Timmerov's Blog
toilet
we have a new toilet. there wasn't anything really wrong with the old toilet. it served faithfully for many years. long ago there was a big drought and the county was giving away free low flow toilets. so we snagged two. they were low end models. but perfectly adequate. 'til now. we also have a teenager in the house. a germophobic teenager. who doesn't go at school because germs. a teenager in the eating phase. like everything. more eat. more poo. a la kirchhoff's law. which he saves for the daily afternoon sprint down the hall. and apparently the old potty isn't up to processing the newer denser larger bricks. b was tired of plunging regularly. so he volunteered to help replace the toilet. i warned him it was going to be messy. and it was. the wax looks pretty gross. but i assured him it's really just wax. and not caked up fecal material. despite what it looks like. so anywho, we did our research to see what kind of potty we wanted to get. i found him giggling at a video of flushing rubber duckies and toy battleships. and i knew we had a winner. it doesn't have a flapper. instead it has something that looks like a missile silo. and jets at the bottom that vanish the waste in milliseconds. admittedly, it is kinda cool. not cool enough to wander around the house burbling happily to oneself and making fwooshing noises. unless you're a teenage boy. who's thinking he'll never have to fetch the damn plunger from the garage ever again. the younger brother likes it too. mostly cause the pot's bigger and harder to miss.
collision
i rear-ended a car today. yeah sure, so what? i was on my bicycle. clueless asian lady wanted to turn right. so she pulled in front of me. and stopped. probably cause she belatedly realized there was a guy on a bicycle there and she had lost track of me in her blind spot. she didn't leave enough room for me to stop. like two bike lengths. it would have been fine if she just turned. but she didn't she stopped. and i couldn't go around her to the left because traffic. so i collided with her rear bumper hard enough to knock the chain off my front derailleur. she knew she had been hit. usually, i'm pretty quick to yell at stupid drivers. but i didn't this time. no idea why not. sigh. i'm gonna get a vest with big orange letters ARMED! with a picture of a gun. see if that gets me some safety space.
catl-catl
our remaining cat is a serious pain in the ass sometimes. she's very vocal. and she sounds displeased. kinda like fingernails on a chalkboard. well, maybe not that bad. but it might as well be at 5am. damn cat. what i want is a smallish hockey stick. but with a spaghetti fork/spoon thing on the end. specifically designed for enscoopinating cats. then i could open the door and fling them into the back yard. the stick thing would be like an atl-atl. but for cats. i'd manufacture market and sell such a thing. if only i could think of a catch name for it. what to call it. what to call it.
intimates
shopping for a bicycle is a very surreal experience. the conversation with the sales person invariably turns to the seat. which leads to talking about testicles. now, i'm not really a fuddy duddy. i'm also not real comfortable talking about my nads to my doctor. and here i am in some public place trying to explain to some bike head groupie that no, i really don't want anything, anything *at all*, between my legs at crotch level when i ride. sheehs. you sit in a chair with your weight supported by your pelvic bone and padded by your butt cheeks. you don't sit at the dinner table on a padded saw horse. that's so dumb you won't even try it. so why do you ride a bike this way? one sales dude tipped the gag. apparently, there are racing specs for a bicycles. and if your seat doesn't meet the specs, it's not legal to race. wtf? i'm not going to race. ever. someone should make a frikken seat that doesn't cause real physical harm to its uses. wait. i'm someone. boo yah. i'm gonna be so rich.
halloween
i've decided what i want to be for halloween - a giraffe with a sauropod tail.
xkcd so rocks. hrm. any suggestions how to convince the beautiful and talented alisa to make such a costume for me? hrm. maybe i can just get one on a t-shirt.
