Aitch-Bar

Writing About (Mostly) Not Astrophysics


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Apollcalypse

When I’m listening to some of these internet radio stations and their slightly off-brand retro dance music, I feel like I’m about to have a bad teenage experience. I am at a rave, and I can’t find any of my friends, and the fog machine is slowly displacing all of the oxygen in this abandoned warehouse but no one else seems to mind. I’ve stumbled upon that small fraction of the population–and every single member is here tonight–that can wear naught but glowsticks and have intercourse in the open without performance anxiety-induced ED, and have that be just another Friday. I am concerned that Hot Mix Radio 90s is going to roofie my drink while I’m not looking, and I am going to come to with no wallet and an untreatable case of the trojan flame.

There is a series on Natty Geo called Doomsday Preppers, where every episode showcases three adults devoting what remains of their lives to ruining what remains of their children’s. The NG poll at left is taken from their website, hopefully illegally. A few items bear discussion; you can go ahead and click the thumbnail to bring up a full-size view, because otherwise these observations won’t make any sense. If you’re ready, let’s proceed. 26% of those surveyed think the Soviet Union is still around. 21% are trapped in the ruins of the History channel, deep in the body dent on their couch, an episode of Ancient Aliens and a bag of Cheetos as their only sustenance as they await the weekend, when they will finally shower. 2% support destroying the Sun before it destroys us. And, by my calculus, 104% of people are generally pessimistic about our future prospects. I invite you to look up the definition of “microcosm,” as it is apropos on that last point.

GS made a fascinating observation, which points to the one and only thing that’s wrong with the subjects of the show: they are all preparing for the apocalypse by storing food and holing up in bunkers. Thanks to these episodes, we know with great precision exactly where all of these people live, what their defensive capabilities are, and what golden treasures they secret away. There needs to be an episode where they interview a person whose sole purpose is preparing to invade everyone else’s bunkers, and is stockpiling military hardware and conscripting homeless people, and every Saturday evening gets to add three new flags to their map of the U.S. No one ever steps up to really own the role of warlord until post-cataclysm. A little preparation now will go a long way, after a solar flare causes Yellowstone to spew radioactive oil-eating superviruses all over our money.


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Shameless Promotion

Image

For some reason, you read this blog more than you know me. I don’t know why or how that happened, but somehow, you are looking at this. Although that inexplicable situation has come about, there is something you can do to make things better: go to this link and watch this fairly preposterous commercial entry featuring yours truly. Then “like” it. We are in a contest that is based on how many humans like it. I don’t frequently tell people to do things—usually, when it comes to blogging and whatnot, I tend to just write things for years, for free, and then send it into the electronic void and ask nothing in return. Nonetheless, if any of you humans wanted to watch me embarrass myself for the sake of a local ad campaign, please do, and shoot a ‘like’ in our direction since that is the currency of our brave new world, and our brave entry is in a tight race for first.


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Two Seconds Hate: Truck Nuts

There is a large truck directly ahead. Whatever your cruise control is set at, the truck is slightly slower. Tap those brakes. Can you get around? Negative; the truck is two lanes wide. Blue-tinted smoke bellows from its twin exhaust pipes. The sky rains asphyxiated birds in its wake, and you switch to recirculated air when the world begins to smell like cheap vodka. Judging from the bumper, the driver is geared to go fully Republican when the 2004 election rolls around. The back window is adorned with crucifixes and Gothic lettering, and you assume that the letters actually spell something, but your brain will be goddamned if it’s going to devote the energy necessary to decoding that stupid fucking font1. Still, you think, perhaps the driver is a person who you could hypothetically hold a conversation with. Perhaps, if the two of you were trapped on a desert island, there would be some grace period before things turned Lord of the Flies. And then your eye drifts toward the pavement, and the ensuing aneurysm and subsequent hemorrhage almost make you lose your cool. Camouflage truck nuts. There is only one thought left to think: camouflage doesn’t really work in some situations. Indeed. Not nearly as well as you wish it did. Dare I say, it looks more like leprosy. Enjoy this stretch of one-lane highway while you stare at something that looks similar to, but in fairness slightly better than, a pug’s rear2.

I assume that the endowment of trucks with reproductive organs is the reason why there are so many trucks on the road in the first place, in the face of soaring gas prices and concerns over manmade carbon emissions. There are a lot of issues to discuss on that front. I’m available for debate. Until then I’ll be in the Cabela’s parking lot, neutering pickups and affixing giant collars around their front grilles so that they can’t chew on their stitches3.

