Category: Humor

Top Men Working on It

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My recent thought experiment to determine whether the geometry of our universe is Euclidean or not has inspired me to get involved in the upcoming Trump Administration.  Just as Trump has farmed out budget cutting to DOGE, I would like to volunteer (well not for free though) my services to perform research that is woefully needed by the United States government.  I haven’t come up with a snappy acronym for my team but I’m working on it.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the projects I’d like to tackle for Uncle Sam.

  • Global Warming – Now, this is a no-brainer. Up until now research on this subject has been performed by commies.  And no matter what information they get they “analyze” it until they can work it into a hockey stick graph that warns that the end of the world is imminent.  What is needed is an objective, scientific approach.  And that’s me all over.  I will analyze the hell out of that data and something tells me that my result will be a call for more fossil fuel and nuclear energy to stave off the next ice age which is already rearing its ugly head.  Also, I’ll perform a mass and energy balance and a cost analysis around such technologies as wind generators and solar energy panels.  Something tells me that the cost of each kilowatt hour taken over the usable life of the equipment and including the replacement cost of the equipment (not neglecting the cost of environmental remediation for mining and processing of heavy metals and other toxic materials) will be an order of magnitude higher than either fossil fuels or fission reactors.  Is it too much to ask to have the “climate scientists” hauled into court for fraud?
  • The Definition of a Woman – In a country where this

Is called a woman, things are not going to go well.  What I propose to do is convene a panel of experts.  I will use the most credentialed individuals available.  I will include married men, wedding planners, hairdressers, script writers from the Hallmark Channel, employees at grocery and clothing stores and shoe salesmen.  In addition, I’ll recruit a fair cross-section of guys found habitually at strip joints from across this great land.  Between them all we will work long and hard to come up with a consensus definition and if necessary, a list of qualifying and disqualifying “conditions.”  I’m sure the team will have a contentious and spirited discussion about everything from terminology to visual aids but we’ll make sure that the exhibit shown above or anything like it is never mistaken for a woman again.

  • My team will devote a full year to trying to figure out exactly which mental conditions Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are suffering from. After making an exhaustive study we will try to translate their last four years of speeches into rational English sentences.  Where no meaning can be found we will overlay those sections of the transcripts with pictures of kittens and puppy dogs.

So that will be a start.  Eventually we’ll expand out and solve all the problems of the multiverse.  But I will charge time and a half on weekends.  After all I’m only human.

I Can’t Wait to Get Started!

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I was reading a chapter in a mathematical survey that I bought a long time ago (Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent’ev).  It was a section in the non-Euclidean Geometry chapter called something like “Real Space.”

The author was trying to make the point that since gravity bends light and light rays were the closest thing to perfect straight lines that you could claim that parallel lines can intersect and triangles can have more or less than 180 degrees in real space.  And to get away from the idea of straight lines in empty space (no matter present) he said that the concept of space only exists in the context of it containing matter.

And I stopped to think whether that seemed to follow.  I never usually question the meaning of empty.  My basic visualization of reality is that the universe is the void of the Bible augmented by really small golf balls bouncing around in it.  Empty space to me is wherever there aren’t any golf balls at that moment.  Now granted, I’ve heard that particles are always appearing into and disappearing out of existence in the “quantum vacuum.”  And I know that many physicists characterize the universe as just a bunch of “fields” of the various elementary particles; the electron field and the Higgs field, etc.  But I don’t understand why we can’t imagine empty space.  I mean I know that at any time a quark or a gluon or some other ephemeral exotic particle can show up anywhere but why is it so hard to say. “Right now, right here is empty space because nothing is there.”

I guess I’ll have to read more deeply.  After all, if the empty space between galaxies (and everything else) is always and ever more rapidly expanding as the universe itself inflates at an accelerating rate, it seems logical to me that there’s more and more “empty space” everywhere.

