The Random Yak

An old joke, but appropriate to the spirit of the day.

June 28, 2010: Please Take My Children to Work Day

I’m not sure whether this one originally started as a plaintive cry from stay-home parents who’d finally had enough of their laundry-throwing, frosting-licking, habanero-stealing offspring, or just a joke.  But either way it sounds like a reasonably good idea.  Particularly if the people we’re talking to are teenagers working at summer jobs.

I can hardly think of a better way to encourage them not to have children too soon.  Six hours keeping little Billy out of the deep-fryer while simultaneously trying to keep a courteous tone in your head and make sure you know if the customer wants fries with that burger and shake … knowing Mom’s at home eating bon-bons and enjoying a few rare moments of silence … would convince even the most kid-friendly teenager to think twice.

As for the teens themselves, and anyone else forced persuaded to take their – or someone else’s – children to work today, I offer this advice:

Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver.

…but I saved her using my L33T World of Warcraft skillz.

There might be a bigger Gamer-Geek Tale of Awesome in the world today, but I don’t think so.

The link in a nutshell:  12 year-old Norwegian boy, out for walk in woods with sister, encounters angry moose.  (Note: moose are dangerous. They will actually try to kill you.) When the moose attacks, the boy remembers from Warcraft that a tank “taunts” to get the monster off weaker party members.  He does so (though I’m not exactly sure how he pulled it off) and when his sister runs away, Norwegian Tank Boy does what any good hunter does when danger rears its massive, shaggy head…

…he feigns death.

At which point the moose loses interest and leaves.  Making Hans Jørgen Olsen one of the few hunters I know who can also tank properly.  Nicely done, Hans.

*We apologize for the continuing movie references in the titles.  Those responsible have been sacked…(queue the llamas).

Tip of the horns to BoingBoing for today’s Linkbait Generator post.

Having difficulty coming up with something to fill the white space between the toolbar and the “publish” button?  Problem solved.  In fact, it makes a creepy-but-entertaining game for those days when I’m struggling to make sense of the Voices In My Head.  Check linkbait, and force myself to do something with whatever it gives me.

It’s like “leftover night at the blog diner.”

All kinds of awesome.  (Don’t eat the meatloaf.)

For today, however, let’s just play with the generator and see what it offers up.

Option 1:  “8 Horrible Lessons about Hippies Hollywood Teaches Kids.”  (I have four off the top of my head:  1: They all make as much money as Drew Barrymore and Val Kilmer; 2: they all LOOK like Drew Barrymore and Val Kilmer; 3: (Thanks to the failure of smell-o-vision) they all SMELL like Drew Barrymore and/or Val Kilmer (though admittedly, I’ve never smelled either one and have no care to start now); and 4: We don’t need no steenking badges.)

Option 2: (using the singular subject “Yak”) “10 Under-appreciated Things About the Yak”  (Rejected for actual posting because there’s no way I can get that list down to ten…)

Option 3:  (subject: BP oil spills) “10 Ways People Have Gotten Rich Exploiting BP Oil Spills.”  (Suddenly this doesn’t seem quite as random any more…)

Any rate, I’ve found a new game and I’ll probably check in with it from time to time.  Unless I get distracted or find something more engaging to waste the limited minutes of free airspace on.

* Extra points to those who caught the title reference.  (Statistically, 78% of you didn’t, and the others have children under 12.  The rest…keep on guessing, guessing, guessing…)

Today is Yak the Younger’s birthday.  As of 5:14 pm, he will have seen 15 full years.  In honor of the occasion, permit me to share a few Lessons Learned in the course of his lifetime:

1.  Parents should never say anything they don’t want repeated louder and more publicly.

2.  Turning your back on a 2 year old is a bad idea.  Turning your back on a teenager who can reprogram your computer is worse.

3.  Oreos, beef jerky and ice cream come only in single-serving containers.  (No matter how big the containers may appear.)

4.  A three year old with a sharpie can have a mustache if he wants one, regardless of his ability to grow hair.

5.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but habaneros can also teach you a thing or two.

6.  If you’re going to steal dad’s candy, you’ll have better chance of getting away with it if you don’t leave all the empty wrappers on his desk.

Corollary to #6:  When confronted with the wrappers, a general denial isn’t always the best choice.  Especially if there were only three people in the house at the time and two of them were asleep.