voting
i think we should run elections in american politics the same way we pick the winner of dancing with the stars. or other reality tv shows where you vote people off the island. except in this case you'd vote people off the ballot. on election day, you'd rank order your candidates from most favorite to least favorite. and drop it into the box. the list is then turned upside down. the votes for least favorite candidate are counted. and whichever one receives the most least favorite votes is eliminated. and removed from the all of the ballots. the process then repeats with the remaining candidates. until we have a winner. most rank order voting systems drop the candidate with the fewest most popular votes. this fails the voting populace in an easily demonstrated way. suppose you have three candidates: left, center, right. for simplicity, let's say 35% vote left/center/right. 40% vote right/center/left. 10% vote center/left/right. 15% vote center/right/left. by traditional run-off methods, the candidates finish left 35%, center 25%, right 40%. center is eliminated. and right wins a run-off. which is too bad. because 60% of the population would be happier with center. by the reality-tv method, the candidates finish left 55%, center 0%, right 45%. and left is removed from the ballot. and center wins the next round. and yeah, 75% of the voters didn't get their first pick. they got their second pick. and nobody got their worst pick.
dumbasses
apparently congress is fighting about the debt crisis. huh. the cbo says there is no debt crisis. so why the fuck are we fighting about it? the cbo also says the affordable care act will reduce federal deficits. so why the fuck are we fighting to repeal it? seems like if we really did have a deficit crisis, which we don't, we'd want to implement the aca sooner rather than later. yeah okay. your dick is big. we get it. go to hell. stop fucking with the economy. ie my investment portfolio. from which i contribute to campaign funds. sheehs. get a fucking clue.
humor
how many politicians does it take to change a light bulb? answer: one to change the bulb. one to argue it doesn't need to be changed. one to propose obulbacare. one to claim mitt romney would have been a much better light bulb. and one to hold the light bulb hostage until obulbacare is repealed. ba dump bump. like it? thank you. thank you very much. hate it? b told it to me. and made me post it.
buzz
i buzzed off all my hair. well, technically i paid someone to buzz off all my hair. it's shorter than it's ever been. and of course i didn't warn anyone i was gonna do this thing. surprise! heh. it's drawn a lot of comments. some of my favorites are: i see you've grown your hair short. so you decided to come on over to my team. heh. i like that one. it was time to leave team combover. heh. i was expecting it to be cold. but it's been a week. and i'm still wearing a winter cap at work. sigh. ah well. it's not pretty. but it's better than the look i had going before wise. especially after biking. i'd regularly end up with a triangle of greasy looking hair sticking up on top. and two triangles sticking out the sides. sort of an einstein/joker look. not for me. thankyouverymuch.
irony
it's kinda funny. the looming default means we don't pay treasury bills the day they mature. the last time this happened was 1975 or so. it affected $122m worth of t-bills. meh you might say. but the rate we had to pay on treasury bills went up by 0.6 percentage points. for a very long time. over the course of which we paid billions extra in interest. so yeah, even the threat of defaulting is a big deal. so what the fuck are them idiots thinking? my best guess is higher interest rates will mean we'll be forced to borrow less. cause we won't be able to afford the extra interest payments. and hence smaller government. ding! see? it all makes sense. higher t-bill rates are good for the rich. cause they'll make money faster. assuming of course we pay the penalties associated with making late payments. which the 14th amendment and the supreme court will ensure we do. another large beneficiary of higher rates is china. and ironically, social security. cause social security surpluses are loaned out by law in the form of t-bills. which will undoubtedly allow bleeding heart libtards to expand it. heh. so much for smaller government. dumbasses.
bus
i think people are very confused about what the democrats want from the funding standoff. it's not concessions from the republicans. or backing down on repealing obamacare. dems want the republicans to throw the fucking crazy anarchists under the fucking bus. how much more plain can i make this? sheehs.
cats
many places around the country manage feral cat populations by catching, neutering, and releasing the felines. i really like this plan. the cats get fed. and get rudimentary care. nothing fancy. the cats are pretty much on their own. but they can't reproduce. so the problem stays manageable. which is really cool. some places have cages where people can abandon a non-neutered cat without the stigma of dealing with a person who might judge the donors as bad people. don't you love your kitty?! heh. i'm thinking, that should be the plan for the poor. make it on your own. or get neutered. and live out the rest of your life in a very modest fashion. pre-existing kids get educated. and at puberty they're either shipped out into the real world. or they too get the knife. this might be a crazy idea. but it's a whole lot saner than the world's current solution: slums.
