“I have no firsthand knowledge.” Yeah, no doubt.
I landed here because I needed some fake test people for a work thing, and I inadvertently created a brother for Sherlock Holmes named “Brad”. My friend Chris and I were going over some options for Brad’s obviously much needed back story, and while Chris thought he would be a criminal mastermind driven by his spurned need for his family’s affection and approval in the shadow of his brother, I pictured him “more like Kato Kaelin”. I have to imagine that had Brad been alive today, he would have been continual fodder for tabloids and reality TV.
Read about it on Wikipedia: Kato_Kaelin
Hard bronze shell, gooey motor oil center!
Sometimes old timey technology is just really satisfying. And impressive! If I heard on Gizmodo or whatever that someone had invented a self-oiling bushing material by crushing powered metal into a porous substance that then vacuum-impregnating it will oil so that it stayed lubricated even as it wore out, I would say, “THE FUTURE IS NOW!” Sometimes, I guess, the future is 1930. When you refuse to let go of the little ’70s rotor tiller because it was your mom’s, even though it needs parts that don’t exist any more and wasn’t meant to be taken apart in the first place, this is where you end up. At the Gopher Bearing city desk, next to other retired grandpas holding oily rags containing greasy parts of junk that anyone else would have thrown in the dump. And learning what a city desk is (it’s just an obsolete phrase for a customer service counter, that’s apparently only used in certain regions of the heartland. You can’t even look that up in Wikipedia!).
Read about it on Wikipedia: Oilite
Oooh, ahhh, baby do the North Pacific Gyre!
What does it say about me as a citizen of earth that I’m actually a little disappointed that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t a great, undulating mound of water bottles sprinkled with bowling balls and coolers full of drug money that you can walk around on like the best garage sale ever? I mean, if we’re going to pollute the crap out of the ocean, it may as well be a fun place to hang out. A post-apocalyptic flotilla of weird trash-a-marans surrounding a giant windmill made of fishing net and produce bags, powering Elon Musk’s futuristic self-sustaining recycling plant that provides the base for a tiny economy of black market traders, pirates, and climate researchers, all drinking together in an underwater tavern on the weekends.
In the interest of science, and to try to be like XKCD’s What If blog, I did some math to convert the annual use of plastic microbeads from cosmetics into an imginable chunk. Somehow, I thought it would be the size of the Empire State Building, but according to my calculations, each year in the US people flush enough microbeads into the rivers, lakes, and oceans to build a cube six and a half meters on a side. Still, that’s, what… I dunno. A big cube. It would fit 561 horses inside. I had to have a discussion with my coworker about the volume of liquid horses just now… you’re welcome.
Read about it on Wikipedia: Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
“No I’m not Engligh! I was actually born in Ireland.”
“You probably don’t know anybody who has a [real] Fu Manchu.” Wow, apparently the wiki entry for the Fu-Man has been co-opted by hipsters. All I know is, when I had one, it neither increased my kung fu ability one iota, nor allow me to use peculiar animals or natural chemical weapons to do dastardly deeds. In fact, it’s amazing to me that the words “creepy” and “eew” don’t appear in the Wiki article at any point…
Read about it on Wikipedia: Fu_Manchu_moustache
“Break for lunch. Anyone have a picture of Taco Bell on them?”
First tenet: If P.T. Barnum had lived in the age of terrorism, you’d see fake bomb/ivory/truffle detectors being made that worked by showing the thing a picture and tuning it to the “vapors” of the stuff. Second tenet: We DO have this being made. Conclusion: P.T. Barnum is still alive and living in the Bermuda Triangle. Bonus conclusion: There are more minutes in the day than there used to be, and the suckers born therin have a lot more money.
Read about it on Wikpedia: ADE_651
Why you’d go B&W and lose the amazing pink outfits is beyond me, but trust me, they weren’t nurses.
I have to wonder about my childhood when a phrase like “Kiss my grits!” comes flooding back with such familiar urgency after not having thought about this show since I was, I don’t know, seven? This is going to be one of those weeks where I sit around watching reruns of something that is so terrible that only people who watched it when they were seven could even stand it. Anyone born around 1978 and not doing anything this week? The grill is hot at Mel’s Diner (at my house [on my TV {which is actually a laptop}])!
Read about it on Wikpedia: Alice (TV series)
Cousin of the Trumpeter, the Harper swan has a much harder time getting into funk bands.
I love Wiki entries that leave some of a mystery intact. I don’t consider it so much a lack of solid scientific information being included in the entry (…okay, maybe I do…) but a deference to a more poetic interpretation. This would certainly be appropriate for the entry for “swan song”, after the reading of which I’m not only left asking, “so do they sing when the die or don’t they?” but also, “ohmygod, do they really pull out a harp and accompany their own dying aria with a harp solo plucked out with their own swan lips??” There’s a “put it on my bill” joke in there somewhere…
Read about it on Wikipedia: Swan_song
“Is this shark repellent or tomato soup?”
After not remembering if this crazy boat belonged to crazy Ernest Shackleton or crazy Thor Heyerdahl, I decided it was time I familiarized myself. It turns out there was a lot less drinking of Mai Tais and playing of the boat itself with marimba mallets, and a lot more great white sharks hungry for parrots than I thought. Nevertheless, I’d have signed up. If only there were places left on earth that I could still introduce the pineapple to…
Read about it on Wikipedia: Kon-Tiki
