None Of The Above

Anything that doesn’t fit into existing categories

Contest: 1-Verse Filk

I’ve had a bummer couple of weeks for many reasons, most of them relating to Global Cooling and a mild skin rash on several of my knuckles. So I need to increase the silliness factor a little, and am hereby mounting a contest, with real prizes.

The challenge: Submit a 1-verse filk; that is, a short parody song with original funny words to only one verse, what ur-filker Allan Sherman called a “schtick.” It has to be a funny filk, and the contest will be judged by people who know what “funny” means. (They will not necessarily be filkers. I will have a vote.) The tune can be anything, but it has to be a tune that has some chance of being recognized by a reasonable number of people. The song should only be one verse long; brevity is the soul of damned near everything, humor not the least of it. You can send me more verses, but your chances of winning decrease with each verse submitted beyond the first.

All entries should be submitted as comments to this blog. Your choice which site, and if you feel so inclined, submit entries to both sites. Being in both places does not increase your chances, though it may increase the number of people who see your entry. The two sites, in case you only ever read one, are LiveJournal, and WordPress.

No other rules except: Use no dirty words that will get either of us into trouble. Numerous things rhyme with “duck” and even more with “wit.” (Here’s a rhyming dictionary, in case you get stuck.)

The winner will be judged by Thanksgiving Day, or as soon thereafter as I get at least three entries. If I don’t get three entries by Christmas, we’ll call it done and both entries will get prizes. The prize will consist of your choice of one from the following list:

One copy of any title from the Copperwood Press catalog.
One copy of Assembly Language Step By Step.
A variable capacitor from my collection. I’ll test it for shorts before shipping.
A TO-36 auto radio power transistor from my collection. Sub a 6SN7 if you’re allergic to germanium.
Anything else somebody sends me to be a prize, to be listed later.

Hey, if that don’t get your mouth watering, what will? And in case you’re not sure what a one-verse filk is, let me show you:

Let There Be Fleas on Earth

(To: “Let There Be Peace on Earth”)

Let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away from me;

Let there be toads and snails, but not where I can see!

To love each creature’s obnoxious features would drive me up a tree–

So let there be fleas on Earth, but keep them away….from me!

Shirley, you can all do better than that. So get on it!

You Can Buy Heinlein’s Address (But It’s Not His House)

Apr 4th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

13 comments

Larraine Tutihasi sent me a note that Robert A. Heinlein’s house is for sale in Colorado Springs. Here is the real estate listing. The agent is mistaken; although this is indeed the great man’s address, this is not his house. The Heinleins built a custom home in the Broadmoor area of Colorado Springs in 1950. It was a wonderful design, distinctly Frank Lloyd Wright-ish, with lots of techie grace notes designed by Heinlein himself. The house was supposedly “remodeled” after the Heinleins moved to Santa Cruz, but several people have told me that virtually the whole thing was torn down circa 1995, and the current larger but very ordinary home built on the site. The bomb shelter is apparently still there, as is the very appropriate address of 1776 Mesa Avenue.

I’m floored by the asking price: $650K for a good-sized house on a 1.5 acre lot in the poshissimo Broadmoor is a steal, unless the house has serious problems of some kind. It’s 2.75 miles linear distance from me, but over six miles street distance because of all the damnfool gated communities between here and there.

Oddly, Carol and I lived almost as close to Heinlein’s Santa Cruz home when I worked for Borland, and in fact Carol’s boss’s wife was the listing realtor when Virginia Heinlein sold it in 1988. Alas, I had just been laid off by Borland, and had no clue where I would be working after that, so we didn’t even go see it. I’ve been kicking myself for that idiotic lapse ever since!

Hell Hath No Power Like a Bad Haircut

Mar 19th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

I guess anybody in a Buster Brown ‘do starts to look like the Golem after awhile.

Heat of Fusion

Feb 28th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

moonvenus022709 Well, we’re off to Chicago again, driving that familiar I-80 corridor, and yesterday got as far as North Platte, Nebraska. The target was Kearney, or at least Lexington, but winter threw us a curve: As we left Colorado on I-76, the temperature started to drop, and the quick dusting of snow that had passed over the area an hour or so earlier was freezing on the pavement, making the left lane a first-order approximation of glass. In fifteen miles we passed two rollover accidents, and speed was down in the 45 MPH range. Driving that stuff in the light of an overcast sky was bad enough. Driving it at night was right out. So we stopped at a nice Holiday Inn at North Platte. The free broadband is about dialup speed, but at least it’s there.

As we took the puppies out for a walk last night in 15° temps, I tried to get a shot of the conjunction of the Moon and Venus on a dark, unplowed road behind the hotel. The shot above isn’t bad, considering it was a snapshot from a handheld camera (my new Canon G10) that I still don’t know how to use in any detail.

We’re about to load the car and get back on the frozen roads, wishing that the heat of fusion of water was a little lower, so that the Sun would clear the ice a little sooner. It’s +4° right now, and it may be a slow haul to Des Moines. We’ll soon see.

Running Out of 2008

Dec 30th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Carol and I got back to Colorado Springs a few hours ago, and the suitcases haven’t been emptied yet–in fact, they’re in a pile in the corner of the bedroom and may not even be unlocked until tomorrow morning. But on the way home from the airport we picked up the puppies, who seem no worse for the wear, except for their tear-staining. We give them occasional doses of Tylan to treat the staining, but we don’t expect the kennel people to keep up with that. So they’re going to be redeyed for a couple of weeks yet.

