Good, Better, Bitter

"Good fences make good neighbors" - Robert Frost,

Better fences make better neighbors,

Bitter fences make bitter neighbors.

The Berlin Wall didn't last forever,

And exists 

now in 

fragments 

that function 

not as a 

restrainer,

But as a reminder for those who care to remember. 

esbb
2009.08.31

Wanna Buy A Watch?

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.

So hows your day? Is it anything like the "dream-day" I had where you get in a fight with someone who rips your arm off and then they proceed to beat you with it as a weapon, just whippin' the snot out of you with your own arm, and then sudDENly, they get a bright idea.

"See this watch? ,,, Like it?" and they are showing me the watch, my watch, on my detached limb.

"I'll sell you this watch right now at half its normal selling price on eBay if you call this fight off (which, by the way, they, of course, had started!), and sign this document promising to never fight with me again, and never tell anybody about what happened to your arm, deal?" - and he holds out my arm to shake to make the deal. At that point I notice that my arm has my watch AND my ring.

That was my day.

That was my entire weakend.

That was my weak.


Those were not typos.

My Guide for Hunting Easter Eggs

This is a letter I sent to my pen-pal who shares my first name initial

Dear E,

Happy E-Day to You!

To assist you in your Easter Egg Hunting, I have created this useful guide of egg shaped letters and symbols complete with explanations, of course.

0 - egg

O - fatter egg

o - fatter but smaller egg

() - egg on a diet

@ - an "a" hatching, the shell is ...just... cracking open!

U - empty shell, too late

Q - something is squirming out of this egg, obviously snaky

6 - starting off curvy in life and headed north by northeast

D - "D" for dented egg

P - dented egg with something Possibly crawling out of it

R - same thing, only twins!

B - a stack of dented eggs (see previous item)

~ - this is the snake that crawled away from the "Q"

! - not a tiny egg, but actually a very large egg at a great distance with an obviously very large "thing" jumping out of it! Good thing we are this far away!!!

* - starfish - not an egg

& - ampersand, maybe it is an egg (?)

G - egg with a door that swings inwardly, how inconvenient.

C - egg with garage type doorway - missing door

% - West and East Egg-ermany, separated by Berlin Wall

9 - starting off curvy in life and headed south by southwest

LU-99999999999-V - a whole bunch of the previous thing on a Southwest Airlines jet, again, headed South by Southwest by Southwest

(LUV: stock market symbol for Southwest Airlines)

LUV,

E

2 of 3

.2 of 3.

Two Out Of Our Three
Here At Our Casa Tonight
Eat Abacaxi

(ah-bah-cah-shee - accent on the last)

It Is The One Word
Of The Braz-Portuguese Tongue
My Wife Ne'er Forgets.

POETRY LINK: The next poem in my blog ...

Rough Draft for a Song for My New Musical: 'My Fair Laddie'

While in the shower recently I came up with the following song that goes to the tune of 'Loverly' from the musical/movie 'My Fair Lady', only in my case its 'My Fair Laddie', the story of an out of work chemist who longs to go back to his old job or at least his old plant to work. Consider this song incomplete and at rough draft stage, (at best).

Chem-er-stry



All I need is a job somewhere,

Preferably back where there’s stinky air,

‘Cause my nose just wouldn’t care,

Oh, wouldn’t that, be chem-er-stry? (echo: Chem-er-stry?)



Lotza problems for me to solve,

Like, 'why this junk doesn’t wanna dissolve,

Or what it could possibly be,

Oh, have you shot it on a GC?' (echo: a GC?)



It can be a quite an unruly mess

But I can handle it with my GC-MS

Lotza peaks, lotza chemical names

And don’t forget our labor-ra-dory games,

.

.

Who takes good care of you?

An organic chem-er-ist, why, that is who (echo: that is who)

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

Sportz-illas

Amarillo TX has had a few recent interesting sports mascots. The Amarillo Dillas (armadillos) for baseball, and when they got ready to rename the hockey franchise, they picked Gorillas! Oh, when I saw that for the first time my heart kinda sank and died just lil bit, but then my internal Mr Giggle thought, well, if they ever have a professional women's sports team, they could call them the 'Amarillo Chinchillas' and I thought with word "chill" embedded in the name, that might have been a better choice for the hockey team. Do you realize how silly an angry gorilla looks with goalie gear on? Just imagine certain Canadians, there you go!

