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I Don't Write 'em, I Just Pass 'em On!

Me: Time to relax and get into bed!
Internet: Want to read something upsetting first?
Me: Yes! Obviously!

My girlfriend broke up with me for being too "un-American".
I saw it coming from a kilometer away.

If you're not an expert but you think you've destroyed the entire foundation of a vast scientific community with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you could be wrong.

My wife can't remember the password that she changed yesterday but can remember what I said on June 8, 2014, at 6:47PM.

Parents today:
Text me when you get there, text me the names of the kids who are there, text me when you're coming home.
Parents in the 80s:
Bye.

When my wife says "You know I've been thinking" there's an 85% chance we're going to end up in a store.

A 90 minute movie takes 2.5 hours to watch because my wife and I pause it to figure out what other movies an actor/actress was in.

My dog sets an impossible bar for how I should greet my wife when she comes home.

My family has been giving each other the same five gift bags since 1984.

Live it up young people because one day you'll reach the age when you have a favorite cashier at the grocery store.

I made dinner reservations for my wife's birthday and told the host there was an extra $20 for the bartenders if they card her.

The older you get the more annoyed you become when an unfamiliar car drives down your street.

My wife set parental controls on Netflix because I watched a show without her.

Eventually, your bladder becomes your alarm clock.

In my 20s I was excited when we made plans to go out.
Today I have that same excitement when plans to go out are canceled.

Congratulations to my wife on the purchase of her one millionth candle.

When a TV breaks today we immediately buy a new TV.
When a TV broke in the 80s we watched a smaller TV on top of the larger broken TV for a full season of Happy Days.

Listening to the 80's channel in the car my nephew asked why I had on the oldies station. The 3 mile walk home did him good.

I've lived in my house for years and still try to open the fake kitchen cabinet drawer.

For someone that doesn't like to leave the house, I care way too much about the weather.

Her: My aerobics instructor says I've got the chest of a 23-year-old.
Him: What did he say about your 60-year-old ass?
Her: He never mentioned you.

My friend Joe recently went on the Dolly Parton diet.
It really made Joe lean.

Breaking news! Protests continue over groundhogs decision.
#notmygroundhog

I heard a funny Volkswagen pun.
But they told me not to Passat along.

My friend told me he couldn't afford his water bill.
I sent him a get well soon card.

My biggest fear about becoming a zombie is all the walking.

My cousin just lost his job at the clock factory.
They said he was putting on too many hours.

Today I wore something that still fits me from 55 years ago.
It's only a scarf,
But, hey, let's be positive.

What did the French groundhog see when he woke up?
His château.

A priest is driving down the road when he comes across a dead pig in the road.
He contacts the police to inform them of the problem.
A cocky desk sergeant laughed and said, "Did you give it the last rites?"
"No", said the priest, "I thought I'd inform the next of kin first".

I wish there was a way to donate fat like you can donate blood.

You might be a redneck if you use Bubble-wrap under your doormat as your alarm system!

When you realize that the last day of 2023 will be 1-2-3-1-2-3.

I was just on the Weight Watchers website and it asked me if I accept cookies.
Is that a trick question?

My friend just said to me, "You've put a lot of weight on".
I said, "I've had a lot on my plate recently".

We're going to have to paint potatoes this Easter.

Valentine's Day Special, $500.

We arrest you in front of your wife and release you on Tuesday.
Includes camping fee, fishing license, tent, and beer.

Been on a diet for two weeks and I'm proud to say I've lost 14 days of happiness.

Tying ropes together.
It's knot fun.

Hipster gets mad his photo was used in an article about how all hipsters look alike. Finally realizes it wasn't him.

Can you explain these gaps in your resume?
I believe those are from the space bar.

Bought ice cream and left it outside because it was 7 degrees last night and is still 27 degrees today. Why did the ice cream melt?
Because it was celsius ice cream.

How is it that I weigh a pound less when I wake up than 1 hour after I wake up? I haven't eaten or drunk anything!
Optimism. Before the day has truly started and you're half asleep, you're full of optimism, which is lighter than air. Then the reality sinks in – literally, and your optimism leaves, and you are back to real life weight.

Remember the day we argued about Roman numerals?
Even now that day remains VIVID.
I tried to stay CIVIL,
But you ended up LIVID.

Doctor: Your X-ray showed a broken rib, so we fixed it with photoshop.

If you blink slowly enough it turns into a nap.

Posted on

Of Balloons and National Security

The balloon. 

