That's not my banana!

I'm crazy with conference calls all morning, so I'm focused on taking notes, looking at PowerPoint presentations and contributing as little as possible to the call.

Finally during a break between calls, I try to do a little tidying up around my cube. That's when I notice that there was a banana peel in my trashcan.


Only, I hadn't eaten a banana all morning! In fact, I was so busy with conference call meetings that I had only left my cube for a few minutest to get the requisite cup of coffee after starting up my pc.

My superior powers of deduction have led me to conclude that some socially defective cube drone was eating their breakfast while passing my cube and, instead of disposing of the refuse properly, they decided to dump it in my own private trash can.

So now I have to deal with the smell of rotting banana peel all afternoon? I don't think so, Sunshine. I don't know about you, but that's not the way we roll in my little plot of the cube farm.

I deftly exchanged my trash can with the offending peel for a trashcan from a cube a few aisles away. I think it was an unoccupied cube. But if you work in cube 1B963, well, er, sorry 'bout that.

tagged: corporate, office, trash, banana, cube

YouTube Tuesday: Brutha can't drive

Here's the scenario: You're a famous actor, you're doing a movie about fast cars, and you have a chance to drive a $1 MILLION Ferrari Enzo.

Here's the result:


tagged: movie, YouTube, video, Eddie Griffin, Ferrari, Enzo, crash

Dream job?

Let's face it, most of us aren't in a job we love. Personally, I merely like my job, but I always have this nagging thought that there's probably something better.

Then I caught this little nugget. It looks like KMBC Channel 9 News, home of geezersauraus rex Larry Moore, is looking for a new weather dude/wench.

In my mind, there are pros and cons to any career choice and you have to weigh these carefully before telling you current employer to foxtrot oscar. So, regarding this opportunity...

Pros

• You don't have to know a thing about meteorology.
• Chromakey+Maria Antonia+remote control=tons of fun.
• I have more hair than Micheal Mahoney.
• Endless opportunities to riff on Larry Moore.

Cons

• I'd have to develop a "sky is falling" attitude about thunderstorms.
• I've been told I have a face for radio and a voice for print.
• Endless opportunities to be hazed by Larry Moore.

All in all, I'd say it's worth a shot. I'm off to polish up my resume and get my audition tape ready.
tagged: media, job, career, meteorology, Maria Antonia, Larry Moore, Kansas City

Carnival time

John B. has posted this week's edition of the Kansas Guild of Bloggers carnival over at Blog Meridian.

Great posts all around, including one from yours truly. So if you have a few extra minutes to kill while avoiding any productive activity, be sure to check it out.

And don't forget to submit an item for next week's edition, which will be hosted at Thoughts from Kansas.

tagged: Kansas, blog, blogger, carnival, KGB

The More You Know: What's that smell?

The next time you're in Houston and you smell something terrible, it might be a dude roasting his ex-girlfriend on his balcony.

But just to be sure, here's a primer from The Slate on what to look smell for

Burning muscle tissue gives off an aroma similar to beef in a frying pan, and body fat smells like a side of fatty pork on the grill. But you probably won't mistake the scent of human remains for a cookout. That's because a whole body includes all sorts of parts that we'd rarely use for a regular barbecue. For example, cattle are bled after slaughter, and the beef and pork we eat contain few blood vessels. When a whole human body burns, all the iron-rich blood still inside can give the smell a coppery, metallic component. Full bodies also include internal organs, which rarely burn completely because of their high fluid content; they smell like burnt liver. Firefighters say that cerebrospinal fluid burns up in a musky, sweet perfume.

tagged: smell, human, flesh, burning

Monday Malaise: Tell me something I don't know

I've seen this sort of thing on other blogs, and since I'm a radical conformist I realized I had no choice but to post a few random thoughts myself.

• I feel a little uncomfortable shaking all the hands at church during that time when you're supposed to get up and shake everybody's hand. I just feel like I'm picking up all kinds of germs. I actually sit with my "shaking" hand away from my body for the rest of the service.
  


• I've always thought I would die in a fit of spontaneous combustion, probably after the Democrats nominate Hilary Clinton for president.


• I have a horrible compulsion to peel and chew my fingernails. It's a shameful, disgusting habit I know, and it's a demon I constantly battle.


• I think gravity is an interesting theory.


• I wear only two styles of sock, white (on the weekends) and black (during the work week). Seriously, I buy multiple copies of the same black sock so I don't have to worry about having "pairs" of socks.


• Sometimes I think the hokey pokey is what it's all about.


• I absolutely almost loose it in crowded elevators, especially if people only take the elevator up one or two flights. I mean COME ON!


• I hold a very dim view of people who spend too much time working on their MySpace pages (not you of course, just other people).


• I would never actually do this, but sometimes, when I'm driving at night down a two-lane highway and I see the headlights of an approaching car in the other lane, I wonder what it would be like to veer into the other lane at the last second and get into a head-on collision. Please don't hate me.


