flooding / a friend’s hooptie

Today it’s flooding here.  We’re been under a flash flood warning for a few hours.  Some of the roads are completely covered with water.  This makes it fun to drive around.  (And I’m not being sarcastic.)  Since I have a truck, it can handle standing water well.  This morning I was creating waves about 5 feet high, splashing the windshield of some of the cars in the other lane.

If little childrens happen to be outside playing in the rain, I can create huge waves that envelope them, where it’s like they’re at Wild River Country for free.  And who doesn’t like going there?  So it’s a good deal all around.

Of course, it’s not always flooding, so this is a limited-time opportunity.  However, I have a friend named Lyn who used to have a hooptie (i.e., clunker) of a car — a 1981 Ford Mustang hatchback — and it had an interesting feature : the windshield washer fluid would shoot out the side, several feet past the car.  It barely even hit the windshield.  He used to drive around town and shoot water on unsuspecting kids that were walking or riding their bicycle on the side of the road.  One time a boy was so surprised by it that he drove his bicycle off in the ditch and wrecked.  He would also do this to friends in parking lots when they walked up to the window to talk to him.

Speaking of that car, it was truly unique and unusual.  You might think it was nice because it was a Mustang, but this wasn’t a nice one.  It was grey, not shiny, and it attracted bird poop like you wouldn’t believe.  We never knew whether it was because the car was grey or if it was just because of his bad luck (because he was left-handed), but it was like birds would come along and carpet-bomb the car with their droppings.

Perhaps the worst “feature” of the car was that it had no power whatsoever.  It would go from 0 to 25 in 8 seconds.  That’s flooring it.  Seriously.  The time to 60 was really bad.  I’m not sure our stopwatch would go that high, though, and I’m fairly certain he didn’t want us to time it.  It had an automatic transmission, and there had to be some engine problems for its performance to be that bad.  It also smoked some and idled really, really high.  1981 was arguably the worst year for Mustangs.

But there was another good feature of that car — the audio carried a long ways.  In fact, I think the bass was louder outside the vehicle than it was inside.  That’s not ideal, of course, but when you’re in high school and wanting to impress folks with your sound system from a distance, that’s a good quality.

I could tell a number of stories about that car, but I’ll save them for another time, before this post gets too long…

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adding site search tags

I’m going to start adding tags to the end of posts to help with search engine optimization.  Or, in other words, to help bring more people to the site.  The more, the merrier, they say.  (Whoever “they” is.)  You’ll notice it as links after the post.  In most cases, they will just search this blog for other posts with that word or phrase in it.  The tags have to be a link, hence the search capability.  The words will just be “tags” that specify what the post is about.

Hopefully this helps more people find the random goodness that is Buffet o’ Blog.  If it helps, I’ll keep them.  If there is no difference in traffic, then they’ll go the way of the dodo.  So it’s like an experiment.  And I just wanted to let my regular readers know what’s going on.  They’ll be visible, because they have to be.  Google penalizes your Page Rank if you hide text behind pictures or make it the same color as the background.

And the experiment starts now…  🙂

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a big hole in the universe — why is this news?

According to local news sources, astronomers have found a hole in the universe.  That sounded interesting, but there’s actually nothing to it.  There’s no actual “hole” — someone just looked out in space and found an area with nothing there.  An excerpt from the article :

Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. … It could also be a statistical freak of nature, but that’s probably less likely than a giant void, said James Condon, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. … “It looks like something to be taken seriously,” said Brent Tully, a University of Hawaii astronomer who wasn’t part of this research but studies the void closer to Earth. … Retired NASA astronomer Steve Maran said of the discovery: “This is incredibly important for something where there is nothing to it.”

So if there’s a spot in the universe with nothing there, it’s a hole?  I can look in the night sky and see lots of empty spots.  The retired NASA astronomer’s statement is puzzling, also.  He said there’s “nothing to it”, yet it is also “incredibly important”.  What does that mean?  Is it important because this new “discovery” (or lack of discovery) might result in additional millions of dollars in research grants?  I hope not!

This seems like one of the biggest non-newsworthy discoveries ever.  They put their news-sounding verbiage to it, but consider it this way : “I was looking around the sky with my telescope and radio transmissions receiver, and I found this big spot where nothing is there.”  Since when is it big news when there’s an empty patch of space?  Are there supposed to be stars in every single part of the universe?  If so, who decided that?

If there are missing stars out there, that would be newsworthy, because it would mean something — or someone — was stealing them.  But the article did not imply that at all.  So what’s the big deal?  Can anyone explain why this is news?

random mid-week links

Here’s a few links to some random stories or news that you might’ve missed, including a video clip and a movie trailer that you’ll probably want to watch.

wrecking ball lands in trunk of carA 1,500 pound wrecking ball broke loose from a demolition crane and rolled nearly three-quarters of a mile downhill, damaging multiple cars.  It finally landed in the trunk of a car at an intersection, and it pushed the car forward about 20 feet, causing it to crash into two other vehicles.

Have you ever wondered how insects look up close?  You may be surprised.

There’s been numerous movies based on video games, and most of them have siphoned.  Think of Super Mario Bros, Street Fighter, DOOM, Mortal Kombat, etc. — none were nearly as good as the game.  None of them could really capture what it was like to play the game.  Well, someone has decided to make a movie on one of the most famous games of all time, and it’s something original.  It’s .  Follow the link to see the live-action trailer.

Some guy hacked the Nintendo Wiimote to measure g-forces and acceleration of his car.  That’s very nerdy, yet it’s cool that the Wiimote has that much technology in it.

I saw an article saying pigeon dung contributed to Minneapolis bridge collapse, but I think that’s a load of crap.

You might’ve seen this one already, as it’s making the rounds via e-mail forwards.  from the Miss Teen USA 2007 competition tries to answer a question about why one-fifth of Americans are unable to locate the United States on a world map.  I’m sure she was extremely nervous, but it sounded like her answer was a collection of catch-phrases.  What does Iraq and South Africa have to do with Americans not being able to read a map?  Anyway, it’s very much random, but that wasn’t the right place for it.  Do you feel sorry for her, or is it her fault for not being prepared enough or for being too stupid?