Less.



Comment From Niece M:
haha good advice..but i like to eat..i love food! especially if it has suger...so now how do i save on groceries haha

Comment From Uncle E:
Okay, more Uncle-y add-vice:
You walk into a restaurant and ask them, say, I was just needing to know what time it was .. OH LOOK! Free sugar on the table, WA-HOO! Jumpin' pole cats in the winter time this is better than huntin' coons in the bayou with my best dog Pete. Well, thats not true, I actu-ally shot Pete one day, mis-took him for a coon, I gotta start feedin my dogs A-lot better than that, and anyways, now this is his son Re-Pete. Anyhows, (lowering my voice) lets sneak outside and I'll show you how many packets of sugar I got off with, dang, I'a-didn't mean ta get that there ketchup, hate ketchup, don't mind catsup, but hate ketchup. Looky, there, got off with 18 packs of sugga'
Say, isn't that a Tag-go Bell over there?

Comment From Niece M:
haha that is funny! thanks for the....help...yeah thats what it was help! :)

Comment From Uncle E:
What I think is really cool is that the title of this blog is 4.5 times longer than the content of the blog, 9 words to 2. I am sure that is a rarity for blogs to have a word ratio like that. I just thought of a another version of this blog:
Title: "How To Save Money on Your Grocery Store, Bill"

Content: "Bill, build a smaller cheaper store, say, one out of Legos maybe. And then only stock it with non-perishable items such as canned food and paper towels. Tiny paper towels. Tiny cans. And don't hire any off-duty cops to patrol it for shop lifters."

Brown Things in Motion .. OR .. Why Gigantic Baboons Don’t Study Physics

Today I was reading an article in Wikipedia about something in physics called 'Brownian Motion'. Albert Einstein used it in 1905 to explain the existence of atoms. It has to do with the random movement of small visible objects being tossed about by collisions with smaller invisible things. Part way down through the article they give an example in terms of something on the scale of human beings. BUT before you read it (if you want to), notice how I highlighted the word 'balloon'? Well, it is much more entertaining if you read the same article and replace the word 'balloon' with the word 'baboon'. How do I know this? Because when I started reading the article, I had my glasses off and I read the word as 'baboon'. What? A 10 meter wide baboon? Imagine my confusion. Then after a few sentences I realized it said 'balloon', not 'baboon'. Then I realized I had accidentally merged the "ll" with the first "o" of balloon to get a second "b". Well, in fairness my eyes are "C/II". In Roman numbers that's 100 divided by 2.

So I decided to do a little experiment on my friend. I copied the paragraph into a text editor, and changed the 7 occurrences of balloon to baboon. Next, I had my scientific friend come read the paragraph.
I wait .....

No giggle.

Just a comment about how that was interesting and he walked away.
"What???? Didn't you find that funny?", I ask
And he came back and started reading it again, asking where the humor was. "You don't think a 10 meter (33 foot wide) baboon is funny?" He had read the 'baboon' as 'balloon' throughout the whole article.

We later came to the conclusion that we both have something very wrong with our brains but in the exact opposite direction. I told him the next time he goes to the zoo, tell your wife, "Look Honey, can I have a balloon?!?!?"

Brownian Motion from Wikipedia.com

(used with permission by the GNU Free Documentation License)

Consider a large balloon of 10 meters in diameter. Imagine this large balloon in a football stadium or any widely crowded area. The balloon is so large that it lies on top of many members of the crowd. Because they are excited, these fans hit the balloon at different times and in different directions with the motions being completely random. In the end, the balloon is pushed in random directions, so it should not move on average. Consider now the force exerted at a certain time. We might have 20 supporters pushing right, and 21 other supporters pushing left, where each supporter is exerting equivalent amounts of force. In this case, the forces exerted from the left side and the right side are imbalanced in favor of the left side; the balloon will move slightly to the left. This type of imbalance exists at all times, and it causes random motion. If we look at this situation from above, so that we cannot see the supporters, we see the large balloon as a small object animated by erratic movement.

My more interesting Brown-ian version:

Consider a large baboon of 10 meters in diameter. Imagine this large baboon in a football stadium or any widely crowded area. The baboon is so large that it lies on top of many members of the crowd. Because they are excited, these fans hit the baboon at different times and in different directions with the motions being completely random. In the end, the baboon is pushed in random directions, so it should not move on average. Consider now the force exerted at a certain time. We might have 20 supporters pushing right, and 21 other supporters pushing left, where each supporter is exerting equivalent amounts of force. In this case, the forces exerted from the left side and the right side are imbalanced in favor of the left side; the baboon will move slightly to the left. This type of imbalance exists at all times, and it causes random motion. If we look at this situation from above, so that we cannot see the supporters, we see the large baboon as a small object animated by erratic movement.

True Mrs. Adventures Explaining The Venture Brothers While Venturing

This is a true story, my thoughts during some of the moments and now as I write and recall (trip was Aug 10th, 2008 and wrote the next day, transferred from MySpace later).

So we are traveling to Amarillo on Sunday and I happen to use the word "minion" in my conversation with my wife and she asks me what that word means. I tell her the best example that I know is "Henchmen" from the animated series "The Venture Brothers". So I start telling her all about The Venture Brothers, some pretty wild outlandish things are tied up in all that animated violent funny for-adults-only series. I don't know if you have seen it or not, but after several minutes deep into my explanation/story, (don't worry, she is driving), I mention that I had forgot to tell her that the arch villain of Dr. Venture is named 'The Monarch', and that he and his henchmen wear butterfly costumes. AND THEN (after several minutes of telling her EXACTLY the total truth) she looks at me and grins "You're making up all this stuff off the top of your head, quit trying to fool me" (My wife just happens to wear a LOT of blouses with butterflies, I just now remember that and make a bit of a connection as to maybe why she thought I was kidding her)

Oh, I just cracked up laughing,

"Oh come on now, you really think I can make up this kinda crap right off the top of my head????"

