We won!
Finally, after all these years, I’ve won an auction on eBay. Seems like I’m always bidding on things everyone else wants, and that those everyone elses really really like using those irritating widgets that bid for them in the last 2 seconds of the auction. I hate that! This time, I monitored the last two minutes of the auction second by second, upping my bid erratically to try to confound competitors who probably don’t even exist. But my desire to win had become gonadal in its singlemindedness, and win I would.
Oh. What did we win?
It’s
A VERY NICE FUTABA 6-CHANNEL COMPUTER RADIO SYSTEM T6XA (s) ON 50 MHz CH 50.800 WITH 4-SERVO’S, THREE ARE FP-S148, AND ONE IS A S3003, THAT ALL WORK EXCELLENT. THE RECEIVER IS A FP-R127DF 7-CHANNEL DUAL CONVERSION, AND COMES WITH SWITCH HARNESS, 600 mah BATTERY AND CHARGER. THE RADIO AND FLIGHT PACK BATTERIES ARE GOOD AND READY TO GO.
Jake wants to start building real combat robots, not those build-from-kit things you can’t even find anymore. Our first project requires only three channels, but this way we have room to grow — six channels (if I’m not mistaken) would give us four-wheel drive plus two weapons. Or perhaps two-wheel drive plus two weapons plus two blinky lights to send enemy robots into epileptic fits! Yeah, I like that.
With Battlebots coming back (supposedly), we have to work fast if we’re going to compete.
We bought a couple of wheels today, an R/C Solid State D-Switch yesterday, and we won the radio today.
I think I need a couple of motors.
Bet you didn’t know I was such a gearhead, eh?
D.
Trans-cendant
Spam killed me.
More precisely, the uber-geniuses at BlewHost suspended me because I was the victim of a spam attack. Reminds me of the time I was five and I got into my dad’s razors (back when razors were double-sided, and you had to verrrrry carefully mount them into your razor holder thingie) and slashed up a finger, and my dad told my mom that she should clean me up, get a band aid on it, and bring me back for a spanking. Excuse me? I just learned my lesson, thank you very much. As I recall, I made my point as succinctly and clearly as a five-year-old under threat of spanking could, and I escaped corporal punishment.
But not this time. Not only am I slammed by porn-spammers, but then the shvanzwads at Blewhost suspend me without warning, and it takes me THREE calls before I finally get someone who can tell me what to do.
The first two guys told me I would have to delete all my comments and then disable the blog to new comments. (Um, hey guys? You do know what a blog is, right?) One of the two convinced me to eliminate most of my plug-ins.
The last guy figured out the problem and guided me to the proper spot in cPanel. Five thousand deleted files later, my blog is up and running.
These porn-spams were interesting. Most linked to a site with transsexual-labia in the URL, and the commenter’s names all had ‘trans’ in them. Here, I saved several:
Illinois department of trans
Where can I buy a Pontiac Trans Am
Trans Oceanic Shipping
Jansport Trans Backpack
Trans Siberia Orchestra
Trans Link Golden Gate Transit
and best of all
Trans Canada
I would like to hurt these spammers. I would like to send 1000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and 10,000 Mormons to their doors. I would like to spam them with ads for the latest Amy Grant CD. I would like for them to become targets of our national legislature’s top moral watchdogs, Senator Larry “I am not gay” Craig and Senator David “Diaper Boy” Vitter.
But I’ll be content if I can reinstall my plug-ins.
D.
The post-MTV generation
Jake was watching music videos on YouTube tonight.
“That’s the one that turned me on to the Dandy Warhols,” I told him. “Trent Reznor did a special on MTV, something like two hours of his favorite videos. The stuff he listened to at the time.”
“Now THAT is a great video,” I told him a little later. “It’s a good one because I didn’t much like the song until I saw the video, and then I really liked the song.”
So he was like all meh to the whole thing. We watched a few more videos. I made him search YouTube for “Mark Romanek” and I pointed out that he had seen Romanek’s videos for Perfect Drug and Closer.
Still no interest from The Boy.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you even watching this stuff?”
“I like listening to the music,” he said.
D.
Mothballs
Weird how smells can take you back.
No one uses moth balls anymore — at least, not anyone I know. I don’t think we used them in our household when we were growing up . . . but my grandparents did. I never knew that until now.
On the way back from the grocery store, I stopped off at a local Thai market. I had been meaning to check out this store for the last few months, but hadn’t gotten around to it. But, hey, I want to get back into cooking Thai food, so no time like the present.
I bought three different kinds of rice noodles: the circular wrappers for making cuon, the thin vermicelli used to stuff the cuon, and the wider noodles for making pad thai. I bought red, green, and masamun curry paste, some coconut milk, two different kinds of squid snacks, a mix for making satay chicken (because I’m lazy), and pre-made sauce for pad thai (see last parenthetical). I went up and down the aisles twice so that I wouldn’t miss anything important, and it was the back of the store that brought me to a halt.
