Author: chrisbenson

Here’s a good link I ran across for the age-old question, “Ginger or Mary Ann?” (well, my age, anyway).

---

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately. Last Friday we came down with what I’m assuming was some kind of Halloween-triggered virus at work that turned about eight of our machines into blue-screen door-stops, including my trusty Blog-mobile. Took all day Friday and Monday to straighten it out with multiple Windows/Office/Network Client installs. We still haven’t figured out what really happened, but whatever it was, I haven’t seen any evidence of new Halloween virus reports.

---

Last couple of days have been pretty busy over here at Asparagus Pee blog. J-walk blog posted a link that’s driven 40-50 extra people here each of the last two days, and I’m starting to build up a pretty good content base for natural search hits.

Some recent searches, over and above ‘asparagus pee,’ ‘gooblek,’ ‘pee in pants,’ etc., where I feel like I may actually have helped some people find what they were looking for were:

“elliott smith”+steak knife
*
eggo rocket surgery
-and-
eggo syrup commercial
*
mtv+nrablacklist
*
and my favorite: passaic mary tree stump pic

Interestingly, the Germans must be really into pee fetishes, because I get anywhere from 3 to 5 of my 6 to 8 normal hits per day from different people just searching for ‘pee’ on google.de, and my blog is like the 641st search return for that term, which I relate with no particular pride.

---

Today’s been interesting. Four of us met at 5:30 AM and drove down to San Francisco’s Golden Gate University for a 4-hr seminar that was billed as being ‘especially for catalog marketers and inventory managers,’ that was basically a remedial Excel class. I don’t use Excel much because I have real-time tools I’ve created in character-mode DataFlex for working with our native database files, so I learned a couple of interesting tricks, but was it worth getting up at 4:00 AM and spending 4 hours in a car? Nope.

---

I’m not personally ready to go no-meat all-the-time, but I do think we have an obligation to treat the animals we eat with some degree of benevolence and dignity. This is interesting: The Meatrix.

Our next door neighbor’s kid suggested that Emily should go trick-or-treating as a water bottle, and darned if Mrs. Asparagus Pee didn’t make it happen. The label says, ‘Emily’s Best crystal clear Auburn Tap Water.’

A site called stoptheNRA.com is taking petition names at NRAblacklist.com. Guns are almost always a bad idea &#150 check it out.

If you totally disagree, here’s a link to the National Rifle Association – MyNRA

I sure wasn’t expecting to have to say this, but here’s a very clever quote from Attorney General John Ashcroft:

“There are only two things necessary in life &#151 WD-40 and duct tape… WD-40 for things that don’t move and should, and duct tape for things that do move and shouldn’t.”

---

Okay, this is getting links all over the place, but it’s worth a look – the guy’s wife had an affair and left him, so he’s selling her beanie babies on E-bay: Collection of 26 Beanie Babies from Ex-Wife.

---

There’s a great article at Guardian Unlimited called 300 Reasons We Love the Simpsons. Reasons 66-75? Bart’s 10 best blackboard lines: I was not touched ‘there’ by an angel; Fire is not the cleanser; Fish do not like coffee; Pork is not a verb; The hamster did not have ‘a full life’; No one wants to hear about my sciatica; I am not my long-lost twin; The nurse is not dealing; I will not surprise the incontinent; Temptation Island is not a sleazy piece of crap.

It’s been pointed out to me by a kind reader that ‘It’s not rocket surgery‘ is a registered service mark that belongs to Steve Krug of Advanced Comonsense. (Way to go Steve.)

Said reader also discovered that Asparagus Pee blog is the unique hit for ‘Eggo syrup “rocket surgery”.’

---

One of the things that’s really sad about Elliott Smith’s story is what we consider newsworthy. If he’d finished his 2-CD masterpiece and released it to critical acclaim, it’s doubtful I’d hear about it other than by word of mouth or accidentally running across it. But he throws himself on a steak-knife, and now he’s big news. I guess it’s some small consolation that his music will undergo a posthumous surge.

Here’s a cool idea – they carve pencils with an X-acto knife into all kinds of interesting shapes: Pencil Carving.

Update:I see that J-walk is sending people here because of this entry (Thanks John!), so I want to pass the credit along to Clifford Pickover’s Reality Carnival blog, where I first saw it (Sorry Clifford!) – if you like cool, weird things that make your brain feel good, please go check it out.

Steven “Elliott” Smith

Update – Here’s a very good article on Elliot Smith’s suicide on the BILLBOARD website.

Update – That story focuses mostly on his addictions and attitude – here’s another one that discusses his music, with some lyrics and descriptive phrases like “impossibly melodic.” There’s also some good multimedia content over on NPR.

They’ve spotted the Virgin Mary again. This time, she’s a tree stump in Passaic, New Jersey.

Now, I’m all for people worshipping whatever however they want, but it seems to me that if this is all it takes to call out the Diocese-mobile, I think I could find something that looked a little more like Mary without any huge difficulty.

Honestly, I feel a little sorry for the church and how seriously they have to take all these claims, especially since the human brain is hard wired to see faces in everything from hills on Mars to scorched tortillas.

---

All this week, Scott Adams is featuring Dilbert strips drawn by other cartoonists. Check it out.

Good ol’ Clay Aiken now has the #1 album over on the Billboard Albums chart. Here’s an article about it on MTV.com. I like Clay, I really do. When he was on American Idol, I even called him ‘my boy.’ But have I mentioned lemmings?

In other music news, we lost a good one yesterday. Elliott Smith seems to have killed himself. RollingStone.com: News: Elliott Smith Dies

Someone actually got here by a search on ‘personality test – do you prefer baths or showers,’ and do you think they voted in my bath vs. shower poll? Did you guess no? I give up.

You’re probably getting kinda tired of listening to me brag on our little girl, but last Sunday at the Pumpkin Festival over at the park, she decided she’d like to climb the mobile rock wall, and we said, hey, why not? We didn’t even have a camera with us (who knew?), but a lady who was there overheard me saying I wish we had a camera, and she let me take this picture with her point-and-click Advantix&#153. She told me that it might be awhile before they got the film developed, but she must have done it that same day or the next, because today is Tuesday, and we got her picture in the mail!

---

Hmm. Well. Not much to say about this.

---

I was watching TV tonight (gosh, there’s something new), and there was an ad for Eggo&#153 maple syrup, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s sure a no-brainer,’ then the guy in the commercial who’s supposed to be the CEO says to the people at the conference table, ‘The only thing I don’t get is, what took us so long to come up with this idea?, I mean, it’s not rocket surgery.’ I love that – ‘rocket surgery‘ instead of ‘rocket science’ or ‘brain surgery.’ Two memes, one stone.

Then, a few commercials further on, there was an ad for a new American Express&#153 gift card – the idea was that you don’t buy a gift certificate for a particular store, you give a prepaid Amex thingy that’s like a prepaid calling card – Duh! – it’s as good as giving cash, but it’s less tacky!