Aside from the fact4 that they look stupid, and that testicles are useless without a corresponding man cannon (which no one has the initiative to put on their car for some odd reason), what amazes me is the number of women who attach these to their trucks. There are more than zero who do this. In fact I’m told that hot pink are the scrota of choice for ladies’ vehicles. This is to delineate that these male genitalia are a woman’s. At this point, whatever message one may have thought one was conveying is now pretzeled beyond recognition. We can distill only the basics: you have a Hemi and you want it to feel embarrassed when it goes out in public.

It’s worth noting that South Carolina has imposed a blatantly unconstitutional ban on bumper balls. Which is great news; I love it when two wrongs interfere with one another. And nothing better illustrates the point that South Carolina legislators are well-focused on critical issues. Last year the law was contested by a 65-year-old woman who refused to pay a $445 ticket for going anatomic with her truck, which I guess makes her the Rosa Parks of gluing balls to your car. Her jury trial does not yet have a date set. I await, rapt, her made-for-TV movie.


1. Fuck that font. Write in normal human letters.
2. Pugs look absurd.
3. I have a “Gone But Not Forgotten” tattoo with Bob Barker’s face. With Gothic lettering. … Oh. He’s not dead? Am I the only one who wasn’t aware of that?
4. Fact.


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Panda-monium

Let me put that right in my calendar, assholes.

The Internet is making some unwarranted assumptions about me. In specificum, that they can come into my house and show me pictures of how they’ve put Kung Fu Panda and World of Warcraft in a blender and then expect me to do something with that information. My entire goddamned morning web routine is throwing this in my face, which makes me think this is specifically targeted. Now I’m tracing back through my entire life, trying to find the moment when I made myself a target of choice for this particular dickery. My sum total WoW experience consists of having watched that one South Park episode. I have on occasion played a Video Game, but I never told Google that, and I had the lights off and the doors locked, and my phone was in my pants, both far away from me. I once told that panda joke where he eats, shoots and leaves. I apologize if that was a spoiler. (Here’s another: Apollo 13 survives re-entry.) Also there was that time when I searched for “mmorpg racist panda conical hat” over and over until I blistered.

Now that I’ve been pulled into the vortex, I’m having a crippling flashback to the strategy-based Warcraft games, which had no World attached to them, and had no requirement that you be social at all. In fact, the early games forbade it, but more because the Internet then consisted of a stream of pigeons slowly flapping from house to house — white for 1, grey for 0, was the mnemonic they taught us in school. Each of the three original games was groundbreaking in its own way. Warcraft I, back in ’94, pushed the limits of how much bullshit one could crowd into sidebars; lesser computers would grind to a halt while attempting to render the next-generation shaded button borders. Warcraft II, released a year later, was never actually played; instead, one would simply begin an orc campaign, pause, and turn the speakers up to max, because the high-energy timpani-driven score was like doing coke. I’m sure Warcraft III did something notable as well. I can’t remember what, because now I’m listening to the Warcraft II soundtrack and preparing to jump through the ceiling and fight a cop.


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This Cabin and Your Manhood Both Need Dozens of Animal Heads

I’m feeling this rustic cabin, my friend. Very countrified. Check out that fireplace, what is that, a forty-eight inch? Nasty. It’ll be roasty toasty up in here come snowfall. Understated chandeliers, that’ll make for some good ambience. And you’ve got the feng shui in full effect with this chair and table arrangement. That’s all great. Only one problem I’m seeing, and that is that someone might catch sight of your living situation and then confuse you with a ball-less old lady. That is a potential issue. And as far as I can figure, there’s only one thing for it: we’re going to fill this place with animal heads until it’s standing room only.

See this fine-grain wood paneling between the mantle and the doorjamb? That’s got some badass texture, great with the overall motif. Here’s what I’m thinking: animal head, right on top of it. There’s only one thing with greater aesthetic value than woodgrain, and that is a summer coat preserved by world-class taxidermy. That’s card-carrying virile young male status. If they actually made cards for that, they would be made out of pelt.