And so, I propose the following thought experiment:

I posit that using the James Webb Space Telescope, we find a spot in the sky where there aren’t even any really, really old galaxies hanging out.  There’s nothing along that line of sight.  I then take two flashlights (or “lasers” if anyone insists) and using a protractor and some really straight two by fours I line them up parallel to each other in the direction of that cosmic empty spot and turn them on.  Why wouldn’t those two beams continue on to the end of the universe exactly the same distance apart?  Now, sure, a few photons here and there might be deflected by a some randomly situated gas molecules or by the odd quantum vacuum quark that appeared for a femtosecond along the line of sight but for the most part the laser beams should continue on forever and ever, amen.

So, if that is the case.  What’s the problem with imagining empty space (mostly) with my two flashlight (or laser) beams going out and out and out forever?  And forever parallel.  After all there’s nothing close enough to really bend those light beams.  Now to prove this result there will need to be someone on the other end of the universe to do the measurement.  This presents something of a problem.  However, there may be a solution (well, a thought solution anyway).  It’s a well-known part of the Big Bang Theory that there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe.  But here we are with basically none to be found.  I theorize that at the end of the universe is the anti-matter we’ve been looking for (just like those ‘droids).  Granting this, then there should be an anti-matter me at the end of the universe.  Let’s call him anti-photog.  Now assuming he’s extremely long-lived (which anti-matter life forms always are) and that he thinks precisely as I do, he’ll be waiting for those two beams of light and he will measure the angle between the beams and find them to be parallel and thereby prove the Euclidean (or in his case anti-Euclidean nature of empty space.  Then he can send a return beam back in our direction (somehow) and we will have the answer.  Of course, the sun and probably the Milky Way Galaxy will have long ago been absorbed by the local super massive black hole and cosmic lichens will possibly be the only form of life remaining but that’s how science works sometimes.  You have to take the good with the bad.

So, Lobachevsky, Gauss, Riemann and all you other “non-Euclidean” geometricians (I’m looking at you A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov and M. A. Lavrent’ev!) shouldn’t put too much stock in all this curved space hand-waving.  Until the results of this wonderful research of mine are available, they should sit tight.  Estimates for the return trip signal are still being calculated but I’m sure it won’t be too bad.  I’ll be starting my crowdfunding page to buy the lasers and the two by fours very soon.  I’ve still got my third-grade protractor somewhere around here so I don’t need that.  I can’t wait to get started!

Update:

I asked an AI image generator to reproduce my thought experiment rig

It came up with this!

This may take a while.

A Sense of Loss

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“I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.”  “Cannibals ate my Uncle Bosie.”

We all will feel a real sense of loss when Joe and Kamala move onto the next chapters of their lives.  Well, Kamala will anyway.  There is no next chapter of Joe’s life.  There may not be a next paragraph or even sentence.  If Biden shows up at the Inauguration, I hope someone will have had the foresight to bring along a body bag and some absorbent material; kitty litter or paper towels or something.

But we will be losing a lot.  I can remember in 2021 and 2022 when things were truly awful with COVID and the restrictions around it.  It was only Joe’s struggles with gravity that gave me the will to go on.  And what about Kamala’s pronouncements about yellow school buses and Venn diagrams?  It was only this level of idiocy that gave me the hope that even the American public would back away from the edge of the Abyss and send these two boobs packing in 2024.  Sure, it was thin gruel to keep us going for three and a half years but it was all we had.

And it worked!  In July when I watched Joe Biden in the debate it was like the clouds parting and the sun blazing out at me.  It was the promise of all those gaffes, flubs and pratfalls coming home to roost for the Democrats.  And it was not only that.  It was this fumbling, bumbling, inarticulate, incoherent dementia patient juxtapositioned against all the sound bites of politicians and reporters and talking heads like Morning Joe swearing on a stack of bibles that Jumping Joe Biden was “as sharp as a tack,” that “this version of Biden … is the best Biden ever.”  It was Christmas in July.  The horror and panic that descended on Washington and Hollywood and New York was hilarious.  And the more the Left begged Biden to drop out the more he doubled down.  The interview he did with Stephanopoulos was remarkable.  You could see the pain on Stephanopoulos’s face as he tried his best to put the dots together for Biden on how hopeless his chances were.

