Tag: rambling

Yosemite Sam and Nerf guns

If someone is annoying you by repeatedly shooting you with a Nerf gun in the office, what do you do?  If diplomacy doesn’t work, you respond with a bigger gun.  🙂

For some reason, my intro reminded me of Yosemite Sam.  (Yeah, I watched a lot of Looney Tunes growing up.)  Here’s the quote:

Yeah?  Well, I talk LOUDLY and I carry a bigger stick.  And I use it, too!  WHAM! ~ Yosemite Sam, on foreign policy

I’m not sure I’d want Yosemite Sam as a minister of foreign affairs, but he might do better than some of the current politicians…  He would certainly be more amusing and funny, although not intentionally.  Consider this:

Whether playing a buccaneer, Arabian knight or the roughest, toughest, meanest, old prospector west of the Pecos, Yosemite Sam’s slapstick physical humor always sets his audiences laughing.  This rootin’, tootin’, six gun shootin’, varmit-huntin’ wild man of the west believes in his own innate superiority and charges his way into one misadventure after another — and as loudly as possible.  The only thing shorter than the fuse on his temper is Yosemite Sam himself and this walking keg of dynamite is always ready for action.  From his ten gallon hat to his fire red mustache, Yosemite Sam is the most flamboyant of all Bugs Bunny’s adversaries.  But the funniest thing about Yosemite Sam is that he has absolutely no sense of humor which makes him the perfect foil, or fool, for Bugs Bunny.

It’s amazing that he’s so funny despite having no sense of humor.  Ironically, that might suit him as a politician, since most of them are professionally humorless (which is lame and boring).

a snow hurricane

This post may seem contrived given the content versus the current news event of Hurricane Sandy combining with a cold front to bring potentially unprecedented devastation, but I assure you this was written a couple of weeks ago.  It’s ironic because we discussed a snow hurricane, but considered it just rambling because that’s impossible, right?  Hurricanes require warmth to survive, yet this one may produce wintry precipitation with this “100-year-storm” / nor’easter / frankenstorm.  Anyway, enough with the irony… let’s get to the rambling.

Recently we had discussed how to prevent hurricanes, and one of our regular readers had the idea of using some of our existing technology that we’ve already invented.  His suggestion was to use our snow machine to create snow in the Sahara Desert.  (Yes, we have built a snow machine from scratch.  Follow the link if this is news to you.)  Based on just those parameters, it sounds like a win-win scenario, but there’s a flaw in the slaw.  However, I am getting ahead of myself.  Let me first explain his idea.

Of course we’d have to scale up our snow making machine many times, but this can be done given enough funds.  But as you might have already surmised, such an idea has a few logistical issues.  Making snow requires water, which is typically scarce in a desert.  (Yeah, yeah, that goes without saying — it’s a desert.  Duh!)

So this “solution” might be impossible.  But for a moment, let’s imagine the possibilities.  Given enough snow injected into the hurricane-forming cycle, could it create a snow hurricane?  (A snowicane?  A hurrisnow?  We’ll have to work on the name.)  But imagine a snowstorm in the form of a hurricane that comes to the southern U.S. and dumps snow everywhere… that would be awesome!  (For those of you not familiar with the southern U.S., it rarely snows here.  It’s a BIG DEAL when we get accumulation on the ground — schools cancel (sometimes even at the mere forecast of snow), businesses close, and people play in the snow and make snow ice cream.  Here in Arkansas, we rarely get more than a couple inches a year.)  Although, besides the awesomeness of it, there would be collateral damages, and then we’d be working on a way to stop it, so perhaps we aren’t really fixing the problem with this “solution”.  But personally, I’d rather have several inches of snow than several inches of rain, so I’m all for it.

Perhaps we should apply science here instead of just rambling.  (What an idea!)  Hurricanes may start with dry desert air, but they have to accumulate moisture at some point.  If we could make that moisture cold enough and somehow get it to stay cold… well, this might be impossible as well.

This idea will require a professional-grade think tank.  Fortunately, the Buffet o’ Blog R&D (Research & Development) team is qualified for such a task.  What we’ll need is (can you guess?): a lot of money.  Now, I know, you’re thinking it doesn’t take money to think, and there’s some truthiness to that.  But a hurricane-scale snow maker isn’t gonna build itself, plus there are numerous logistical impossibilities to overcome, and we’d need time away from our jobs to accomplish this mission.  So if you want a hurricane made of snow, you’re gonna have to send us money.  There’s simply no other way.  Again, we can print off some official certificates saying you’re awesome for contributing to this world-changing project, and you’ll feel warm and toasty inside (except when you’re out playing in the snow).

