nobody asked…

If God had intended us not to masturbate he would’ve made our arms shorter. — George Carlin

This site may soon go dark for a day or three. Or not. Since WordPress released the “latest and greatest” version 2.5 a couple of months ago, I have ignored it for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is my Oblomovian lassitude (follow link to my previous post if you have forgotten what that means or if you (…gasp…) never read it). Every time I open WordPress, it nags at me like an ex-wife, reminding me that my crusty olde version is unsafe, unstable, expired, moldy, dried out, lost its fizz, contaminated, and about to either implode or explode (they do not specify which). If it was so friggin’ terrible, why did they tout it the latest and greatest at the time of release? It’s been good to me and has not blown-up or kicked me in the arse.

On the slim chance that a couple of features have been added that within three days will have me wondering how I ever lived without them, I’m prepping to take the upgrade plunge. Dreamhost usually does an outstanding job of providing a “One-click Install” through their Control Panel, and I have never had any disasters. The hind-side of my brain is quite preoccupied with thoughts of the “proverbial first time.” At the very least, I will be required to add back the plug-ins and themes I want to be active, and perhaps some upgrading of some of those to their “latest and greatest” compatible versions.

The mission date has not been established and will depend on whether I can find something else to occupy my idle time. I do expect this will happen within the next week, probably when it is raining in the Nashville area so that I am stuck inside anyway. Emergency lights have been installed. High-powered handheld halogen beacons will be deployed around the perimeter for use by the curious among you who have the courage to venture forward for peeks into the dark chasm. My best bio-chem warfare suit has been cleaned and checked for moth holes. My newest assault weapon has been cleaned and calibrated and is fully loaded and charged for the dangerous mission ahead.

Your kind thoughts and well wishes are appreciated. If you are inclined to pray, this might be an appropriate time to do so. If by chance I do not return, it has been a nice run. I love you all — well, most of you — and appreciate your time and patronage in visiting, reading, and commenting on my murmurings. All I can hope for is that you will remember me with a slight smile and the thought that he was a pretty good guy.

Sometimes we get on a roll. You know, jump on a hot streak where nothing can go wrong for a few minutes. Then,

.

W H A M !

Someone or something hits you upside the head and sends you spinning uncontrollably through space and time back to someone else’s tortured and distorted vision of reality. The reality of just how common and ordinary and fallible you really are. How human. Oh, the piteous shame of it all… Gasp…

I could pull a Republican style cover-up and just sweep it under the carpet. Or claim that my etymological faux pas was really an embedded test to find out who in my vast audience is paying attention. Which reader has the smarts and intelligence and sharp eye to find camouflaged errors? And the audacity to bring their findings to my attention…. Gasp number 2…

No, I’ll come clean and fess up. Might be good for my soul, should I ever decide to acquire one. On May 26, just three short days ago, I wrote a tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek post titled Shattered Dreams… , which contained these lines:

At the age of 7 or 8, I did not connect the dots relating education to occupation. My educational goal of Spelling was not complimentary to what I really wanted to do when I grew up. So what? That disconnect was years away…

Now, most days I know when to use complimentary vs. complementary. On May 26, I had an attack of the stupids while writing and proofing the post. Looking back at the usage in the context of the surrounding sentences, my complimentary should have been complementary.

To complement is to provide something felt to be lacking or needed; it is often applied to putting together two things, each of which supplies what is lacking in the other, to make a complete whole… [Ref. dictionary.com]

While double-checking myself over at dictionary.com, I also discovered that though they are two separate words with different spellings and meanings, these two homophonic words share some common roots and meanings. In fact one of the obsolete or archaic entries show compliment and complement to be synonymous. Ah ha! I knew I didn’t err in the spelling (How embarassing would that be in a post bragging about spelling ability?), but in the usage. If I admit to being obsolete and archaic (Guilty as charged…), then perhaps the usage is not wrong, just born of antiquity.

[With tongue firmly out of cheek, I offer sincere thanks and admiration for the bearer of the news that I might have made a mistake. Fear not, fair lady, I do not shoot messengers. However, I have fired my chief copy editor for allowing this controversial situation to develop. Job applicants may submit resumes along with salary requirements and chocolate offerings to my email address as shown on my Contact page. - WR]

Why does everybody else look down on us engineers. They think we are all nerds, nothing but nerds, with no interests or skills or knowledge other than techie stuff. This point is made and amplified over and over by Scott Adams with the wonderfully realistic Dilbert comic strip. These introductory panels from the Sunday, May 25, 2008, strip are classic… and typical…

This mindset was given legs by the dolt from the dark side who coined the phrase, It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Well, excuse me, but yes it does. Scientists, engineers, technicians… Yes, it does…

Do you people not understand who is really in charge here? … Who is important here? The President disappears for a few days — no one cares. If a salesman or accountant or librarian takes a week off, you forget about them. If a lawyer never shows up again, it’s a good thing. But if the Engineers decided to stay at home one day, the world goes nuts and shuts down. Sure, we are cram full of techie stuff that makes the world go round and brings you all the wonderful gadgetry that you hang around your neck, stick in your ear, clip to your belt, and will soon have implanted under the skin behind the ear — by government edict, of course. And yes, we understand that you don’t understand it and don’t want to understand it and it bores the hell out of you when we talk about it. You just want it to work…

Then be nice to us. Bring us chocolate…

A helicopter was flying around Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it.

