I now wish to be addressed as AJ Nipplepunisher.
It's spelled AJ Nipplepunisher but pronounced "You Sweet Thing".
So I'm on a late conference call, listening intently.
As this was planned, everybody knew not to bother me.
Well,
almost everybody.
Five seconds before the first word was spoken, the air conditioner turned on.
The wife announced, loudly, she was going to lay down because her head hurt.
As the conference starts, The Loud Family begins entertaining the neighborhood with its rendition of Power Saw Samba #9, dedicated to my wife's headache.
Then the Russian guy starts talking. His English is flawless (until he tries to speak). I can
feel the sound of 50 participants' eyeballs rolling.
But wait... the sound of screeching. Of someone horribly mistreating an animal.
Oh. The dog is outside and wants to come in. It's a shame nobody told me he was outside.
If my coworkers had any idea of the things I do while on conferences, they'd all quit. After sterilizing the phones.
Back to sitting quietly and listening.
The Loud Family, having just finished their rendition of Moby Dick for Explosives and 12 Gauge Shotgun, wasted no time on going into their next song: Blue Danube for Two Lawnmowers. The interplay was spectacular, but we missed out on the stereo separation because we weren't out in the street.
Someone yelled ENCORE and they've been out there tuning their circular saws for 30 minutes.
- CORRECTION: I'm a big man and not afraid to admit my mistake. Last issue featured my wife telling me to heat Marshall's chicken breast before giving it to him. I asked which spices he preferred and should I offer him a nice cabernet with it. I have since been corrected, by my entire family, that one does not drink cabernet with chicken: it would be proper to offer something called Rose-A. Lest you think I ain't got no cultchur.
- UPDATE: the WhatsApp caution that a specially formatted message could destroy your phone was incorrect. The worst it can do is cause you to have to reboot the phone. All reports of the phone exploding and burning down your house were grossly exaggerated.
Good Day: your boss tells you his dad worked for the CIA
Not So Good Day: you say, "Your dad was a spook?" to the black man
Better Day: your boss says yes.
Since I have more traffic from Russia these days, I'll try to translate this for former citizens of the USSR:
Good Day: your boss tells you his dad worked for evil capitalist spy agency, bent on spreading warped ideology to other countries by destabilizing people's government
Not So Good Day: you say, "Your dad was filthy spy?" to the criminally oppressed minority in country where everybody isn't equal
Better Day: your boss says da, silently pointing to the mic in the flowers on his desk
- Part of the ThermionicEmissions Quality Control program is spell-checking my rantings before they go out. This is a little difficult because Google's spellcheck (Blogspot is Google) doesn't have certain unimportant words, like internet, blowjob, tv, McDonalds, or gauge.
I see a lot of press being given to people who insist Artificial Intelligence is going to kill us all. I used to laugh it off, like everyone laughs off most of what I say, but if you think about it, it has already started. I'm talking about that poor lady mowed down in Arizona, while walking her bike across the street. It was a self-driven Uber, with a test driver who happened to be looking down.
Police say the car didn't try to avoid hitting the woman.
See, I told you so.
The official explanation from Uber is that they discovered a bug in their software that separates Stuff floating across the road from Stuff you shouldn't hit. Apparently the car failed to see the woman as something that should not be mowed down. I'll go along with this premise, but this is not a 'bug' - it's programming. They built the sensors to 'see' her but had to program them to figure out if it was ok to mow her down. As it turns out, even I don't mow people down with my car, no matter how much they deserve it. Thus the beginning of Artificial Intelligence killing us all. Our first martyr.
Apparently there's a tradeoff between a car that's jerky because it keeps hitting the brakes and a smooth car, which just might mow down an object it considers harmless. Do you see where this is going? Harmless? Random human?
As a result, a number of states and car companies have stopped testing their software on pedestrians... I mean stopped testing their cars on public streets.
Fast fact: the codename for the car's software is Manson.
