Wrap Your Mind Around This, If You Can

Water can fall from the sky while it's frozen!





It's like... it's like that stuff that sno-cones are made from, only falling from the sky and devoid of colorful, flavored syrup!

Yes.

Hell yes.

"Aint Clem, Come Quick! The Crick Done Froze Over!"

It looked a lot cooler when there was snow on the ice, but it was too ass-cold outside to take pictures then.

The photos are actually 1024x768; the thumbnails are clickable for higher-res versions at Flickr.

This One Is About Toilets and Their Fans

The office where I work has a small custodial crew, hired from a cleaning company by the building owner. There's one guy on this crew who's a real piece of work.

You know that slightly weird but altogether harmless-seeming kid who sat at the very front of your algebra class in eighth grade? The one who thought he was everyone's friend because nobody really picked on him, yet it was all more out of a shared desire just to avoid him? Ever wonder what would happen if the kid grew older, but never grew out of his social maladjustment? This man is what happens.

The man of whom I write is almost as wide as he is tall, balding through an already-thin scraggle of curly gray hair. He does not walk. He can only waddle, and I don't mean just hints of a waddle or a waddly-type walk, either—you can see the effort he puts into lifting his leg from the hip and setting it down again. It is the quintessential duck-style waddle, so pronounced it would be parody were it not tragic, tragic reality. He breathes from the mouth, and he talks to people halfway down the hallway, loudly, even if they're not interested in talking back (perhaps an extension of his inability to fall into step with people due to his waddle). Once, when I was unfortunate enough to have to squeeze by him in the hallway junction, I picked up the unmistakable aroma of vinegar emanating from him. Oh, and this guy is a total creep, too.

Hmm, I guess it would be wrong of me to judge someone based on their appearance, huh? Well, I guess it's a good thing I'm not.

This guy likes to clean the women's restroom. He really, really likes to clean the women's restroom. He's responsible for cleaning the men's room too, but he only gets in there twice a day. With the ladies' room he's like a goddamn cuckoo clock: he pops his head through the door every hour. I wish I were lying when I say he gets himself in there every hour, but I think that's all he's really there for. Whenever he's away from the women's restroom, it feels as though he's just killing time, going through the motions cleaning other not-the-girls'-bathroom things, waiting for the next opportunity to get into that restroom at such an interval where he doesn't seem creepy. But I'm onto him. Oh yes I am.

To truly convey the creepy nature of this man's modus operandi regarding women's restroom sanitation, I shall have to break it down for you. First, he shall knock, though I'm sure this is only because even he realizes you can't just walk into the women's restroom unannounced. He shall then (quite) cheerfully call through the door "maintenance department," though "mouth-breathing manchild janitor" would be more succint and fitting.

Here is where, when I first noticed the pattern, something really started to give me chills. If nobody answers, he will enter, the door will close behind him, and he will clean the still-clean-from-the-last-four-times-he-was-in-there-today restroom. If the restroom is occupied, however, he will call (still very cheerfully), "Oh! That's okay!" There will be a pause as he stares at the door, then "Take your time, no rush!"

The pause and the line that follows pushes my creep-sensor needle into the orange of the meter. There are variations to the line (e.g. All right then, I'll wait" and so on), but just its presence doesn't sit well with me. Want to know what pushes my creep-sensor into the red?

When he makes small talk, through the door, with whoever's in the bathroom.

Now, the small talk is just small talk, innocuous per se. If you were to read it as dialogue from a script, with no direction, it would be boring. However, the fact that a fully-grown man is talking about the weather with a woman who just wants to finish her business on the other side of a door should be enough to make anybody cringe.

Even when he doesn't chat up a lady on the can, he stands there, several feet away but still essentially in front of the door, waiting for whoever's in there to leave. He could just go dust something or wipe down windows or whatever and come back later, but no, he waits, a true man on a mission.

My theory? He wants to see the face of the woman he'd talked to while she was doing her duty.

The crew he's a part of has been here for several months, but I'm only now mentioning it because of something interesting that happened today of which both I and Manchild Janitor were a part.

Our restroom has automatic-flushing urinals. I'll explain how they work for any women or robots who may be reading. Essentially, it's the same sort of echolocation device on sit-down toilets, only used here to determine when someone has both approached and left a urinal. When you leave, it flushes the urinal. I had a whimsical streak in me today, and early in the day today I indulged it by standing to the side of the urinal while I did my thing, where I would be invisible to the futuristic auto-flush technology. I zipped up, backed away, and the urinal did not flush, for it had never known I had been there. For some reason, it felt like an awesome thing. Man still superior to his own technology and all that.

Later this afternoon I was the victim of one of Manchild Janitor's halfway-down-the-hall conversation starters. Unlike all that had come before, however, this one interested me.

"Say, buddy, has the flushing been all right for you today?"

"The what?" I replied. The thing I'd done this morning with the urinal was not registering.

"Didja use a urinal toilet today?" (Yeah, he called it a "urinal toilet.")

"Yeah, I did."

"Did it flush okay?"

That's what reminded me, right there. I read his face, and his look was one of bewilderment. I jumped on it. I lied.

"Sure did."