Yes, was her reply. (I felt truly deeply honored at that moment)

NO HONEY, all this is true, someone really writes all this stuff AND alot more, trust me, it only gets stranger than this, we're only touching the surface of the Venture Brothers here. Oh, and there are actually TWO sets of Venture Brothers to confuse things.

A little while later I tell her I remember that The Monarch's girlfriend is named "Dr. Girlfriend" and she has this very deep voice, which I very poorly imitate. I do a much better 'Willie Nelson', or 'Elmer Fudd', or Elmer Fudd trying to sound like Willie Nelson when he sings. Heh heh heh heh heh heh (staccato)

When I got to Amarillo and told my younger son (a VentBrot watcher) this story, he just died laughing, and reassured his mother that whatever dad had said was all true.

Say VentBrot people, do you need a new/another writer?

The Past Tense of the Word ’Island’

So, there are just only so many funny things in the world, but it is a big number, a very big number. Here are two stories, old men stories, that happened to me within minutes of each other yesterday.

As I was leaving the groc store yesterday on the hunt for breakfast, a very ancient man walks into the store wearing a blue Tee shirt with these words in white:
" I am the kid your parents warned you about "

I found breakfast at MCD and had just started munching when two elderly men walked by, one I have seen every once in awhile for 20 some years and the other a stranger. We exchange a Texan 'howdy' between bites and they sit down 2 tables away. The one I barely know is loud and jovial, the other speaks quietly, mainly in questions.

Loud: "After we get finished here, I need to go to Radio Shack"
Quiet: "What are you going to buy there?"
Loud: "I am gonna get some diodes and resistors"
Quiet: "What are you going to do with them"
-Knowing what diodes and resistors are, I naturally think he is going to say something like "Work on my ham radio", but no.....
Loud: "I am going to make some jewelry for my grandchildren"

Wasland
That is my new word of the day. Its what you call an 'island' that has disappeared. It will probably appear on maps in the future;
global warming;
oceans rising,
places disappearing
beneath the waves,
land that was,
no longer is,
now waving

Froggie - The Forbidden Meat in the Garden of E-rnest-den

Not much of anything that is animal in nature lasts too long in my back yard. I have a doggie doomsday killing machine for anything that lurks too long. But my latest canine training technique of 'Froggies Are Our Friends' seems to be finally working. Instead of trying to kill them (but 'play' with them first, of course), Cooper will now just watch them hop across the patio. No paw action, but his ears do perk up. The other evening there was even a brief after dinner snack of wasp killing, exoskeleton crunching and eating two of them before I could snap my photo.

Most everything else is fair game including his favorite squeak toys 'Kiboko' and 'Elefante'. Notice that Elefante lost his ears a long, long time ago ...BUT Kiboko's ears must be made out of Kevlar and connected with superglue. Cooper really works hard at trying to rip them off, but no luck after several months.

(Those are stickers and dirt - so let's head to the pool, K & E)

The name Kiboko comes from the East African Kiswahili language for 'hippo'. Cooper loves his new (3rd) pool. The first two pools have suffered the ravages of UV radiation, soccer ball impacts, snow shovels, and the West Texas weather. The dog has actually been quite kind to his pool. He loves to walk in a circle around the inside perimeter sticking his head under the water while biting at it. I just ask him, "Wanna go get some salmon?" and make growling bear noises and slowly oscillate my head sideways. He just looks at me and then buries his head into the water and imitates my motions.

He NEVERS puts his backside into the water though. So for all the neighbor cats reading this right now, beware, or your ears may look like Elefante (or worse) some time soon.

A.L. G.A.

See my photo album " A.L. G.A. on Rice " over at MySpace

My First 100 MySpace Headlines

Come visit my other blog of cartoons !!!
Tiny Pictures From My Brain


Now Available : My 2nd Set of 100 Headlines-> 101 through 200 Click Here

100: Coma Toes - a medical condition I just renamed whereby your foot falls asleep, mainly at the region where the 'These Little Piggies' are.

99: Several days ago I learned that when a fly lands on your computer screen, the moving of the mouse pointer underneath him seems to have no effect. This is because he is watching your keyboard trying to steal your password. Is this how bugs get in software?

98: Ernest is going to make everyone so much happier by NOT writing in the font called 'Captcha' ever. Actually I never started but don't tell anyone that. Its our secret.

97: I was sad this morning. We went outside to play and there were no orangutans in the trees of my backyard! But then after a couple hours I remembered I live in Borger TX USA, affectionately known as the:
'Bellybutton of North America'
... and now I am less sad ;)

96: Today I learned that when a fly lands on your computer screen, the moving of the mouse pointer underneath him seems to have no effect. So he is probably not reading your screen trying to steal your password unless you use a very small font.

95: Ernest is writing, singing acapella and playing virtual guitar, all in the style of Willie Nelson with Elmer Fudd's voice, "Sometwimes Duh Woman Dwinks All Duh Viskey"

94: Ernest is writing and singing acapella an.....d playing virtual guitar, all in the style of Willie Nelson this evening, "Sometimes Your Woman Drinks All Your Coffee"

93: Ernest is.

92: Ernest invented a new word today to combine 'meticulous' carried to the level of 'ridiculous': meritdiculous

91: Ernest is playing w his 11 new Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo Bit UM-201 Gel Pens - 0.18 mm - in lotza COLORS!!!!

90: Writing minutely on Minute Rice takes more than a minute when done right

89: Eeek eeek eeek! (The Eeek shall inherit the earth, at least the efficiency apartment complexes of a certain north west Texas town named Dumas)

88: Ernest loves his 7 new Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo DX UM-151 Gel Pens - 0.28 mm - in lotza COLORS!!!!

87: Ernest is puzzled as to why someone would name something 'Long Island Iced Tea' and yet include no tea in the recipe and rarely include any dirt from the island itself

86: I'm sorry sir, our Bose[R] 'QuietComfort 3' Acoustic Noise Canceling headphones were not designed to quiet the other voices in your own head

85: Ernest is creating StFR, an organization for preserving the smallest, quietest, most timid, miniature lions: "Save the Faint Roarest"

84: I just bought a piece of luggage that has its own built-in raincoat - now, just how cool is that?