From Greg Fallis:

Jesus suffering fuck. Republicans are terrified of everything but guns–the one thing we KNOW kills thousands of Americans every goddamn year. They're terrified of gay folks, terrified of the entire concept of gender that's not based on a toggle switch, terrified of people of color, terrified of beliefs that don't fall within their wildly idiotic interpretation of Christianity, terrified government agents will break into their homes and seize their gas stoves, terrified of books they haven't read, terrified of surgical masks, and now they're terrified by a Chinese balloon.

"My concern is that the federal government doesn't know what's in that balloon. Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?"

This was no ordinary fucking idiot who said this. This was a special fucking idiot. This fucking idiot was Congressman James Corner, the Republican Chair of the House Oversight Committee. And he said it on FOX News, of course, the primary venue for fucking idiots. This fucking idiot has access to a massive amount of information; he's a fucking idiot with a staff whose job includes researching issues of national concern and informing him so he won't come across to the public like a fucking idiot.

I'm not a member of Congress. I don't have a staff. But I have a Chromebook (I could have just used my cell phone, but the display is smaller and my eyes get tired). So let's see if we can answer Corner's concerns.

Did the balloon take off from Wuhan? Nope. Okay, first–because words matter–it's a goddamn balloon. Balloons don't "take off." Balloons are inflated and released. It's not a fucking missile. Beyond that, we can with a certain level of accuracy backtrack the balloon's path based on its current height and known patterns of wind currents. And hey, a whole bunch of meteorologists did just that, and we can say with confidence it was released somewhere in west central China. Wuhan is in east central China. So, nope.

Do we know what's in the balloon? Yes and no. I mean, yes we know what's IN the balloon, since all high altitude balloons are filled with some lighter-than-air gas, like helium or hydrogen. But he's talking about the payload. The stuff the balloon is carrying. And no, we don't know what the payload is. However…

Is the payload a bioweapon? We don't know, but almost certainly nope. First off, it would be massively stupid for China to attack the US. Secondly, even if China was stupid enough to attack the US, a localized bioweapon attack would be an incredibly weak opening salvo of a war. Thirdly, even if China was that stupid, a high altitude balloon would be a really inefficient and ineffective delivery system for a bioweapon attack.

Here's a question this particular fucking idiot didn't ask, but is being asked by lots of other fucking idiots: A) Could the balloon be carrying surveillance technology? Sure. But why? China launches a lot of rockets capable of carrying sophisticated surveillance technology–and by 'a lot' I mean they're second only to the US in the number of racket launches. If China wants to conduct surveillance of troops/bases/deployments, they have the capability to do it without resorting to a balloon.

The thing about balloons is they're at the mercy of the wind. And yeah, we know general wind patterns at different altitudes, so while it's possible (by changing the altitude of the balloon) to generally guide a balloon, they can't be sent to spy on a specific target location. In addition to the wind, high altitude balloons are sensitive to the weight of the payload, to the amount of helium/hydrogen used for inflation, and even the air temperature at the time of release. Balloon guidance is largely a crap shoot; you know the odds, but you don't know the outcome. To attach surveillance tech to a balloon and hope it drifts by something worth seeing is a really dumb surveillance approach.

Another thing. People keep saying "This balloon is the size of two (sometimes three) school busses," as if that's somehow threatening. The balloon IS A BALLOON. Even a really big balloon is just a latex membrane surrounding a lighter-than-air gas. The balloon may be really big, but that doesn't mean the payload is really big. If the payload was the size of a couple of school busses, then the balloon carrying it would probably be the size of a football stadium.

But but but the military says they won't shoot it down because of the risk of "debris could land on people or homes". So doesn't that mean the payload must be big? Nope. It means if you shoot a missile up in the air, the missile will come back down. That's how gravity works. Could the US military shoot down the balloon over a rural area to minimize the risk? Sure. But the least expensive air-to-air missile (AIM-9X Sidewinder) costs US$430,818. Add in the cost of jet fuel (and that shit ain't cheap) and we're talking about spending maybe half a million dollars to take down a balloon. A balloon, for fuck's sake.

So just what in the popcorn fuck IS the balloon and what's it real purpose? I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be just an underinflated weather balloon. Underinflated because a properly inflated weather balloon is designed that as the balloon gains in elevation the gas inside it expands to a volume larger than the balloon's capacity to expand, at which point it…pops. The payload then returns to earth on a parachute. An underinflated balloon won't reach that height and so won't expand beyond its tolerance. It can just wander along until the elevated UV light at that height degrades the latex and it pops on its own.

Is this situation a violation of US air space? Yes. It may be accidental, but yes. But it seems highly improbable that the balloon or its payload, whatever it is, is a threat to US national security.

