I think I'm addicted to this meme. For those of you who missed the first two versions, here's the rules:

1. Pick 13 movies that you enjoy.


2. Pick a line of dialog that you like.


3. As people guess the film, strike out that entry.


4. NO cheating!!! That means NO: Google, IMDb, searching my archives etc.!


5. First person to correctly guess each entry gets a point. If there are any left after 24 hours they are worth 2 points.

Quotey bits are in the extended entry. Game on! more...

Posted by: Jim at 08:24 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
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Write a caption for the picture. Win fabulous prizes!*

The contest will be open until some time next week.

(Click to enlarge)

* Best caption gets 5 points with another handful thrown around to the rest of the best.

Posted by: Jim at 08:07 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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Lovely Wife is a huge U2 fan. She even likes the crap that came out after The Joshua Tree. Now THAT'S dedication.

Anyway, they're currently touring and there's a decent chance they'll be coming through Atlanta. They're continual teasing about it anyway. Lovely Wife went online to find out how much U2 tickets are running at their other venues on the tour.

Here's a serious question for y'all. What flavor of stupid do you need to be to pay $4,800+ for a ticket to see a band? Any band. Led Zeppelin reunited - not worth it. The Beatles in their prime - not worth it. Lynrd Skynrd's Back From The Dead Tour - with an intermission show where they "Go Southern" on the Dixie Chicks - not worth it. Well, maybe. Depending on what I meant by "Go Southern".

The point is that if I'm paying $4,800 to see U2 the concert better end with Bono giving me a blowjob while The Edge juggles my jewels. Whoever else is in the band can serve drinks and pastries and provide towels as needed.

I'm just saying.

Posted by: Jim at 12:44 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The tombstone contest is complete. There were four entries and four finishers so everybody wins! Putting them in 'best' order was hard enough with just four. There's just something about grave markers that makes me smile. Must be my rampant morbidity.

Anywho, on to the results:

First place, with a prize of 5 points, goes to Jen. The beautifully morbid self reference put me in mind of the classic stones at Tombstone. She really stole the show with this one:

(Click for big size)

Second place, with a 3 point prize goes to Frick. Frick went rebel with this one, profaning the ease of the tombstone generator to photoshop a message for the cockroaches of the internet:

(Click for big size)

Third place, for 2 points, is VW with a line from my favorite Monty Python skit:

(Click for big size)

Fourth place, for an additional point, is Frick again. This one came in last because it has far too great a chance of actually happening in the real world:

(Click for big size)

Congrats, y'all! The point board will be updated around lunchtime.

Posted by: Jim at 08:49 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I've written a short essay on the fundamental problem in our current public school systems. You can find it at Zero Intelligence.

RP's post here is what sparked it and his post is a good read as well.

Posted by: Jim at 08:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The first issue of the Vacant Funhouse, an online webzine featuring short stories and poetry of a horrific and macabre nature, is up. Issue #1 features the short story Hunting Todd by everybody's favorite blogger with an alarm clock themed weblog title.

Spread the word. Do links and things to the Funhouse. Make them ubersuccessful so they'll buy lots more of my stories and make me rich so I can retire to a tropic isle and blog full time.

Posted by: Jim at 09:07 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1. The Author grants permission to include his/her story entitled ___”Hunting Todd_," a work of approximately _2726____words, hereinafter referred to as the Work, in THE VACANT FUNHOUSE...

What's that about? Well, I've just sold my first story! The Vacant Funhouse is "A Webzine of horror, mystery, suspense and crime short fiction and poetry." More importantly, they've recognized my genius and purchased one of my light horror short stories for their debut issue.

Said issue will be up later today at which point I will link it prominently. Y'all should do likewise so they become amazingly successful and continue to buy my short stories.

Posted by: Jim at 11:22 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Had a busy day yesterday burning stuff and the shots knocked me for a loop. Slept bad, got up late, walked around like a zombie, farted a lot, pooped 3 times.

In other words, I didn't do any blogging this morning.

But fear not, there is something for everyone over at The Bestofme Symphony.

There's still a point contest open too. Last chance to submit your gravestone humor. Winner gets selected later today.

Posted by: Jim at 09:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Dopple-G mentioned how much he enjoys a certain type of my stories. Ones like this, or this, or maybe even this. I always aim to please, so...

The other night we had finished with the washing up and sent the boys to put their pajamas on. Burger sometimes has a difficult time with his. He can put on a two-piece with no problem but the one-piece jammies with the footies are a pain. On this occasion he had the footie jammies and he called me in to help him out. I got him dressed and then a problem surfaced.

Burger: Daddy, there's a rock in my foot.

Me: A rock? In your foot?

Burger: Yeah. In my sock.

[Side Note: All three boys smuggle rocks into the house and they turn up constantly in the oddest places. A rock in the freshly laundered pajamas wouldn't be an altogether impossible scenario.]