Regardless of whether it was horrible programming or the vehicle's decision to reduce the population by one, we come back to the same result: I told you so.
I told you these things were Not Ready for Prime Time. To test them on public streets is to test them on the public. In this case, it's tantamount to murder. There's absolutely nothing wrong with testing them out for years and years. This is a product you don't want running around mowing people down. I guess the lawyers sent opinions and the bean counters counted their liability beans, deciding it was time to set the murdering machines loose upon the public.
I'm not particularly proud of it (I told you so) but I wanted to make the point that maybe I have a point and deserve a little consideration. Usually I told you so is reserved for computer security matters and conspiracy theories that turn out to be quite true. So next time I warn you about something and you ignore it; when it comes true, at least say he told us so.
- There's a critical bug in 7zip, the archiver. Download the latest version. Now.
- There is a bug in PGP, Pretty Good Privacy. A Big Deal was made but it turns out the world will not end. The recommendation was to turn off HTML email (IF you use PGP). Fortunately most, if not all, of my readers won't have to worry about it. Because if they did, they'd lose all of those wonderful backgrounds and emojis (HORROR of HORRORS).
I don't have the heart to summarize this, but
this entry has some very important information about credit freezes. It's depressing, demoralizing, and disheartening. And it shows you whose hand is in what, as credit goes.
- I read an opinion in the New York Times, so it must be vetted first, that Trump's choice for CIA head ran a black detention site in Thailand, where people were tortured at the behest of the CIA. Most of the previous words are abhorrent to me.
- Yes, one could argue that she has experience at all levels and toes the company line, but....
Donald Trump's Twitter Account Hacked!
Well, we're not entirely sure, but this morning's tweet was relatively short, full of facts, and contained no Trump-isms. So we think the account was hijacked. When asked what they were doing to protect the president, the Secret Service asked, "What's a tweet?"
- a police car pulls over a vehicle that has just turned into McDonalds...
- UK police would see the car into a spot and confiscate any plastic knives.
- Australian police would allow the car to place an order first, then see it in the parking lot.
- US police would pull the guy out of his car and beat the shit out of him. "Rubber hoses leave no marks"
Weather Modification
As humans, we are only beginning to discover things we can do. For instance, did you know we can control the weather?
We can cause it to rain by washing the car.
We can also cause a 30 degree drop in temperature by installing window screens.
Who knows what else we'll find as time goes on...
- So we're heading out shortly and I'm checking the weather forecast. WXnation says 57 with an 80% chance of showers. Weather.com says 73 with a 20% chance of rain. Obviously they're both correct because 80% plus 20% equals 100%, right? Right? The forecast on my computer is for showers every day. Normal people would find this suspicious. People around here know you can't go wrong predicting rain and clouds every day.
Word of advice: when your mom asks you to shoot her if she's acting like her mom, don't.
Lowes Blows
My wife needed hardware. Not that kind, smartass.
She has a love/love relationship with Lowes. Or so I think, because she spends a lot of time there. Normally it's the man who visits Valhalla, but I'm weird.
We have this thing she calls a lopper. Women don't always know the names of things, so I helped by referring to it as 'that long red thing for cutting branches you can't reach'.
None of this would be an issue if it weren't for my dad. He's gotten a little 'itchy' since he retired, and insists on coming over to help me. We suspect he's gotten a little tired of Mom, so he insists on coming over to help me. As it turns out, we may be wrong, because he brings her along too. Mom has also gotten a little 'itchy' since Dad retired, and insists on coming over to help the dog. No, really. She does some sort of energy work on him, which seems to help. She can tell where he's hurting. Mom was always tuned into different frequencies... when I was a teen and my friends came over, if one of them did so much as pulled a cigarette out of a pack, Mom would yell, from two floors up, "Is anybody smoking?" She could also tell when someone was pregnant, long before they announced it or looked pregnant. Boy was I shocked when a girlfriend turned out to be preggers (I had no part in it, so to speak).