Don’t make me get buck in here. And by that I mean, three hundred pound white tail with a two foot antler spread. Here, there, on that rafter, and pretty much anywhere we’re not going to have moose. Then you should mix it up with some marksmanship trophies. Skeet shooting is where it’s at. I’m thinking this entire area, to the window, to the wall, all skeet skeet. That says “man” with no room for miscalculation, which is important for you vis-a-vis the ball-less old lady situation. I bet you keep getting lost kids coming to your door asking for porridge or whatever. It’s because they look around, they don’t see any giant stuffed bears in attack position, and they figure you’re an old crone who’s probably got a kettle of something tasty going.

What’s that, in the far corner? That looks to me like some free space. You should see that free space and be thinking, this is bullshit, and then fill that gap with a hippopotamus. I’m thinking posed in full roar, like it’s the movie Congo and you’ve just willy-nilly rafted in on its territory as if you pay the rent. He’ll be like, “You folks must be lost. Allow me to serve you up a fresh helping of sixteen-inch incisors. Hope all your supplies weren’t on that one boat, because I just snapped into it like a Slim Jim. This is Hips territory, next time bitches stay on land where bitches belong.” That says nothing but hard. You may as well put up a giant phallus for all the subtlety in that message. A trophy dong. And below it? Two giant balls affixed to their own plaque, because structurally speaking you’re less likely to tear out the wall with separate support points.

When you have a party in here, people will be like, “wow, check out those heads. This guy is awesome and completely sane.” And deep down they will feel the seed of fear sprout a bud, because they’ve seen Highlander and they know how insanely powerful you probably are by now and how far you can jump. Then you can regale them with the story of how you were snowbound in here for five weeks and you fever-dreamed a complete production of A Streetcar Named Desire, with you as Blanche Dubois and a Bengal tiger playing the part of Stanley Kowalski. Rangers found you at first thaw au naturel and heavily depending on the kindness of strangers. That part isn’t mission-critical, but keep it on the back burner.

This is going to take some serious investment from you, because you’re going to have to grow a thick mustache and wear a safari hat all of the time. Which is probably not going to go over well with the missus. I can tell because she’s been glaring at me since I first opened my mouth. If this isn’t going over well it’s going to be even harder to pitch you on turning your minivan into The Mystery Machine. I should have opened with that idea.


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Two Seconds Hate: The Myth that you can see the Great Wall of China from Space

Expedition 10 photo showing Great Wall of China

View from the ISS, with a 180mm lens

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the Great Wall of China is “the only man-made structure visible from space.” Why on Earth does that thought escape anyone’s lips? It takes less time to realize how stupid it is than it does to actually say the sentence aloud. The important, and impressive, fact about the Great Wall is how long it is, not how wide, and why would length alone ever be a factor in determining whether or not you can see something from a great distance? It is clearly less wide than any major highway (most of which also tend to be pretty long), and basically the same color.

This is the kind of thing I could only imagine becoming a myth before we could go into space and see how stuff looks like from orbit, (even though, for the extremely obvious reasons listed above, it would still be a stupid idea), and in fact, it does appear to date to at least the 1930s, in the form of “the GWoC is visible from the moon.” What?! Continents are barely visible from the moon.

This obviously completely wrong fact is even printed in Chinese textbooks. There have been many complaints about the lousiness of our textbooks, but at least our nationalistic garbage is vague and hard to convincingly disprove (to about 30% of people anyway). This obviously completely wrong fact is so ingrained in culture there that when their first astronaut was unable to spot it, panic ensued, and it took a second, American, astronaut taking the really indistinct picture above, to satisfy everybody. Seriously, that picture was plastered all over Chinese newpapers as evidence that this idiotic myth was true. Even though it was through a magnified camera lens and is still almost impossible to discern. I doubt it would have mattered, people everywhere else in the world already reflexively believe it to be true with no evidence or second thoughts in the first place anyway.


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Today in History: September 14th

1501: Michelangelo’s second day of work on the statue of David. This is the day he started working on a certain part of the statue that you are probably very familiar with. You know the part I mean.

More Papal Bullshit

A Catholic plot to get us to not have a stupid calendar

1752: The Gregorian calendar is adopted by Britain, finally ceasing the slipping of the equinoxes due to the imprecision of the Julian calendar. The transition requires skipping 11 days, meaning that Sept. 14th followed Sept. 2nd. Under the rules of the old system, years were 365.25 days long, with a leap day every forth year, but because the year is actually shorter, 365.242 days, the extra leaps had pushed equinoxes earlier and earlier since Roman times. The solution was to jump forward by length of this accumulated error, and to abolish leap days on years ending in 00, unless they were evenly divisible by 400. Because the new calendar was decreed by Pope Gregory, it’s adoption was viewed as controversial throughout the non-Catholic parts of Europe and only gradually came into effect. Irish rebels, for instance, took on the calendar as an act of anti-English defiance, celebrating Easter on the new date, switching back after being conquered, then finally re-switching back once Britain itself adopted the calendar, thus coining the term ‘Irish Easter’ to mean a breakfast of scrambled eggs with a side of rabbit bacon.

