Category: humor

Early Christmas Gift for Us!

We’re still in the big Arctic Blast. The wind was howling after the snowstorm. We worked so hard shoveling snow that we decided to give ourselves a slightly early Christmas gift. It’s a foot massager.

We had to clear the front walk to enable the delivery guy to get it to us.

It’s quite a deal, the massager. It can put you to sleep. It can also energize you. The remote control is easy to use. You can set it to run for 15 or 30 minutes.

I really like it because all you have to do is plug it in. There’s no assembly required.

Cedar Waxwings Get Cold Breakfast

The morning of December 22, 2022 was one of the most frigid days in recent memory. The winter storm brought 30-40 mph winds and temperatures sometimes to down to 30 or worse.

I didn’t get right out there to shovel. Snow was blowing around until well after noon. This gave me a chance to watch a flock of Cedar Waxwings gather around the winterberry bushes in our backyard.

The berries must have been pretty cold. There was ice on them. One bird couldn’t seem to get a bill bite on them and dropped his breakfast on the ground a couple of times. I don’t think he got a bite to swallow.

And the city plows plugged our driveway as usual.

That means Sena and I had to get out there around 3:30 in the afternoon to shovel our driveway and sidewalks. It took us about an hour and I am considering calling whoever in city government is responsible for ordering up this weather.

Snow Day!

I wrote this post yesterday because I didn’t know whether or not we’d have a power outage because of high winds (up to nearly 50 mph) predicted for the Arctic Blast this week.

When we’re not outside scooping our walkway and driveway, we’ll probably be playing cribbage or, God forbid, Scrabble (which I always lose).

We’ve heard about the renewed interest in board games, one of them being Scrabble. We recently found an old Scrabble game at Old Capitol Town Center (formerly Old Capitol Mall). It’s Super Scrabble and it was on sale for $50 at a hole-in-the-wall shop lacking an entrance sign. The high price is because it’s a collectible relic from the past, although a quick internet search revealed it was made in 2004—hardly an antique. You can find them on eBay for $30. On the other hand, you can find them going for as much as $179 at an on-line store called Mercari.

We’ll also probably take a break by munching on our Christmas cookies.

I’m all set for the freezing weather. I’ve got my thermal underwear out and sweats out, along with my heavy gloves.

The wind will probably make shoveling pointless at times. We’ll probably bag it and then I’ll practice the juggling behind the back trick—another pointless activity.

Blockbuster Sasquatch Cribbage Game Antics!

Brace yourselves! Sena and I are going to break the internet with the never-before-seen YouTube video of our antic-filled cribbage game on our Sasquatch cribbage board—and playing with the Sasquatch cribbage cards!

This had an extremely rare outcome. Wait’ll you see what it is.

I also shared a few nuggets of knowledge about Sasquatch that I learned from the internet. One of them is that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) credits the state of Iowa with 76 reports of Bigfoot encounters (not necessarily sighting per se, but so what?).

Sasquatch Playing Cards Arrive!

We got our Sasquatch playing card deck! The images of Bigfoot are strikingly similar to the carved image on our new Sasquatch cribbage board. And they both resemble the image of Patty, the female Bigfoot supposedly captured on 16mm film back in 1967 by Bob Gimlin.

That’s the legendary Patterson-Gimlin video of Bigfoot. There are two opposing views on the existence of Bigfoot which I think are probably influenced by Patty.

The TV show, The Proof Is Out There, aired an episode of experts who talked a lot about evidence for Bigfoot. I watched the show, which ran on December 3, 2021. The Daily Mail UK ran a big story about it. I honestly can’t remember what they decided.

On the other hand, there are a few people who claim to know for a fact that a guy has admitted that he put on a stinky monkey suit and played the part of Patty—and said he’s blowing up the whole thing because he never got paid for doing it. That was way back in 2004, and the story is all over the internet.

I tend to be skeptical about most things like Bigfoot and extraterrestrials. I’m not exactly saying they don’t exist.