• I wonder if anybody really "fits in," I mean really.
  

tagged: personal, thoughts, fingernails, elevator, myspace, driving, collision

Victory for wanking and free speech

I wanted to give a shout out to the federal judge in Philadelphia who dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography.

In overturning a 1998 U.S. law which makes it a crime for commercial website operators to let children access "harmful" material, Judge Lowell Reed Jr. essentially said the right of free speech outweighs parents' rights to have the government raise their pervy kids.

In his opinion, Reed wrote:

"Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection."

That's a good point. Everybody just needs to ease up a little and keep things in perspective.

I contend that if you’re a parent and you're worried about your kid seeing pornography on the internet, then you're probably already "with it" enough to use any of the myriad of blockers and filters available to prevent that sort of thing.

Besides, as the article points out there are bigger concerns for parents of connected kids to worry about such as predators on social networking sites like MySpace, identity theft through spyware, and the contagious geezerhood of Larry Moore.

tagged: free, speech , wanking, porn , Larry Moore, Judge Lowell Reed, internet

Headlines: Biting criticism

Back in high school, a friend of mine used to say he wanted to be a PE teacher.

He thought it would be cool to have summers off, wear sweats to work, maybe coach the JV basketball team.

I'm not sure if he ever pursued the dream. I lost track of him when I went to college. But I'm guessing if he had seen this story, he would rethink his grand plan.

A former Woodburn coach has gotten a state reprimand for biting the thigh of one of half a dozen wrestlers who tried to give him a wedgie. At a December 2005 practice, the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission said, team members tried to give Peter Porath a wedgie — jerking his undershorts upward.

I'm sorry. Maybe this makes me insensitive, but I gotta call a big fat BULLSHIT on this one.

Just so we understand what happened here: Half a dozen adolescent cro-magnons think it would be cool to attack the teacher and wedgie him (thank science they weren't going for the dreaded Atomic Wedgie), and the school board reprimands the teacher for trying to defend himself.

That teacher got freakin' screwed! The state board

"put him on probation for two years and said Porath must complete a class on appropriate behavior and write a public apology to the student he bit.

Public apology my ass! What kind of lesson are they teaching these kids?

If they asked for an apology from me it would go something like "I'm sorry I didn't have my posse with me to kick the shit out of those punks like they deserve."

tagged: headlines, news, wrestler, teacher, Peter Porath, Woodburn

YouTube Tuesday: Once Upon a Time in a Cage

I'm not so sure how I feel about mashup culture.

On the one hand it seems like cheating, especially in artistic endeavors, to take two (or more) works completed by someone else, combine them in some way and call it a new work of art. I mean, if I drew a beard and mustache on the Mona Lisa, that's just vandalism, right?

It just seems to signify a lack of original thought that is becoming epidemic in our culture.

But on the other hand, there are examples like today's YouTube Tuesday entry. YouTube member jthelms has taken scenes from one of my favorite westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West, and added a soundtrack from Canadian indie rock group Arcade Fire's My Body is a Cage.

The result approaches sublimity as the haunting mood of the chords make a perfect complement to the beautiful scenes of Sergio Leone's cinematography. I've watched this at least a dozen times and it still seems fresh and important to me. Let me know what you think.

tagged: movie, YouTube, video, western, music, Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone, Arcade Fire, culture, My Body is a Cage

Hollmark

It's been a few months since I posted anything about the new addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (you can see my previous posts on this subject here, here, here and here).

My friend and inside source, Matt the Architect, has pretty much wrapped up his involvement with the project, which is set to open to the public in June.

If you're at all interested in Kansas City and/or architecture, then you no doubt are aware of the controversy this project has spurred locally. Some keyboard critics have likened the structures to Butler Buildings, calling them an eyesore and an insult to the original neoclassical museum.

Personally I like the new addition, and not just because I have a friend who helped build it. I applaud the design daring and I'm glad the powers that be were willing to take a leap to the unconventional rather than settle for the same old thing.

And even though the rank and file plebs of Kansas City might have their doubts, the design patricians seem to be responding positively. Design journal Metropolis posted an in depth critique of the project last week, in which it calls the building an elegant, magic light box.

But the most delicate and entrancing aspect of the building is the way it pushes the current ideal of drawing natural light into exhibition spaces to its limit.

The article notes (in sometimes painful detail) the thought processes that went into solving the lighting challenges that come with building a museum out of translucent glass.

Architect Stephen Holl noted such challenges were expected, but working with light is the reason he took this commission in the first place.

"For an architect whose passion has been light from the beginning, it's really a rare opportunity to get to work with the sequence of natural light in a gallery and then have the building itself be kind of made out of light."

Read the article for more on how the particular lighting issues were addressed. There's a really good image gallery that includes some of the design sketches as well as shots of the nearly finished addition.

tagged: Steven Holl, Nelson Atkins, art, architecture, Kansas City, museum, Metropolis