The Space Toast Pages

Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.

Retired Addiction

Barnaby Ward's Sixteen Miles to Merricks and Other Works
I've mancrushed on Ward before. Picking up his graphic novel was worth the money. Now where's the next one, Barnaby?

Building the Shack, Part 12

Ended up spending most of the winter on the walls, working on warm days. Started by cutting and stapling sheet plastic over the frame where the walls would go.

Collected usable scrap lumber from around the property. Angle cut boards on the table saw to 30°. Made perpendicular cuts in the workshop with hand-held circular saw.

Started on the west wall. Didn't beat the snow. Got most of the west wall nailed into place standing on saw horses. Finished on the extension ladder.

East wall was the most complicated. Hung the entension ladder on the roof peak from the foot of the banking, being careful of the picture window.

Made a platform with the ladder, to get the board above the window nailed into place. Steadied the ladder by running ratcheting straps out from the side windows, and finished the roof peak late one night in February under freezing drizzle.

South wall easier. Stood on the block of styrofoam from the picture window installation to get the top board in place. Worked up from the bottom. Recut the final board a few times.

North wall finished last. Cut the final board trapezoidally by hand.

Finished this afternoon, in sunny 45° spring weather.

Caulking needed in places, but walls are in place.

YouTube Captioning: Duck and Cover

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And to the sound of the Dumb Dumb song, we welcome you to a classic piece of WTF.

The Allegory of Bertrand Russell

Clearly.

Wh-? Where did-?!
Oh god, the monkey was a suicide bomber!

♫ He didn't speak unless spoken to...

"FOR THE CAUSE -!"

*bits of dead monkey begin to fall*

"Plod along mindlessly, and withdraw within yourself when there's unrest."

*instinctively mashes the Top Menu button*

"...any unathorized rebroadcast, retransmission, or relocation without the express written consent of the Civil Defense Administration is prohibited."

I think Bert's pretty much "out" already.

"You're a puss."

Scenes from "Burt the Turtle Fights VD"

Emotionally?

Sometimes monkeys just blow themselves up.

"Under my hairpiece, children."

But do we understand its needs?

"Such as school desegregation."

Alert the FBI if you see anyone talking to unknown fires in your neighborhood.

Hitler!

"If you ever need to drill a fire."

"Herbie: Fully Loaded" should be avoided at all costs.

"Our ragamuffins shall protect us from the cars."

Or risk suburban ostracism.

Pre-Tweens

Chances are you won't.

If you're not lucky enough to be vaporized instantly.

Or will again.

Miss Rumphius: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

"Burn your shadow into the pavement..."

"It can menace people near drugstores, and smoke marijuana."

Please. Bert is boiled like a sweet in there.

"Oh yeah. Oh god yeah."

Did you know your homeowner policy doesn't cover atomic brinksmanship?

Shame-wise

With your face?

Cover your back with your septum.

"Isn't this f*cking bullsh*t? Wouldn't we f*cking die anyway?"

"Shut the f*ck up, Betty."

Sometimes you will see the monkey, sometimes you will not.

"Permission to go faster, sir."

"PBS. No, the Mrs. Slocum's Pussy tote bag is at the $200 level."

"Does that look like an atomic bomb to you?"

You may be playing with yourself when the signal comes.

FASTER! TRAMPLE EACH OTHER, YOU F*CKERS! THE WEAK WILL NOT REPRODUCE UNDER THE NEW ORDER!

"Galactus!"

In your perfectly pressed suit.

Near the liqueur cabinet.

If you're in Chinatown...

"It's in my soundproofed apartment, right up there..."

"Let go of my elbow."

"Forget it, baby. It's... Chinatown."

"...you may encounter a Beatnik."

"Me?"

Unless you're The Flash.

"When they dump your books, dive into a fetal position, screaming like a little girl. Watch..."

"Ugod! Wah! Stopit! Stopit! Aaugh!"

"See how he's wet himself?"

"That'll keep them from stuffing you in the janitor's cart."

"Expect them to spit on you. Fortunately, no one can jack off fast enough to soil you in that manner."

I'll take my chances with the bomb, thank you.

Except the room itself.

"IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD, KIDS! INCEST! DRUGS! WAAAH! HA HA HA HA!"

"...they'll never live down the shame."

"Out of my way, b*tch!"

"Too bad they won't be around to enjoy it."

"A feeble attempt, really."

"Future civilizations will be amused by the shapes they leave in the half-molten topsoil."

GAH! They are!

Did she put her head through the cladding?

Or her head will be preserved, anyway.

"Tony regularly wets the bed as a result. Tony's dad beats him."

Tony, can I recommend the other side of the wall?

Tony thinks that if he can't see the shockwave, it can't see him.

"Notice how he weeps, and curses Oppenheimer."

Any unnecessary rubbing or thrusting he does is condoned by the United States Government.

"He's armed, so be careful of him in the ensuing anarchy."

"No matter how mad his demands."