Me: Let me see. more...

Posted by: Jim at 02:50 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 A moral that should be learned by teachers and day care workers all over the country, I'm sad to say. Excellent story!

Posted by: RP at March 04, 2005 04:43 PM (LlPKh)

2 Oh god, I need a tissue. You made my eyes run from laughing so hard!! *grumbles* Knew I should have picked up some kleenex...

Posted by: The Webwench at March 04, 2005 07:20 PM (xflu9)

3 I recall my mother telling me similar stories about what she found in my pants...

Posted by: diamond dave at March 04, 2005 10:19 PM (l35ua)

4 I am weeping. That was frickin' great. I can oh so identify... unfortunately.

Posted by: Boudicca at March 04, 2005 11:26 PM (z7nbM)

5 Ya know, Jim, it's not so much the stories as it is how you tell them. Specifically, your creative vocabulary.... "poopicules" is simply a word you can't get anywhere else. Which is why I keep coming back here :-) And I'm just wondering if that's pronounced Greek fashion, like Hercules?... poo-PIC-yoo-leez...

Posted by: Harvey at March 05, 2005 02:24 PM (ubhj8)

6 Love it. I also love that your LW can, indeed, speak Hysterics. She's a good 'un. P.S. That whole Nekkid In The Streets thing is still not happenin'. Stupid trackback. :: kick ::

Posted by: Margi at March 05, 2005 02:58 PM (zalxZ)

7 ** wiping eyes ** after laughing so hard I teared up. I am so with you on this one.

Posted by: vw bug at March 06, 2005 03:23 PM (ILxg4)

8 That you needed reminding of one of the basic laws of parenting is a shame on us all. Might be time for a parenting guide.

Posted by: Simon at March 07, 2005 01:38 AM (OyeEA)

9 ROFL - I don't even have kids, and that just made me laugh so hard I cried! Thanks :-)

Posted by: Barb at March 08, 2005 12:35 AM (g9qHI)

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Anita's son is having a problem in math class. He does complex division problems correctly in his head but his teacher isn't looking for the answer, she's looking for long division. She wants to see the work between the question and the answer.

This is a touchy subject for me. I was exactly the same as her son with long division. I did it in my head lickety split and got the correct answer in a fraction of the time. My teacher enlisted my mother and forced me to go through long division, the very same situation that Anita and her son are in right now.

Why use long division?

The rote answer is "you need to know the process". Why? We use a process that works. We get the correct answer faster. We also get the correct answer more reliably. Long division is only a regressive loop of simple division problems. An error at any step yields a wrong answer. What is wrong with our process?

Absolutely nothing. It is superior to long division in efficiency and accuracy. The problem is that only a fraction of students can do division this way so it is not permitted in school. This is lowest-common-denominator instruction at its worst. Hold back the advanced students to the limits of the generic lesson plan. It is incredibly frustrating to somebody who is being thrashed with it.

I despised my math teacher after the long division debacle and my opinion of my mother went down several notches as well. My "math sense" went way down and I started hating math class, formerly my favorite subject. I got fed up to the point where I forcibly rejected long division. I spent months unlearning the method that had been hammered into my brain and relearning my method. Once I'd removed the taint and returned to my method the problems went away and I enjoyed math class again.

A few years later I was placed in an advanced self-paced math program. The guide/teacher not only acknowledged fragmented division (the name he gave to my particular method) but promoted it. Do a Google search for "long division in my head" and you'll see just how common this is.

My advice to Anita? Don't force your son to lose his process. Educate the educator. If she can't be brought around to the fact that there is more than one way to do division then you face a very tough choice. Maybe he can use his method to get the answer and then use long division to provide the proof. That will frustrate him too, but not as much as having to abandon his method.

When it all comes down to it though it's about education and not grades. He has the education part covered and it's superior to what the teacher is trying to impose. I'd rather have that and an "F" than to go through what I went through.

Posted by: Jim at 10:35 AM | Comments (13) | Add Comment
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It's one of those mornings...

It was very cold this morning. Cold enough that I cranked the heater in the van up all the way. As such things go it eventually got too hot.

So I turned the radio down. Amazingly it was still too hot.

I turned the radio down some more. Still too hot.

In exasperation I turned the radio off. The heat did not diminish.

Great, I thought, now I have to replace my radio.

Where's my coffee?

Update: We have a nice coffee set-up here. For creamer we have those little half-and-half containers that you peel the top off of. The first creamer went into the coffee cup normally. The second one emptied successfully. The third one caused a spill. It took me several seconds to realize that container two and three had been poured into container one.

Now you see why I need a secretary.

Posted by: Jim at 09:15 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1. Sucked on the teat of a giant cow.


