Category: Random

Don’t call it a comeback…

I’ve been here for years. 🙂 And the blog has been here. There just hasn’t been much interaction in a while. But that’s changing. I’ve missed writing, and I often have ideas that I jot down to write on sometime in the future. Well, the future is here! 🙂

If you’re curious what happened, I had children and free time approached zero, so quite a few optional activities were cut back. Life is still busy, but I’m going to allocate some time for sharing randomness and humor. The world certainly needs to laugh more these days!

So what have you missed? Well, not much in terms of new content being posted, which is unfortunate. However, the blog surpassed ONE MILLION page views, which is quite the accomplishment considering there has never been any paid advertising for it. (I suppose this is my 15 megabytes of fame.) 🙂

There’s something else that was missed around here, and that’s the community. It wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without the witty comments (and I’ll acknowledge the bad puns, too). There were a lot of “inside jokes” that were funny on their own but even better for the regulars here. And the cast of recurring characters who appeared in the comment section were definitely unique. (I wonder if that “Important Evil Genius” is still around… obviously he hasn’t taken over the world yet.)

I also recently remembered the free-for-all stories and re-read them, and there is nothing else like that. Most other stories are somewhat predictable, but these are not in any way predictable! Even the people writing on it had no idea what was going to happen in the next paragraph beyond theirs. 🙂 If you haven’t read them, it’s a good time.

Memes have become quite popular, which are somewhat like the caption contests we used to have here (filed under “Say What?”), except memes have the joke/humor printed on the picture instead of in the comments. I always enjoyed the caption contests because someone else seeing the exact same picture would think of something hilarious that I never would’ve thought of, and sometimes one funny comment would lead to another. Plus there were sometimes references to the “inside jokes” I mentioned earlier with recurring characters and stories.

Hopefully all of you subscribers will stay for the show and participate in the comments. The upcoming posts will be along the lines of what was here before — although, the theme is “randomness”, so it could be anything, but that’s the fun of it, right?

car commercial with Bo & Luke Duke

I realize many people don’t watch TV commercials anymore, or at least try to avoid them.  Many commercials are dumb and annoying.  However, every once in a while someone creates an awesome commercial, and the one below may be the best commercial of all-time.  The premise is AutoTrader helping Bo and Luke Duke find a new car.

If you aren’t familiar with the characters, they’re from The Dukes of Hazzard, which was an awesome TV show of the ’80s that you should check out.  It was much better than the movies.

And there’s no way they’d replace the General Lee, even with a Viper.  Imagine how the Viper would fare after one of those jumps… Admittedly, the original cars didn’t always survive, but they actually did the jumps and landed them.

[Update: Apparently AutoTrader pulled the video because of the confederate flag conspiracy.  What predictable knee-jerk overreaction.  Anyway, the video is updated to another source now.  It’s still a cool commercial.  And I don’t think you can even see a confederate flag in the whole video.  So why was it censored?  Think about it…]

Einstein, ACME, and science

A while back I read an article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and it had a few statistics that seem somewhat embellished to me.  Now, I’m no scientist, but I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.  And because of the anonymity of the Internet, I could be the smartest person in the room (as far you know).  Whether any of that is factual or not is largely irrelevant to this discussion, because we’re going to have fun with it.  Let’s get started, shall we?

Winding the solenoid coil of the CMS [Compact Muon Solenoid] took five years to complete. When it is fully operational, it will generate a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than the one produced by the Earth.

What could possibly go wrong?  I first think of a super magnet that Wile E. Coyote bought to catch Bugs Bunny.  It was a 10,000,000,000 volt electric magnet, in a do-it-yourself (DIY) kit sold by ACME (of course).

Actually, there’s a structure made with 12,000 tons of iron to bridle the lines of the magnetic field in the LHC so normal stuff won’t get disturbed.  So they say…  Next!

Components are assembled for A Large Ion Collider Experiment, a.k.a. ALICE, an experiment to measure the matter created in the extraordinarily high temperatures — estimated at 100,000 times hotter than the sun — that existed after the Big Bang and that will be created by the particle collider.

The Earth picks up only 0.45 billionth of the sun’s daily energy output, yet that is more than 239 trillion horsepower each day.  I realize there’s more to energy than heat, but I still question their estimate.  And even more so, I wonder what their electrical bill is…  And upon further thought, would a device creating heat that’s 100,000 times hotter than the sun contribute to global warming any?  Something has to happen to the heat — you can’t just flush it down the toilet — there are those pesky laws of thermodynamics…  🙂

Speaking of ACME, they had everything, didn’t they?  Did you know that the Animaniacs helped Einstein figure out the theory of relativity by singing the ACME song to make him feel better about himself?  I never learned that in school…

But wait, there’s more!  While watching the Wile E. Coyote video with the super magnet, I noticed it said “Zajaxi Dynamos” on one of the boxes instead of ACME.  Maybe it was a subsidiary?  I have no idea.  I’ve never noticed that before and never heard of that, so I googled it, and would you believe my search returned ZERO (0) results?  There is something that’s been around for decades for which Google had no answer whatsoever!  I’ve always figured you could find anything on the Internet, but I just proved otherwise.

So now let Buffet o’ Blog be the FIRST WEBSITE EVER to mention “Zajaxi Dynamos”!  How many times can you say your website is the first to ever do something in the history of the Internet?  We should win an award…  🙂

And since there’s no reference to what that phrase stands for, I suppose we can make it up.  Any ideas?

Why would you say that?!?

couple standing in front of burning barnI was recently visiting the in-laws around Christmas, and the conversation took an unexpected turn.  One person was telling a story they heard on the local news about a couple who were burning trash outside their house but went inside, leaving the fire unattended, and their house caught on fire.  That’s a tragic story, but they learned some “common sense” the hard way.  Anyway, there’s no need to rant on that, since the moral of the story is quite obvious.

After that part of the story, an older country woman said, somewhat agitatedly, “Why were they burning trash outside?”  That piqued my curiosity, as I was eager to hear some further explanation of that statement.  I mean, where else would you burn trash?  (Before anyone rushes to the comments to lecture on why people shouldn’t burn trash, I agree, but some people don’t have trash pickup and live in areas where burning stuff is still allowed.)

I looked around, wondering who would answer her question.  I didn’t know what to say.  There was a short pause (which is rare in those parts), and then the conversation went to a completely different topic.  That was disappointing.  Did everyone else just ignore her?  I wanted to ask about it, but given the general atmosphere at the in-laws at the time, I didn’t want to stir anything up, so I left it alone.  Nonetheless, someone should’ve at least jokingly asked her where she thinks you should burn trash.  It was a missed opportunity.