Incredibly, instead of making the change all at once, Sweden made the bizarre decision to push the calendar forward gradually by simply not having leap years between 1700 and 1740, then immediately forgot this plan in 1704 and 1708, and had leap years anyway. This all means that Sweden would spend 40 years completely out of sync with either calendar, and then still end up 2 days off their intended target. Having acknowledged the plan’s failure after having forgotten to implement it, the Swedish King Charles XII decided to give up entirely, and go back to the Julian system in a royal decree titled “Fuck the Flow of History.” Since the Swedes were now 2 days off, this was accomplished by extending the month of February by 2 days instead of 1, and meant that for the first and only time, there was a February 30th, the most depressing date in history.

Although the pre-United States adopted the new calendar as the same time as the rest of the Britishish people, the territory of Alaska experienced it following its purchase from Russia in 1867. Additionally, the International Date Line, which had originally been on the Eastern side of Alaska had to shift over the proto-state. This was accomplished at great expense and difficulty by teams of oxen, steamer vessels, and loggers, who freed the line when it became stuck on tall trees. The expense incurred by the operation is known as “Seward’s Folly” and it’s costly example is the reason that China uses only one time zone.

Remember The McKinley

Fooled by the classic “gun under the handkerchief trick”

1901: US President William McKinley dies, having been shot one week earlier by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz is commonly referred to as an anarchist in accounts of the assassination, however he did have some specific demands. Among them, an increase in vowel shipments to Eastern Europe*. It is an historical curiosity that Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, was present at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo where the shooting took place, at Ford’s Theater when his father was killed, and an eyewitness to the assassination of James Garfield, while serving as Secretary of War. His attendance at a third shooting gave him the rare ‘Presidential Assassination Hat-Trick’ allowing him to retire from the exhausting task of following presidents around hoping someone would kill them.

1987: The Toronto Blue Jays hit 10 home runs in a single game, setting a new record. This is partially due to the fact that Canadian baseballs have an oval shape to make them more aerodynamic, as well as the field having shorter right and left field walls to accommodate the rounder, five-base Canadian baseball diamond. Interestingly, due to the metric system, the Jays only managed to score 8.5 runs in the game, due to the fact that a homer only counts for half a run throughout the Dominion.

* The recent acquisitions of Hawaii and Guam in the Spanish-American War provided the US with a surplus of vowels which it was leveraging for diplomatic favors around the turn of the century.


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This Week in Wreak

In counterpoint to Ryan’s affluent shoppery, there is the market of Real America, and the signature publications thereof. We live in the post-Gutenberg era, and quite separately have mastered the art and science of ballistics, so it is only natural to expect combinations of the two. What I am never quite prepared for is the gusto with which these combinations are made.

Allow me to BabelFish that for you: Damn there are a bunch of magazines about guns in this grocery store.

I list from the top left:

  • Rifle Firepower
  • Pocket Pistols (note double-checked, this is a firearms-related publication)
  • Crossbow Revolution
  • Personal & Home Defense
  • Guns
  • Gun Collector
  • Small Arms
  • Special Weapons
  • Black Guns
  • Gun
  • Bowhunter
  • Guns & Ammo
  • Concealed Carry Handguns
  • Military Surplus
  • Traditional Bowhunter

 

The greatest part was something I only just realized after a detailed analysis of the snapshot of the rack: To the very right of these selections I can spy titles including Disney Princess, The Amazing Spider-Man, Spongebob, and other colorful booklets. The children’s literature is directly adjacent to the murder section. I have not legitimately fathered a child (as you may recall), so I cannot opine on this with true conviction, but personally I would at least get a NASCAR buffer in between those two selections.


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At Least They Can’t Read This?