7.  There is no blessing greater than a happy, intelligent, healthy child.

Fifteen years ago this evening, I welcomed a premature baby into the world.  (For the record, I still think he did it to make sure his birthday came earlier than mine.) The doctors weren’t completely sure he would have any birthdays at all.  That he has seen fifteen, with the promise of many more, gives me a joy almost as great as that I experience when I see the man he is beginning to become.  My father would have been proud, had he lived to see his oldest grandson today.  The Random Spouse and I are proud of his achievements, impressed by his character, and occasionally mortified by his continuing insistence on proving his snark is at least as fast and well-heeled as my own.  But that, I probably should have expected.  After all, the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Happy Birthday to Yak the Younger.  May he have many, many more.

Spotted yesterday morning on the sidewalk near the Citrus Heights Town Hall:  one mother turkey and six baby turkeys.  The feathered family was walking next to an empty lot, making its way toward either the fountain in front of the town hall or the town hall itself.  As usual, one of the babies was straggling behind.  Mom didn’t notice or didn’t care.

For the record, this section of Citrus Heights is not a rural area.  The town hall is bounded on one side by residential structures, and on the others by a Dairy Queen, a Sam’s Club, the Citrus Heights Post Office and a fish and chips place.  In other words, I found it a little surprising to see a family of turkeys wandering down the street.  (Note: I didn’t even know we had wild turkeys in California, though I guess if you’re going to look for them, Sacramento is the natural place.)

All of which leads me to conclude the turkeys were on a homeschool field trip to study government, with a possible fish-and-chips and/or Blizzard treat at the conclusion of the day.

Some of you may think me odd for suggesting wild turkeys would have any interest in visiting the Citrus Heights town hall.  I say, “not so!”  Mom clearly just wanted the kids to see their own kind in their natural habitat.

I had four entries lined up this morning, ready to run for today’s posting slot, but (as occasionally happens) a late entry beats them all hands down.

Why?

Because any time you get to poke BigLaw in the eye, you take the shot, and when someone else does it for you (complete with rainbows and sparkles) you better get in line to take the laugh.  In this case, it’s a long, long line.

On April Fool’s Day, ThinkGeek (one of the best websites in the known universe) posted an ad for the following “new product” offer:

The ad bore the slogan, “Unicorn: the New White Meat.”

In itself, awesome and worthy of note.

Then, on May 5, ThinkGeek received a cease and desist letter from none other than….the U.S. National Pork Board, claiming that “Unicorn: the new white meat” infringed its trademarked slogan, “The Other White Meat.” (ThinkGeek posted the first page of the letter here.)

Now, even ignoring the fact that the Pork Board recently stated its intention to stop using the Other White Meat slogan in favor of an updated and more interesting alternative (as reported by Slashfood, and also on the ThinkGeek blog) and assuming that the Pork Board’s legal counsel had honorable intentions to protect its client’s intellectual property, the noble, high-minded village idiots attorneys at [firm-name-deleted-to-protect-the-bottom-dwelling-though-you-can-find-it-at-the-link-above] might have wanted to take a couple of things into account before popping off with an angry growler of a cease and desist letter.  Things like:

1.  This might be an April Fool’s Day prank.

2.  This might be an April Fool’s Day prank.

and

3.  Unicorn isn’t really a sustainable meat, so the slogan won’t be around all that long anyway.

In the attorneys’ defense, I can certainly understand their concern.  Lots of people have a hard time distinguishing unicorns from pigs, particularly in a legal environment, where those who oink the loudest often seem to believe they poop rainbows.

Light blogging last week.  This week promises to be worse – but for all the right reasons.

See, we have company coming today from out of town.  Some of those “virtual friends” I blogged about a while back are getting off the computer and into my guest room from which they will use their laptops for online gaming and ventrilo – enabling us to talk over the Internet from within the same house.  (There’s something exceptionally geeky, and probably creepy, about that, so we’ll just leave it there and move on.) Specifically, one of The Random Family’s much-loved and long time family friends is coming to visit this week, and bringing his two young sons with him.  (We’ll call them Thing Son 1 and Thing Son 2.) Today happens to be Son 2’s third birthday, as well as their arrival day, so Yak the Younger and I went out and found the perfect birthday present(s) for a boy-turning-three and his older-brother-soon-turning-six….