And finally, when Pelosi and her hatchet-men had delivered some doomsday ultimatum to Biden to force him out of the race, imagine the horror the campaign faced when they evaluated how they could package and sell Kamala.  Their first idea was the best; don’t let her say anything except, “joy.”  They used that for about a month, that and whatever versions of it they could frame.  I guess the most embarrassing was Kamala is “brat.”  But eventually they had to let her talk and that would eventually remind voters that presidents have to be able to speak and by extension, think.  And of course that is Kamala’s weak point.  Well, it’s one of them.  She’s also unlikeable and, perhaps worse, she’s incandescently inauthentic.  Everything she says comes across as an absurd lie that everyone can see through.

And so, the Left went from Biden to Harris.  Scylla to Charybdis.  Bad to worse.  Dumb and dumber.  I can only imagine the horror of the campaign team.  There must have been an ocean of booze imbibed during the campaign to keep the staff from bolting for the exits.  And the Democrat voters told themselves so many lies and so many contrasting versions of the truth, that it must have been like some kind of self-inflicted brainwashing protocol.  Yesterday, Biden is a super genius.  Today he’s a doddering moron and Harris is a political dynamo and a lock for the win. Tomorrow they’re praying for the Never-Trumpers like Liz Cheney to save them from a razor thin margin.  And then the morning after, it’s a wipeout and she never had a chance.  And thus, was spawned a thousand TikTok videos of angry women screaming at their phones about fascism, the 4B Movement and never going to Thanksgiving ever again.  Oh, so wonderful, oh so painful.

Well, we won’t have Joe Biden to kick around anymore.  I doubt anyone will even attend his funeral.  And Kamala will return to California where she hopes to become governor.  I kind of doubt it will happen.  If nothing else this campaign has made a lasting impression on everyone about just how stupid this woman is.  Maybe she can be mayor of San Francisco for life.  Those people have so much white guilt that setting up Kamala as a figurehead leader would make sense to them.  But that’s about as far as she’ll go.

So that’s it.  No more Joe.  No more Kamala.  When will we see their like again?  Never!

It gives me a feeling of emptiness, of loss.  We need a new leader for the Left.  Will Obama or Michelle fill the gap?  I kind of doubt it.  Well, we’ll have to wait and see.  Goodbye Uncle Bosie.  It was fun.

Trump vs Morning Shmoe and Lycra

photog Current Events, Humor, Trump , , ,

Update:

I don’t normally revive an old post.  But this post from 2017 just seemed timely due to Joe and Mika’s recent antics.  It seems back then I spelled Schmoe without the c.  Well potato, patatta.

 

 

Morning Shmoe (MS) – Welcome back from that commercial break and it’s 13 and 1/8th minutes after the quarter hour and we’re here at the newly refurbished set of the Morning Shmoe Show.  And Lycra Spandexy and I were just saying how much better it is to be us, young and in love and not old and racist like President Trump.

Lycra Spandexy (LS) – Yes, he’s a creep with small hands and bad hair.  He’s not beautiful like me.  I am still very, very young and don’t need a facelift and would never get one and besides it’s called a dermatological procedure and everyone gets them because they’re young and not because they need them.

MS – That’s right sweety.  But this is not about us.  It’s about this very bad man.

LS – Yes, he’s a very bad man.  And there was no blood and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

MS – Okay honey, let’s move on.  So, as you all know we’re deeply in love and being together here on the show and also constantly morning, noon and night, all day every day is great.  We never tire of each other’s company and we do everything together.  Every single blessed thing.      ….        And it’s great!   Really, really, really   …     great.

