Another Hmmmm Moment

Another Hmmmm Moment

When hiring the cast for Queer Eye, was sexual preference discrimination practiced? Isn't that illegal?

Hmmmm moment #1
Hmmmm moment #2
Hmmmm moment #3

Sealab 2021 Getting Attention

Sealab 2021 Getting Attention
	Can there be a better show on television than Sealab 2021? I think not. I was flipping through my new Wired today and in the fetish section, they have a piece on a flat screen

television and displayed on the screen was a scene from the genius Cartoon Network Adult Swim show Sealab 2021. It was the episode where Captain Murphy has his brain removed (Quinn was experimenting) and replaced with a mouse at mechanical controls.

Seeing this in the magazine excited me because 1) The world deserves to know about Sealab and 2) Wired continues to be hip by using hip material.

My favorite episode of Sealab 2021 has to be Lost In Time where a couple members of the crew, Stormy and Quinn, get stuck in a temporal loop and begin piling up each time they go back in time 15 minutes. Each instance of Stormy and Quinn get degeneratively worse as they go back in time and eventually devolve into some interesting things. But Stormy only saw the positive side and created his own dodgeball team of Stormys and Quinns.

The show has gone through some changes. One of the best characters on the show is Captain Murphy and the voice actor who did Murphy unfortunately died towards the end of last season. So no more Captain Murphy. I've seen the new episodes and they replaced Captain Murphy with a cowboy gym teacher who incidentally is voiced by the actor's son. He's not nearly as funny as Murphy but the rest of the crew pick up and do a decent job of filling in the void that Murphy left.

Just recently they had an episode where there was a Sealab and a Spacelab. Everyone on Sealab had a counterpart in Spacelab so there was a space Quinn, space Debbie, space Stormy and so forth. The Spacelab was monitoring an asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth. They ordered a tool that could destroy the asteroid and save Earth, a tool which happened to double as a High Definition Television known as the ASHDTV, Asteroid Smasher High Definition Television. They didn't want it for its HDTV properties, just the asteroid smasher part. However, since Spacelab and Sealab are very similar, just one is in space the other at the bottom of the ocean, the ASHDTV accidentally got delivered to Sealab. Of course the only thing the Sealab folks saw when they received the delivery was a high definition television and they put it to immediate use, destroying their old, small screen, crappy analog television. The repeated calls from Spacelab to Sealab to have them return the ASHDTV went unheeded and as a result, the asteroid impacted Earth and everyone was destroyed.

Nothing short of comedy brilliance I tell ya. Sealab 2021 and the rest of the Adult Swim shows for that matter (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Harvey Birdman) are the best kept secret and hugely underrated shows currently on television.

My Day

My Day

I've had a busy week. I'm receiving a new air traffic system at work to support. Good for me because it's job security, so I welcome it.

My days are pretty routine actually. I understand people are fed up with the sameness of their lives, the methodical mundaneness, but mine has never bothered me. I think it is because I look to be comfortable and in relaxed settings. The smallest change is a job for me, so in my view there can't be too many boring days, although change can be fun, the routine is just more relaxing. It's a give and take with me, depends on my mood.

Here's my day (weekday):

6:30 a.m.: Alarm goes off. I or Mrs. Lock hit the snooze. Most of the time it's Mrs. Lock.

6:39 a.m.: Alarm goes off again. Snoozed.

6:48 a.m.: Alarm goes off. Snoozed but I lie in bed staring at the ceiling calculating how late to work I'd be if I slept to the next snooze. Mind is still in unconscious dream land so I (mis)calculate I have plenty of time, hours if need be.

6:57 a.m.: Alarm goes off, finally it's shut off. This is the motivation not to go back to sleep. I put on my glasses and stare at the ceiling which is now in focus. Then I calculate how late I'm going to be.

7:05 a.m.: Still in bed, with my glasses on. I turn on the TV to get the news and weather. Hearing the voices clears my head and brings me more into consciousness.

7:10 a.m.: Time to get up head into the bathroom and take care of hygiene.

7:15 a.m.: Check the clock and think 'If I leave right now, I can be on time.' I still have plenty to do though.

7:20 a.m.: Get dressed, go downstairs to feed the farm. Fish get a pinch of flake food; cat gets Iams in the food bowl plus fresh water; rabbit gets a carrot from the fridge. Rabbit also gets pellets, fresh water and hay. He's manic about seeing the carrot, so much so, he sometimes falls out of his cage trying to get to it before I can get the cage door open. Try to keep my finger from getting between the carrot and the rabbit's mouth.

7:25 a.m: Feed myself. Bowl of cereal or on occasion, Pop-Tarts or both. If we have any bananas, take one for work. Watching the same news broadcast downstairs while I eat my breakfast. Keep checking the clock and know that if I leave know, I'll only be ten minutes late.

7:30 a.m.: Rinse out cereal bowl. Grab any lunch items I might need to take to work. Go upstairs, kiss the wife who's still getting ready. Head back downstairs, get in the Jeep and head for work knowing I'll only be 15 minutes late. Not bad.