Actually, it was the huge crystals of alum that caught my attention. I wonder what it’s used for? But when I got closer to examine that bag, I found another bag labeled “naphthalene balls.” You can smell them right through the plastic. I stood there for a few minutes, smelling the bag, and even after I moved on, I kept smelling my fingers. I was back in the house on Atlantic, and it seemed a small matter to close my eyes, step forward, and enter that forever-dark living room with its shmatte-covered sofa, the chair wrapped in plastic that No One Must Ever Sit In, the TV no one ever turned on, the cabinets of tchotchkes. I can see my grandfather sitting in his recliner, I can hear my grandmother yelling from the kitchen. (The GM: Off your ass, useless! The GF: Shut up, you toothless witch! Half in English, half in Yiddish.) A few steps further and I’m sitting on the wooden bench of the kitchen’s dinette. My grandmother gives me a slice of my grandfather’s bakery’s rye bread mit shmear (margarine, never butter) and her signature beverage, watered down RC Cola, or something very much like it.
Something tells me that smell was everywhere. Something tells me you only need to bring a bag of naphthalene balls into your house and leave it there one night, and your house will forever have that smell.
The package said: Covers odor of mildew and decay with sweet smell.
I wonder what my grandparents were trying to hide? Maybe the odor of that monkey my grandfather kept hidden in the attic, the one he would never show me.
D.
State-dependent memory
You have to understand, the faceless dude and the werewolf and the guy spouting technicolor blood out of his neck only make sense if you’re stoned. Then, these things make perfect sense. But not once the high wears off. Oh, you can try and write out an explanation for everything while you’re high, but you won’t be able to understand it later. That’s okay, though, since you’ll understand what you’ve written next time you’re high.
I saw The Song Remains the Same at the Rosemead multiplex, when the movie first came out. That means I was fourteen going on fifteen, which means some adult had to drive me to the movie and pick me up. Think about that for a bit. At the time, I thought my parents were overprotective, but they really weren’t. I don’t think they much cared where I went or who I hung out with. They had already conceived my brother and my sister, so I was Darwinian gravy.
Mind you, I didn’t smoke pot at The Song Remains the Same. I didn’t have to — everyone else in the theater was doing it for me. I had never paid much attention to Led Zeppelin before this movie, nor did I pay much attention to them afterwards. Still, the movie clung to me like dope smoke . . . shower and sleep it off and it’s gone from the memory banks.
I mean, I really don’t remember the chick at the end of this 9 minute snip, the one with the glowing red eyes. You’d think I would remember something like that.
Just now I was trying to explain to Jake that the merit of The Song Remains the Same is that it deepens one’s appreciation for This is Spinal Tap. But now I’m not so sure. The Spinal Tap movie made sense.
We got off on this tangent because for some reason, my boy had discovered The Great Stairway to Heaven Backmasking Controversy (with audio of the relevant passage played backwards and forwards!) Remember when subliminals were a big deal? Remember when there was so little else fucked up in the world that subliminals could be something even remotely big dealish?
I remember those times.
Several days ago, quite out of the blue, my subconscious pushed the words into my forebrain: who will remember our works. I’m still not sure what it means. But it strikes me that the nature of art is that is remembered, while crap disappears with a shower and a good night’s sleep. This is as it should be. Otherwise, the clutter would be horrific.
D.
Last refuge of the blocked writer?
. . . writing reviews.
Here’s my review of Talebones #37. Enjoy.
D.
It has to be said
Happy Freakin’ New Year
I resolve to feed my brains to fewer zombies. How about you?
D.
This will consume your every waking moment
. . . if you let it.
The Spoony Experiment.
Imagine the arcane principles of Mystery Science Theater 3000 applied to the crappiest video games ever made, yet freed of the censoring influence of television. That’s Spoony. An example:
The X-Files review (sorry, didn’t embed well)
Noah Antwiler, the creative genius behind The Spoony Experiment, rips movies in addition to video games . . . but Jake and I don’t bother with that end of the site.
D.
‘Tis the Season
For latkes! Below, my recipe for potato pancakes (from a 2005 post). But first: anyone up for live blogging tonight, or are y’all still Christmasing?
Latkes (potato pancakes) For my wife and son, both small eaters, I use one good-sized russet potato, one small onion, and two eggs.
Peel and coarsely grate the potato. Add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt and toss to mix. Over the next few minutes, the potato will give up some of its water. You can pour this off, but in my experience the ultimate pancake is only subtly different.
Beat two eggs in with the potatos. Add a heaping tablespoon of matzo meal (NO, flour or bread crumbs will NOT substitute) and mix well. Coarsely grate one small onion and add this to the mix. The onion is optional, but I think it adds considerable character. Freshly ground black pepper is a must.
The matzo meal will absorb some of the liquid over the next five minutes. That’s about as long as I have patience to wait. In a nonstick pan, heat vegetable oil (a thin layer — don’t skimp, but your pancake shouldn’t swim, either) until a bit of potato sizzles.
I make my latkes about three inches across. I flatten them slightly with a fork. If your cooktop doesn’t heat evenly, turn the pancakes before flipping. Before flipping, you want ‘em GBD, as Alton Brown says (golden brown and delicious). The second side will brown more unevenly than the first, but don’t worry about that.
Drain. Serve with sour cream.
Or just eat ’em hot.
D.