bears
there's a talking point that's popular in some circles about bears. specifically, don't feed the bears. it's bad for the bears. it's bad for people. the bears are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. yada yada. and don't feed the homeless/poor. for exactly the same reasons. oh wait. heh. okay don't get me wrong here. i think people should succeed or fail on their own merits. and if you choose to help others, good for you! just keep it to yourself. k?thxbye. on the gripping hand, should we feed the bears in the zoo? yosemite logic says no. but wait. these bears cannot take care of themselves. we must feed them. i don't know of anyone who thinks we should put bears in cages and charge people money to watch them starve to death. that'd be kinda sick. so... are the poor like bears in yosemite? or like bears in the zoo? good questions. neither really. they're people. they're not wild animals. in many cases they're perfectly capable of fending for themselves. we should not feed these people. in other cases, society has taken away their natural habitat. street vending is illegal. working is illegal without proper papers. try getting a permit to push an ice cream cart. ha! and the list goes on. if you have not, your options for bootstrapping yourself are pretty much non-existent. i invite you to try it before arguing otherwise.
shutdowns
wikipedia has a nice list of government shutdowns going back as far as i can remember. lotta people have counted up the days or instances and assigned blame. who the fuck cares? the interesting question is why did the government shut down? let's review: spending - okay. funding for abortion - okay. funding for abortion again. and again. and again. and again. sheehs. average shutdown: 11 days. kinda ouchie. especially considering one party (dems) controlled all three branches of government. then there's the reagan era. spending - okay. missiles - hrm. missiles again and abortion again - sheehs. quibbling - gah! funding civil wars in foreign countries - wtf? and again. these shutdowns lasted 2 days. and ended with compromise. let me say that again. they ended with both sides quickly getting most of what they want. without looking like complete jackasses. sheehs. continuing... deficit reduction - go bush1! balanced budget - okay. balanced budget again. but this time compromise took 21 days. ouch. have we so quickly lost the art (and point) of negotiation? one president has "success" being belligerent and suddenly everyone thinks it's gospel. most such folks find themselves at the end of noose. anywho. here we are today. will there be compromise? i hope not. i'm hoping a sufficient number of republican representatives tell the leadership to go fuck themselves on this one. sheehs. honestly, shedding the radicals would be the best thing for the republican party.
silk coins
so silk road got shut down by the fbi the other day. good riddance. some people think this is going to be bad for bitcoin. and yeah the price dropped by percentages that would cause heart attacks, suicides, and homicides on wall street. but such swings are not all that unusual in the highly volatile digital currency. what's interesting is the fbi didn't try to shut down bitcoin. which would be kinda futile. take a look at the list of the top 100 supercomputers in the world. the bitcoin mining operation is bigger than all of them together. by a lot. like orders of magnitude. yeah. wrap your brain around that one. okay so now your gray matter is all warmed up and stretched and ready. this thought should slip right in like a glove on a (an alleged) murderer's hand. why would the fbi shut down bitcoin? every transaction ever made using bitcoins is a matter of public record. the fbi doesn't need a search warrant or permission or oversight or anything. it's like a wet dream currency for the g men. if you ask an fbi agent which would be harder to trace, a stack of cash, or a wallet of bitcoins. they gonna pick the crypto nuggets. guaranteed.
visual pun
so i had a conversation with a co-worker the other day about the conversation piece on my desk. it went like this. so what's up with the dried weeds in the coke bottle? it's thyme. time for what? no, the spice. spice? the herb. oh i thought you meant like dune. tee aytch why em ee. uh... ? it's thyme in a bottle. ba dump bump.
