I'm on the bandwagon

I know this is spreading across the internet like wildfire right now, so you may have already seen it….but if you haven’t seen Garfield Minus Garfield then by all means please do so. Before Jim Davis notices it and makes him take it down.

When I first saw it I laughed until I cried… at work. Subsequent viewings at work have all produced audible evidence of my slacking. My coworkers are wise to me and glance at me knowingly when I start to giggle for no apparent reason.

Something about it is deeply disturbing and nudges my tickle box in just the right place.

Perhaps I can entice you to view them. Here’s the concept. They take Garfield cartoons and Photoshop Garfield out of the comics. What’s left is Jon talking to himself. Without Garfield as a foil Jon comes off as a deeply disturbed individual. The comic is much darker than anything that could have been produced intentionally.

Perhaps the verbage from the top of the site can convince you if I cannot:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Also, I’ll be interested to find out if others find this site as intoxicating as I do….or it this a sign of my further mental degradation.

That is all.

The horror.

Perhaps it’s a lack of passion, a lack of social conscious, or a lack of idealism, but I’ve never been one to get involved in protests. At best I’m usually ambivalent about such endeavors, at worse I might roll my eyes. I’ve always assumed that the true value of a protest is that the protesters get to feel like they are doing something, not necessarily that the protest actually gets anything done. So I guess they empower but not accomplish.

Well the restaurateurs in Israel have concocted a protest that I would sit up and take notice of. Restaurants in Israel are taking spring rolls off their menus as a form of protest against their government. Why you might ask? Evidently we’re not the only government with stupid immigration laws. According to the Gadling blog, “work permits for Asian chefs are being cut, and next year the government decided that it will not grant any new permits.” So to bring pressure on the government to change their stance, restaurateurs are systematically starting to deprive Israelis of Asian food. The horror! Right now it’s just spring rolls, but they are already threatening to expand it to noodles and sushi.

The restaurateurs are hoping it will provoke people to petition the government. The government sees this as an opportunity to train more Israelis as specialist chefs. All I know is I would be pissed, probably at both parties. Not to mention the Dawns, have they even considered the Dawns? Hungry, angry Dawns ravaging the country-side, looking for unagi. I’m glad the U.S. hasn’t tried some sort of sushi embargo….I’m positive people would get hurt.

In the service of clarity

A coworker had trouble understanding the phenomena. I produced this helpful example for him. Perhaps you will be likewise illuminated.

while (redspot)
{
    moveTo(redspot.location);
    eliminate(redspot);
}
respite();

I trust this clears things up.

Spots, spots, spots.

The marching. That damnable marching. Always in the back of my head the marching…and it’s been getting louder lately. I don’t think the others can hear it. Not yet.

And the music… it has been getting louder too. It calls them to arms, commands them to swarm. Make no mistake, that music is the sound of war. Belle and Sebastian mostly, but occasionally fragments of other tunes can be heard. I think it goads the spots on. Like stepping on an anthill the music makes them march all the more furiously.

I can feel the spots marching around on the inside of my skull. Like an itch that cannot be scratched. That should not be scratched, at least not conventionally. No not with the metal hooks. We need a different method to scratch them, something without metal hooks. Perhaps a game would help.

Yes a game. That’s what quelled the spots last time. Last time Samurai Warriors 2 put the spots in their place. Before that Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires help staunch the spots…but it was an ill-formed prescription. The punishment cubes - were they worse than the cure? I guess one must take the bitter with the sweet, but are the side-effects worth it? The side-effects should be avoided if at all possible.

What are the current options available? Perhaps a new tonic has been brewed; something cleverly designed to target and smite the marching spots. Yes, Dynasty Warriors 6. Is this the medicine I’m looking for? Will it dose closer to Samurai Warriors 2 or be more similar to its name-sake Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires? I don’t think my body could withstand the punishment cubes… not again. Still the damnable marching is getting louder. Why won’t the spots let me think!?!

There is no alternative, I must purchase it. I must try to wipe out the spots before they consume me. I just hope I start each mission with a horse. That is key. Without a horse there can be no joy, no relief. Don’t make me purchase a one-use only horse. I’m a general, why am I using a rent-a-horse to go into battle? This is clearly the work of the punishment cubes.

Ah. A horse is provided at the start of the first mission. Freely given. Perhaps now I will find peace - for a time.

My weekend with the null set.

During the course of the weekend I spent considerably more time thinking about null sets than I ever have before. I’m not sure if someone can be a null set fetishist, but if they can, I think the person who crafted the latest round of my homework is. There was a whole lot of null set used in strange and (to me) unusual situations.

Now I was never a good math student, so some of this probably won’t be new to those of you who were. Oh, if you’re planning on struggling through the boring math stuff to make it to the funny conclusion at the end of the post…just stop reading. I didn’t have the kind of weekend that encourages humorous antidotes. This is straight-up set theory mathematics from the streets, yo.

