Past week has been pretty craptacular. Got the Lyme disease and all that. Doing much better now, although my energy gets zapped in an instant if I'm doing anything physical. Also kinda sucks that I'll be taking these heavy duty antibiotics for three weeks because my brother's birthday is next weekend and I wont' be able to drink on 'em.

On a funner note, we finally got our hands on a Wii. The games that come with it are kinda lame, but we got Tiger Woods golf and it kicks major ass. My dad was up this weekend and even he loved it. It takes a bit of practice to stop yourself from hooking/slicing because you hold the controller in your hands like a golf club handle and if you twist it a little, it will hook/slice like real life golf. It's pretty insane.



We had to get Leyna a lefty character after a few rounds of this. Oops.





We only have three controllers, so we need to get one more to make it easier to do the foursome. Kinda sucks having to switch back-and-forth because untightening the strap and re-tightening it gets annoying after a while. I think it would be pretty neat to do 4 player tennis on the Wii Sports game too.

Went out fishing today with my brother. Brought the radio along and listened to the return of the Rocket and the Yankees win. It really doesn't get much better than that.

Here's the first spot we hit. Pretty calm section of the river. Nothing bit at all. Kinda sucked because there was river grass that kept getting caught on the hooks. :



I cropped out a section of the picture above for this. I love cropping.



Here's Kyle fishing the second spot on our Farmington River tour. This place was just a little ways down the path in the first two pictures.



Kyle bokeh with some little flowers.





We stuck around this spot for about an hour and caught nada. Not even a bite. So we decided to hit the road and go a bit farther down the river to another spot. Maybe a little more action elsewhere.

Here's our fishing whip.



On to the third spot! This spot on the river has a pretty strong current. Better luck here.

Looking downstream



Looking upstream



Kyle...



This spot was nice because there is a little rock island that juts out into the river.



The arsenal.



Kyle caught a pretty big rainbow trout. Go Kyle.



I was totally psyched for him because a few minutes earlier he had a monster on the line and he got it all the way in and the stupid thing fell off the hook as he was taking it out of the water. It was kinda funny to watch him try to catch it once it hit the water.

Anyways, here he is with his catch.



He was so happy.



So, needless to say, it was a friggin' awesome day. I really love nothing more than doing things with that kid. My brother is the best. I'm a pretty lucky guy to have him.

On this day in history, 1896, Henry Ford test-drives his first automobile. I think that calling it a 'test-drive' is a little misleading. I mean, if the thing goes forward even just a little bit, I would call that a huge success. It really seems like you have to grade the first automobile on a pass/fail basis.

Here he is on his 'Quadricycle'. Catchy name, Henry. Now, go hop on your Quadricycle, drive to work and fire your marketing team.



Apparently, even the first car was a chick-magnet.

Thought you might like this, Joe:



This shirt combines Lincoln, who is great, with self-defense, which everybody respects. Good thing + good thing = better thing, right? Observe the flying squirrel. Observe the houseboat. Here, in that same tradition, we bring you the iconic Abe Kido shirt.

It seems to me as though a lot of the blog posts on here lately have been about relationships. I've also noticed that a lot of music through the years have been about relationships also. Oh, and books too. I wonder if they follow some kind of offshoot of the Pareto principle (80/20 rule - 80% of them about relationships, the other 20% about 'other' stuff). I wouldn't be surprised. What is the deal with people's fascination with relationships? Hell, I haven't read a friggin' blog post about one yet that's fascinated me. The thing that really strikes me as absurd is that so many of them detail problems people have with relationships. The absurd part is that, based on the blog posts alone, it seems as though people are infatuated with relationships even though, for the most part, they all suck to some degree. Now, I realize that all relationships don't suck. Disney ones always seem to turn out well. I just think it's funny that so much of our waking consciousness seems to be wholly devoted to...well, hanging out with someone and to what degree it sucks. Even people I know in real life seem to complain all the time about their significant other. People are so strange. They make no sense to me.

Hoover Dam

Fast-Fact Pamphlet
(If Hoover Dam Were
a Scale Model Made
of Legos)


Hoover Dam weighs more than .0027 tons.

Hoover Dam contains materials salvaged from a pirate ship, a medieval castle, and a moon rover.

When operating at full capacity, Hoover Dam generates 0 million kilowatts of electricity.

If Hoover Dam were laid on its side, it would be taller than the coffee table.

Beginning in 2006, cars were no longer permitted to drive across Hoover Dam, because we don't break our toys.

Hoover Dam was once knocked over by a border collie.

Hoover Dam employs a full-time staff of two workers with yellow plastic heads.

