The Blog of Many Hats

From The Nietzsche Family Circus:

My wife, bless her, usually handles all of the late-night baby issues. She is well within her rights to wake my lazy ass up and make me do it, but she either loves me or knows that it would be easier to just deal with it than to way me up. I'm not sure which.

As a result, I'm a little untrained on how to deal with 2:00am baby issues, which is how the following conversation came to take place:

Baby: Waaaaaaaaahhhhh!

Cecilia: Okay, Bryan, I'm completely exhausted so you are going to go give the baby her pacifier. You will not make eye contact. You will not speak. You will not make any noise at all. You will not engage the baby in anyway. You will simply grab the pacifier, insert it into her mouth, make sure she has a firm grasp on the stuffed elephant, tuck her in, and return to bed. Do you understand?

Me: Sir, yes sir!

Where I work, everyone's e-mail address is first initial, last initial, at vgei.com. So if you are Pomerania Elbergort, your e-mail address is pevgeicom.

My e-mail, naturally, is bsvgeicom.

Do you have any idea how maddening it is to give that address out to somebody over the phone? This is what I usually wind up saying:

"Yes, that's 'B'-as-in-'boy', 'S'-like-'Sam', no, not 'F', 'S'! 'S'-like-'Sam'! at 'V'-like-'Victor', 'G'-like-'Gary', 'E'-like-'Edward', I dot com."

It makes me want to shoot myself in the head every time I have to say it.

Almost all of the people I know who believe in conspiracy theories have one thing in common:

They are bored out of their skulls.

I got to thinking about conspiracy theories earlier today -- the Freemasons, the Knights Templar, the Illuminati owning our currency, the government deliberately blowing up the WTC on 9/11, etc. -- and was wondering why anybody would believe such crap despite overwhelming evidence that the crap is false. And that's when it hit me: boredom.

Jennifer is even experimenting (tongue-in-cheekly) with the idea of conspiracy theorism as a hobby. This is proof positive that boredom will allow anybody to believe batshit crazy stuff.

Here's another thing that most conspiracy theorists I know have in common: they are profoundly unextraordinary human beings.

Everybody wants to feel special, and conspiracy theories are one hell of a way to go about feeling that way. After all, you have secret knowledge that "the government doesn't want you to know" and "most people refuse to believe" and that "science can't explain". But you know the truth, right? Right.

So here's an interesting experiment. The next time you feel like George Bush is trying to hide the truth about the Jesus's third cousin from the world in order to boost Haliburton's profits so they can further fund the Trilateral Commission...try taking your S.O. out to dinner. Or go see a musical. Or play basketball. Or masturbate. Anything to replace thoughts of ancient evil plots with fun in the here and now. I'm pretty sure you'll feel much better.

Fnord.

Okay, listen up restaurant owners, because I'm only going to say this one more time:

Stop using nasty ketchup!

There is only One True Ketchup^tm and that is Heinz. Hunt's is allowed if you can't find Heinz, but there are no other acceptable ketchup brands. At least not in the USA.

Now, those of you who care to look will find messages from me in alt.ketchup from the late 80's and early 90's extolling the virtues of mustard over ketchup. But I wrote those messages when I was still a teenager, and didn't understand that while off-brand mustard is palatable, generic ketchup is pure evil. Please forgive my youthful ignorance.

I just picked up a burger and fries from a local mom-and-pop burger joint. They gave me "House Recipe^(r) Tomato Ketchup^(u)". And it is fucking gross. ARGH!

Listen, people: I know that buying the right ketchup is a little bit more costly. But saving a few cents per burger is not worth alienating customers by feeding them toxic waste. STOP DOING IT AT ONCE.

Oh, and let me end by saying that there is a special circle of Hell reserved for you restauranteurs who refill Heinz bottles with generic ketchup-esque puke. Really, you people should just eat kittens and get it over with.

Update 2/10/07:

Today, my wife and I sat down to lunch and I put a brand new bottle of Heinz on the table. Cecilia is from Argentina and has only been in the USA for 3 years. She is not used to a lot of American brands. When she saw the Heinz, she said to me "I'm so glad you got that. I've decided that that brand is my favorite." I tell you, folks, I haven't been so proud since she and I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking at the last Republican Convention and she told me that, if she was allowed to vote, she would vote Republican.

The folks over at Drivl have a very funny blog about what code doesn't do. As opposed to what movies tell us it does

Check it out.

Oh, and while we're dispelling code and coder stereotypes, I'll toss in my two cents: real programmers abhor animation of any kind. Yes, games are animated. And graphics designers and movie makers need to deal with animation. But we do not build our tools to contain needless, stupid animation. Mostly, we just want to get our work done and animation just slows us down. So when you see a movie guy click a button, or press a key, and a remarkably complex piece of animation plays to indicate that work is being done...yeah, that's bullshit.

From an article recapping the weird news from Florida in 2006.

The Lee County school superintendent nearly started a trade war with Britain. He decided to keep a Fort Myers high school band from performing in a London parade, saying the terrorist threat was too dangerous. In response, parade officials released a statement warning British travelers about Fort Myers' crime and homicide rates, Lee County's record number of traffic deaths in 2005 and that the area is prone to "catastrophic hurricanes." The band eventually went to the United Kingdom.

The Brits really know how to say "Fuck You".

My lovely bride and I saw Spamalot this past weekend. All I can say about it is: drop whatever it is you're doing when it's in your area and go see it.

It has old favorites like "Bring out your dead!"

And it has new stuff, like Brave Sir Robin serenading Arthur to tell him "we won't succeed on Broadway if we don't have any jews."

You can find out more about it here.

If you see just one musical [lovingly] ripped off from Monty Python and the Holy Grail this year, make it Spamalot!

A particularly uninteresting post. The author pauses for a moment, deciding what to write, then decides he has nothing important to say. "This is," he thinks, probably just so that I can see what a second post on the main page would look like, with a separator after it.

Suddenly, a second paragraph occurs to him. I know, he thinks, I will experiment with the idea of using italics to indicating that I am thinking.

The post ends, anticlimactically.

This is the first sentence of the first post. This is the second sentence. This sentence serves to augment and clarify the preceeding two sentences.

This sentence of the post is here to point out that the final sentence of the first paragraph failed miserably at its job. This sentence serves to point out the the previous sentence is engaging in mindless bickering and is not actually contributing anything constructive to the post.

This sentence attempts to take the post in a whole new direction, but fails. This sentence tries to back up the previous one, but fails as well. This sentence comments on the awkwardness of having each sentence of the post refer to itself, to previous sentences in the post, and even, in some cases, to future sentences like the punk ass bitch of a sentence that begins the next paragraph.

This paragraph takes charge of the post and tells the preceeding sentences that, henceforth, there will be none of this self-referential nonsense going on. The previous sentence failed to note that the average blog reader will be put off by this drivel, but is promptly cut off in mid

Sensing that no good can come of this post, this sentence decides to end things, hoping that it will be construed as a commentary on the fragility of life and the need to live with one another in harmony. This sentence sneaks in, just before the post editor is closed, and tells the previous sentence to go back to communing with all the other pinko commie leftist sentences, noting slyly that perhaps it would find a home among the writings of Michael Focault or Noam Chomsky.