But why can’t anyone find a corpse, roadkill, or a definite fossil of Sasquatch? Is that why people are starting to call Bigfoot an interdimensional being, coming and going through a wormhole vortex? And why does everybody still pay attention to the tale?

I think it’s because just about everybody likes a good story—which is what Bigfoot has always been.

The Proof Is Out There Airs Debunked Rerun of Simulated Reality

I watched one of my favorite TV shows last night, The Proof Is Out There, and I was surprised to see the rerun of a debunked segment from last year. It was the simulated reality spot in which a photo of a girl showing her reflection in a mirror with apparently two different facial expressions was determined to be an “unexplained phenomenon.” Even the forensic video expert was fooled.

It was the same photo that was debunked on the show last September because an alert viewer notified the show it was a smartphone camera trick which was done in panorama mode. The effect had been known for years. I duplicated the trick and published a post about it, entitled “Proof of Simulated Reality—Or Cool Camera Trick?”

I sent an email to the show this morning and got an automated reply indicating the Proof Team received it, and indicating they might reply.

We’ll see. Anyway, Sena and I made updated weird pictures. I think motion creates artifact—which itself can look pretty cool (see the featured juggling photo in which we minimized it).

Avatar Fever

Sena and I just watched the original Avatar movie on TV last night. The new sequel just opened: “Avatar: Totally Under Water Without Snorkel or Scuba.”

I can’t recall when we actually saw the original Avatar, although it was probably not long after it was released in 2009. The CGI effects are still mesmerizing.

Sena found a YouTube with a demo showing how the action sequences were made, which pitted Sam Worthington (who played Jake Sully) against what looked like a rubber dragon yanked around by a few guys while other actors played their parts, all of them wearing what looked like ping pong balls and green dots.

It doesn’t take any of the magic away from the finished product, believe it or not.

However, I’m not totally sold on the avatar concept. I get it that Jake’s consciousness jockeyed back and forth between his human and Pandora bodies. But I can’t pin a specific inconsistency on any particular scene in the movie suggesting sometimes Jake was conscious and interacting during the day on the spaceship during the times when he should have been conscious learning how to be one of The People.

You know, when Jake’s conscious in the spaceship and out of the incubator (so to speak), his blue guy avatar should become limp and lifeless out in the Pandora Forest, maybe at the exact time when Neytiri (ultimately his main squeeze, and played by Zoe Saldana) is trying to teach him how to juggle deadly 3-headed zebra-striped iguanas, whose main diet consists of a certain male Na’vi body part involved in reproduction. This is why many of them look like they have Peyronie’s disease. This is available only in the Director’s cut, of course.

I was astounded by the relative difference in stature between the Na’vi and humans. For example, Jake’s main rival for Neytiri’s affection is a guy named Tsu’tey (played by Laz Alonso) who looks like a shrimpy, homely nerd next to his Pandora comrades. But when he’s on the airborne military transport toward the latter part of the movie, he’s several feet taller than the human soldiers and he tosses them around like garbage bags.

I wasn’t clear on why the head scientist, Dr. Grace Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver), smokes cigarettes. What’s up with that? Her line early in the movie when they are all in their avatar bodies, some of them for the first time: “Don’t play with that, it’ll make you go blind.” Is that supposed to let the audience know that the Na’vi males have penises? Or do I just have a dirty mind?

Sena read an on-line source that the James Cameron, who wrote, directed, co-produced, and co-edited Avatar, called the main bad guy, Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang) in the film a “motherf***er.” I guess he’s been reincarnated in the sequel. Evil never dies.

But Good always triumphs in the end-we hope.

Bending Amaryllis Staked, Sort of…

This morning we noticed that the Amaryllis was bent almost 90 degrees. We found a zip tie and used an old wooden spoon to stake it. Sure, it looks like amateurs did it-because amateurs did it. But the alternative is to cut the stem and sacrifice the blooms, which are still vibrant.