7:31 a.m.: Once a week, during the drive, realize I have an empty gas tank and forgot to fill it up the night before. Have to get gas. I'm really going to be late now.

7:40 a.m.: Got gas and on the road again. I'm going to be half an hour late.

7:40 - 8:15 a.m.: Fight traffic to get to work. Listen to morning talk shows on the way.

8:20 a.m: Walk in to work, check on the systems. Make sure nothing crashed over night. If something did crash, it's going to be a busy (and short) day. Check work email, take care of any routine procedures depending on the day of the week.

Before 9:00 a.m.: Update Daily Simpsons.

9:00ish a.m.: Check personal email after immediate work needs are met. Log on to instant messenger.

9:00 - 4:00 p.m.: Surf the web - read email, instant message, read blogs, update blogs. Answer the occasional work phone call and/or email and keep an eye on systems. God bless system administrator jobs.

4:00 p.m.: Clock out. I had lunch in there somewhere. Usually a cold cut sandwich of some kind plus chips. Just eat at my desk while I surf.

4:00 - 4:15 p.m.: Fight the airport traffic to try and get onto the highway to head home. During the drive, listen to the radio or CD.

4:45 p.m.: Make it home. Pull into garage. Get mail and any newspapers lying in the driveway, grass, street or on the roof. If it's Monday, haul the empty trash barrels back into the garage.

4:45 - 5:00 p.m.: Head inside, sift through mail separating out my mail and wife's. Put junk mail in the shredder (80% of our mail), a real credit card offer graveyard. If the weather is nice, let crying cat outside and rabbit. God bless fenced in backyards. Clean out litter box. Turn on Maury to catch the only interesting segment of the show, the last 15 minutes. "So he isn't/is the father of your baby? Don't worry, you'll be on next week's lie detector test show." Dress down (get out of work clothes). Boot the laptop. God bless wireless networks. Log in to email to see if anyone has written me in the last hour while I was driving. Log in to instant messenger.

5:00 p.m.: Take the porcelain throne. Have lots of material to read under the bathroom sink. Finish up any hygiene events I may have missed from my rushed morning, shower or shave.

5:30 p.m.: Check to see if there are any TiVo programs I need to watch - yes, hours. Bunch of Seinfelds, SG1s, Aqua Teen/Sealab/Harvey Birdmans, Daily Shows plus whatever was on primetime the night before.

6:00 p.m.: Wifey gets home. Get a kiss. Wife gets settled in but doesn't dress down. Joins me to watch whatever I'm watching.

7:30 p.m.: We think about eating. Briefly discuss what we should have for dinner.

8:00 p.m.: Decide we really should eat dinner sometime. If we eat in, Mrs. Lock starts cooking. If we eat out, we take off for the establishment. If we need groceries, pick them up while we're out (usually falls on Monday somehow).

9:00 p.m.: Get home (or finish eating). Watch more TV/TiVo, play video games, get my freak on (to quote Mrs. Lock) or do our own thing. Whatever strikes our fancy. This is where we mix it up and fight off the mundane blahs. TV, video games, marital quality time or do our own thing which usually means one of us gets on Kazaa and downloads music.

10:00 p.m.: Try to get our butts in bed so we don't have to keep hitting the snooze in the morning.

10:30 p.m.: Get our butts in bed but open a book and start reading.

11:00 p.m: Lights out.

Just because you didn't think of it, doesn't make it a bad idea.

Just because you didn't think of it, doesn't make it a bad idea.

Let Loose The Dogs Of War

Let Loose The Dogs Of War
	Here is the second half of pictures I rounded up from our visit to Civil War Days at Billie Creek last week. I promised you a cannon picture and I delivered. Ready, aim, FIRE!

US Platoon
General On The Field
The Lone Soldier
Confederate March
Confederate Field
Confederate Field With Flag
Let Loose
The Dogs Of War

Happy First Anniversary

Happy First Anniversary

Happy anniversary Mrs. Lock. I married the woman of my dreams one year ago today.

Quit Killing Germs

Quit Killing Germs

Anti-bacterial soap is not only an unnecessary thing, it could be hazardous to your health; more importantly it could be hazardous to my health. The marketing ploy is to convince you that you are surrounded by armies of germs and you need to take the battle to them with these wipes or mops or sprays or soaps.

What's wrong with germs? We've survived 30,000 years with them in the worst possible conditions. As cavemen we ate raw meat after wiping our butts with our hands. The black plague thrived in destitute situations in Europe with people who were hygiene-ignorant throwing their waste out into the streets, living in knee-high squalor with the disease still only managing to kill 25 percent of them. So what do you think a line of dirt or old milk container or kid mucus is really going to do to your family?