If you have money but doubt our plan, we could draw up some diagrams and flow charts to send to you in exchange for funding.  🙂  We could also meet to discuss this over good pizza…  (Our R&D department usually meet while eating… we’ve found it’s good for morale and having good ideas.)

Star Wars music on the radio

I just got in my truck and the radio was playing the Star Wars main theme at the big majestic part, and it made me want to go save the universe.  I thought about it, but my wife really wants me to get the dishes done today, and that’s gonna take a while.  There’s some other household chores, too.  I know, saving the world is a big deal, but as the saying goes, if your wife ain’t happy, no one’s happy.  Oh well.  Such is wife.

You might be wondering what radio station I was listening to that would play Star Wars music.  It would be a good thing if all radio stations occasionally branched beyond their “top 40” policy and played all-around cool songs like the Star Wars theme.  There are a few stations now that play a wide variety, which is refreshing, but most are stuck in a deep rut.

Anyway, I was listening to KLRE 90.5 FM, which is the classical music station in Little Rock.  I know, some of you probably just tuned out (no pun intended) when I said classical music.  It’s normal these days.  Many people think they don’t like classical music, although I suspect a lot of people do but don’t realize it.  I won’t get into a long discussion on that (maybe another day), but consider this next one point.

John Williams composed all the Star Wars music (which is over 14 hours of orchestral music), along with the music for Superman, Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, E.T., Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Home Alone, and the first three Harry Potter films, along with many others (including most movies by Steven Spielberg).  He also composed the theme music for four Olympic Games and NBC Sunday Night Football.  The next time you watch any of these movies, listen to the music and realize most of it is classical music.

I realize the emotions of the movie make the music more memorable, but also consider that the music makes the movie more emotional.  It works both ways.  As George Lucas said, “Sound is fifty percent of the motion picture experience.”  Many of the songs from the movies referenced above can stand on their own as good music.

crazy quotes by Charlie Sheen

You’ve probably heard of the recent self-destruction of Charlie Sheen in recent interviews.  He is all kind of rambling these days… some call is Sheenglish.  I normally don’t write on Hollywood / celebrity gossip, but since this blog specializes in randomness, this fits in.   So below are some quotes by Charlie Sheen, just from the past couple of weeks.  At this time, people are wondering if he’s on drugs or if he’s gone crazy (in the literal sense).  So far it sounds like all-of-the-above.  BTW, I didn’t bother to include the context for these quotes because they still don’t make sense even with it.

“I am on a drug. It’s called ‘Charlie Sheen!’ It’s not available because if you try it once you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”

“I’m a high priest vatican assassin warlock. I don’t know. All these words just sound cool together. They come from my grand wizard master.”

“When you’ve got tiger blood and Adonis DNA, it’s like, get with the program dude.”

“I’ve been the aw-shucks guy with this … rockstar life, so now I’m going to completely embrace it. I’m going to wrap both arms around it and love it violently, and defend it violently, through violent hatred.”

“I am a peaceful man with bad intentions.”

“You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like dude, can’t handle it, unplug this… It fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this terrestrial realm.”

“I wish him nothing but pain in his silly travels especially if they wind up in my octagon. Clearly I have defeated this earthworm [show creator Chuck Lorrie] with my words – imagine what I would have done with my fire breathing fists.”

“I’m sorry man, I got magic and I’ve got poetry in my fingertips, you know, most of the time, and this includes naps. I’m an F-18, bro.”

“There are parts of me that are Dennis Hopper.”

“[CBS] picked a fight with a warlock.”

“I think I’m worth over $1 billion but that’s just on a cellular level.”

“I dare anyone to debate me on things.”

[On salary expectations] “I’m not [broke] but I was kind of counting on some of that money to get me through the summer. Now I’ve got to like work. But that’s alright. Work’s good. Work fuels the soul.”

On that last one he sounds like a professional athlete… Still illogical considering he was making $2 million per episode, but at least he was on topic for a change.

As someone who is familiar with the flowing of randomness, I’m impressed by just how random his word associations are.  It’s hard to imagine how someone in their right mind could be quite that random that often.   It sounds like we are witnessing a train wreck in progress — you don’t want to see it happen, but yet you can’t hardly look away…