83: Ernest is battling residual sulfur compounds from a battle of chemical warfare between a Canis lupis familiaris and a foulsome fighting Mephitis mephitis (Dog v Skunk)

82: If you don't bother to search for truth in your life, you may as well be entertained by the conflicting lies that swirl about you.

81:The most violent thing about me is my sneeze. Its a good thing I have Benny Drill.

80: Ernest is pretty sure that he rarely accidentally sends fuses for thermonuclear devices to the wrong China (note to George Bush: it was the right one on the map)

79: If your Question of the Day is 'How can somebody possibly be that stupid?', then your Answer of the Day is 'Practice'.

78: Ernest is pretty sure that the people who want me to get in touch with my inner child really just want to know who broke that lamp in the living room 37 years ago.

77: Ancient Organic Chemist's Proverb: People who live in Styrofoam houses shouldn't drink Gasoline.

76. I really enjoy writing fiction but my real life sometimes presents such bizarre and funny episodes that its really just a matter of capturing the moment and momentum of the word heard herd.

75. I came to the realization that 'peanut butter' was invented a very long time ago by someone who just chewed on something way too long. Who knows how many "butter" await us in the future, so chew and churn.

74. There is an old cowboy saying, "If you don't beat your wife every once in awhile, you'll just take it out on your horse. And you wouldn't want to ruin a good horse". I think I'll stick to trying to beat my wife at poker.

73: This reminds me of the time cheese invaded Lithuania and liberated all the women and they danced in the streets and got the right to vote.

72. If you come to one of those "Give a man a fish or Teach him to fish" decision moments, remember there is also the "Buy him a lifetime supply of Long John Silver's coupons" option.

71. Ernest is headed towards Amsterdam. No, I'm not going TO Amsterdam, I am just going in that direction the next time I go to mom's place.

70: This is probably the 7th most important question in the universe: How much toe could a towtruck truck, if a towtruck could truck toe?

69: If you have any wise old sayings that have been handed down from previous generations that involve "pond scum" as the central sagacious character, you might be a redneck.

68: If you overlay a 'plus sign' and a 'heart' with the 'plus sign' off to the left and up a little, it makes kind of a 'Texas' shape. Happy Valentine's Day.

67: After the demolition crew blew up the old candy factory, the factory workers stood around in a pessimistic mood as the mist of PEZ candy peppered the ground.

66: The acid rain in Madrid Spain falls mainly placidly on the window panes.

65: Wanted: Actively seeking corporate sponsors for my jump into the professional circuit of Freecell competition. I just need a few more and I'm set for life, baby.

64: I had a dream that MySpace was going to remove all the periods and commas from all our messages today then put them back tomorrow. I need a better dream writer.

63: "The mother of the younger other odder otter is the daughter of an even odder older uddered otter", uttered all the raccoons and baboons from their view in the zoo.

62: I suddenly started believing in reincarnation simply because I think I know where the "former" Joseph Stalin is hiding right now. Ha ha to all my suddenly worried Baptist friends out there, just teasing, its Friday, I'm silly.

61: If at any point in your short miserable life 'Jello' has been an acceptable reward for anything, please call me and I'll set you free for a small fee so you can flee and something different be.

60: My secret for a proper weight loss program: Plenty of exercise with the puppy in the great outdoors with proper UV radiation protection for both of us. Ah, feel the burn. Hardened muscles. Two smiles. Special Olympics, maybe?

59: Kenya - My deepest sorrow in a long time is that one of my favorite parts of Africa is filled with senseless killing and bloodshed.

58: Life is just that dark, empty, meaningless, lifeless void that exists while waiting for the next episode of NCIS

57: Remember: arrows rarely kill people, but the sharp pointy part of the arrowheads do.

56: Today's Dog Thought: That orchid plant must be REALLY bad. I only get sprayed with that water bottle when I do bad things, but he gets it every day.

55: If you are the kind of person who worries about the stock market, then you are probably the wrong kind of person to be involved with it.

54: I have a private story that I can't tell you, but I can tell you that it inspired me to come up with this bumper sticker:'Honk if you love Jesus so much you would be willing to steal for him'

53: One of my siblings would only eat one fourth of their M&M's. They would give me all their reject 3&3's, E&E's, and W&W's, AND so now I'm the one with the weight problem

52: There were probably several times in history when certain people may have pondered "Why did I go with the Option A of '12 MEN' disciples when I could have had Option B, '3 WOMEN and one really smart dog'???"

51: Sometimes people are so busy smack-dab in the middle of preparing their case that they fail to recognize that they do not even have one

50 What I hope to perpetuate in summation at the end of my days is my laughter & kindness through my heirs rather than the kind of petulant loftiness of some of my ways and errors.

49 My dog is audibly dyslexic: I keeping tell him 'no' when he wants to sit 'on' my lap. At 70 lbs he is no longer an on-your-lap dog. Of course, as with most people, places, pooches and things of life, he prefers 'on' to 'no' in most situations.

48 Every time a writer dies, an angel gets a novel

47 Ultimately there is no such thing as free speech. It always costs someone something, sometimes everything, very dearly.

46 All the truly bad events of life involve some form of plumbing malfunction.

45 I have created my own non-profit organization 'United Weigh' - dedicated to helping overweight conjoined twins

44 All the truly marvelous ways of life have an element of dance to them.

43 It was trying to talk Australian but I have never studied that language so it just sounded like a strange egg laying web footed space alien minus one arm - My most recent cell phone text message

42 The sun is scheduled to burn out in a few billion years so we should be practicing to stay warm by other means such as friction

41 Every year I psychically transmit a message of "Ernest will bring me presents this year instead of Santa Claus" to all the children of the world and this is how I achieve a goal of disappointing 750 million people all on the same day

40 I have written a guide for helping people make it through the winter time blues "Driving on Black Ice, Avoid Yellow Snow, and Learn All the Words to 'White Christmas' "

39 I have written the definitive 'Guide to Cooking Bacon at an Extremely Slow Yet Accelerated Manner' due for an early Spring 2008 release. Beat the crowd and Pre-Order your copy today.

