Humor Archive
I built this after seeing other contributed seals at Real Live Pirate.
The quotation means "They condemn what they do not understand" or "They condemn because they do not understand" (the quod is ambiguous) as can be seen on Wikipedia.
Just to make things easier so you don't have to try to read the small print, you can make your own official seal here.
Your results:
You are Spider-Man
| You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.  |
Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz
I've just been having too much fun watching this video.
This video (YouTube) is one of the most amazing kitten films I can recall. So many kittens. Almost doing what the filmmaker wanted. Does Cute Overload accept video as well as pictures?
OK, so I know I'm a fan of comics and comic strips (more strips than books in recent years), but I admit I didn't know the answers to several of the questions on this quiz. I did know some of them and some I recognized when I read the answers, but I found it fun. Youngsters out there (anyone under 65 or so) might find that your media savvy has a few holes in it.
Hey! I just found out that the online comic strip Unshelved will allow non-commercial websites to display their current comic for free! So I have added that to the end of the middle column of my main blog page. That makes it easier to read the strip and gives me a reason to check my own blog every day. How cool is that! Since I worked in libraries for 13 years and my wife has spent her whole career working in libraries, this strip is pretty popular with us. (Of course, wouldn't you know it. The current strip is for a Sunday and won't fit into their standard sized image. Rats.)
I ran across this quiz recently. I managed to get just over half of the quotes matched up correctly to the person who said them, but there really wasn't much difference between the two folks. Not that this means anything. Just saying...
So, I finally found my camera battery recharger. Somehow it had gotten buried under the pictured pile o'stuff.
But now that I have a working camera again, allow me to show you our newly rebuilt, refinished, and reupholstered rocker. This had been my wife's grandmother's rocker and so it is not only beautiful, but it has a lot of sentiment attached to it as well. Behold!
So, the timer on our oven has been driving us crazy, especially my wife. It has been rattling more and more for some time and had finally reached the point where even I thought something needed to be done. For a year or more if we hit the front panel of the oven or slammed the oven door it would shake whatever was loose back into place so that it would quiet down. Now it had gotten to the point where the most that would accomplish would be to shift the sound from being incredibly annoying to being merely annoying.
So, I got some tools and set to work. I found five screws around the edge of the control panel which held the panel to the face of the oven. Getting those out was relatively easy. However, the panel would only pull a couple of inches from the cabinet because there was a lever which locks the oven door for the cleaning cycle (does anyone actually use that? maybe I shouldn't say things like that out loud) and the panel couldn't slide past that. I tried to pull the knob off of the end of the lever, but it was very firmly attached, so that didn't seem to be possible. To get better access to the back of the control panel looked like it might require lots more dismantling, perhaps even pulling the oven out of the cabinet. I decided to see what could be done with the small gap I had.
I got a flashlight and pointed it down into the gap by standing it on the shelf of the cabinet above the oven which made it easier to see. I got a step stool so that I could work and see more comfortably without standing on tiptoe to look down from above the oven. My wife walked over to the circuit breaker box and flipped the breaker so that I could reach back there safely (one of these days I'll remember to do that before getting that shocking reminder of why it is a good idea to do that). When the noise stopped with the flipping of the breaker we knew I was on the right track.
First we tried spraying some canned air into the gap at the clock mechanism. We hoped that maybe there was some dirt or something that was interferring and causing the noise. Unfortunately, restoring power quickly showed that this hope was forlorn.
Next I looked at the wiring and connections as best I could. I found that there were actually two different mechanisms which were closely related. In addition to the clock with it's timer there are a couple of controls for delayed starts and for timing the cleaning cycle. My analysis of the mechanism (and it does appear to be mechanical, no modern electronics on this oven) showed that these other timer functions actually worked based on gears connected to the noisy clock. However, the wiring for controlling turning the oven on and off was not connected to the clock itself, only to these speciallized timers which are driven through the mechanical connection from the clock. Thus, any electrical mechanisms which turn the oven on and off shouldn't really be affected by whether the clock is running or not (other than that they won't be able to actually turn the oven on and off at specified times, which, again, we haven't done anyway).
Armed with this knowledge I took my wire cutters and snipped one of the wires leading to the clock itself. If I'd correctly understood what I was looking at this should disable the noise since the clock would not be running but not otherwise affect any of the other oven features which we use. So, the breaker was flipped to give it a try.
The clock made no noise with power restored. So far so good. Next I turned the dial control to "Bake" and the little light that indicates that the oven is not yet up to temperature came on. This looked promising. Finally I reached into the oven and held my hand close to the heating element. Yes! The heating element was clearly getting warmer! Success!
So I was able to break the clock so that it stopped annoying us without ruining the oven. I am once again a domestic hero and all is right with the world. Ok, with the kitchen. All right, with the oven. Whatever. I do what I can.
I am shamelessly stealing a joke from JNelson at Philosophy Over Coffee:
Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Cone find themselves all at the same time at Caesarea Philippi. Who should come along but Jesus, and he asks the four famous theologians the same Christological question, "Who do you say that I am?"Karl Barth stands up and says: "You are the totaliter aliter, the vestigious trinitatum who speaks to us in the modality of Christo-monism."