Construction on Hoover Dam began on a Sunday afternoon in February and was completed later that evening.

Hoover Dam leaks water like a sieve.

I had a meeting at 2:00 today and I brought my stress ball to play around with because I knew I would get bored. Stupid thing broke and it shot seeds all over the place. It's kind of hard to play it cool after that happens. I'm not even stressed...as if that's what the stupid ball is for anyways. It's a toy. And I broke mine. Not...going...to...cry...

So I was sitting around on my lunch break, Googling myself as usual, when I came across this website called www.theforsakenguild.com.

http://www.theforsakenguild.com/

Basically, it is a website that is nothing more than a webpage packed with links to blog posts from Blogs 4 Me. What's the deal with this? Timbo? I have the sneaking suspicion that I've been violated....like my underwear is on the ground all ripped to shreds and my butt's a little sore but other than that, I feel fine.

From the Ken Jennings Blog:

In our continuing series of Dopey Things Your Teachers Lied About: the tongue map!

You remember the tongue map from elementary school? Sweet in the front, salty on the sides, etc.? Well, it isn’t true. It comes from a misinterpreted graph in a mistranslated German psychologist’s paper from 1901. And scientists have known about the mistake for like 30 years! Which means when my teachers were telling me about the tongue map, while I was putting pretzels and lemon juice and baking chocolate on different points of my tongue and nodding sagely at the difference…there was no difference. You can taste all tastes (oh, and there’s been more than four since 1909) pretty much equally well on all parts of the tongue.

Mindy felt bad about this because she has done this particular psychosomatic “experiment” with kindergarteners before. You’re part of the problem, Mindy! Gangway for science!



The Ken Jennings blog has got to be one of my favorite places on the interent. Learn cool things all the time and he is funny as hell. Ken Jennings is the man. 'Nodding sagely' cracks me up...

Gangway for science! :)

I was thinking about seeds this morning on the bus. Seeds are pretty neat because they have all the parts inside them that are necessary to make trees and grass and stuff. When you think about it, seeds also have the 'seed producing' parts of whatever plant they are going to be, right? Then those seed producing parts might not have seeds in them, but they have the means to produce more seeds. What are those parts? Seems to me like that part is almost like magic or something. I mean, there are the parts of a seed that will tell a tree how to make leaves and a part of the seed that tells the tree how to make bark, but the part that tells a tree how to make seeds...that's friggin' cool. Making seeds has got to be a total bitch because you gotta put all the blueprints for making trees...and how to make more seeds again...and then squeeze them all into a tiny little seed. When you think about it even more, the whole shebang is just an assemblage of atoms and it's pretty cool that nature can put together the right atoms in the right configuration to make a self-replicating organism. I wish I could configure atoms to make stuff do that. I'm pretty good with legos, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

So I was watching TV and I came across yet another of VH1's friggin 'I Love...' countdown shows. This one piqued my interest because it was 'I Love Toys'. It was totally bunk though. Number one toy - the hula hoop. The friggin' hula hoop? When was that even fun? Maybe in like the middle ages or something. Even then, I think that game where you hit the hoop with a stick and chase it would've been way more fun. Barbie and G.I. Joe were in the top 10 too, which is pretty dumb. Those toys don't do shit besides eventually get naked and grope each other clumsily. There were just way too many things wrong with the list. A friggin' tea set beat the balsa wood glider! The tea set also beat R/C cars, which is laughable. I didn't even think that a tea set was a friggin toy. It's cups!

Kites didn't even make the list. I think my childhood was a sham now.

Big Wheels did make it though. Those things were badass.

Friggin' tea set. I'm still pissed.

What was your favorite toy growing up? I swear to god, Joe...if you say 'tea set'... :)

I want to know more about dust. Dust particles are probably little pieces of something else, but what happens to them when they get to be as small as something can get? Wouldn't it be neat to be able to tell what each speck came from? What happens to them all anyways? Can they be reformed and combined to make new stuff? If not, where do they all end up? I'm sure you could glue them all together and make something, but whatever you make would just be a combination of parts of other things. Dust is freaking me out, man. I think some pieces of it are skin flakes, so there's little body parts all over the place too. Then there's saw dust. Dude, I heard the coolest thing ever about saw dust. You know how back in the olden days, before refrigeration, they used to keep ice in icehouses with sawdust (because sawdust is an insulator)...Well, some guy figured out that if you mix 14% sawdust with 86% water and then freeze it, you get a form of ice that is like a million times stronger and it melts a million times slower! It's called Pykrete (the guy's name was Pyke so Pyke + Concrete = Pykrete). I want to make some. They were going to build a huge aircraft carrier out of it and keep it cooled with internal cooling pipes. It would've been naturally bouyant even as a solid lump, so you can imagine how bouyant it would be with hollowed out chambers inside for crew and equipment. I saw a guy slamming a block of it with a hammer and he was barely making dents in it. Friggin amazing.