38 I have lived enough long to come to the grand conclusion that men and women are not equal and should not be treated with equality ....Women are vastly superior and must be treated as the master race.

37 I am suffering from a form of auto-self-cannibalism, I keep biting my tongue at around 3 AM and no dreams are involved, and I'm really not that hungry.

36 How is this different from that? Easy: one has Is and one has At

35 You know you have reached the sweet spot in life when you suddenly realize that you really aren't sure what day of the week it is and you really don't care and most of the time it doesn't really matter. Really? Really.

34 If you start off early using a shovel for a puppet, a dog will always be leery of it and bark & dance like a boxer. Just give the shovel a wiggle & a low, mean growl to reciprocate.

33 Currently suffering from bad peach syndrome at $1.99 a pound. That's not a disease from fruit, its a form of PDPD - produce department performance disappointment.

32 I have a banker friend in foreclosures who built his whole career on a typo. 'Carpe Dime' – seize the money

31 Cooper and I know how to split a chocolate chip cookie - I get the chochips, he gets the cookie

30 My wish for the world: To never see the sequence of the 9 letters 'O.J. Simpson' in a national news headline again till the end of time. We don't care. There are more important things and people and places. Those letters are completely wore out.

29 Note to Fox TV: Forget Hi Def, it would have been nice tonight to have had even Low Def instead of your Glow Def

28 If you thought you saw me littering by throwing something over my backyard fence today, it was just a dead tarantula. Something new for the "Killing" section of Cooper's resume.

27 My main problem in life is not spending enough time listening to music. What? I can't hear you .... headphones

26 You know life is a bit interesting when you think its Tuesday, and then you convince yourself that you were wrong and it must be Thursday only to find out that its really Friday.

25. I will be gone for a season, but still be at my house a little less tanner, as I sit still and watch the entire 3rd season of 'House' on disc in marathon manner

24. I came, I saw, I concurred

23. A garden hose is a relatively inexpensive thing to play with, and hooking it up to a faucet and getting one of those spray guns and passing water through it makes it even better, all for a few more kilo pennies.

22.News Flash: A movie star just spontaneously exploded, she became a movie supernova, her name was Ellen Burstyn

21. Identity theft? I can't imagine someone wanting to be me, much less pretend to be me. It would take too much effort on their part to get my accent down just right.

20. Every time someone walks up to me and asks, "How does it feel to be a famous movie star?", I just have to look them in the eye and truthfully reply, "I just don't know" and walk away quietly and stop signing the autographs of other people.

19. What would happen if a dyslectic person wrote on a mirror with a magic marker and then looked at the results through another mirror and tried to read it? It would be the incantation that makes the universe just implode and cease to exist.

18. You must be something, as my dog finds you more interesting than a bowl of milk

17. Some days shaving at my house is like a combination of watching the national championship rounds of the Australian sheep shearing contest in slow motion and the deforestation of the Brazilian rain forest, everything is misty,moist, and fur is flying.

16. I looked like an elk that had been beaten with a bat and had headlights shining in my eyes - quote from someone after 'WINNING' a restaurant eating contest that involved very hot spicy oily food, no utensils and a timer

15. Nothing in life is quite like a surprise that involves pork

14. 'Hairy Potter' is not the right book; that one is about a rather furry marijuana grower

13. 'Got Buffy?' - Let me interpret that for you: My wife asked me if I had any buffalo thawed out so she could make me some lasagna tomorrow.

12. The answer to your most important question of the day is: "Yes" > I got buffalo lasagna tonight

11. I don't understand why you don't understand me

10. Remember, even idiots don't like to be reminded that they're idiots

9. Don't shake the baby, don't shake the baby!!!!

8. Let the tomato sandwich eating season begin ... now

7. Let the tomato sandwich eating contest begin ... now

6. It's Friday, so that means it's Pie-Day, Mmmm... pie.

5. Maybe, just maybe, the headband on your cap is a little TOO tight

4. Whoa! My garden is doing so good this year I've got tomatoes growing on all different kinds of plants

3. Money doesn't grow on treeeeeees; it takes a cotton plant. Oh, and some flax.

2. 'One if by land, and two if by sea' - that just means that its going to cost twice as much to take a Caribbean Cruise, Sweetie

1. Teach a man to fish, and he'll just be competition at the next fishing tournament

Our Mongolian Language Lesson of the Day

The Magical Powers of Herbalwife

Certain names & numbers that been changed in this story for anonymity, but other than that, it is a true story.

Groc shopping. One of my favorite social activities, wandering through the grocery store. I have a lots of special groups/categories of friends, and one of them are the people who work at the groc store. I know tons of people there by first name. Chatting with my groc friends and the discovery of new stuff to try eating. Eating and chatting, my two favorite things, well, that just depends on what day it is.

I stopped at the free-in-miniature-quantities coffee and defective cookies stand (They were going to throw them away anyway, selection rejection collection confection ejection). One of my favorite Groc-ese is Eilsel, and her sister happens to be working in the bakery section this fine day. We begin chatting near the F-I-M-Q coffee & aforementioned cookie stand. She tells me that Eilsel is working at the groc store today and that she is doing well in her new business venture, outside her normal groc store job. This info is new to me. So later I find Eilsel's checkout line.

I asked Eilsel what her new business is, and she tells me that she has started using and selling "Herbalwife", and I tell her that my wife used to sell Herbalwife too. And then she tells me an amazing story of how she has lost 40 lbs and 75 inches. I am utterly dumbfounded, shocked and amazed. I look straight up in the air and then back down to her, and exclaim, "Wow you think I would have noticed you being that much taller than me before and then losing 75 inches. That's like (pause for quick mental math) 6 ft 3 in!"

By this time she is cracking up laughing, probably another side effect of Herbalwife. So I thought of a logical scientific explanation and told her, "I bet it was like magic or something. Or maybe you secretly put it in the drinking water for the entire city of Borger and now everyone has lost 75 inches (depending on how much you drink BORGER's water – hint: taste) and people come from miles around to see the little tiny teenie people of Borger and we all became scared of the giant people invading Borger and that's why we built the walls around the city to keep the giants out when we could have earned a lot of money from tourism."