One of Dad's projects was my tree. The tree sits out there, mocking me and annoying much of the neighborhood. Do I look like I care? It stays there because in the fall, it drops leaves by the ton on the Crazy Lady's lawn. That's a blessing to me. Anything I can do to 'inadvertently' make her life (more) miserable, I'm doing it. She turns 440 this year and doesn't look a day over 125.
In any case, the tree has been a bit of a problem recently. It started throwing limbs at the ground. I don't mind limb throwing, but only at the Crazy Lady.. it's a waste of a perfectly good projectile. If it didn't grow leaves, I'd think it was dead. One particular branch was getting cozy with a power line, so we called the Tree Guy. Tree Guy quoted us $600, because anything he does starts at $600 and rises rapidly. The following year it looked like another branch was loose, so we called Tree Guy, who charged us...... wait for it.... $600 to remove it. We're not all that quick, so it took a few years to figure out the guy was taking down the entire tree, but doing it one branch at a time, at $600 per branch. At those rates, you'd think he was a plumber.
Dad decided this was going to be his job. He picked up the lopper and started sawing. He got so busy that it wasn't safe to walk near my house, lest you get pierced by falling bits of tree. He too was taking the tree down by attrition, but he wasn't charging. Two hours later, he asked where the blade was, because it wasn't there, like me. Wife had no idea. Apparently the hardware loosened, jettisoning the blade and itself. Speaking of hardware, my wife is juggling chainsaws, and Dad calls at two hour intervals, wanting to know if she got the hardware yet. Dad's tenacious, if not short.
After telling Dad that she got the hardware, to make him stop calling (it didn't work), she decided it would be a good idea to actually get the hardware, so he wouldn't be without his hobby when he arrived. This is where it gets weird, as if it wasn't weird enough already...
Lowes is Lowes. A huge home-improvement warehouse. Wife asked where she could find the replacement blade: "Over there." Ok, then... over there she went. Through some managerial mistake, she found the blade. You know what's coming next, right? It didn't have the hardware. So she wandered around, looking for a Helpful Employee. Due to corporate budget cuts, they no longer hire Helpful Employees. Instead, she looked for a Very Busy Helpful-looking Employee.
Did you know it's not against the law to dance naked in any aisle at Lowes? All you do is stand there and look for help. You are now guaranteed that nobody who works there will come down the aisle, and can start the striptease. After she got done dancing, she found someone, purely by mistake, as he was just about to go on Hiding Duty. He said to go to the hardware aisle and he'd send someone over. This is a phrase they teach employees and sounds extremely helpful and hopeful. In reality, it means "I'm not allowed to say GO AWAY so I'm sending you to an aisle where no one will ever find you".
She waited fifteen minutes at the aisle, when a different employee approached, looking all hardware-like. Three feet down the aisle, he acquired fourteen people, with fifteen questions, preventing him from helping her any time in the next millennium. Wife gave up, nearly decapitating several hangers-on with one throw of the blade.
Off to the register with blade, but without hardware. This cashier came directly from McDonalds. Or maybe a shoe store on a strange planet, here on a student visa, to study how much bad customer service you can throw at customers before they simply leave the store. His name was Taniesha and his short fro featured two very yellow stripes and sparkles simply everywhere. Before Wife could even get out a greeting, Taniesha started regaling her with tales of his day, how nobody would let him get his work done. Does this mean coworkers stopped him from pushing keys on the register or did somebody hide his stockings? He continued the monologue by mentioning he was there at 5am and hadn't even gotten a break and nobody appreciates him.
Now this is where it gets weird:
He says, "Oh, snap."
Complete with hand gesture.
And that, Your Honor, is when his head just came off and rolled down the aisle.
So now we have a replacement blade, but no one has the heart to tell Dad there's no hardware to secure it. I can hear the phone ringing already.....
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| I'm not moralizing - make your own decisions |
