Hape cracked open his portfolio to reveal a sleek laptop, which he opened to Danny’s dismay and started the presentation. This was his ace in the hole. He’d helped put this thing together, and it not only briskly revealed the technological superiority of the FlexTelligence E line, but broke the news that Head had bought no less than three super-high-profile endorsers away from rivals : Gil Fisher, Ainsley Chong, and the apparently unbeatable Ricky Phil Stiller. Stiller was widely expected to sweep the Grand Slam this year on the strength of his terrifying serve and shrewdly evil baseline play. It was commonly speculated that his endorsement of the “Claymore” model racket had been the only thing keeping the Prince corporation alive.
The presentation video was fast-paced, well-produced, and hard-hitting, saving the Stiller endorsement for last and introducing a flashy new model co-designed with Stiller – the “Big Brain”. That epithet was one commonly applied to Stiller early in his career, when his primary method of winning matches was making fools out of aggressive opponents by exploiting their positions with his surgical shots from the baseline. Since, he had developed a high-velocity first service to match his better opponents, but the name stuck. Hape could never shake a vague unease with this title and Head’s adoption thereof, however – he felt that it was mildly anti-Jewish. There were plenty of cerebral players out there – wasn’t this sobriquet a way to shove Stiller into that old “Jews are smart but lack brawn” box?
Danny, who generally loathed presentations, found himself quite engaged by this one, and the news of new endorsements softened his heart a bit toward Head. Hape, who was watching Dracula’s face like a poker player throughout the presentation, began to notice the details of Danny’s appearance. His close-cropped blond hair amplified his ruddy complexion to an almost alarming degree, and his left ear had no lobe to speak of. The faint shininess of skin around his neck suggested corrected scarring and made Hape suspect that Danny had been in a bad auto or industrial accident. His white Ping golf shirt was pressed, but had a small red stain on the left shoulder blade that Hape surmised Danny had missed, given the meticulous condition of Danny’s Nikes and the impeccably creased pleated khakis he sported. Hape imagined how the stain might have gotten there unnoticed : did the offspring of Dracula sneak up with a Crayola marker? Unintentional dribble of Kool-Aid from a hoisted toddler’s lip? Shirt taken from irregular stock? Hape realized with a twinge of regret that he would never know the answer. (9,707)
OK, here we go, my soggy mopesters. In it to win it this time, so do your wurst! +10 oblivion points to anyone who correctly guesses th' inspiration for this one.
__
My feet are tired and my hands are sticky Don't think I'll ever make it home The name of forgiveness freezes in my throat So many nights with just the stars as my coat
Am I gone?
A wretched close to this benighted year I don't think I can do any more The soreness crawls like a spider up my back The remorse won't stop gnawing; don't think I'm intact
Am I gone?
Maybe they asked a favor And maybe I said "OK" And maybe now I'm feeling I'm in a place with no escape
This has been such a tough year This has been such a tough year [maybe you can't take any more] This has been such a tough year This has been such a tough year [you just can't take any more] This has been such a tough year [you just can't take any more] This has been such a tough year [you just can't take any more] This has been such a tough year I just can't take any more This has been such a tough year I just can't take any more This has been such a tough year I JUST CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE This has been such a tough year I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT
As a relative newcomer to urban agronomy but a very experienced practitioner of cynicism, crypto-radicalism, and anti-everythingism, I knew already that the current corporate approach to commercial seed-and-plant selling was doomed and damned. It's a fact that many commercial seeds and plants are bred for appearance and not function, and that many of them are genetically designed to be infertile.
However, there is another practice in which I am highly experienced : that of doing things at the last minute. So, when I realized that planting season was upon me and that there was very little bee activity in my food-production area, I zoomed out and hastily bought a lot of started flowers in an attempt to bring th' bees over to where I wanted them. I spent about $75 (that's my strychnine money for a whole week) on snapdragons from Home Depot and marigolds and petunias from Whitfill's Nursery. I planted the suckers in my two containers and in sunken beds that I'd freshly dug, interspersed appropriately with my early food crops' seeds and transplants. I figured that since they'd been locally grown (all were marked with Arizona grow sites) that they'd be 'native' enough to be appropriate for my application. [dun dun duuum!]
Now, there is a big mass of weedy flowering plants on the other side of my yard that is always full of bees, so I figured that a few smart bees were likely to venture over to the new beds and find their tasty flower snax. [Why didn't I just plant my food crops closer to the existing flowers, you ask? It's because there's not enough shade / light filtration in that area for the crops I'm growing.]
I planted the things, and kept them well-watered with a buried soaker hose, and was ready for a bee essplosion!
So imagine my surprise when I watched bee after sleepy bee buzz around and sniff these new flowers, only to turn up their noses at them and pass by without landing! I was like WHAAAT
Meanwhile, the weedy flowering plants on the other side were budding more flowers and attracting more bees than ever. What the snake was wrong?
Here's what's wrong. Instead of planning ahead and planting native wildflowers earlier, I decided to cut corners and buy commerical garbage varieties of subspecies from other states that have nothing to do with my climate and also are unfamiliar to the local insect population (and being sold as ornamentals, may even be engineered to repel insects). See, bees and other benefical critters know to look for plants that grow normally in their area. And when they see and smell a native plant, they know it's good eatin'. But when they see a non-native blooms, they're like "well what is that" and sometimes they don't even recognize it as a potential nectar source. Even if they do recognize it as a flower, its alien smell will not likely entice the little beastie to munch. It's like if you put a big dish of palak paneer in front of a Wyoming cowboy. They'll just be like "now whut in tarnation is that racket" and move on.
