Makes kitchen cleanup a snap, even removes the hardest baked/caked-on residue with no fuss and no muss. Just place pots and pans on the floor, walk away and let nature take its course. BEST TIME SAVER EVER!
They’re happy. I’m happy. WIN!
Author: Jim (Page 19 of 51)
Father of 4, Engineer, Social Worker, longtime blogger, #linux user. Opining on the internet? What else is it for?
Olaia’s project for French class. Tickles me to death. Her Tio Roberto helped her film it. There’s even a little song at the end.
“Oh, I just can’t take this. Why is politics so stupid?! U.S. politics are messed up. Puerto Rico politics are messed up. It’s ridiculous. What do we do, Jaimito?”
“Move to Jamaica?”
*ROFL*
Got a pair of fancy-schmancy bicycle shoes – carbon fiber no less. Kids call them the Ka-chow shoes.
See a resemblance? I certainly feel like Lightening McQueen in my spiffy shoes. KA-CHOW!
I’m seriously annoyed with the press coverage devoted to the oil gusher. BP is bad, bad, bad. Evil they are. No wait, they are incompetent, lazy, greedy corporate bastards at best, evil fish killing, baby seal clubbing, agents of the apocalypse at worst. It’s stuck in my craw, I tells ya, this BP bashing. It’s so convenient to sit on our asses and bash bash bashidy bash.
Where does our complicity in this spill start for the average global citizen? How do we, as a society, divorce ourselves from the problems that arise when we are addicted in a gluttonous fashion to free flowing black crude? We need cheap food, because we demand value. Farmers must consolidate their production farther and farther from the centers of consumption. They must use fertilizers fabricated from petroleum, transport it long distances using petroleum, to supermarkets lit with electricity derived from petroleum, purchased by consumers driving their little metal bubbles powered by petroleum. It’s in our plastics, toys, cars, winter warmth, food, and freedom.
Oil is in our freedom?! Quick get a skimmer to get that shit out of there. You can’t, and you know it. It has flowed into America’s freedom wetlands, soaked into the sand of liberty, and been choked down the gullets of our winged agents of change. Its slimy mess has turned to a thick oozing muck and seeped in so deep, extraction is impossible.
BP is evil though, we muse, and we continue to sit and wring our hands about how bad Big Oil is and how good we are because we care about the fishies, and the birdies, and the little shimpies, and those poor shrimping families that can’t feed themselves now. Oh boo hoo; let’s go to Wal-Mart and buy a bigger TV so we can watch bluray.
Forget the news coverage. Forget BP. This tragedy makes two things clear:
- We are addicted to oil, and it is our collective fault, not only BP’s.
- We should not be doing deep water drilling at all if we can’t manage a worst case scenario. To paraphrase Ralph Nader, oil drilling currently seems to be unsafe at any depth.
when the Brit is the tannest guy in the room.
I was watching the History Channel yesterday, you know, the channel with nothing actually historic, only speculative. Haha, it used to be the channel about stuff that happened during the years 1938 through 1945. Now it’s the channel about stuff that might have happened. Some shows (After Humans), are about stuff that could happen someday. Is it the Speculative Future Channel? Maybe they are turning into the vacancy left by the SyFy *snicker* Channel.
But I digress.
So I was watching this show about the ancient pyramids, ruins in Peru (Machu Picchu, etc), and manna in the Bible, all these mysterious and wondrous artifacts (except manna), and how they were all achieved by alien tech. Yeah, that’s right, aliens gave us advanced technology to play with thousands of years ago. I don’t make this stuff up, that’s what the history channel was saying. It’s a fun speculative show and everybody’s all deep and mysterious.
“These tolerances are impossible, even with modern technology.”
“If someone came to me and said I wanted a stone cut like that, I wouldn’t do it for any price.”
Ooo, spooky.
And it goes on, one breathless expert after another speaking at length about how such feats, difficult to achieve today, would have been impossible thousands of years ago – unless they had help. Help from aliens.
Yeah, that makes sense, I think. Just because something seems impossible or difficult you’ve got to pull out the aliens card. I’m more a fan of Occam’s Razor. There’s a simpler explanation, one that actually has plenty of evidence in existence today.
It goes a little something like this: Engineers are not particularly good at documentation. You can actually stop reading here, because that’s it.
Even in our time, clever engineers fail to document stuff that has to be rediscovered as little as ten years later. Engineers are so enamored of their works, so convinced at their own brilliance of cleverness, that the construction or solutions are believed to be, by them, self evident. How could you not know what it does, it’s so simple, they say. There’s an old gripe about how clever programmers always think their solutions are self documenting because they are so elegant and perfect. The pyramids? Whatever their purpose, I’m sure engineers of the era couldn’t possibly conceive of someone NOT KNOWING what they do. It’s obvious. It’s always obvious to someone, except when that someone has been dead for 4500 years.
Without fail we must rediscover these “simple” solutions over and over again. Remember, concrete? The ancient Romans used it all over the place, but its secret was lost for 13 centuries until 1756. “Bah, write it down!? You must be an idiot. It’s so simple. No way is anybody going to forget this. Oh, shit, the Visigoths! They weren’t covered in our disaster recovery plan.”
I suppose there’s also the problem that people just don’t have a multi-generation mindset when it comes to passing information forward. We might think of our kids, but beyond that, it’s all a hazy blur of “somebody else’s problem.”
And bam! You forget how to make concrete.
So, it wasn’t the aliens that gave us awesomely advanced technology to make mind bogglingly beautiful and intricate structures. We just forgot to write it down and back it up. “That’s the next contractor’s problem,” they said.
We watched “Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Squeakquel” the other night. In the interest of not saying anything negative about the movie, I give you this: my three year-old loved it. Loved it! I think it’s his favorite movie so far. He got all excited and was dancing around as the girl chipmunks were singing, “Single Ladies.”
“Hey, Asier, are you a single lady?” I asked chuckling.
And as if sensing my humor and the incongruity of a three year-old boy being a “single lady,” he quickly responded, “No Daddy, I Batman.”
And he kept dancing.
“Daddy,” Olaia said, “Dora has bad parents.”
“Why do you say that, Olaia?”
“Who lets their daughter go to China with a monkey?”
Asier Enrique O’Malley Gorbea has achieved a milestone of impressive proportions. For the first time and perhaps the last first time in this family, we have achieved targeted evacuation. Long has been the road to this operation and as diaper operations quickly come to a close, we breathe a sigh of relief at this most fortuitous success. To what do we owe this completion? Bribery? Threats? Time? Patience? Maturity? I have asked myself the same question. Did he actually understand the process? What is his motivation?
“Asier, you can’t go to a playdate with Javier and his friend until you go caca in the toilet. You have to show us you are a big boy,” Laura informed him today.
Upon arrival home, he dutifully called out a caca alert and made it so.
“Ah, so he gets it,” I said, “He understands the process; he just needs the proper motivation.”