Her laughter, which got really bad when I mentioned that thing about the shrinking people and foreigners (non-Borger-ese) being giants, finally subsided and she said, "No, silly, I lost 75 inches of body measurements all together, you knew what I meant." I asked her if I could write this story and blog it, and she said yes, and I even confirmed that she didn't have to proof the story first.

Such a trusting soul. Another bad side effect of Herbalwife.

Which now makes me think, if you measure ENOUGH body parts, I'm sure you could easily lose 75 inches just by dropping a few pounds.

Poor math skills, another bad side effect of Herbalwife.

Karma or Amtrak?

I did not, happily, write these questions

I did, sadly, write these answers.

Do you still own any VHS tapes?

Yes, where are they … yes, there they are in my time capsule waiting for me to close the hatch. Click.

How many jobs have you had?

Lots. Sold eggs door to door, human dishwasher in a restaurant – twice, SD & TX, carpenter's son, well digger's son, (same father!), combine operator (again, same father) - twice, roofer, now, without my father's help: chemist, computer baby sitter, blend chemist, programmer, chemist, computer babysitter (AGAIN!), dog sitter, chemist. I want to retire soon to study the science I am interested in and be an artist and a writer and … but mainly I want to play with my dog. That is 4 years and 365 days away. It's a leap year thing. I won't add my usual XX hours and YY minutes and ZZ seconds.

What's your favorite kind of soup?

Hah! There are just toooo many …..

Do you still have your wisdom teeth?

I have wisdom and teeth. And I have one wisdom tooth left in my head because of the JERK idiot disguised as an oral surgeon who couldn't manage to finish the job. Now I bite the inside of my mouth WAY TOO often. Call me if you want his name and business address to avoid him ….. his brother at the other end of the building has a much better reputation.

Did you ever collect Beanie Babies?

Yes. Here is a picture of Cheeterie and Tigger on my trip to the Grand Canyon. Currently Tigger is propped precariously at the "Northeast" corner of my video monitor at work where he constantly inspects everything I do. You could say he is my "Maine" Beanie Babie at the moment. Cheeterie belongs to someone else, I just rescued him from his neglectful owner and he "accidently" wound up going to Arid-zona, against the wishes of Tigger who can be jealous and has that "I'm The Only One" attitude.

Other photos in the MySpace album "Arid-zona 2003"

When was the last time you got a haircut?

My wife is a cosmetologist and I am a cosmologist, yet our planets don't align often enough and she needs to orbit my orb and bar-bor it rob it of it robe of fur. Okay, I ran out of "R-O-B" type words.

Have you ever been to a bachelor/bachelorette party?

Too many. Mine was rather boring. No alcohol. Just one brother.

Is your next birthday coming up soon?

Yeppa, in just four days! Half a century of wandering, wondering, and one wedding ring.

What's the last board game you played?

The only board game I ever play is 'Sequence'. No more chess. I stopped playing that game about 35 years ago and then about 2 years ago for the second and hopefully last time. It just depends on what the wishes are of the grandkids when they arrive in the far distant future.

Do you actually eat 3 meals a day?

Define meal, eat, act, you, all, do and day. No need to define three.

How many cars have you ever owned?

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,,,,, how many have been in my name? A lot, but other people actually wear them out. My last car I drove for 12 years.

Can you do math in your head well?

It depends on the kind of math and the condition of my head and the atmospheric pressure and current state of nuclear warfare alert "DEFCON" number according to the military supreme hierarchy, say isn't that math too? Wargames.

What's your least favorite chore to do around the house?

I actually love all of my chores as I enjoy being alive and then running out into the mountains of Bavaria and bursting into song because the plains are alive with the sound of .. then a lion cub licks my face and I wake up.

Do you ever read the weather forecast?

1 – that is the shortest way I know for saying 'yes', as in binary logic first invented by ancient folks like Egyptians and Chinese and later refined by Bacon, von Leibniz, and finally George Boole, giving us Boolean logic ushering in the computer science world and digital electronics. Somehow my worlds shortest form of YES just became waaay tooo long, darnsies. Oh, I forgot to tell you that 0 means 'NO', just in case you would like to use this system of 0 and 1. 0?

Who is your favorite Star Wars character?

The tall hairy son of someone named Ford. Harrison Ford.

What radio station do you listen to the most?

I never listen to radio stations… they still exist?

What was the first thing you ever learned how to cook?

Eggs, because my mother "over"-cooked them to please my father's carbonized morning appetite, die if you ate it, diet. Mmmm, a fried egg sandwich with mustard, my specialty. Just like in the movie 'Havana' with Robert Redford and somebody else Scandal-navian who pretended to sound Cuban and fooled only people from Oriental countries, I'm sure.

How old were you when you got your driver's license?

Dezesseis, but I "legally" killed a pheasant with a Pontiac Catalina station wagon with (I think) 455 caliber cubic inch V-8 w a four barreled carb in Kansas while headed south on highway 83 at age 15 with an officially sanctioned SD Learner's Driving Permit. Actually the front grill killed the bird, not the engine. The cargo box on top stopped him. My father skinned him. We later re"grill"ed him. My paternal grandfather handed me a cigarette. Pall Mall. My nervous hands could not find a match. He held one up for me. By the way, the Chinese Ring Necked Pheasant Phasianus colchicus torquatus is the state bird of South Dakota, that's what they get for wandering off to a dangerous place like Kansas where children smoke the same brand of cigarettes that later kills both grandfathers.

Today's main lesson boys and girls: Never go pheasant hunting with a doubled carburetor if a four barrel is available. And don't smoke cigarettes, at least in Kansas, immediately after killing your first pheasant.

…and finally…

Do you believe in karma?