I think that if we didn't have noses, we would never know that scents existed. I know that sounds pretty elementary on the surface...and it probably is just a retarded thought, but whatever, I'll follow it. Say that you were the only person to have a nose and the first person to ever smell something. How would you explain that to someone? "Hey, see this thing on the middle of my face? Dude, this thing can detect invisible particles in the air and it let's me know about things that are around me that I can't see. Watch. Go into the kitchen and start cooking something. I'll stay here and then in a few minutes, I'll tell you what it is and yell it around the corner." But what if nobody ever had a nose, like ever? We would still probably be able to use science to figure out that there are microscopic particles in the air and crap, but we would never be able to detect them with our faces or without instruments. Maybe it's just me, but I'm always smelling stuff for some reason. Smelling things that don't need to be smelled. You know, just to be sure. I got a pen today from Hoovers (A D&B Company) and the end of it slides off and there is a USB flash-drive thingey in there. That's the friggen coolest. Thanks Hoovers! Your stupid stuff is way cooler than the other stupid stuff I get from companies. (By the way, it smells like new plastic). Smelling things probably evolved so that we would be able to tell what was good to eat and what wasn't. Funny to think about what it was like before that though (if it did, in fact, evolve for that reason). Animals just sticking everything in their mouth totally indiscriminately and sometimes dying, sometimes not. I wonder how the livers developed the smell gene though. You would think that this evolutionary double-blind experiment would've fizzled out after a while with all hereditary trails eventually winding up eating poison. Life sure was stupid back then.

Went and got my fishing license yesterday. My brother and I have determined that we are going to catch a fish that breaks the state record for something this year. We went lure shopping yesterday also. I think I could've spent hours looking at the 10 aisles of lures. The only ones that don't really interest me are the rubber worms. Who uses those? I'm sure some real fisherman out there is like, "Oh, you have to use purple rubber worms when you're trout fishing in a reservoir in the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday. Everybody knows that." You know what? Screw purple rubber worms. I want big, shiny, spinning lures with lots of hair all over the place and a treble hook the size of my fist. We're not going fishing for minnows...unless there is a state record for minnows.

Also, how far away from Crystal Lake do you live, Joe? Ever go fishing there? My brother and Joe R. went there last year and caught a bunch. I was thinking of heading over there at somepoint. Wanna go?

If you are going to try to predict when the end of time will be, for Pete's sake, pick a date that is beyond your own lifetime. You're just going to look like an ass if you don't. I know, I know...you won't be able to enjoy the 'I-told-you-so!' effect if you're right. Trust me. It won't even be that good anyways. Predicting the future has got to be one of the toughest jobs out there. I mean like besides weathermen...they've got super dopplars to blame when they're wrong. The regular, everyday psychic I mean. I bet they're totally kicking themselves for not going to see the guidance counselor when they had the chance. They must've always known they were going to turn out to be psychics though. I also wonder what a good psychic brings home on a good week. You know what would be a sweet job? Professional bass fisherman. It really says something about our society when you can make a decent living as a fisherman and throw every fish you catch back in the water. How would you even explain that to a caveman? "No, Undungo, we don't eat the fish. Just throw it back. See, people pay me a boatloads of money just to watch me catch the fish. I don't need the fish. Hell, I don't even like fish." Do people even eat bass? I know they eat Chilean Sea Bass, but that's just a stupid marketing ploy. Those fish used to be known as the Patagonian Toothfish, but who wants to eat a friggin' Toothfish? Not me. You rename that sucker "Chilean Sea Bass" and I'm game.

I accidentally bought a pair of pants that are too small yesterday and now I think that everybody is noticing and laughing at me secretly. I really want to go home and change them, but I don't think that I can work that out. It's really bothering me and I think I might cry, but I will hold back the tears because that would look silly.

Some attorney: "Ryan, why are you crying?

Me: "My pants are too small! Everybody is looking at me!"

Some attorney: "No, everybody is looking at you because you are on the floor crying, kicking and screaming..."

What I see when I read political discussion on the internet:

You're all wrong and shut up please I'm trying to talk and I agree totally, but you're wrong and I'm not listening I'm not listening I'm not listening...ok, I heard a little bit...and I DISAGREE TOTALLY! I wish you would stop whining and defend the country by attacking brown people or keeping brown people away from me but don't bitch about anything else because I don't like that and make sure to vote for all the douchebags all at once or I'll friggin' yell and then stomp off for a few minutes!