He shook his head, as might a chess player who knew he had a winning move but was denied it before his turn. "Dang. I think one of the urinal toilets is actin' up a little. Don't use the one on the end, okay?"

He didn't specify which end, but as it happens I already knew which end. I couldn't let this go; this was an opportunity to crawl into his mind, if only a little bit. I had to see. I had to see if he was truly worthy of the title Manchild Janitor.

"Acting up, you say?" I walked closer to encourage him to share more.

"Yeah, was in there just now* and the water had pee in it, like it ain't flushed. I waved my hand and it flushed, but it might be broke or somethin. I waved my hand a couple more times to make sure, and all th'other urinal toilets too. They all seem to work okay, but stay away from that end one, okay?"

I was actually mildly surprised that nobody had used the urinal after me all day. If they had, however, I suppose none of this could have been possible. I nodded and continued down the hall, in a bemused daze.

My not-prank had blown his mind. He truly is the Manchild Janitor.

*Remember what I said about him only visiting the men's room a few times a day versus his clockwork-like visitation of the ladies' facilities.

Piano Hero

Want to learn how to play piano, or perhaps just a specific song? If a midi exists of the song, use Piano Hero to see how it's played!

All you have to do is download the Piano Hero .exe from Sourceforge, run it, and select a midi file that's on your computer.

I Think I'm In Love

With this.

Oh, and this too.

Happy Valentine's Day, suckers.

Follow Your Dreams, Unless They Are Not Financially Viable

The inlet that runs by the house was frozen over all last week due to it being ass cold outside, and I meant to take a photo because it looked awesome. However, I kept putting it off and putting it off because damn, it was ass cold outside.

The filmmaker bug is nibbling at me again, and I found myself fantasizing at work today about quitting and making a living creating works of entertainment. I guess the official term would be "independent filmmaker" but, you know, my stuff would be indy due to the nature of its creation, but not indy indy—not the same genre where flowers wilt or steaks rot in time-lapse black-and-white while its creators all but fellate others for awards and golf-claps. I dig accessible works of art, you see; I'm not so much an appreciator of art as I am a consumer of it. I suppose that says something about me right there, but I just can't "appreciate" something created for the sole purpose of pointing out how I both can't understand it and refuse to pretend that I do.

There's a cross on a hill that sits next to Route 5, in a small break of the trees. I haven't been up the hill to look at the cross up close, but it's probably about 10 feet tall and made of either stone or marble. When driving home from my friend's house late at night, I've sometimes caught glimpses of it during fog or during a starkly-clear full moon. It looks like an establishing shot out of a horror movie, and I find myself wanting to incorporate it into a work that doesn't exist.

Speaking of a horror-themed work that doesn't exist, I'm still waiting on Symphony of the Night to be released on Xbox Live. I've never played it before but damn, do I ever want to.

The Most Fascinating Thing You Will Ever Read, Ever

So I cleaned the oven this evening.

Hey, come on. This is about the most interesting thing I've done recently.

Anyway, I was pretty much forced to, since a horrible-smelling, oily smoke would start to pour up from beneath three of the four burners on the stovetop whenever they were turned on. Here is the epic story of how I went about that.

Being occupied by bachelors, the house obviously has very little in the way of cleaning supplies. Fortunately, this also meant there was plenty of BPoI™ to call upon to get the job done despite that.

I used a dish sponge, the Lysol Bathroom Cleaner from the bathroom, and about three SOS pads. After lifting the stovetop to disconnect the burners, I found I couldn't disconnect the first one. It was simply attached to the wires but good. For that burner, I simply sucked it up and cleaned out the tray beneath it with the hunk of iron resting on my hand, one watchful eye on the burner's knob in case some ghost decided to reach from the ether and turn the heat on while both of my hands were busy scrubbing. Hey, you never know. Try cleaning a burner while it's still attached to the stove and watch how paranoid you get. The other three burners detached nicely, enabling me to clean their trays in the sink.

To say these trays were filthy would be an insult to actual merely filthy things everywhere. These trays were biological hazards. If you had to throw the trays out with the rest of a hospital's trash, they would have to be separated from the medical waste so that the waste would not be contaminated. As I scrubbed each one with an SOS pad, the offal would blacken the water. The water would be black as it circled the drain. Black! As the soap inside the SOS pad lathered up with my scrubbing, a thin gray sludge of water, soap, and whatever the hell was on that tray gathered in the bottom. It was disgusting; I began to think the previous tenants never once cleaned the stove.

By the time I was done with all three, the crud I'd cleaned out had almost clogged the drain filter. Fortunately, it's removable, so it met with the trash can and a good thorough shaking. I thank providence I didn't have to actually touch it. After soaking the sponge for a rinse wipe-down (and more black water, God, where did it all come from?) on each of the trays, I put them back and fired up a burner.

Success! No more smoke, aside from the cooking-off of what water was left in the tray. I finally got to prepare my macaroni and cheese without any danger of setting off the smoke alarm–at least, no more danger than what there normally is of that happening when I make mac 'n cheese.

I suppose though, for awhile yet, that every time we cook, it will smell like someone sprayed Lysol in the kitchen.

Ah, Google Ads

Bringing cryptic non-advertising to the masses like nobody else can.



Well, are you?