Next thought: What sport would be good for the 'Amarillo Godzillas'?

Sumo Wrestling!!!

I'm a Smoot !!!!!; Are You?

smoot - a non-standard unit of length = 5 foot 7 inches

During a recent episode of the CBS sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" there was a cameo appearance by physicist George Fitzgerald Smoot III, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. While reading the wikipedia article about George, I came across this disclaimer:

From wikipedia: George F Smoot

Although Smoot attended MIT, he was not the same Smoot who was laid end to end to measure the Harvard Bridge between Cambridge and Boston;[4][5] this was his cousin Oliver R. Smoot, an MIT alumnus who served as the chairman of the American National Standards Institute.[5][6]

This led me to read about Oliver, who had a unit of length - his height of 5 ' 7" - designated as a "smoot"



From wikipedia: Smoot

The smoot is a nonstandard unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot (class of 1962), a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

So they could have also used me, a Boston, to measure the distance from Boston to Cambridge across their bridge. (That was a cool construction - see how I did a 'Boston Boston bridge bridge'?) Of course in the year 1958 I was not yet 5 years old, much less 5' 7", and much closer to 5 months old, so they would have had to wait a few years for me to reach my full smootedness.

Note: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the following:


Smoot

and

George F Smoot



(and lastly, the answer to your subliminal question is 'Yes', the "!!!!!;" in the title was a sneaky reference to 5 foot 7 inches -> smooth, huh?)

Souper String Theory with Onions and More

This article is about wonderfully silly things I have been doing in my kitchen now that a certain (dis-)organization doesn't want me to be a chemist for them any more. Well, at least part of the (dis-)organization doesn't seem to want me. You can take the chemist out of the chemical plant, but you can't stop him from inventing with chemicals from other plants: Food

1. MSG: Managing Sour Grapes

The best way to handle sour grapes is to eat them with good grapes alternating between the two OR three kinds of grapes. And very cold almost frozen grapes are such a delight.

2. Fun with Your Toaster

Caution: Avoid hot surfaces and wear proper protective gear when holding objects near an electric toaster.

Toasters can be a great deal of fun. I obtained some pumpernickel rye bread that was too long for my toaster. So I learned that I could toast one short end of the bread by holding the piece of bread with my hand a safe distance from the heat of the toaster. Then I dropped the uncooked main portion in the toaster to get a fairly even toasting of the whole piece.

Here is where it gets totally fascinating (not really, I just had to say that). Tonight I took a regular sized piece of light colored wheat bread and made it go from uncooked on one side to burned on the other in a gradual manner. I accomplished this feat by slowly and evenly dipping the piece of bread in and out of the toaster.

3. ATF (Avoid Tomatoes Falling)

Tomatoes are not really good at staying inside a sandwich, whether as a sliced entity or even as ketchup.

(They must be affected by gravity
more than other foods, I have found.
Perhaps it is because the tomato has spent
so much of their lives just hanging around
and now before they are consumed
they just want to touch the ground?)

Here is a trick I have devised to keep the tomato on my sandwich longer. I slice the tomato in a spiral manner creating incredibly long single thin tomato pieces (an entire tomato sans inner and end pieces). So now there is less tomato sandwich slippery-age.

(If you didn't notice on the first pass through, I was trying to make the 3rd item look like a tomato sandwich, red between two pieces of brown)

4. Souper Strings of Onions

The spiral tomato idea gave me another idea to try this with onions that I sautee for my soups. I cut them by the same spiral technique in incredibly long pieces. I try to cut the onion piece so the cutting depth matches the width of individual spiral pieces. So far I have only tried these in a buffalo chili where I sauteed the onions first with jalapeno peppers in some bacon grease. The result was an incredibly strange looking snake-like thing showing up in my soup. I hate to use the word 'worm' because I have never seen worms this long. The next thing I want to try is serving super souper sauteed cebola strings mixed in with spaghetti. I guess I could call this invention "Anaconda Angel Hair Pasta" (Cebola is the Brazilian-Portuguese word for onion and has an 's' sound at the beginning and the Anaconda is a long snake from Brazil) I have only experimented with purple onions so far and will try other varieties soon.