Bitching about the stupid government on the stupid internet is not working apparently, so give it a goddamn rest already! Go write a thousand letters to your stupid friggin' congressman or something! He wants to hear about it! Seriously! He tried really friggin' hard to get you to vote for him so that he would be able to listen to you! I didn't! I don't wanna hear it!

(I know, I don't have to read it if I don't want to...but goddammit, politics are boring as hell)

(This has nothing to do with Blogs4me either.)

End rant.

Ok, when you put a prism up to light, it breaks down the light into it's various components (colors). I want to know what happens if you put a prism up to the light and then put another prism in the refracted part...say, for instance, in the middle of the red. Would it just spit out a bunch more red on the other end because no other colors are available? What if it spit out mostly red, but then a little bit of the edge was yellow. Then you would know that you are off by just a c-hair and you could adjust it accordingly. Then, put another prism in the middle of the refracted part of the second spectrums output. Redder still? Maybe. I bet if you kept on doing this, you would have the reddest red possible. I really want to try this. I bet it would be really cool if you set them all up in like some kind of fibonacci-esqu spiral (because the red shifts to one end). But wait! What happens if the reddest part of the red doesn't line up with a true fibonacci line of spiral? I bet whatever color does is the best color there is. Actually, that angle is probably contingent on the cut of the prism anyways. Well, let's just say that it is a 60 degree angle on all three sides so it will be a perfectly symmetrical triangle. Then, align the 'prism array' on the fibonacci line so that each prism is hit by the same color in the spectrum. Whatever color at the end will probably be the best color there is because fibonacci numbers are involved and light is a constant and as close to perfect as things get (besides maybe subatomic particles like neutrinos...those things can reach Earth faster than light can from exploding supernovae. I was amazed by that.) Anyways, I bet when you combine light with fibonacci, God does a little dance and angels explode all around.

Man, I had a really bad dream last night. I was walking around Manhattan just minding my own business when I noticed that I kept seeing the same guy over and over again. Then I noticed that right before he would turn corners, he would secretly look over at me. Then I started doing subtle things to try and catch him, just to make sure, and sure enough, he was following me. Then I started running and he started running to follow me. That's when John C. Reilly showed up in a taxicab golf cart or something like that. I jumped on the side and said, "That guy is trying to catch me...Hey! Aren't you John C. Reilly?" and he just nodded and started making evasive maneuvers. We drove to a part of Manhattan that was like a really run-down old industrial part with this shell of a building that looked like it would fit right into post-WWII Dresden. There was a chainlink fence encircling it and like that yellowish grass that grows like a foot high all around it. Anyways, we ran into the building and up to the second floor. There was debris everywhere and like piles of crushed up concrete and crap like that. We looked out the window for a while and nobody came. I was almost relieved. Then it dawned on me that this was a dream. That's when I started to worry again. I knew that since I was dreaming and worried that someone was going to come around the corner then they definitely would. I thought to myself, 'Ryan, don't think that! It will only make it happen!'...then it happened. The bad guys came careening around the corner like those hordes of derelicts from a Mad Max movie. They were driving crazy tow-trucks and tractor trailer rigs all decked out in the latest post-apocalyptic fashion. Me and John C. Reilly tried to hide under a desk but there was no way we could both fit so when one of the bad guys came upstairs, we locked eyes immediately. He smiled this really crooked toothy smile and went back downstairs really fast to go tell his cohorts where I was. I told John C. Reilly that it was going to be okay because I was going to wake myself up and stop the dream right then and there. I decided the best way to do that was to jump out the window and commit dream-suicide. So, I ran towards the window and jumped out head first only to do an accidental slow-motion somersault and land right on my goddam feet! The dream wouldn't let me die! So I took off running again and I could hear the bad guy's girlfriend yell, 'There he goes!'. So I ran towards the fence and jumped like super-humanly high to get over it. That's when I realized that since I was dreaming, I could pretty much do whatever I thought about. So, I started hurdling fences by jumping up and like twisting my fingers somehow on the top of it and using my wrist strength to catapult myself over. I started going through barbed wire like it was a cobweb. Then I did the finger-twist-wrist-snap over a fence without looking where I was going and I landed in a huge friggin' pile of barbed wire. Of course. That's when I woke up and decided to watch some TV at 4:00 am.

Then I fell back asleep and had a dream where my brother and I had motorcycles and we were cruising around in the rain doing powerslides and crap. That was way more fun.