Category Archives: fun

Last weekend I was transferring some old VHS video tape stuff to the computer in an effort to keep recorded history alive, ahead of the demise of the media upon which they’re recorded. I’ve still got old super-8 movies I have to transfer, as well as some cassette tapes. I’ll probably just have to give up on the wire recordings and wax cylinders. The clay tablets are holding up nicely though…

Anyway.

Michael and I were goofing around with the video camera and discovered the joy that is infinite video recursion.

Below is a small sample.

We actually burned about an hour and a half doing this. Sometimes the silliest things can be good diversion, particularly for a curious mind. Next week he’ll probably want to take the old video camera apart to see what’s inside.

Today we bring you the biography of one of my favorite bloggers, the illustrious Weaselmomma.

She was born in upper Mesopotamia in the second century, the youngest of twenty seven children. A fighter from an early age, the brash and arrogant girl rejected the simple agrarian life to which her family was dedicated and soon left home to join the huns and learn the ways of the barbarian. Her young life was spent looting and pillaging, plundering stores of mead and ale, and terrorizing small villages.

She eventually grew bored with her life in Ireland, so she emigrated to Chile where she studied with ninjas, becoming adept in the arts of stealth and surprise attack.

This provided the skills she needed to bully her way into a full scholarship at Cambridge University, where she studied under Sir Isaac Newton. During these years she led a quiet life working as a patent clerk while developing her special theory of relativity, which she released in 1905.

Ausgeseichnet!

For many years she spent her life in relative obscurity, publishing the occasional breakthrough paper in theoretical physics and giving graduate student lectures.

The arrival of the Beatles in America in the early 1960s was a turning point for Weaselmomma. She cut her hair, donned a purple jacket and joined the group as the “twelfth Beatle,” with fellow alumni Scotty Pippen and Marty Feldman.

While touring with the Beatles in Nova Scotia she became intrigued with the teachings of the philosopher Socrates, and after a late summer concert she originated the Toga party, inspiring a young roadie named John Belushi.

The constant touring and partying took its toll. Weaselmomma began to yearn for something beyond herself. She felt the need to leave a lasting legacy. So at the young age of sixteen, she enrolled in Harvard Medical School. After breezing through the master and doctorate programs, she graduated to an internship at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center where she specialized in disorders of the liver related to conspicuous consumption of domestic malted beverages.

It was while attending to a special case involving an aging Gene Cernan that she became inspired to join NASA and become the first woman to walk on Krypton. Sadly, there were no planned missions to Krypton at the time, due to the high expenses of traditional Earth-bound mission launches, and the fact that it was a made-up planet that had long since exploded anyway. She used her creativity and engineering skills to design an orbital observation and mission platform, launched in 1998 as the International Space Station. Tragically, she was never able to set foot aboard her own creation.

Determined to soar through the cosmos, Weaselmomma moved to California under the name Gene Roddenberry. Forming a lasting friendship with a kindred spirit, Walt Disney, she went on to star in one of the most beloved science-fiction television programs of all time, “Star Trek Voyager,” playing the part of Captain Janeway.

The series lasted only three episodes.

Out of a job, broke and destitute, Weaselmomma was forced to return to her homeland, where she had little else to eat but scrapple.

It was while stalking pigs in Vermont that she had the epiphany that led to her greatest achievement. Seeing the vast numbers of maple trees in the area, Weaselmomma soon began collecting the sap from the trees to make maple syrup. Her grade A+ syrup became a local legend, and kick-started her maple syrup empire. Her syrup became an international sensation, and a treasured childhood icon that lives in the hearts and memories of us all. For despite her vast and checkered past, Weaselmomma will always be remembered most fondly as the model for her syrup bottles.

Happy Birthday, Weaselmomma! Long may you reign!

BTW, you’ve been blunked!

Check out more blunking fun at Momo Fali’s, Suburban Scrawl and Nuclear Family Warhead.

I have been tagged for another meme. Dear Mr Man has graciously passed along the torch of “25 Things About Me”, and I present that to you now.

1. Name someone with the same birthday as you. Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are others, but I tend to view myself most like Arnold. Except for the whole Governor of California thing.

2. Where was your first kiss? The first one I care to remember was right in my kitchen, about seven years ago.

3. Have you ever seriously vandalized someone else’s property? Seriously? No. But there were some minor incidents of which I am not proud.

4. Have you ever hit someone of the opposite sex? I don’t think so. Probably should have, in at least one case, though.

5. Have you ever sung in front of a large number of people? Yes.

6. What’s the first thing you notice about your preferred sex? No matter how many times I read this question, I don’t like it. The first thing I noticed about the love of my life was her smile.

7. What really turns you off? Meanness, cruelty, betrayal.

8. What do you order at Starbucks? Decaf Grande Mocha.

9. What is your biggest mistake? I’ll have to pass on that one.

10. Have you ever hurt yourself on purpose? No need to do that. I get plenty of accidental injuries to last me a lifetime.

11. Say something totally random about yourself. I’d really like to lose about 80 pounds.

12. Has anyone ever said you looked like a celebrity? When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was told I looked like John Ritter by some, and Beau Bridges by others.

13. Do you still watch kiddie movies or TV shows? Absolutely! Having kids gave me a great excuse for doing that. SpongeBob has been a favorite of mine since it first came out; my kids thought it was sort of strange that I watched it with them, but they came to like it. Phineas and Ferb is one of the more recent shows that I like. It has complexity and depth to it that most other modern kids shows don’t.

14. Did you have braces? No. There were plenty of other reasons to pick on me as a kid; I didn’t need that to add to the mix.

15. Are you comfortable with your height? Yes. I can see over cubicle walls and the tops of most people’s heads.

16. What is the most romantic thing someone of the preferred sex has done for you? Drove all the way across town to deliver dinner on my doorstep, complete with a secret message constructed of letter-shaped cookies.

17. When do you know it’s love? Step one: Wait at least five years after being a teenager. Step two: picture yourself and your intended in your nineties, and you’re changing his/her Depends. If you can do that with a smile, it’s love.

18. Do you speak any other languages? Ich spreche ein wenig vom Deutsch, aber nicht besser als ein kind.

19. Have you ever been to tanning salon? Shamefully, yes. Someone convinced me that I needed to be tan in order to be acceptable.

20. Have you ever ridden in a limo? Yes, a couple of times.

21. What’s something that really annoys you? Being utterly dismissed. Like, basically being treated like a gnat. Once I pulled up to a stop sign at the end of a street to make a left turn. As I was looking for traffic, this other guy pulled up along side me on my right, didn’t even acknowledge me, and then turned left in front of me just as I was going to go.

22. What’s something you really like? Hawaiian music

23. Can you dance? No, unless everyone else is doing the “Little Kicks” step.

24. Have you ever been rushed by an ambulance into the emergency room? Yes. First time I had atrial fibrillation, my wife gave me the choice: either she wakes up the kids and we all drive there, or she’s calling 911. It was an interesting experience, to say the least. I felt like a complete dork.

25. Tag five people to answer these 25 questions on their blog. If I don’t, what will happen? Seriously… I think everyone I know has been tagged on this already.