We need to talk about this Amish situation. Has anyone actually tried offering them a combustion engine free of charge, and seeing if they’ll just take it? Like, leave one under a tarp, turn around, close your eyes, see if it’s still there after five minutes, and if it’s not then just walk away without raising the point? Here’s why I ask: Because I just drove straight through the back of a horse-drawn buggy. Three times, actually, in three separate locations. I’m not sure why the Amish are a nocturnal people, and I’m not sure why they use such poor reflectors, although I imagine that one can only sew and churn so high a glossiness into a material. I blew right through them. Hat buckles sent asunder. Wooden shoes sailing through the air. Two thousand pounds (max) of bison meat strewn about the road. No, I don’t actually know anything about the Amish. Yes, I just cast them as Dutch Mayflower pilgrims in The Oregon Trail. I got as far as typing “amish wiki” into the Google bar and then decided, fuck it, I’m on vacation.

As long as we’re on the subject, here is the rest of the mosaic stereotype:

  • Yodeling
  • Master Chocolatiers
  • Hunting turkey with blunderbusses
  • Windmills, which turn water wheels, which turn other, smaller windmills
  • Constantly repelling Shawnee raiding parties
  • Owning Ikea
  • Pop culture representations include The Lollipop Guild, and at least one of the locations in The Bourne Identity

 

And here are some outstanding questions I’d like answered:

  • How was Hans Christian Andersen Amish when they aren’t allowed to read or whatever?
  • How did my 3G work so well during my entire trip through their [reservation? stronghold? protectorate?]
  • What is their take on Jeff Ireland as GM of the Dolphins? Do they squarely blame Tannehill for the team’s ridiculous performance against Houston, or is it an all-around shoddy offense?

 

Yes the Ohio trip is going great so far. I’m going to go lay down so that a train can wake me up in an hour, every hour, forever.


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Today in History: September 10th

1306: St Nicholas of Tolentino dies. Today is to become his feast day, an annual remembrance of the times he resurrected hundreds of dead children, (they were confused and hungry, and their parents barely cared because it was the 13th century), and the time he saved a burning palace by throwing some “blessed bread” on the flames. Firefighters in subsequent years attempt to understand and replicate the ingredients of ‘blessed bread’ with little success. Most inquiry focused around getting the essence of Catholicism into the yeast. The last notable attempt is made by a 15th century fire brigade, found to be responsible for grinding up the preserved hand of St Benedict to bake a loaf of this so-called ’emergency bread.’ Because the authorities successfully manage to burn them at the stake, St Nicolas’s feat goes unrepeated to this day.

Prior to 1974, all Canadians wore this hat all the time1823: Simón Bolívar becomes President of Peru. He sighs heavily— it wasn’t the one he really wanted.

1858: George Mary Searle, overcoming a childhood of taunts based on his middle name, discovers the asteroid 55 Pandora from an observatory in Albany, NY. Little does he realize that nearly 300 years later, Marines from the Space Expeditionary Command, Ultra-Capitalist Division, will land on the rock and prepare to begin mining blue-skinned metaphors for living in harmony with nature. They will be disappointed to find that the barren, airless environment supports no life whatsoever, and leave before discovering that the object contains an untold wealth of Unobtainium, one of the MacGuffin Series semi-metals from the Fictional Periodic Table.

1939: Nine days after the outbreak of hostilities against Poland, Canada declares war on Nazi Germany. Having prepared for this eventuality, Himmler reports back to the Führer that the Germany’s stocks of maple syrup, beaver fur, and Labatt Blue are in full supply and they decide to proceed with their planned genocide and world domination.

Monkeys are known to have monarchist sympathies1967: Gibraltar holds a plebiscite on whether to remain a British territory, or be ruled by Spain. Although voting to remain under UK control by a margin of 99%-0.36%, the possibility of voting irregularities were never conclusively disproved. If Gibraltar had required voter ID there is no telling how many Barbary macaque monkeys would have been prevented from subverting the true will of the people.

2001: Conspiracy theorists wonder to themselves about why they haven’t had a good conspiracy for a while. Sure, there was the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Queen getting those fake paparazzi to kill Princess Diana, but neither of those had the same panache as those really great ones from the 60’s. JFK, RFK, the Moon Landing. The sixties had it. Don’t get them wrong, there is nothing wrong with Elvis sightings, Big Pharma creating AIDS, and the Challenger explosion, but back then, the secret one-world government knew how to make an impression. Killing Paul McCartney and replacing him with a robot? Fluoridating everyone’s water? Classics. While brushing their teeth, they wish to themselves that something terrifying and significant would happen that could make them feel that way again— then sigh and go to bed.