Add a 't', and I probably come closer to believing in the near reverse, "Amtrak". Someday soon I hope to sneak away from a certain amount of my known universe and go to Garden City in Kansas. There I will go to 100 North 7^th Street. Buy a choo choo train ticket. Then get on a choo-choo train. Only now I understand they no longer make that exact noise due to a lack of steam, maybe. Then I will peacefully steal away to somewhere far far far away on two pieces of steel, as my eyes stay full of new country side and my cameras going click click click and zoom zoom as the train goes clickity-clack and zoom on the metal track. I still think choo-choos still make that particular sound 'clickity clack' due to the tracks even if they don't go choo choo as the go, but what do I know? I made it back to Kansas......without a cigarette or a match or a grandfather, with only both of their names now equally hidden in mine.

e s b b

My Salamander, The Demander

My Salamander, The Demander

My salamander on my desktop asked me today, "I wish you would give me something to do"

He is about 4 inches long and made of cloth, and is painted a bunch of strange colors, a gift from someone on a road trip from a long time ago, (I think Jill, while she was in New Mexico). I think he is kind of like a bean bag chair. Just don't let him know that I said that about him.

I said "I'm busy right now, leave me alone"

He said, "Say, I have been sitting here for nearly two months since you got back to work and who do you think keeps throwing things at you when you fall asleep and keeping you from getting fired? Its me! Now give me something to do OR people are going to start hearing you snore!"

So I gave him my Texas Instruments Model TI-1775 Calculator.

He said, "What should I do now?"

I said, "How about solving the global energy crisis?", and I thought that should keep him busy for a while.

Silence.

Pretty soon I fell asleep again at my desk and he didn't throw anything at me and I had some dream that involved Iceland, zebras, and Santa Claus.

"DONE!"

14 minutes.

Wow, that was fast!

A couple of years from now when the Nobel Prize committee is handing out the award in Economics to Ernest's Salamander for his work on solving the global energy crisis, you will know which 'Ernest' they are talking about, and which 'Salamander'. But I am not counting on getting any of the prize money. You know how salamanders are about their money. And now you will know who to thank when the price of gas finally goes down.

The next day.....
When I took my salamander back to work after his photo shoot, I gave him a name and educational title to go with the story. I put them on a sign by the corner of my desk where he now resides slaving away at other deep dark scientific & mathematical problems that plague mankind & sala-mankind-der.....

Ernest's New Assistant:

Dr. Sol M. Andrews, Ph.D

Specialist in Global Economics Involving Crisis of Oil (GEICO)

18 Years Ago Today

April 21st 2008

18 years ago today at 10:30 AM I became an artist. It was a Saturday. It involved Mickey Mouse. Minnie. And D. Duck. The longer version will come later, I have to go to work now....

The Cost of Humor

Being a scientist, mathematician, and an artist all rolled up in one, as someone who studies thermodynamics, I know that essentially nothing is free. $omeone is always paying $omething, $omewhere, $ometime, eventually. Even for comedy.

$ome things may be very cheap; there may be 100 funny things in a Reader's Digest issue. A penny a pun.

My satellite TV monthly bill is pretty high, but divided out into 2.7 people (that includes the dog who is becoming more human all the time. He is probably 70 percent.) and the number of shows we watch, its certainly less than a dollar a show on average. Oh, I forgot to amortize the TV. Okay, two dollar$ a $how.

Other things may come at an extreme price. My "Happy New Year, Its Bumper Stealing Season!" story, several hundreds of dollar & hours of my time to replace my son's stolen bumper. You'll have to wait for that $tory to come out in my book and pay for it, its not "free" in My$pace. $nicker.

$ometimes friendships dissolve for bizarre reasons but it is only much later that the humor of the situation finally arrives. It's pretty hard to put a price on that.

With most people we aren't around them for most of their life, so there are stories from certain bygone eras. You don't find out about the really funny things of someone's life until you go to their funeral. Wow, now that'$ was pretty expen$ive for $omeone.

Bacon Jealousy

(Contents of a letter to a fellow bacon lover)

I just wanted to let you know that if you felt jealous of anyone in the universe just now and didn't know why it was me consuming bacon. Mmmmm.

Here is an Arabic funny: Most Arabic speakers are Muslim, non-pork eaters. So what is the word for meat in Arabic? laHam

he he he, ha ha ha, ham ham ham

I made my sandwich internally very pretty with a geometric swirl of purple onion. I sliced the onion in half. Then I took the pieces apart and arranged them starting on the outside of the burger and going inward, starting with the longest piece first. Then each successively smaller piece was offset spirally clockwise a little bit until the onion covered the burger in an even manner. (Now I wrote all this to give you a recalculation of the phrase 'a picture is worth a 1000 words', in this case its worth 67. What a bargain! Okay, its worth 108 if you include this explanation)

Re-enactment of the purple pieces spiral:

The Apes of Wrath by a Non-Steinbeck

Here is my latest dumb joke.

An old toothless gorilla walks into a bar and suddenly remembers that he left his false teeth at home. The bartender notices, as the gorilla is a regular customer, and forgets his teeth about half the time. Then its very difficult to understand the gorilla when he talks, especially after he's had too many drinks.
So the bartender asks him, "Would you like to have your 'banana' tonight in liquid form as a 'daiquiri'?"
The gorilla replies, "Nah, gnaw banana"

So just as soon as I wrote this joke I called my mother to tell her. She is typically the first "victim" of my humor. So I explained that I wrote it working backwards starting from the word 'banana' as I was making my grocery list. I had just asked my wife if she wanted a banana and that sparked me to try to write a symmetrical sentence with the syllable sounds "nah,nah,bah,nah,nah".

Oh, I just love silly symmetry.

So while I was still on the phone with my mother, I cracked up laughing, telling my wife in the other room, "Oh Honey, you inspired me to write an old toothless gorilla joke", ...

to which my mother warned me, "she's probably going to hit you for saying something like that."

Everybody - Lets Learn to Wiggle Properly!