“I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building because they gave me a technically correct, but completely useless answer.”

[A spin of my beanie propeller to George aka Decrepit Old Fool]

That subject line should increase traffic hereabouts. I’ll keep you posted. But the real reason for this post is to pass along a bit of vital information that I learned last week.

Like all of you, my email Inbox is rife with unwanted spam messages trying to interest me in everything from V1ag.r.a, spelled in a variety of creative ways, to mail order drugs from Guatemala at pennies on the dollar compared to US prescription costs, death benefit and burial insurance on my puppy, every kind of get rich scam you can think of, mortgage and debt consolidation, and of course, the gazillion different ways to grab my hard earned dollars for penis enhancement. [My mama-in-law has actually replied to some of those, to let those poor misinformed people know that she is a female and does not have a penis that needs enhancing. Heh...]

Also, like many of you, I take precautions to keep the buggers out of my Inbox, using a variety of filters at the mail server level and on computers running my favored mail client, Thunderbird. But those spam bastards are clever, always coming up with new ways to get through, by, under, over, or around any defenses put in their path. As if finding ever new ways to bug the living shit out of me will finally make me break down and click the link and reveal my credit card number to them so they can sign me up for the best opportunity in decades to grab some beach-front property on a little known but fast developing resort island in the Caribbean. As if… Right…

Occasionally one of those rogue messages does land in my Inbox where I can blow it away or dissect it to my heart’s content. I just love to see the little buggers squirm and squeal when scalpel is applied to their soft tissues. So last week I had retreived my mail and was scanning over it when this subject line caught my eye:

Average Gain is 302 Inches!!!

On closer examination… you guessed it… it turned out to be a penis enhancement scam. But 302 inches? That’s over 25 feet! I wonder if they supply a hose reel that straps around your waist…

1. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a mechanic.
2. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
3. If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you haven’t tried before.
4. There is no evidence to support the notion that life is serious.
5. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
6. For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.
7. If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.
8. Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.
9. Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.
10. Junk is stuff you keep for years and throw away the week before you need it.
11. Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
12. Blessed are they who laugh at themselves for they shall never cease to be amused.

Squint as you approach lest my brilliance blind thee…

You have known me as Winston, a simple man with simple tastes, a man humbled in the presence of his fellow men and women, a seeker and speaker of truth, a bland personna that was one with the Great Mass of Mediocrity and Confusion in which we all strive to immerse ourselves.

Well, no more, boys and girls of all genders, no more…

Through a special private invitation extended to everybody who ever heard of the internet, I have traveled to the sacred ground on which has been erected a really cool bar majestic temple that shall stand till the next gusty day comes along against all time as witness to the power and coolness of Dudeism. After completing a long and grueling study of several minutes under the tutelage of his Excellency, the Most High of the Mostly High, I was awarded this useless priceless Certificate of Ordination (Click the certificate to enhugen to boastful size), which will be either hanging in an appropriate frame here on the hallowed walls of BlogCentral, or folded to smallest possible size and carefully stored in a remote corner of the big pocket of my backpack where it will spend the rest of eternity along with a half pack of Rolaids, several crumpled business cards collected over the last decade from people I neither do or want to remember, a long ago used-up Bic lighter, and several Peanut M&Ms in assorted colors.

So, dudes (there are no genders here, no dudettes, only dudes — cool…), slip on your jesus sandals and something loose and comfortable, grab a brew, lay back lie back get horizontal in a hammock, and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Chill with your local Priest of Dudeism while we explore the unknowable mysteries of the known… Peace out…

If memory serves, I have only posted one other joke in these annals since the beginning. But this one was so good I just couldn’t help myself — it just begged to be shared. If the story has a moral, it probably has several. Make up your own. For me, there is nothing that brings back my youth like sitting around a campfire, late at night, telling goat stories…

[Thanks and a nod of my camouflage hunting cap to my friend, Pita, who owns a larger joke collection than anyone else I know. Pita knows jokes. And she tells me I are one. Or, maybe she said I don't know my ass goat from a hole in the ground... Whatever...]

Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines. — John Benfield

Found over at John B.’s Blog Meridian, this is one of the most creatively humorous … or is that humorously creative? … works I’ve seen lately. John’s accompanying text includes a couple of other links including this one for a field guide to stray shopping carts. Good stuff here that is guaranteed to tic up the corners of your pie-hole.

This is precisely the kind of off-beat humor I needed this morning. I hope it does to you what it did to me.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale. – Arthur C. Clarke