Nerf/Super Soaker Rattler. All kinds of awesome.

Because nothing says “welcome to our home” like enormous water guns.

We also picked up one for Yak the Younger, and an extra one “just in case.”  (After all, two on one isn’t fair so we really did *need* at least four.) The boys have no idea there are birthday presents waiting for them on Our Side of the Mountain, or that we’re planning a pizza party after I get back from picking them up from the airport.

Although I’m working most of the week, I’ll be playing hooky at least once and probably far too busy trying to get the work done ahead of schedule to blog reliably until the company leaves.  That’s not to say I won’t pop in from time to time.  A three year-old and a six year-old in the house pretty much guarantees Lessons Learned and Random Moments of the best possible sort – some of which I may be inclined to share.

That said, don’t count on it.  It’s 85 degrees, the pool is warm, the lawn is mowed and I have NEW WATER GUNS in the house.

Yeah.  You have a nice week too.

Last night, after an hour and a half battling on the portion of my lawn that’s rapidly becoming known as the Bermuda (grass) Triangle (time really does begin to lose its meaning there) I was visited by Yak the Younger and The Random Spouse, both of whom remembered my earlier promise to make an ice cream run “when I’ve finished in the yard.”

The resulting conversation went something like this:

YtY: Are you finished in the yard yet?

Me: Not quite.  Look at all this Bermuda grass!  It’s invading the front lawn.

RS: It will still be there tomorrow.  We want ice cream tonight.

Me: (pulling stubbornly at a clump that won’t come free, and inadvertently breaking one of the bricks on the front stairs) The ice cream will be there tomorrow too.

RS: True, but you said you’d get some tonight.

YtY (from across the lawn): Hey…what’s this? Wow.  Nasty.

RS:  What…wait, what is that?  It looks like something puked on the lawn.

YtY: Gross.  No, wait, I remember that from my science textbook.  It’s a fungus.

By now I am off the crabgrass and heading across the lawn.  My new, beautiful lawn, that squishes softly beneath my feet and makes me misty-eyed in the mornings when the dew sparkles on it.

Then I reach the place where The Random Spouse and Yak the Younger are crouched over a roughly twelve-inch wide patch of something that does look remarkably like bright yellow puke.  On my new lawn.

Me:  Well, maybe something did get sick here.

RS: (scornfully) Yeah, right.  What in the neighborhood is big enough to do that and gets this far up on the lawn?  It didn’t just fall from the sky.

Actually, at this point, I am hoping it fell from the sky.  It’s a more reassuring thought than the more likely alternatives.

YtY: I’m telling you, I saw it in the science book.  It’s a fungus.

At which point I get The Feeling.  I’ve had it before.  That sinking feeling you get when you realize the person talking to you is probably right, mainly because in similar situations he’s never been wrong.  When it comes to recognizing the odd, the unusual and the scientifically challenging, Yak the Younger has become a walking encyclopedia.  If the kid says he saw it…he saw it.

Which means there’s a fungus among us.

A quick family conference was held on the lawn while I ran to the garage, pulled out a handful of Scott’s weed killer and ran back to fling it on the offending fungus.  The crystals stuck all over it, but my efforts were met with looks I can only describe as disparaging.

YtY:  You know that’s not going to work, don’t you?

RS:  He’s right.  That’s not a weed.

Me: We don’t know exactly what it is.

YtY:  I do.  It’s a fungus, I’m telling you.

RS:  Well, it’s definitely not a weed.

Me:  I don’t have any fungicide!  But I have this, and I have to do something!

YtY:  How about that ice cream?

Realizing the local nursery was closed and I would have to wait until morning to exact my revenge on the vomitous mass clinging tenaciously to my darling lawn, I gave in and went for ice cream.  By the time I returned, the Nasty Thing On the Lawn had begun to darken and shrink slightly.  After another minor debate with YtY about whether this was merely my imagination (his opinion) or actually a positive result of the weed killer (my desperate hope reasoned opinion) we went inside and drowned our my sorrows in ice cream.

