Thursday, October 28, 2010

Don't blame the duck, he just wants grapes


Duck walks into a bar and asks the bartender: hey, got any gwapes?

Bartender: No, this is a bar. We don't have any grapes.

Next day the duck walks in again and asks: hay, got any gwapes?


Bartender: no, I told you yesterday we don't have grapes. Now get outta here or I'll nail your feet to the floor!


Next day the ducks walks in again: hey, got any naiwls?


Bartender: NO I don't have any nails!


Duck: Got any gwapes then?


(this joke available online, with gifs! The internet is a wonderful thing.)

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So, I pretty much suck at telling jokes. I can't ever remember the punch line, have no rhythm, don't 'build' them correctly, and forget most of 'em as soon as I hear 'em.

Sadly, I've not yet forgotten the duck joke. And now you won't either.

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I was listening to NPR (pinko liberal commie radio, funded by a bunch of filthy hippie intellectuals and Novo Nordisc, a Swedish company probably staffed by half-nude vikings and marajuana-ridden legal prostitutes!) the other day, and there was a bump about some guy who is a neurologist has written a book about visual issues and how they relate to perception of reality (or similar theme. I forget details sometimes too). What was interesting wasn't so much the subject matter - though I do enjoy me some altered reality - but was more that this guy has two fascinating visually related deficits himself: face blindness and a tumor in his eye that causes him to hallucinate!

Freaky-deke, right?

Dwell on this, brothers and sisters: dude walks around not recognizing people, ever, not even his wife, and what little he can pin down as memorable is distorted by an eyeball tumor that makes him see things that aren't there!

If I were him, I'd be whimpering in a corner somewhere nice and dark, hoping the walls don't resume shimmying and that the person I think is my wife doesn't appear with 6 eyeballs and a carrot where her nose should be.

This, kids, is why I never took hallucinogens when the opportunity presented itself. Reality is a big enough bear to keep under control - to purposely alter it so that what you KNOW is there becomes something else entirely or things that you never expected (eg, an extra hand, tigers in your bathtub, flowers sprouting from the carpet) seems downright insane.

Of course, I don't have much depth perception and operate on monocular vision because my left eye is seriously nearsighted and my right one is farsighted, so it might well be that my reality would be your worst nightmare. I don't know for sure, but it might well be that what YOU see is very different from what presents itself to me as 'real.' It could be that I'm walking around half-baked all the time because of my vision issues.

Or that might just be the lingering effects of the '80s. We may not ever know.

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There's a cute new computer in the Tiny House. Not by any choice of ours, mind you, but rather because the old computer (clearly, 3 years of service was all it had in it) completely crapped the bed last week and is, by all accounts, now a mere paperweight.

Most of the time, a dead computer can be revived by experts to at least be able to take the data off the hard drive. Well, our computer is an overachiever, for there is NOTHING on the hard drive that can be recovered. No pictures, music files, work-related items, pictures, estimate worksheets, and did I mention pictures? 3 year's worth of them?

Did I also mention that we're getting pretty good at kicking our own butts over not backing up the files?

Let this be a lesson to you. BACK UP YOUR DISC! Save those files to someplace NOT your hard drive. Someplace NOT subject to sudden catastrophic disc crashes. Someplace safe and snuggly, where the bits and bytes can live in peace and safety, certain that they're not going to be utterly destroyed by a power surge or other misery. Because someday you might just want to look at those pictures again, to maye print them out to put in a book, to share with friends, to jar memories. And if you do not BACK UP YOUR FILES you will not be able to do this.

I'm just sayin', is all.

PSA over, Tiff out.

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