LS – Yes, and I tell Shmoe every little thing that pops into my head.  Like yesterday when the girl doing my nails told me that I had a cold sore on my lip and I said it was a white-head and she said it was herpes and I told her that my dermatologist told me that you can tell if it’s herpes because you get that tingling feeling ahead of time and then you use the Abreva and then it’s a lot less icky and nobody can notice it under the make-up on the show and I don’t have to go on assignment for a week and that’s really great and I told her that it was a white-head and I knew that because it looked like a white-head and I popped it with a pin and squeezed out the puss and then it hurt but not much and it looks like it will heal without a scab that’s noticeable so I won’t have to go on assignment for a week.  And Shmoe was so interested while he sat there listening and drinking that scotch without the water and I asked him if he wanted some water but he just kept filling up that tumbler and I said, “Boy that’s a lot of scotch and he just kept smiling and nodding his head and it was great.”

MS – Yeah that was great.  Really, really, really   …   great.

LS – But Producer Jorge says we have a caller on the line.  Hello caller, you’re on the Morning Shmoe Show.  What would you like to say?

President Trump (PT) – Hello Lycra, it’s me President Trump.  I was told by some of my friends who are forced to watch terrible shows like yours for a living about the nasty things you’ve been saying about me.  I figured I’d call up and set the record straight.

MS – Trump, you’ve got a lot of nerve calling us up and invading our safe space.  But we’re not scared of you and we won’t be intimidated by your bullying.

PT – I won’t need to bully you, I only want to ask you one question.

MS – What’s that?

PT – Did the network force you to marry her for ratings?  Because if not then I don’t get it.  I mean to have to listen to that blathering for an hour or two in the morning is doable, but all the time?  I mean come on!  Don’t you ever feel like just putting a bullet in your head to stop the incessant babble.

LS – Hah, that’s ridiculous.  Just because you are a cave-man and don’t value women for their intelligence doesn’t mean all men are that way.  Shmoe loves to hear my opinions.  Like this morning when we were in the middle of that long commute from Jersey and I started telling Shmoe about what my mother told me the other day about how when I was a little girl and my sister stole my “My Pretty Pony” doll and I told her to give it back and she said it was hers because she said I promised to give it to her if she told me what Marcy said about me to Charlene but I told her that I found out from Debby what Marcy really said and it wasn’t what she told me and my mother said that I really hurt my sister’s feelings and to this day she still wants that doll and she told my mother that my face looks too tight after that dermatological procedure that I didn’t have done and I told Mom that that was mean and I thought that my sister’s butt had gotten really fat and I wasn’t going to give up the doll.  And then I asked Shmoe wasn’t he going too fast and why was he swerving toward the guard rail and then he laughed and laughed.  And he laughed so hard that a tear was in his eye and then I told him that I was enrolling us in a couple’s yoga class and there was a jazzercise section too.

MS – I’m sorry folks but I’m out of time.    …  BANG.

PT – Thought so.

A Better Mousetrap

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Camera Girl is a courageous woman.  She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice.  Unfortunately, she usually does this when it puts me in the firing line of whoever she is challenging or berating.  This can get a little dicey for me.

So, she has the heart of lioness, except when it comes to mice.  The poor girl is terrorized by the diminutive rodents.  Something about their tails fills her with horror.  And so, she wages a war of attrition against them in all the outposts of the Compound.  Specifically, the garage and the large shed that houses the yard equipment.  My own feeling is that areas outside of the house and its various attachments are outside of the jurisdiction of polite society and so a mouse or two more or less is not cause for alarm.  But she disagrees vehemently.  Part of the reason is that she has to go through the garage to bring the dogs to the fenced in areas she lets them out into at night.  And if the dogs sense that mice have been in the area, they become interested and this frightens her into thinking that one of Stuart Little’s relatives might make an appearance and trigger the dogs to catch and eat it.  For her this would be even worse than one running by her.

And so, she has taken to mining the garage and shed with mouse traps.  Interestingly, seeing a dead mouse in the snap trap is not frightening for her.  Once rendered inert, she discharges the traps at the edge of the pond and literally caws for Moe the Crow and Poe the Raven and their ancillary corvids to partake of the murine feast provided.  I find this to be one of her most eccentric rituals.