First thing this morning on the way to work, I stopped off at the nursery to ask about The Nasty Thing On the Lawn and, hopefully, to pick up some Nasty Thingicide.  Preferably the variety that works on vomitous masses.  (Note: I also got some Bermuda grass killer. Take THAT, Bermuda Triangle!)

Inside the nursery, I had a conversation with a very helpful staff member that went something like this:

Me: Thanks for the Bermuda grass killer.  Have you got anything that kills fungus?  Because I have this really nasty thing on my lawn – it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before, but I’m pretty sure it’s a fungus.  (See what I did there?  I accepted Yak the Younger’s reality and adopted it as my own!)

Helpful Staff Member: Does it look like dog vomit?

Me: (wondering if I should rename her “helpful stalker”) Yes, actually it does.

Helpful Staff Member:  It’s a fungus.  It’s Dog Vomit Fungus.

Me:  Dog…

Helpful Staff Member:  Yep.  That’s actually it’s name. Pretty gross, huh?

Me: I’d go with ‘pretty accurate’ actually.  Do you have anything that kills it?

Helpful Staff Member:  Not specifically no, but it’s easy to get rid of.  Toss some nitrogen on it and that will speed up the decay cycle.  Then you just have to remove it once it dries up.

Me:  So…something like Scott’s weed and feed?  Just toss it on there?

Helpful Staff Member:  Yeah, that would work great.

Me:  Thanks.  You made my day.

And it wasn’t a lie.  It’s a rare day when everyone in the Random Family gets to be right at the same time.  Yak the Younger gets credit for knowing a fungus when he sees it (even though technically Dog Vomit is a slime mold), The Random Spouse gets credit for pointing out that the ice cream would, in fact, make me feel better, and I’m taking credit for knowing exactly what to do with the Nasty Thing On the Lawn…even if I got there by accident.

Yesterday afternoon I broke my usual Sunday silence to blog a rather entertaining observation regarding the contractor-across-the-street and a lawnmower doing its best to impersonate a civil war cannon.

Not everyone was amused.  In particular, those of the lawnmower persuasion found it less than charming.  At least, that’s what I infer by the rest of the afternoon’s tale.

After dinner I went out front to mow the lawn.  (You remember the new lawn, right?  Good.  Moving on.) Started up the mower, which jumped to life with a satisfying and smokeless roar.  I started down the side of the lawn, but about the time I finished the first strip I remembered that I had lowered the machine to cut the back yard last weekend and had forgotten to raise it again for the front – which still requires the highest setting due to the plushy nature of the new grass.  No complaining there.

Turning off the mower, I bent down to adjust the wheel height.  The first three wheels adjusted easily, but when I tried to release the fourth one the handle caught on one of the little tabs.  I did what any reasonable yak would do: I pulled harder.  Unfortunately, the sticking tab was apparently only a decoy, because it came loose at once, sliding easily into place and putting me slightly off balance.  Without thinking, I reached out to steady myself – and set my left hand directly against the metal vent box and engine casing on the side of the mower.  You know, the one that heats up to approximately five thousand degrees the moment the mower gets turned on.  Yeah, that one.

To my credit, I did not say a Very Bad Word.  To be honest, I didn’t say much of anything, but I think they heard the yelp in Portland.  As in Maine.  All four of the fingers on my left hand seared instantly, and though I took them off the metal as quickly as I touched it, I felt a slight sticking sensation that let me know (as though any doubt remained) that this was Not The Blessing I Hoped For.  It also told me my plans to edge and weed the gardens after I mowed were definitely a thing of the past.

After spending a few seconds staring at my now print-less fingers, and watching a blister rise on the pinky with a rapidity that promised nothing good in my future, I did what any Yak (in shock) would do:  I cranked up the mower and finished the lawn.  The logic behind this went as follows:

1.  In approximately 5 minutes, at least one and probably four of my fingers are going to hurt like nobody’s business.

2.  I should really do something about that.

3.  If I do something about it now, there’s no way this lawn is getting mowed tonight.

4.  The lawn needs mowing.

5.  I’m not going to hurt any worse if I finish the lawn first, and if I get a move on I might even finish before the shock wears off and the stupidity of my actions comes home to roost.