So, I then spent all night doing what I should have done way earlier : I dug up some new sunken beds and sowed them with all-native desert wildflower seeds from http://NativeSeeds.org .
There are two lessons here. 1) Don't be lazy and then try to do everything in a quick-fix panic state. 2) Buy only native plant and flower varieties because your local beneficial insect population will know what to do with them.
Get your urban ag cranking in 2010 -- it's not too late. (13,907)
There's a thundering hailstorm in Phoenix today, sending drops of frozen hate clattering across the skylight and beating the life out of weak trees. On the outskirts of my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of something white and jagged -- the future.
Life as a human right now is akin to having woken up inside the chute of a woodchipper. We may not even recall how we got inside the woodchipper in the first place. The one thing that is clear : the inevitability of the blades.
A feeling like saws chewing into my neck. The sounds of weeping just outside my door. And a cold light knife into my pupil reminds me : This is a world divorced from hope.
When facing a suffocated reality of nonexistent future, what do you do? Here are some options :
1) Lie down and wait quietly for the ice weasels to come. 2) Cry until you're too tired to cry any longer, then die. 3) Fight until death. 4) Put on heavy metal records and rock out for as long as possible.
Now, I don't know which of these sounds most attractive, or which you, the reader, may already be doing. I choose option #4. Here's why :
* Metal music is brain floss. * Metal music improves blood flow to the face. * Metal music is not a norm. * Metal music has no sympathy for your suffering. * Metal music remembers when you were only an animal. * Metal music hasn't heard about your regrets, but it can drench them in molten @#$%^& * Metal music will survive long after the Universe is toast. * Metal music recognizes your true form and can restore it if lost. * Metal music connects you with that aspect of youself that you forgot about. * Metal music is truth erupting from a sea of lies.
There's no future. But with metal music, the present can be made to rock. In these bleak and doomed days, everybody looks for help. Some go to shrinks, some watch TV, and some try in futility to numb the pain with drugs. Well, you all are welcome to your 'cheese' heroin, 'lean,' and amphetamines. I'm an Earache man myself. (19,141)
Having the wrong idea can lead to pleasant surprises. This isn't always the case, of course -- for example, being under the impression that one is going to school and later finding out that one is indentured in a spirit-extinguishing mill of bleak negation straight out of a Brueghel the Elder panel is actually a pretty nasty shock. But sometimes, misunderstanding can lead to a fun serendipity.
My experience at this month's IxDA (Interaction Design Association) Phoenix event was such a delightful mix-up. I'd understood that this event was going to be about "rapid prototyping." When I hear the phrase "rapid prototyping," I'm thinking about supercool "3D Printers" and the like, such as the RepRap, an amazing self-replicating prototying / microfacturing robot. This kind of rapid prototyping is so cool that it makes th' first Guns 'n' Roses record look like Candlebox' B-side collection, and I'm really into it. I was expecting, say, a presentation from a prototyping professional or tech guy and hopefully a demonstration of one of th' amazing machines. Seriously, these things are cool -- look them up! Your university probably has one.
As it turned out, the sort of rapid prototyping on deck at IxDA Phoenix that day was th' sort where a bunch of designers sit around a table with cardboard and kindergarten-style craft materials with the intention of developing a profound improvement on a common household item and building a model of the improved concept.
This turned out to be big fun and more awesome than watching a robot build pieces of itself. Th' industrial-design posse split into two teams. Our team, Team 1, chose to reimagine the domestic laundry setup, while our esteemed competition Team 2 opted for the toaster oven.
One of Team 1's main ideas was a way to integrate "line-dry" or "drip-dry" clothing items into the normal wash / dry regimen without the need for liability-fraught clotheslines or brassieres hanging in the shower.
This was accomplished by creating a slot-based, cartridge-fed air-drying section on the side of our laundry assembly. The design created a rapid-air-dry system by recycling the heat exhaust from the dryer unit through a piping system (cooling the air slightly) and then circulating it amongst the air-dry clothing. The air-dry items are placed in V-fold flat cartridges mad eof perforated non-corrosive screen to maximize air flow. Any water that is captured from the air-dry process is recycled to the washer mechanism. Each load / cylinder can be programmed to stop and make a sound at the end of the washing stage to aler the user to the presence of air-dry items within the load.
The other main idea of Team 1 was to eliminate the hassle of manually changing clothing loads from washer to dryer. This was accomplished by the use of a rotating "magazine" of three laundry cylinders, each of which can be loaded and programmed differently. The cylinders rotate on a central carriage device and are individually and automatically engaged and disengaged from the main rotation motors in the washer and dryer sections of the machine. The cylinders are constructed and ported in such a way that they can function either as washer or dryer vessels.
The washer section of the unit is on top, the dryer is on bottom. The "third" cylinder is idle and out of view until rotated into the washer or dryer position.
With this system, the user can load up to three loads of laundry at once including air-dry-only items, and expect the air-dry items to be done at roughly the same time as the normal machine-dry items.
The entire system takes up approximately the same footprint as a conventional washer-dryer pair (but is slightly taller) and can use the same hookups. In sum, this system is more convenient, more variable, and more eco-friendly than current standard laundry setups.
Team 2 designed a below-cabinet toaster oven, the GuttenTost, that looks like a Star Wars vehicle and serves up tasty toast without the space-hogging hassle of a big-footprint kitchen appliance. Watch the video -- it even makes great toast out of cardboard bread! (20,781)
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