Anyway, a crisis has emerged.  A year or two ago we switched from the venerable wooden spring traps to a newfangled jaws-like version made of plastic.  She liked these better because they made it easier to release the dead mouse from the trap.  But recently these traps have begun failing.  Apparently, the mice were now able to extract the peanut butter that she baited the trap with, without the trap snapping.  She would come back from her trip to the shed, filled with a sense of dread and tell me this tale of woe.  The world turned upside down!

Because Camera Girl had never developed the knack for setting the older wooden traps I have, of course, been recruited to become the baiter of traps.  And also, I have been tasked with solving the mystery of the failed plastic traps.  And it has been implied that if I fail to diagnose the problem and correct it, I will have failed as a man, a husband, and an engineer.

O tempora, o mores!

So far, I have installed the wooden traps with the prescribed bait that was provided to me by Camera Girl.  That much have I done.  But I have only just begun to investigate a cause.  Could the traps be defective?  Could they have gotten rusty and thus less sensitive?  Might the peanut butter have become old and therefore easier to remove?

My mind has raced to encircle this mystery within a thicket of possible solutions.  But these are deep waters.  I cannot be too hasty.  A proper plan of attack is needed.  I’ll need a budget to purchase supplies, tools and instruments.  I’ll need a detailed schedule to properly scope the project and I’ll need a scapegoat in case the project is a failure.  Maybe one of the dogs.  Updates will follow but I felt this project was important enough to warrant an introductory post to benchmark the effort.

The single guys out there probably assume I’m suffering the beginnings of dementia.  The married men will probably understand that this is just one of the many accommodations a man makes to keep a wife happy.  And after all the expression, “Happy wife, happy wife,” Is not far from the truth.  But I do wish someone would invent a mousetrap with lasers.  It would make the who thing much more fun.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Mamaw used peanut butter in her traps as well, but when the diminutive rascals found out how to defeat that, she went to bacon grease. Mice, in Ohio at least, cannot resist bacon grease. Also the plastic traps tend to not give the same force as the wood-and-spring traps. A healthy mouse can get out of them and resist a broken neck due to their lack of dynage. Living on a farm meant constant vermin control. The little buggars aren’t stupid. We have to change out methods and baits from time to time. Thankfully, a generation of mice comes along a few times per year. So anything learned from the last generation is lost to the grandchildren.

Eureka

photog Current Events, Humor, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , ,

After yesterday’s epic whine about the vicissitudes of home ownership I looked around for some kind of salve for my male ego.  And fate or something provided me with the opportunity to redeem myself.  A clogged bathtub drain.  For the last few weeks, the drain in our tub has been getting slower and slower.  Lately I’ve left the plunger near the tub and after every shower I played a game of trying to get it to break loose.  All I achieved was to dredge up a goodly amount of black flakes that were some kind of fossilized soap scum.  And all that achieved was to waste ten or fifteen minutes while I cleaned up the tub of this disgusting residue.

But today I had had enough.  I gathered my equipment:

  • Screwdrivers … check
  • Needle nose pliers … check
  • Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black … check
  • Snake auger … check
  • Electric drill … check
  • Safety glasses … check
  • Disposable rubber gloves … check

All that was left was to let Camera Girl see that I was preparing for battle and even though I would be expending tens of thousands of dollars to have someone competent repair my home, at least I was capable of saving the cost of a plumber to get my bathtub back in good operating condition.

I solemnly explained to her how I would be removing the plunger from the trip-lever stopper to properly auger the drain line.  I don’t think it would be possible for me to overstate the intensity of contempt her look communicated to me.  Well, that’s the problem with women.  They don’t understand or appreciate technical genius.