The armored schoolbus

"Has it ever been cleaned down here?!"

"The glass may melt and splash across your body, casting your final scream in a hideous crystalline death mask."

"Stop eating the cooking fuel!"

If they know what's good for them.

Or they believe it, and that's the important bit for civil control.

As long as it's made of 3" thick lead.

"Which shouldn't be much of anywhere, or you'll just be getting what's coming to you, you slut."

That could have gone so many kinds of wrong.

"In all likelihood, falling structures will do this for you."

"Seriously, what the f*ck?"

"Review the life flashing before your eyes, as the air fills with a sound and smell of sizzling bacon."

"...lose that virginity fast."

Kill every monkey you see.

Don't call him Barry Allen?

Next from Astoria Public Schools, don't miss "It's a M.A.D., M.A.D., M.A.D., M.A.D. Cold War."

Capped by Space Toast
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YouTube Captioning: Sylvia Browne's Predictions for 2009 (Part 1)

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We were. Let's see how you did.

You're not going to change them after the fact like you do on your website, are you?

Book sales down, Syl?

"Ribbit."

Puff puff. Pass. Prophecy. Prevaricate.

That wasn't the first one?

YOU'RE NOT A FRAUD!

Yes yes, my liberal sensibilities are sufficiently buttered up. Can we move on to the predictions?

Everyone expected the December interest rate cut you're referring to, and there was no cut in all of 2009.

Mexican labor?

And many things we don't.

Are we talking about lamp oil? Fish oil?

We sure did expect it though, didn't we?

You fail again, Professor Umbridge.

No, I know about Kermit Roosevelt overthrowing the elected government and installing the Shah in Iran.

All the live-long day.

Don't we see that every year?

All in December?

Strange that you didn't foresee the re-escalation in Afghanistan.

"Lending at the biggest U.S. banks has fallen more sharply than realized, despite government efforts to pump billions of dollars into the financial sector." ~The Wall Street Journal, 2009

"The tally of bank failures easily broke past the No. 100 milestone on Friday night, with regulators announcing the year's 106th closure. That's more than four times the number that were closed in 2008..." ~CNN Money, 2009

"I mean, when the party I predicted gets into the White House..."

In 2009?

With Brooks Garner. Brooks?

(Not really funny. He's just my old roommate.)

You're a psychic. Aren't you supposed to just know?

Yes, I'm sure somewhere "the islands" will have bad weather. Thank you.

"The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was below average in activity, with a total of nine named storms and three hurricanes. For the first time since 2006, no storm brought hurricane force winds to the United States..." ~Wikipedia

"The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season was below average in activity, with a total of nine named storms and three hurricanes. For the first time since 2006, no storm brought hurricane force winds to the United States..." ~Wikipedia

"...she telephoned a psychic."

Capped by Space Toast
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The YouTube Captioning Thing Upgraded

I've added a second mode to the YouTube Captioning Thing. The original version allowed you to create a running commentary beneath any embeddable YouTube video. The new version has a second mode where the captions appear directly on top of the video. Here's a demo:

peZqaHd06xk

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The original Lloyd Thaxton was a retired Grand Rapids machinist who would stand in a long raincoat and leer at the camera for an hour a day. His program ran from 1952-1960.

Back when you had to be drunk to work as a television announcer.

"With a sound as gay as their sportcoats!"

*crowd cheers*

The escalation in Vietnam?

"And other pop culture cliche crap! DAMMIT, JACK, WHERE'D YOU-? Oh, it's in my hand..."

Thank god we invented teen sex.

What's Dorothy doing back there? The Funky Mashed Chicken Potato?

This is what the hep crowd would be doing on a Friday night if Strom Thurmond had won the Presidency.

Where?

That's Lake Michigan.

Well, there are a few.

I thought you said there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

.
o
O
(Two more verses! I can make it!)
*puff puff*

The abandoned mortuary?

Maybe the old vomit factory?

Oh! The weird church on the dump road, in that trailer.

Over... over here now, dude.

Hello?

.
o
O
(It can't be my healthy 3-pack-a-day habit, why am I so beat?)

Gomez Adams: Bandleader

The grand tradition of American songs that use up their material in 90 seconds but just keep f*cking going.

↑

Thinking about Rayon dress pants on a bicycle seat, I hope this guy didn't have balls when he started doing this.

Dorothy, what are you doing?

Wait, he's not really singing!

"WE'RE EASILY ENTERTAINED!"

"Anyone got some Gold Bond?"

"...he'll never work in this business again."

That's the choke.

Christian Bale, Nixon Youth↑

"Ixnay on your ex-life-say."

"David, I understand you're warehoused at the vocational school..."

"Michelle, you're not any part negro are you? It doesn't work on negros."

"The same."

*jing jing!*

Do the faggoty little ribbons come with it?

"--and fight."

Wait, what?

Is this Britain during the rationing?

"But none for you, Dorothy -- I said 'dancers.'"

"CANNED GOODS!"

And the teenagers rebel by going away.