The actual threat to US national security is the Republican Party.

 

Posted on

Conga!

This has been my commute soundtrack for the past couple days. And like it always does, it took me back some 36 years.

Picture this: Tucson Arizona, 1986…

I was young, dumb, and full of…optimism…in a time of great upheaval.

Bernie—my partner of the previous two years—and I had split up. I'd just moved out of an apartment we'd been sharing with a friend, and into my own place.

A year earlier, Bernie and I had flown to San Francisco for a weekend. He had miles that needed to be used, but at the time we were on a shoestring budget and couldn't afford for me to accompany him. When my friend Kekku heard this she said, "But you must see San Francisco!" and promptly wrote me a check.

We came back from The City infected. (No, not with that; with the city itself.) San Francisco had charmed us, seduced us, and planted the seeds of our eventual relocation. Suddenly Tucson had become black and white, while SF remained glorious technicolor.

At the time I was working as a senior architectural draftsman at the firm of Kim Acorn Associates for a little over a year. My partners in crime there were another Mark, Jerry, and most fascinating of the bunch, Kate.

Jerry being Jerry, and Mark

I lusted after Mark in the worst way. I imagined all manner of depraved (although looking back, not having lived in San Francisco yet, my definition of depravity was entirely too vanilla) things I could do to/with him. But sadly, he was straight, married, and unobtainable.

Kate—whom I sadly have no photos of—and I had each other clocked the moment I first walked into that workroom. She reminded me way too much of Large Marge from PeeWee's Big Adventure. She smoked. She walked with a swagger. She drove a truck. For chrissake, she wore more flannel than I did.

She had a keen interest in astronomy, and owned a beautiful telescope that she would take out into the dark desert nights—and also carried a gun "for protection" during those forays into the wilderness. ("Javalina, y'know…") She loved the same music I did and I helped her buy her first hi-fi stereo system.

Her grandmother had been a Sioux medicine woman and had taught her "the ways." Our shared interest in all things otherworldly (both physical and otherwise)—not to mention our mutual overpowering dislike of several members of the firm we worked at—immediately bonded us.

I believe if I could've used today's parlance back then, I would've called her my work wife…

It was at this time I bought my first portable CD player. Imagine! Portable! It was ridiculously expensive, bought on credit, and went pretty much everywhere with me. One of the first CDs I remember buying was Primitive Love. It became a big part of the soundtrack of my life that summer.

Though Bernie and I had separated by that point, our plans to move to San Francisco together remained in place. It was an amicable parting, so there was no reason to change them; to this day we remain good friends.

Things were slowing down at work. Kate and I both noticed that the amount of clients coming into the office was drastically declining. Since he knew of my eventual plans to relocate to SF, coupled with the downturn in business, it came as no surprise when I was called into my boss's office around the first of July and was told that along with Kate and two other employees, they were letting me go. I remember starting to giggle and the guy looked at me and said, "That's the strangest reaction I've ever gotten to telling someone they're being laid off." I shrugged my shoulders and replied, "The Universe is telling me to go to San Francisco now."

And so I did. It took a couple weeks to make arrangements, but I left Bernie to house sit for the month or so I anticipated it would take me to find work, and loaded up my car and headed northwest. Our mutual friend Lee was already in SF; he'd accompanied us on a visit to The City the previous December and came back as smitten as we'd been. I'd be crashing with him at the home of a couple of his friends. It would be an adventure!

And quite an adventure it was. Another story for another time. "The City will chew you up and spit you out!" But suffice to say that nearly our whole gang had become San Francisco residents by October of that year.

I saw Kate briefly when I flew back to Tucson for Christmas. She had been having trouble finding work and wasn't in the best head space. In January or February I got a strange phone call from her. She was in good spirits; decidedly better than she had been in when I saw her. She told me that she (in her own words, just to make it clear) had made a breakthrough; she "had decided she was a man trapped in a woman's body" and was ready to do something about it. She had adopted the name Hawk, and asked if I knew of any place in San Francisco that could help her physically transition. After regaining my composure (where had this come from?) I told her I didn't, but I knew enough even back then that before she went under the knife she'd have to go through months—if not years—of counseling, hormone therapy, and actually living the life of a man, and told her so.  Perhaps she could check with the Gay Students Organization at the University of Arizona? She said she would, and that was the last I heard from her. Subsequent attempts at reaching my work wife were unsuccessful. Her phone had been disconnected and mail went unanswered.

Every time I play Primitive Love think of Kate/Hawk and wonder if they had been successful in finding the inner peace and happiness they were seeking.