6.  Vroom.

For the record, I did not finish mowing the lawn before the fingers began hurting, but I did finish before the pain made it impossible to continue.  I then spent the rest of the evening with my fingers on ice (or aloe, in cycles) and reading a decent book I’d been putting off.  The Random Spouse gets major credit and appreciation for limiting the head-shaking and I-told-you-so’s to one startled “You finished the lawn afterward?” and a couple of “You should probably put something on that”s – and for bringing me Tylenol when I forgot to take it the first time.

It wasn’t the most pleasant night I’ve ever had, and I got to the office late this morning as a result of too little sleep, but at least the pain is gone and it looks like I’ll only lose the skin on that one finger.

The take-home lesson in all of this?  Some of you might say “watch where you put your fingers,” but you’d be wrong.  The Lesson Learned here is never, ever, make fun of a lawnmower, even if it isn’t your own.

They hear you.  And they do not forgive.

A reading from The Yak’s Big Book of Garden Wisdom:

“If it’s on fire, you should probably unplug it and/or turn it off.”

I don’t normally blog on Sundays, but for an ox in a ditch, I’ll make an exception.

I was sitting in my office working on a pleasant project when the contractor who recently fixed up the house across the street (To flip. In a bad market.  Should have been my first clue.) showed up to maintain the lawn.  The house is vacant, you see, and although they used cheap sod (which doesn’t look nearly as nice as my own recently-redone swath of green, but I digress) it does occasionally want a clip.  In itself, nothing unusual there.

The contractor went around the corner into the garage, pulled out the mower, and cranked it up … at which point the machine belched out a cloud of acrid-looking smoke larger than the contractor’s F-250 pickup.  About four times larger.  The plume went up like a mushroom cloud, to my amusement and the contractor’s dismay.

Two minutes later I, too, flipped to the dismay side of the aisle.  Because the contractor restarted the mower (sending up a second plume of epic proportions) and started mowing the lawn anyway – with the recalcitrant mower belching smoke like half the tribes of the American Southwest calling for reinforcements.  Seriously – the cannons at Antietam didn’t send up this much smoke.  Yet on and on our contractor friend mowed, blissfully ignoring the billowing clouds of carcinogens wafting across the lawn, over the house, and around the cul de sac.  At least, I assume there was ignoring going on.  At some points the smoke was so thick I couldn’t actually see across the street.

By the end, the contractor was literally running across the lawn, apparently hoping to finish the job before the mower either quit working or exploded in flames.  I watched from the office window, not sure whether to place my money on terminate or incinerate – or both.

Fortunately, the lawn is small (much smaller than mine, due to the wedge-shaped lots and the fact that said contractor turned half the front lawn into ugly_garden_lined_with_rocks_001 rather than sodding the whole thing) and by some miracle the mower actually managed to survive the job.  As I write, the contractor is loading the unruly machine into the F-250, hopefully for a much-needed ride to some garden tool E.R.

That or there’s a civil war re-enactment somewhere that needs a stand-in for the cannon.

It’s Friday, and yes, I’m in the weeds.  In fact, I’m here so often lately I’m looking into putting up a summer home.

In the interim, please say hi to Miss Penny’s Prattle, a friend-from-the-life-behind-the-keys who’s putting some toes into the primordial electronic soup.  As it were.

I’d say treat her as nicely as you treat me, but since she’s someone I know as a living, breathing human being, let’s go about five steps better than that, shall we?

Seriously, a welcome to Penny.  May she become as addicted to this as the rest of us.

Given the Holiday weekend, and my recent preoccupation with a Super-Sekrit-Spy-Project that shall remain nameless for at least a while longer, a new month managed to sneak up on me without proper notice.

After forgiving me for depriving you of two and a half days of observational enlightenment, please be informed that June is official:

Ice Tea Month  (I made tea from ice once.  It tasted watery.)

Fireworks Safety Month (Let’s get it out of our systems before July!)

Lane Courtesy Month (Lane gets cuts in the Starbucks line all month.)

Effective Communications Month (I recommend the hurling of fragile objects and small animals.  They might not know why you’re objecting, but they’ll definitely know there’s a problem.)*

Candy Month (Let’s introduce her to Lane.)

Women’s Golf Month  (Fore!)

Pharmacists Declare War on Alcoholism Month (No, really.  I couldn’t make this stuff up.)

Smile Month (Remember the old adage: laugh and the world laughs with you, smile and they’ll wonder if you bite.)