Wiggle!
(I like how the white part of her eyes and her right toe don't move. I don't have a name for this particular talent just yet, still working on it)

From the "W" section of the Children's English-Portuguese Picture Dictionary

When I Was Eight

When I was eight I asked my mom to decorate my room with Macho Pete cartoon characters, but partial temporary deafness on her part resulted in Machu Picchu decor and an arduous 3 hour journey to the top bunk every night, but the frigid cold was held at bay by alpaca wool and a bedtime story from the Dolly Llama, my big sister in costume. Mother could get things so spectacularly wrong at times. I can still recite my sister's versions of Tibetan folk lore, though people have remarked how much it sounds like Spanish.

When I was eight I would be fascinated at the beginning of every evening dinner meal as my smiling mother would pour very cold water onto very cold ice in my Johnny Quest tumbler and have slush form centimeters away from my nose as I watched with glacial glee. Then suddenly one evening I was reminded of my much earlier childhood days of the Inuit word for slush "nook-ka-noo" only that isn't real Inuit but the Inuit of my dreams when I fell asleep during Mrs. Petersen's 6th grade afternoon fictional reading story time earlier the same day. Yes, go ahead, do the math, be jealous, I was pushed a few grades ahead for brilliance.

Absolutely none of this blog post is true.

The Strange, Change & Rearrange Sentence Game

My son and I play a silly game with sentences. He will text me a goofy sentence and then I rearrange them with a minimal amount of adds or drops of any words. I use a variety of features such as busting words apart down to syllables, combining, reversing, look for homonyms, etc. Make your own set of rules! I am sure we were influenced by the "wise" man in the movie "Mystery Men" who would spout off mysterious sayings that were really just half a sentence followed by a reversed half.

Sentence: Seals rarely eat Bob Hope's children
Response: The children of seals hope to eat food that bobs.

Sentence: The real question is do you love ponies?
Response: Ponies do love real equestrians.

Sentence: Hippos that love pudding don't reenact the bright spots of Howie Mandel's career
Response: He posed at the Louvre putting donuts in the nuclear reactor but now he stops as the deli man appears.

Sentence: Sometimes I look to the ghost of Macaulay Caulkin for advice when needed. He's not dead so thats a roadblock that has to be overcome (by killing him).

Response: Sometimes I see the ghost of Vice President Ford on his knees chasing Macaulay Caulkin. And the voice keeps saying, "Run Forrest, Run!!!", oh sorry, wrong movie. He is not dreadlocked under his hat, so come over and we'll be recycling him.

Sentence: Gastrointestinal disorders affect more than eagles.

Response: Ben Affleck and AFLAC have ordered Castro to stop testing morphine on the knees of all girls.

Just A Few Q That Characterize You

1. Describe your hair when you first saw it this morning in the mirror:

Japanese war lord

2. When you hear the word 'Kodiak', you think of:

(Actually, all of these in one big blurry moment)

a) An Island

b) A Bear

c) The brand name of a shovel in the northwest corner of my garage

d) Film (I realize the last one is wrong, 'Kodak', but I still thought of it)

3. What is your most common typing mistake?

Its not myfault! Thestupidspace bar doesn't workreliably.

4. Are you taller than most people?

Taller than most people of the 13^th century according to the size of the doorways of castles & body armor.

5. If you had a choice of being abducted by aliens, would you choose Mexicans or little green people from far far away?

If I have to base my answer on 'cheese', I'll go with Mexicans. I just love Kraft "Mild Mexican Velveeta" cheese versus the myth of the moon being made out of cheese. Thank you Neil Armstrong for clearing that up!

6. If little green aliens abducted you, would you prefer to go to one of their planets or a moon?

Whichever one has 5 star accomodations. And a heated pool. And Dr. Pepper, maybe?

Order Your New Valentines Day Card Early While Supplies Last

On the front cover of the Valentines Day card is a picture of a wife in the dining room at the table saying in her best Jerry Springer show guest voice "You should be lucky I made you lunch!"

On the inside of the card is a husband in the kitchen replying in his best gangster serial Anthony Hopkins killer voice "You should be lucky I let you live"

Oh, sorry, this isn't a card, its something that happened at my house earlier today in our "The Sound of Music" existence about 10 minutes ago. (Jan 6th, 2008) Oh, silly-silly us.

A Sad Miserable Life?

You lead a sad miserable life if:

Your psychologist retires just to avoid talking to you.

You are dying from falling off a cliff and your life is flashing before your eyes but then you realize that they put in the wrong tape and it's somebody else's life.

Your best dreams are just automobile commercials from television and they aren't even the good ones in high definition.

You went ahead with the shotgun wedding only to find out that there was no gift of a new shotgun as you had expected from your future father-in-law. Only a used one in the far distant future as spelled out in his will.

Other people are in charge of making your New Year's resolutions that have *serious* consequences attached for failure from the other gentlemen on your cell block.

You discover in your college microbiology class that your mother's technique of washing dishes "lets wipe everything off" is a little bit inadequate.

Your children continue to remind you decades after the event of you trying to trick them by making your own version of Heinz 57® Sauce as an utterly expensive nasty tasting failure.

You di$cover that your mother ha$ been paying everyone to be your friend in My$pace and now they have banded together a$ a union a$king for a pay increa$e.

You buy your first house with one of the stated benefits, from the kind elderly couple, being "free water, sewer and trash" only to discover a bill one day in the mailbox for five years worth after living there only two.

After a few scrapes with the law your parents tell you (and everyone else) that you were adopted, even though you weren't.

You have never left North Dakota because your father told you that you couldn't without a visa and every time you ask someone to help you with the application process they tell you that you don't need one and you just know your father wouldn't lie to you. And he lives in a different state. And he won't tell you which one. Oh well, back to the pig farm.

You have bumped your head so many times on the same object that people start making bets on whether you are going "to do it again this time".

The main thing you are known for at work is for wandering around looking for free food.

You are finally rescued after 11 years. You have stood on the beach and waved frantically at thousands of low flying airplanes. Then you are told that you have been on a "desert peninsula", not island, and the airport that services a city of 2 million people is right over there.

Now ... Grease and Seasonings!

What is your water? Its changed nationalities: WAS French Evian, NOW its Brita®-ish

What are you sad about? NOW about Bhutto being assassinated in Pakistan

What is your temp? NOW warming up, been playing and falling down in the falling snow.