Capped by Space Toast
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Korean Hangul Cheat Sheet

This is a cheat sheet for cramming the basic phonemes of Korean. It's a printable PDF, and a first draft. I've noted the approximate sounds in English and Hindi, because Hindi has a better phonetic alphabet. It's mostly based on this guy's YouTube video. (He doesn't give his name, and I'm not going to look for it.) I number the order of the phonemes in the syllable blocks, rather than using his LRB/TMB system. Corrections welcome.

Panorama: The Eddy, Wiscasset, ME

Stitched together in Hugin from 17 camera phone pictures. Miller Cylindrical projection.

Panorama: Breakwater in Winter

Rockland, ME. A much balmier 20°, but breezy.

Stitched together in Hugin from 13 camera phone pictures. Stereographic projection.

Panorama: Stepped Brook

Union, ME. Air temperature about 10° F.

Stitched together in Hugin from 24 camera phone pictures. Stereographic projection.

The Fiddlers of Rome

Sneering, populist climate science denialism from a self-described Libertarian is nothing shocking, but it should be a bit beneath the New York Times science page. I'm beginning to think the best thing to do is just to sneer back, and keep asking questions about those lovely secondhand robes they've bought from the Emperor.

Leaving aside the question of whether libertarian philosophy is even flexible enough to mount a response to a problem with personalized rewards but socialized consequences, let's make sure we understand why this is denialism, and not skepticism. Climate change "denialism" relies not on a single set of arguments, but on several tiers, whose only commonality is a defense of inaction on the issue:

1. I don't "believe" in climate change, because of X,Y, Z
2. If you show that X,Y,Z are invalid, I will find new arguments U,V,W
3. If you demolish U,V,W, I will say that even if climate change is happening, there is no evidence that it is anthropogenic because of A,B,C
4. A,B,C become D,E,F through the same process that produced U,V,W
5. When D,E,F fall, I will argue that there's no evidence that it will be harmful
6. When harm is shown, I will pass the buck to the next generation, assuming they will invent some whiz-bang technology to reverse the damage
7. Why, under libertarian philosophy, anyone in the future would undertake a massive program whose only benefits are social will remain unasked; presumably in the future Libertarians will remain a fringe minority

The scientific consensus on plate tectonics is about as old as I am. It's been around much longer than that, much like our understanding of the greenhouse effect. To certain generations of Americans, though, the Earth never moved. The geological revolution was a boon to oil and gas exploration, and the free market as a whole. If modern climate science had such a rosy picture to offer, would such an unfortunate gap have ever been opened in the last ten years between scientific consensus and public perception?

Retired Addiction

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

Does a book listing all non-self-referential books contain itself? A book about the founding of modern logic has no right to be such a compulsive page-turner.

Carry On

No existential threat to the civilized world exists from fundamentalist terrorists. We do not call the madman Emperor, and we do not call the criminal Nemesis. Were terrorists able to threaten the existence of our values, the existence of our institutions of law, or even the lives of any great portion of us, they would not require the tools of cowardice. If Cheney, Beck, Limbaugh, Palin or O'Reilly will argue otherwise, let them do so, and let them stand against evidence. Fear will always be sold cheap by shameful men. Defend reason. Keep calm, and carry on.

The Sci Fi Channel

Spaceships

If you don't have artificial gravity, science fiction starts to look more like the age of schooners. To get from place to place in the solar system it'd be necessary to accelerate halfway, turn around and decelerate for the rest of the trip. Accelerating or decelerating at more than the equivalent rate of Earth gravity (9.8m/s) would be difficult for the crew to withstand for long. Jupiter is about 983 million km from Earth at its nearest point. If I'm doing the math right (and I'm probably not) accelerating halfway at 9.8m/s would take 158 hours -- about 6½ days. The full trip would take two weeks.

Laser weapons are a must. You'd only be able to see them when they shoot through gas or dust, but when it comes to shooting from one moving platform and hitting another on a logarithmic scale you won't get much time to aim. A projectile would deliver more energy with less expended, but a powerful lazer would be able to vaporize or nudge it out of the way. Opponents would basically joust on a split-second timeframe, trying to pass momentarily close enough for their computers to shoot. Ships would be no more than specks to one another, usually less. Forget about human combat.

Until someone tells me what exactly an "energy shield" would be, we'll have to assume that surviving a lazer attack means thick, dense plating all over the ship. If a lazer can vaporize a few cubic meters of hull in one shot, you'd better have a lot of hull to spare. It should be shiny too. Getting hit with a lazer might lead to some pretty refractions.

One last thought: Get used to the solar system. It takes light from the sun (which doesn't have to accelerate) eight minutes to reach Earth, four hours to reach Neptune, and four years to reach the nearest star -- itself a burnt-out red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.

Blowing some of the cobwebs out of scifi tropes, fiction begins to slip into unfamiliar grooves.

YouTube Captioning: Morning Musume - Onna ni Sachi Are

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Maxwell

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