So, I removed the drain filter and tried pulling out hair with the pliers.  Nada.  Then just for old time’s sake I put six inches of water in the tub and tried the “Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black.”  I pushed down on the stupid thing once and the tub drained in seconds.  And of course, Camera Girl walked in just as it emptied and gave me the same look.  She picked up the plunger and asked, “How much did you pay for this?”  I said, “ten bucks.”  “And this?” (pointing at the auger).  “Sixty dollars.”  She shook her head and walked away.  Women don’t understand about contingency planning.  Very short-sighted.

Well, as pathetic as my victory was, it has transformed my attitude.  We’re definitely on the upswing.  And after she took a shower, she readily admitted that a working bathtub drain is not a commodity to look down your nose at.  And there’s no telling what I might do next.

Who knows, maybe I’ll tell my builder to stop all work, figure what I owe him so far and take over the job myself.  I mean how long could it take me to shovel ten thousand pounds of gravel?  And how hard can it be to jack up a building off its foundation?  And who needs a truck to pour concrete anyway?  What was it Archimedes said?  “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth.”  Well, some of my ancestors came from Sicily.  Maybe I’m related to Archimedes (at least by marriage!).  Well, baby steps.  I think I’ll shock Camera Girl and brew my own pot of coffee.  How hard could it be?

The Death of a Great Old One

photog Humor, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner
Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

All of Dunwich is in shock and mourning.  Today at three ‘clock in the morning it was discovered that First Selectman Cthulhu was no more.  Apparently, it was a self-inflicted accident.  This was the final night and day of his de-lousing treatment and over the ten day he had enjoyed the effects of the boiling sulfuric acid bath so much that some time after midnight he cranked the thermostat on the heater to maximum.  But something went wrong and the bath was turned into an electrolytic cell and Cthulhu was completely dissolved into the solution with only some siliceous fragments left on the bottom of the tank.

The First Selectman’s personal physician; Dr. Fraudulent Practices declared him dead and assured the grieving throng of well-wishers that Cthulhu’s last moments were painless and in fact probably completely unconscious.  Strangely this crowd demonstrated their grief by dancing in circles and uttering what almost sounded like, “Ding-dong Cthulhu’s dead, brush your teeth get out of bed, ding-dong the lousy squid is dead,” to the tune of that song from the “Wizard of Oz” that the Munchkins sing.  Well, different people process grief in different ways.  Possibly these people were just overcome by horrible sorrow and didn’t know what they were saying.  Although they were doing it in three-part harmonies.  Very strange.

Suffice it to say that Dunwich is plunged into solemn mourning and all official activities have been postponed in anticipation of the funeral.  It is rumored that both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris intend to speak at the funeral.  It is believed that Biden will use the occasion to break out his “My Uncle Bosie was eaten by cannibals” story.  And this may cause some controversy because several of the invited guests are themselves cannibals and may take offense.

But the real worry for the funeral is any comments by Kamala.  It is open knowledge that she had a longstanding romantic affair with the First Selectman and if she chooses to speak at the ceremony there is speculation that Mrs. Cthulhu will take umbrage and may possibly eat her.  In and of itself this situation may not seem so dire.  But it would be a shame if Harris’s secret service team got between the two “women” and were themselves swallowed too.  But all things considered it might be a better fate for them than spending every day walking around and listening to stories about yellow school buses from Kamala Harris.

Personally, I cannot yet speak to my feelings about Cthulhu’s death.  It’s too soon.  The amalgam of fond familiarity and cosmic horror is a hard to explain emotion.  You never can be sure whether the appropriate response is a rye chuckle or a panic-stricken sprint for the exit.  Too soon, too soon.

Every citizen of Dunwich will receive a jar containing one liter of the electrolyzed remains of Cthulhu to be treasured and displayed in a place of honor in each home.  The jar will have the First Selectman’s famous motto, “Shut up and second my motion or I will swallow you whole and digest you in my second stomach.”  Words to live by!

The bottle will be made of tantalum to prevent any possibility of breakage or leakage.  The EPA has rated the First Selectman’s remains as a potent compound with a lethal dose estimated in the picogram range.  I have elected to have my share donated to Nancy Pelosi.  I’ll tell her it’s Botox.