The priority today and tomorrow is to get ready for the big switchover from hand-edited Contra entries (something I’ve been doing for over ten years!) to WordPress. I did some testing of a free blog editor called Zoundry Raven while I was in Chicago, and it worked well enough for me to want to give it a shot in “production mode.” This post is being edited in Raven, and if everything works correctly, it will post the same text and associated images to both LiveJournal and WordPress with one click and without a lot of screwing around. The images were an issue on my test post for December 23, and they may still be, but I’m running out of time to troubleshoot them this year, and I may have to fix’n’figger along the way if Glitch Happens. (And doesn’t it always?)

The new URL for the WordPress-based Contra will be www.contrapositivediary.com, in case you haven’t seen that yet. Come Friday, there will be no new posts on www.duntemann.com/Diary.htm, though links to all ten years’ worth of archives will still be there, at least until I get them moved to the new domain. How far back I move the hand-edited archives into WordPress depends heavily on how much work it ends up being, and that remains an open issue.

Testing Zoundry Raven

Dec 23rd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

I just installed Zoundry’s Raven blogging client in portable mode–I don’t see any reason for it to be installed in any other way–and this is a test post. Bloggar was a little disappointing; for example, I still don’t see how to add tags to an entry locally. So the search for a client goes on, and this post will include an image to see how well image uploading works. A WYSIWYG editor is good, and should allow images to be flowed within text in various ways. I don’t know about borders–will have to try them, since Raven supports them. The issue of how well Raven posts to multiple blogs is yest untested, but if it passes the image-upload test, that’s the next thing to look at. So far it’s pretty impressive.

Odd Lots

Feb 22nd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

From Jim Strickland comes this report of a new coinage. How many seconds did it take for you to get the joke? Did you get it at all?
Alas, neither the Death Star Grill nor the Darth Vader gumball machine made it past the first cut. Dayum. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
This, on the other hand, is a real product. (Again from Pete. Don't miss the video.) On the other other hand, if you have to ask, well…
Here's an interesting discussion on the economics of rooftop PV solar power systems. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the pointer.) As with a lot of posts like this, the real action is in the comments. Had we stayed in Arizona—and possibly built a new custom house there, which we were considering—I would have installed a system like that. Note that batteries are not necessary unless you're completely off-grid. (A lot of people still don't understand this.) The power companies are basically paying you for adding peak power capacity to their grid by reducing your monthly bill. Doesn't work well everywhere, but where it does work well (basically the Southwest) it will become a great deal cheaper over the next fifteen or twenty years.
Sometimes I can spot a hoax. Sometimes I can't. And sometimes I just can't decide. (I know enough artistes to understand that anything's possible.) So you tell me.
It's hardly new news, but I don't generally walk in those precincts: Romances represent 21% of the $6.31B print book industry. SF/fantasy comes in at $495M and mysteries are at a surprisingly low $422M. (Those are print book sales only. Ebooks not included.)
Chris Gerrib called my attention to a great rant by John Scalzi on what's still wrong with SFWA, which I still haven't re-joined, and may not until I know that Andrew Burt has removed himself from their environs to, say, Uranus. And even with Burt out of the way, I'd like to know what the organization thinks that it is, because I myself have never been quite able to figure it out.
The generally clear skies in Colorado Springs failed us on Wednesday night for the eclipse, and while we could tell there was a moon up there (and could tell that it was partially occluded) details were utterly lacking.

Odd Lots

Jan 25th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

Here's a nice article from NPR on sleep. Worth noting is the author's comment that in 20 years, the stylishness of getting only five hours of sleep a night may be seen the same way that the “stylishness” of smoking is seen today: As something that kills you before your time.
Pertinent to the above: I have notes on an SF novel postulating a drug that lets people sleep as much as 23 hours a day, with a side effect that lucid dreaming is not only normative but shared: People using the drug encounter one another in their dreams, and struggle for control of the weird collaborative colony they've created within the human collective unconscious. As years of use roll by, research shows that drug-induced sleep occupying over 75% of each day leads to reversal of aging and what might actually be physical immortality. Sleep forever and live in your dreams! Take that, you short-sleepers!
I stumbled upon Gos earlier today, and it's an interesting concept: A Linux distro focused on Web apps that might be ideal for ultra-mobile PCs, tablets, and ebook readers. (Alas, it's not mature and may not be as “small footprint” as people would like.) Many of the Web apps it installs by default are Google apps, which led me to wonder if the product's creators intended from the start to sell the company to Google someday.
Pete Albrecht put together a long and detailed resources page for model rocketry. Perhaps only peripherally related to model rocketry but interesting nonetheless is the linked-to story of Miss Bomarc. (I had a model Bomarc when I was a kid, and Pete is building a flying model.)
From George Ewing comes a pointer to an intriguing article about 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense. Actually, they do make sense—the problem is that we don't understand them yet. (Humanity's most grievous sin is refusing to admit its own ignorance.) I'm glad they included cold fusion, and the one I would add is poltergeist activity.
Jim Strickland sent me a pointer to an item about a pair of prosthetic legs that communicate via Bluetooth in order to help a double amputee walk more effectively. The story I currently have doing the rounds (though all the majors have bounced it) posits a prosthetic leg with a 128-core Intel processor, a snarky AI personality, a thigh speaker, and WiMax, with all that that implies. If I don't sell it soon, you'll see it in Souls in Silicon later this year.
This June, ContraPositive Diary will be ten years old. (How many blogs can make that claim!) What would you all suggest I do to celebrate? Should I publish a print book “best of” on Lulu? (Might make good bathroom reading…)