Not prepared for Barth's brevity, Paul Tillich stumbles out: "You are he who heals our ambiguities and overcomes the split of angst and existential estrangement; you are he who speaks of the theonomous viewpoint of the analogia entis, the analogy of our being and the ground of all possibilities."
Reinhold Niebuhr gives a cough for effect and says, in one breath: "You are the impossible possibility who brings to us, your children of light and children of darkness, the overwhelming oughtness in the midst of our fraught condition of estrangement and brokenness in the contiguity and existential anxieties of our ontological relationships."
Finally James Cone gets up, and raises his voice: "You are my Oppressed One, my soul's shalom, the One who was, who is, and who shall be, who has never left us alone in the struggle, the event of liberation in the lives of the oppressed struggling for freedom, and whose blackness is both literal and symbolic."
And Jesus writes in the sand, "Huh?"
I thought that I'd do something a bit different today with my Christmas music recommendations. In fact, I'm not even really recommending all of the recordings I mention here. I just wanted to identify some of the odder Christmas music which we have.
When discussing odd Christmas music you can't get much odder than Jingle Cats. Snippets of meows and yowls by cats, edited together to "sing" Christmas songs. When we first played this it freaked our cats out as they alerted when they heard these other cats "saying" nonsense. What I didn't realize when I started this post is that there are multiple Jingle Cats products including toys, books, videos, and who knows what else. This is not something we ever listen to all the way through (maybe the first time we played it), but it is on the juke box. I get a chuckle to hear one of these songs pop up ever now and then (every RARE now and then).
Having started with Jingle Cats, I guess I'll mention Woody Phillips' Toolbox Christmas. Instead of cats this features the sounds of a wide varieties of tools. The sounds of saws, hammers, and all sorts of things are edited together to make Christmas music. Unlike the Jingle Cats recordings which use normal instruments (plus some dogs barking) in addition to their distinctive cat sounds, the toolbox songs are all from shop sounds. It is impressive to hear just because it is so unexpected. But I don't have this in the regular rotation. As musical as Phillips has managed to make these sounds, it is still the sound of tools, not musical instruments. I found a little of this went a long way.
Bob Rivers has released a few different recordings of Twisted Christmas recordings. I haven't listened to these in years, but I still have a fondess for "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" sung to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun" from one of his other recordings.
Rita Ford has put together a recording of tunes played on music boxes. However, these are not your normal small music boxes. These are old boxes that use multiple different disks to play their music. They have a greater range of notes and a fuller tone than most music boxes you're likely to hear. This is a wonderful recording to have, but I find that after a few songs I'm ready to hear some singing or other instruments again. Unfortunately, Ford has concatonated multiple songs together so that the CD only has four tracks, each of which runs about 15 minutes. By the time I'm halfway through one track I'm sometimes ready for something else. Still, I would actually recommend this recording, unlike some of the others I've mentioned here.
Crash Test Dummies released a Christmas recording called Jingle All the Way. I enjoy this CD quite a bit, but I include it here because of some of the vocals. The lead singer of the group featured on their big hit "God Shuffled His Feet" has a very deep and almost mournful voice. When I hear him singing "Jingle Bells" the contrast is so striking between his voice and the usual tone of this song that I find myself laughing almost every time I hear it. For that reason alone I include it here among the oddities. Otherwise it is a very nice recording (I'm listening to it as I write this) and doesn't really fit with the oddities.
There was a limited edition release called Trojan Christmas Box Set. (Get your minds out of the gutter! Trojan is the name of the record label.) What I didn't realize when I bought it is that Trojan publishes primarily (exclusively?) reggae music. It was inexpensive and included 50 songs by artists I'd never heard of. I was hoping for some folk/blues/rock something. Instead I got reggae. I'm not sure that I've ever even listened to the whole thing. I think it is definitely odd. Amazon doesn't even seem to list it. That link is to BestPrices.com.
Clearly there are many more recordings of odd Christmas songs and songs about Christmas. I don't begin to claim that this list is comprehensive of either the market or even my own collection. However, I thought I'd share these few. What recordings do you have that you'd consider odd?
What is wrong with this picture? Here is a larger image if you are having trouble seeing it. This was in the parking lot of my bank. My confidence is inspired, for sure.
While it is still Talk Like a Pirate Day I want to encourage you all to find your true inner pirate.
My pirate name is:
Black Roger Cash
Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. You're musical, and you've got a certain style if not flair. You'll do just fine. Arr!
Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.
Well, I just left a comment on an article over at Alas, a Blog wherein I included a link to my Christus Victor blog entry. In case someone decides to follow the "Main" link from there to see what else I might have to say, I guess it would be nice to show something other than a page wherein all articles have expired.
I need a profound thought to include here so that visitors will be impressed. It would be a lot easier to come up with such a thought if I were a profound thinker. Well, "Alas" readers are a polite bunch, they won't be nasty about my slackness (I imagine).