First off, evidently some people get their panties in a bind if you casually refer to the empty set as the null set. I’ve always assumed that the two names are interchangeable…not so, say mathematicians worried about measurement theory (there is such a thing as measurement theory?) Evidently the empty set is different from the null set being that the null set is not unique where as the empty set is. In set theory we use the empty set. And it’s the empty set, not an empty set….because it’s unique. This is because in set theory two sets are equal if they contain the same elements. All empty sets contain exactly the same elements (which is none) so they are all the same set, which is to say that there is only one of them (welcome to how I spent my weekend). Also, don’t get me started on the difference between equals and equivalent.

Another important thing to wrap your head around is that the empty set is not the same thing as nothing. The empty set is something; it’s just an empty something. It’s best not to think of sets as collections. If you think of them as collections you’ll be tempted to think of an empty collection as no collection. It’s better to think of sets as bags. If you have stuff in your bag then you have a collection in a bag. If you have nothing in your bag, then you still have a bag. You could have lots of empty bags if you wanted to. You could count them. Heck you could even put an empty bag inside another empty bag. But then the one of the bags wouldn’t be empty any longer. It would contain the empty set.

Throw in the power set of the empty set and Cartesian products of two empty sets and you’ll have my Saturday. I think I might need another weekend to recover from the last one…

A boom in the night.

So last night I was working away on homework at around 11:00 pm. Dawn had already gone to bed (big surprise). And there was a loud boom.

It didn’t sound like a crash, it sounded like a boom. It had deep resonance about it. I felt it. I looked up, thought “what the heck was that,” and promptly went about my homework. This morning I asked Dawn if she heard the boom last night. She said that she hadn’t.

Little did I know that was this morning’s most popular game around Huntsville is asking people if they heard the loud boom. The Huntsville Times reports has the following:

What was it?

That's the question being asked in four north Alabama counties
today.

Around 11 p.m. a loud boom was reported in southeast Huntsville, east Limestone, Morgan and Marshall counties.

EMA officials do not know what caused the boom.

If you know, let us know.

Holy cow. It was loud enough to be heard in four counties? I wonder what the heck it was. It seems that if you have a boom that loud there ought to be a missing building or something to show for it.

Conspiracy theorist, start your engines.

[Edit: Thanks Griner. I had meant to include a link to the story this morning and forgot.]

[Update: Redstone Arsenal confirmed that they made the boom. It was a rocket motor test at Test Area 4. They said similar tests have been conducted all week. Evidently the weather conditions were particularly favorable for propagating sound last night. That’s why so many people heard it.

I was hoping for something more sinister. Where are the tentacle wielding spaceships?]

[Update 2: Dawn found an article with some actual details in it….and they’re awesome. Redstone does some cool work. In this case they were baking a missile segment in an oven to see how long it would take before it would blow up. They expected yesterday’s missile to pop sometime in the afternoon but didn’t go boom until 11 PM. Neat.]

Just as I suspected!

Turns out my suspicions that our neighborhood was being ruined by dogs and kids were not the inane ramblings of a delusional old curmudgeon after all. They were in fact the inane ramblings of a highly observant crusader for truth / curmudgeon. And I have the proof.

We got our neighborhood newsletter yesterday and what were two of the major concerns that our neighborhood has to face? DUN DUN DUN. Kids and dogs.

“It is anticipated that the annual homeowner’s dues will be increased this year due to increases in insurance costs, ground maintenance, and utilities. It has been reported that the creek and common area near the park is being “trashed” with litter and that holes are being dug. Hiring someone to clean up this litter is an unnecessary expense to the homeowners so we encourage you to talk to you children about the need to pick up after themselves. The holes will need to be filled so that they don’t
interfere with bush hogging…”

So it appears that the reckless destruction of our neighborhood’s common lands by our neighborhood’s unsupervised youths may in fact cost us money. Yippie. Dawn and I secretly hope the raise in fees is massive. We suspect that we can better shoulder the increase fees than many of our neighbors with kids. We are bad people.

I must confess that seeing this newsletter makes me feel a little bit vindicated. When I would tell people that kids are wreaking havoc on the field behind our house they would mostly nod and say something along the lines of: “Well it’s good that those kids are getting out of the house and playing outside. Today’s kids spend too much time in front of TV’s….” Well that’s bullcrap. First of all, massive doses of TV and video games never seemed to bother me as a kid (unless, of course, you count the fact that I’m a misanthropic curmudgeon). Secondly, at least if they are staying indoors the kids would be actively destroying their parents’ houses instead of common property. I don’t see how vandalism is a forgivable offense if it involves being outside.

The newsletter also has more than half a page dedicated to dogs. Mostly it involves all the places in the neighborhood that dogs are no longer allowed because owners can’t seem to be bothered to clean up after their little defecation factories. It actually has an underlined passage beseeching dog owners not to let their dogs “do their thing” in neighbor’s yards (no surprise there) or on the sidewalks (the sidewalks!!!) We have a bit of a problem with crap filled sidewalks (not to mention mailboxes).

To round the newsletter out they mentioned that there’s a big meeting where they’ll elect a new board of directors and consider new policies soon. Perhaps I should go. I could recommend a few ways to spend our new massively increased fees. We could buy shock collars to put on all the kids in the neighborhood and force all the dog owners to wear some sort of scarlet letters. Well to be fair only dog owners with a confirmed public canine defecation should have to wear letters. See, I’m a reasonable man.