2. Electrocuted myself twice while fixing a single lamp.


3. Taken a one month working vacation to Virginia Beach, courtesy of the Navy.


4. Been paid to not do karaoke.


5. Recorded a duet.


6. Been paid not to play the tape of said duet.


7. Lived with three women, all single, and not related to me. Two of them were hot, too.


8. Snorted vodka up my nose until black stuff started coming out.


9. Attacked a snow drift. (With admittedly limited success. #8 played a pivotal role in this adventure.)


10. Gone to a beach party in San Diego and woken up naked on a beach in Los Angeles.

(Found at LeeAnn's House of Cheesy Goodness)

Posted by: Jim at 05:41 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Awesome blog title: Pith and Vinegar

Adding to the awesomeness, pithandvinegar.com is available.

First one to take it wins, but you have to promise to blogroll me there.

Posted by: Jim at 09:35 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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If you sue the Supreme Court, who hears the case?

Posted by: Jim at 08:09 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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10:30
The power is out. Apparently the construction workers putting up a building across the street did something bad. Georgia Power has advised that it will be about a half hour before power is restored. In the words of our receptionist who relayed the message "...but you know how that goes."

The handful of us with laptops are good until our batteries go down, so I've launched every program on the PC and turned the screen brightness up to max.

12:15
The network finally went down. UPS units on the web servers are only good for so long. This means I no longer have anything productive to do. It also means I'm typing this in Notepad and will be uploading it later.

12:45
Lights are back on. Still no cube power so nobody with desktops can do anything. No network means I'm still playing FreeCell.

1:05
The network lives! No cube power. Two hours remaining on my laptop battery.
Time for blogreading? Heh.

1:10
People keep coming by my cube staring at my laptop covetously. It is dangerous to be among a hundred nerds who are cut off from the internet. I keep getting visions of Lord of the Flies where I'm Piggy and they want my glasses.

(Continued in the Extended Entry) more...

Posted by: Jim at 04:26 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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Somehow I pooched a recent post and lost my liveblogging of the power outage at work. Uncharacteristically I don't have a notepad file for it because it was all short updates.

My misfortune is your good fortune!

Here's what you need to do:

In Internet Explorer go to File in the menu bar and select "Work Offline". Other browsers will be similar.

Open the problem child post.

If you see a full and beautiful post with time marks on the individual entries you are looking at my lost baby. Copy the text and send it to me.

Those of you with newsreaders may also have the full post in your readers.

First person who retrieves the post gets 5 points!

This will only work if you happen to be one of the 30 or so people who saw the full post before I mangled it. Hopefully it still exists in one of your caches.

Update: dafyd wins! Yay!

Posted by: Jim at 03:41 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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(Click for big size.)

Remember the Tombstone Generator?

This looks like the perfect opportunity for a points contest. The bumpersticker one didn't work too well because you had to do a lot of picture manipulation to save it. This one pops up as a jpg you can save directly. So here's the dealy-o:

Make a tombstone (or multiple ones if you want - hell, it's a free country) and post it on your blog. Trackback to this post to enter. If you don't have a workable trackback, use the standalone trackback or comment here with the url of your post. If you don't have a blog of your own just make a tombstone and email it to me.

This contest will be open until next Monday. Multi-points will be awarded, like in a caption contest.

(Reminded of this wondrous toy by 21st Century Paladin, whose site I can no longer comment at because it thinks I'm a spammer and this makes me very sad. If all of the real spammers were dead I wouldn't run into these problems all over the damn place from people trying to protect themselves from spammers. So kill a spammer to make me happy. I'll even give you 5 points.)

Posted by: Jim at 02:48 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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We just had a hailstorm here. It was beautiful but short. You wouldn't think frozen precipitation would delight an old Buffalo son but I think this was the first real hail storm I've ever seen.

The granules were very small, maybe a millimeter, and came down strong and steady. Looking out through the hail was a curious mixture of snowstorm and rain shower. They fell like rain but had the luminescence of snow. The tiny balls of ice bounced through the leaves of the trees like the disks in a Kerplunk game. Just beautiful.

It's been over for a couple of minutes now and the accumulation is already melted. Ah, nature's wonders are ever transitory.

Posted by: Jim at 10:10 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Remember that little inquisition interview of Frank's that I did? Well he's gone and posted links to the interviews of bloggers that participated. And over in this second post he linked to all of the ones who participated who he really doesn't like missed the first time.

There's some fun stuff there. Sarcasm is candy to the well fed blogger.

Incidentally, did you notice how Frank linked my entry? Here, let me quote it for you: "Jim Peacock, fellow intemperate humorist, takes a stab." Yeah, that's right. Frank said I was a fellow intemperate humorist. I've been elevated to the peerage. In Frankspeak he's saying that I'm as good or better than he is and is asking all of his readers to switch over to my blog.

Of course now I'll be forced to wade through hundreds of comments on every post with readers fighting to say "First" for every entry. No such thing as a free lunch and all that. I can handle it though - I'm intemperate, after all.

Posted by: Jim at 08:41 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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