As a kid, working on the farm where a good portion of the area's fly population liked to hang out, I would run an open fist across a panel of flies resting on a board and catch half a dozen of them or so in my hand. I would shake them up, get them all dizzy and let them go. This is how you entertained yourself on the farm. After I was done with my work, I'd go home and eat my dinner without washing up. That's right, and it was fried chicken and corn on the cob every night too, no pansy silverware for my "infected" hands to keep their distance. I never got sick, never missed a day of school or work due to illness. I'm as healthy as an ox (a healthy one).

Anti-bacterial products kill 99% of germs, including the good ones. They are making our immune system weaker by not allowing it to fight anything. What do you think will happen when the resistant strains start to multiply, the versions that your precious soaps won't kill? If you gave up hope on your immune system to fight the germs we have now, what chance do you think you will have against the supergerms? So cut it out. Just use spit and water to wash up before dinner - or nothing.

Camel Crossing

Camel Crossing

This picture is from a Saudi blogger called Religious Policeman (link located under list of Samsari in my sidebar). He has taken a few pictures of the camel populace around Saudia Arabia and the one I'm showing here is probably my favorite.



Be sure to check out his other camel photos. Picture posted with owner's permission.

We Will Never Run Out Of Oil

We Will Never Run Out Of Oil

George Will has a fine column this week about how oil is only technically a limited resource because it will become cost-inefficient to collect before we ever run out and since we're a market-based society, we will never run out of oil - we just won't want to pay for it anymore.

Excerpts from The Washington Post
Oil: How Bad Do You Want It? by George Will
Sunday, June 13, 2004

Of course, oil supplies are, as some people say with a sense of profound discovery, "finite." But that distinguishes oil not at all from land, water or pistachio nuts.

Russell Roberts, an economist, says: Imagine that you love pistachio nuts and are given a room filled 5 feet deep with them. But you must eat them in the room and must leave the shells. When will you have eaten them all? Never. Because as it becomes increasingly difficult to find nuts amidst the shells, the cost of the nuts, in time and effort, will become too high. You will seek a substitute -- pistachios from a store, or another snack.

Tim Appenzeller, writing in National Geographic, says tar-sand deposits in Alberta "hold the equivalent of more than 1.6 trillion barrels of oil -- an amount that may exceed the world's remaining reserves of ordinary crude." Alberta, a future Saudi Arabia? Perhaps. Full-throttle production of oil from tar sand is not economical. So far.

MIT's [M.A.] Adelman notes that even before 1800 -- before the coal-fired Industrial Revolution -- Europeans worried about exhausting coal supplies. "European production actually did peak in 1913 and is nearly negligible today." Billions of tons remain beneath European soil but are uneconomical to remove. So far.

Growing Up

Growing Up

Fifteen years ago in high school, I remember looking at the middle school students and thinking, "I was never that young. They're getting younger."

Ten years ago in college, I watched the freshmen start their undergrad life and I thought to myself, "Those freshmen are young. No way I was that young when I started. They're getting younger."

Only recently is it beginning to dawn on me that they are a part of the work force and now the cycle repeats itself only with each new cycle, the cynicism gets worse as I get older. Because now we're on the same playing field. Before, I was the upper classman, my whole life still in front of me as I decided on what career to pursue. I was winning. I was in the lead. I was going to get to the finish line first. But now they have advanced to my level, they have crossed the finish line I crossed years ago and I'm still standing there at the end with nowhere to go. I'm at the finish line with the broken tape lying on the ground, but I'm not panting, I'm not sweating, I'm not even in shape anymore. I sneer from my La-Z-Boy recliner and watch them double over with exhaustion, smiling as someone hands them a cup of Gatorade.

Now, we are the same, we all finished, we are all workers eking out a living - except they're younger. It's funny, as a kid, I was winning by being older but now they caught me and they're crowding me... cramping my style... making me look old.

I finally realize that this group of kids I see enter where I once was, is the same group that has been chasing me all of my life, chasing me into old age. Did that generation before me have a bizarre recessive gene fusion accident that turned them out younger than I was at that age or have others noticed this about surrounding age groups?

In the seventh grade, I remember being intimidated by the 8th and 9th graders. You want my lunch money, here you go. You want to borrow my only pencil but never return it, go right ahead. I look at 8th and 9th graders now and I think, "I can take 'em."

That generation is always going to be right behind me and there's nothing I can do to shake them. They're always going to be there and remind me that I'm old and getting older.

To compound the problem, most of the celebrities are younger than I am. As a kid, I couldn't wait to grow up and be like them, but now, I passed it and they have millions and fame and good times and they're in their 20s! Sometimes younger! I know it's only going to get worse as I grow older and a new generation of celebrities and sports heroes take over and soon I won't only be older, I'll be twice their age.

I'm getting laughed at by the generation above me as they read this. They're thinking, "You think that's bad, wait till you're 40, 50, 60..." I do feel like the guy in the snowglobe staring into his own snowglobe.

You know the saying, 'the youth is wasted on the young.' I am appreciating it more and more as time marches me on.

Dag-blasted whippersnappers.