What has made you laugh? NOW, listening to my children play football on Playstation 2 all day

What is your most recent culinary discovery? NOW making Buffalo and Bacon Gravy with a hint of Tabasco

What are you eating? NOW nothing ... SOON sugar cookies straight from the oven. No, correction, pit stop for frosting is going to be required, it is Christmas ya know. BEFORE spiral ham at supper, the best stuff ever (only in the 'Ham' category, Alex) seasoned with 'Boar's Head® Brown Sugar & Spice Ham Glaze'.

What is the main thing you are listening to? NOW its a tie between the TV and the oven exhaust fan. Surprisingly the pair and a half of children, the other parent, and the puppy are all quiet at the moment.

What is your main pain? NOW slight dental, its been repair time in my mouth, a porcelain coronation!

What is your main problem in life? NOW you don't wanna know.

What is touching you? NOW my dog is laying on my right ankle. He is uaually within 4 feet of me if he can be. And clothes.

Mi Casa Spins and Drains Differently Than Yours

I have designed and built a new 3,500 square foot house that rotates slowly and constantly.

Magazine interview transcript from Nov 29th, 2007

Why 3,500 square feet? I just kept adding stuff, mainly floor.

Why rotate constantly? I decided that I wanted my new house to be the only house in my hemisphere (northern) to drain water in a clock-wise rotation in the shower.

How fast does it rotate? Thats a closely guarded secret.

Couldn't we just stand outside and count the revolutions? No, there is a stationary shield to guard from prying eyes.

Will there be tours? Maybe.

What is it like to live inside a spinning house? Oh, its just horrible. After a while your mind starts to think that little pink spiders have started crawling all over the walls making monkey noises. Who could have predicted that ?!?!? I had predicted squirrel noises, maybe.

Update 2007-Dec-23 - It was discovered that a bearing was defective on the main rotation device, making a squealing noise, and that is what was causing the "monkey" noises. The neighbor's dogs don't howl as much now either.

Song Wars

"Oh, the weather outside is delightful and ...."

"No, Honey, its 'frightful' - 'the weather outside is frightful' is the lyric to the song"

"No its not - its not 'frightful' outside right now. I can sing it however I want"

So I respond by reading the complete correct lyrics aloud off the Internet.
---
Dec 22nd, we wake up to blowing snow, piling up.

"Oh, the weather outside is frightful and ...."

"No, Honey, its 'brightful' - its nice and sunny out today even though it is snowing"
---
Jan 16th, 2008 - we wake up to find that extremely mobile part of Canada has decided to move to Texas.

"Oh, the weather outside is 'single-digit-fahrenheit-ful' ...."

I think that is close to being one of the longest words I have ever created.

Ice Sculpture 101

Today you will learn about the fascinating world of Ice Sculpture using my special techniques. I will demonstrate how to make two sculptures which we did earlier today in my backyard.

I used plastic molds to create the shapes and applied the correct pressure at just the right point to achieve these wonderful pieces. Well, the dog liked them really well.

The first piece was a half moon semi-circle like a chunk of longhorn cheese from your supermarket. The water froze completely across my dog's circular pool. I stepped on it right in the middle just barely applying any pressure and it snapped the circle of ice almost cleanly in half. Then I removed the semi-circles from pool and stood them up by the storm cellar entrance. A giant 4 foot diameter by 3/4 inch thick ice sculpture of cheese glistening in the sun.

The second piece was from a 2 quart water pitcher that I left on the patio table last night. It did not quite freeze completely leaving a small section of liquid at the bottom of the pitcher but still frozen on the sides. I turned the pitcher upside down and the chunk of ice came splashing out. I put it upside down on the ground and filled it with water for my dog. He drank from it. And wagged his tail in approval.

My Secret for Eternal Ice Cream

Here is my wonderful new invention for keeping your ice cream from getting freezer burn: Tightly cover the ice cream with Saran Wrap™ or equivalent LDPE film.

A Pair of Penguin Pals

MyWife, Son 2 and I stopped at Starbucks and when I get to the table with my drink, Son 2 is playing with this cute stuffed penguin. I look behind him and in the basket of stuffed animals there is one and only one, more Aptenodytes Starbucki. So I decide "ah ha, there is Elisa's birthday present" But then I notice that Son 2's penguin has a cuter left wing that is stuck up at an angle, waving 'Hi', and when I ask him to exchange, he refuses, and by this time he has named them. His is "Scrappy" and mine is "Ned". Son 2 gloats that Ned is far inferior to Scrappy, and Scrappy is dancing, making voices, singing, and doing gymnastics. Then Son 2 gets out his camera phone and has MyWife make him dance while Son 2 records video. MyWife even supplied some music.

That was a few days before Thanksgiving. So Son 2 shows up for T-Day and I ask him if he brought Scrappy and he says "No" but then immediately gets him out of his coat pocket with a proud poppa smile, and my dog immediately thinks he has a new CHEW toy. So I wisely put both penguins high in my bedroom out of the dog's sight on top of the DVD recorder. Well, Son 2, being a bad pet owner, forgets Scrappy when he goes home a few days later. The next day I get a text message from Son 2 that says "Scrappy doesn't like Ned sitting so close to him" so I move them to opposite sides of the DVD recorder and respond back. I almost shot a photo of them kissing but decided against that.

So a few days later MyWife is headed to Amarillo by herself and I remind her to take Scrappy to Son 2. Well, I am sitting at the table and as I am busy writing something, I see a "Jaws" shark feeding type motion at the edge of the table just inches away (and keep in mind I didn't know MyWife had brought Scrappy in from the bedroom). Milliseconds later the flash of moving colors registers in my brain as "penguin -> rescue now" and I go running into the living room and yell angrily at my dog who is in motion, who suddenly whips around and just happens to let go of Scrappy just enough that I rip him out of the dog's mouth without damaging any fur, just a little saliva stained and soaked. So I scolded the dog and MyWife felt bad about leaving him at the edge of the table, but then I sai