* Disclaimer:  Please be informed that you should not take anything in italics seriously.  Now or ever. This is a humor blog. No small animals were harmed in the making of this entry.  The same cannot be said of fragile objects, because I know the state of the human ego.  Do not throw animals, glassware, grandma’s china, faberge eggs, tiffany lamps or anything else likely to shatter, break, stain, disfigure, discolor or really really frustrate the dust bunnies under the fridge.  I disclaim any and all responsibility, liability, emotional attachment and other consequences of your puerile insistence on mistaking my humor for serious advice, and for the drool-inducing IQ levels that might make you do so.  The fact that your genes hang out in the kiddie pool isn’t my problem, but I will remind you that a person can drown in less than two inches of water, so if you’re studying your toes too closely, please do not inhale.  Your actions, however conceived, are your own and if you break, injure, molest, squash, hyperventilate too close to or set ablaze any object or creature as a result of this or any other thing you’ve heard me say: I care. Really, I do, but that sounds like a personal problem to me.

Have a nice day.  Unless you’d rather not.

…though not without some shame.

So.  Yesterday I post an article about Cats Tweeting, and – in a result whose irony is not lost on me – it gets tweeted.

Twice.

Fortunately, not by cats.  At least, they don’t look like tweets from cats.  But now that we know cats tweet, it adds a whole new dimension to the “never know who’s behind the keyboard” dimension of the Internet.  A whole new fuzzy, creepy, bizarre dimension.  In a strange way, it’s kind of growing on me.  (Like a fungal infection there’s no medicinal salve for…but I digress.)

At any rate, I’d like to welcome our new feline overlords, and humbly request that in the New Empire, I be eaten last.

After all, I not only blogged about cats tweeting, I have now laid sufficient Internet-spider-bait to disrupt at least a thousand Google searches and attract ten times that many spambots.

Or, to misquote Frank Herbert…

...the Yak has called a big one…

Hang on for your lives.

In a story which reached publication only because it enabled the author to use the phrase “Sony Makes Cats Tweet” (and yes, I’m admittedly green with envy that someone else got there first), Asia’s TechOn news reports that Sony  – whose new slogan really should be “Making the Unnecessary Ubiquitous and Almost Affordable Since 2001″ – has developed a wearable lifeblogging device for cats.

Let’s repeat that, in case you weren’t listening:

Sony has produced a device that lets cats blog.

Well, almost.  It literally makes them Tweet.  The device contains sensors which “deduce” the cat’s behavior based on movement and timing, translates those deductions into one of 11 fixed phrases … and automatically posts them to Twitter.  To the cat’s twitter feed.

This is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin.  For a change, let’s go with the easy one:  I don’t want my cat to Twitter because I don’t want something without opposable thumbs having more followers than me. And since I don’t use Twitter…that would be easily done.  From there, it’s a fast and slippery slope to places we absolutely, positively, don’t want to get to.  Even if the device is correct that “meals taste better after a walk” – and that the cat is, in fact, enjoying a meal after taking a bit of an afternoon stroll, I don’t want to know.

Unfortunately, I’m guessing most Twits (which, as David of TWC tells me, is the correct nomenclature for “persons who use twitter”) do.

The device does have serious limitations, however.  Any cat owner can tell you that cats have far more than 11 thoughts romping through their monstrously devious heads.  Clearly, “TwitterCat 2.0″ will need a few more phrasing possibilities.  Permit me to suggest a few popular ones, based on my own cats’ behavior:

1.  “The human won’t give me a Frito.  Come quickly and help me shred his ankles until compliance is achieved.”

2. “Don’t bother me, I’m sleeping.”

3.  “Open the fridge, mortal.  Open it now.”

4. “Don’t bother me, I’m sleeping.”

5.  “If he doesn’t come home with cat treats, I’m eating his socks again.”

6.  “What part of ‘nap time’ do you not understand?”

7.  “Squirrel!”

8.  “I find your lack of treats disturbing.”

9.  “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

10.  “Toilet water tastes much better than water from the little bowl on the floor.  Want some?”

On the other hand, none of these may be necessary.  The minute you tell a cat he’s “tweeting,” he’s likely to do what any self-respecting being would do if forced to twitter against its will.

He’ll give you back the bird.