Month: December 2001

Interview #01

• by GeekMan • In Experiments •   8

Earlier this week I joined up with Blogger Insider. My first Interviewer/Interviewee is the heretofore unknown to me (but now added to my favorites list) C. Dodd Harris IV of Ipse Dixit. Below are his questions and my answers.

My god have mercy on our souls.

  1. Does your girlfriend still think HoBiscuit is funny?

    Yes. At least I think she does. Wait a minute and let me check.

    “Honey, do you still think me calling you HoBiscuit is funny?”

    *Whack*

    “Oooowwww.”

    Uh, no. The answer would be no.

  2. Is being a geek a form of cultural superiority?

    Absolutely, now shut up and peel me another grape.

  3. Choose one: Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams. Justify your choice.

    That’s pretty tough, but I’ve got to go with Adams. Even though Neal wrote Snow Crash, which is one of the most amazing pieces of fiction I’ve ever read, it is still only one book. Nothing else he’s written has had the same kind of power and sense of ‘reality’ as his first book and I don’t know that anything he ever writes will. On the other hand, Adams wrote the Hitchhiker series and each book was better than the last. Also, Adams is dead which always raises an authors perceived worth.

  4. Do you still have a Flintstones pillow?

    No, but sometimes I miss it.

  5. Have you ever considered murdering someone to get their rent-controlled apartment? If yes, please describe.

    I’m a New Yorker so the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.

    Describe what? The way I would kill them? Well, I’m a hands-on type of guy, so there would be blood and lots of it. Power tools and drop cloths would be used. In order to make it look like an accident, I would use a power sander since everyone knows that power sanders cause more deaths than any other power tool costing $34.95 or less. It’s a fact. Ask Sears.

  6. How is Marx’s critique of Capitalism relevant to the current War in Afghanistan?

    I don’t think it is. Marx wanted everyone to give up their individual prosperity for the good of the society as a whole, but this ideological view of society failed to take into account humanities ingrained vices and the individual’s free will. In society, he did not see a group of individuals, he merely saw a large mass of living things. The result of course, was that his ideas worked in theory and on paper, but never in practice. Afghanistan’s leadership however, wanted to remove free will from its citizens using fear and hate disguised as religion. They tried to create a nation of unthinking, frightened slaves who would do whatever they were told to do by those in power, without ever thinking for themselves. It is an old, old method of controlling an easily frightened, exceedingly poor, deeply religious and mostly uneducated people. The two ideologies are vastly different.

  7. How many children would you like to have? Any time soon?

    Three kids. A boy, a girl and possibly a radioactive, mutant broccoli but don’t hold me to that last one. Two children of one gender and one of the other would also be fine with me. And no, not anytime soon.

  8. Made any money through CafePress?

    Very little, but then again I’m only making 50¢ on each sale so I didn’t expect to get rich. I just think it would be really cool to walk down the street one day and see my face on someone’s shirt. Heh, that would rock.

  9. How the Hell does a freelance designer afford a surround sound system like that?

    I’m a very good freelance designer and my clients are very happy to pay me handsomely for my services. No, really they are. I swear.

  10. Having had a chance to use it for a week now, would you recommend the Lernout and Hauspie speech recognition program to users interested in such a product?

    If they have the patience and are willing to actually use it then yes, I would recommend it. However, it does take some getting used to, and training it to recognize what you say can be both time consuming and frustrating. But it’s definitely worth it.

  11. Do you consider yourself to be paranoid?

    No. (Yes you do)

    No, I don’t. (Then what’s with the tinfoil hat?)

    It’s a… a fashion statement. (Hah! So why do you live in an old WWII bomb shelter?)

    Uh, low rent? (Nice try. And all the canned food with the labels removed?)

    I, uh, like to be surprised? (Why is there a gun-slot in your front door?)

    That’s easy. I live in NY and every apartment has one. (But yours is chrome plated.)

    That keeps the rays out. (Rays?)

    The mind reading rays from the satellite the government keeps over New York at all times. Everyone knows that. (Uh-huh. And why would the government want to read minds?)

    To find out where I am, of course. (Why?)

    They want my teeth! The secret plans are written on my teeth and they want them! So do the giant, alien llamas! But they’ll never get them, never! I’m too smart for ‘em! I hid my real teeth and replaced them with marshmallows! HahahahaHAHAHahaha!

    (Ah, I guess you’re not paranoid after all. You’re just plain crazy)

    Llamas got my teeth! Llamas got my teeth!

  12. (Optional) What is your name?

    I choose option ‘E’. None of the above.

You can check out Ipse Dixit for the questions I asked him and his answers. This is fun.

The Pain Of Cooking

• by GeekMan • In Geek Life •   4

I’ve been sitting here for most of the day trying to figure out how to write my Christmas story. Now, I’ve been working on it all day, but I’ve run into a little problem. I just don’t know how to start writing it.

Yeah, yeah. I’m an idiot.

So instead of beating my head against the wall trying to come up with the “right way” to write my story, I decided to simply write it when I can. Since I’ve already written three pages of the story, I think I deserve a little break.

Especially since I was losing my voice.

I also wanted to tell everybody about a little thing that happened to me last night. It’s a little thing I like to call ‘dinner’. You see, last night for some strange reason I decided that I would cook. That might not seem so important or awe inspiring to you, but to me it’s a very big deal. I don’t like to cook. In fact, you could say I actively avoid doing anything that even resembles cooking if it doesn’t also involve an open flame.

Every man knows that a barbecue is the only way to really cook.

There’s just something so right about an open flame slowly roasting the outside of dead animal flesh. Everything tastes better when it’s cooked over an open flame. Steak, potatoes, chicken, small children, or anything else that you could ever want to eat. They’re even better when drowned in barbecue sauce, pink on the inside and slightly charred on the outside.

Especially the small children.

Anywaste, last night I was going through my pantry what I discovered that I had pasta. I don’t know how old the pasta was, 1988, 1989, or maybe 1991, but it didn’t make a difference to me in the least. All that mattered was that I had something to cook that I might actually be able to eat.

And lord knows I was hungry.

I scrounged up some pasta sauce from the bottom of a ketchup bottle and noticed that in the back of my freezer there was some mold that looked like it could have been some sort of meat at one time in the past. I scraped this mold off the back of the freezer, put it into a pan and started cooking. The pasta was boiling, the sauce was simmering, and the meat was browning nicely. It was at this point that I had another one of my revelations, an epiphany if you will. I realized that I was only cooking for myself and therefore didn’t have to tone down the spices.

My god, I could finally make the perfect sauce.

I literally flew to my spice cabinet and took out all the spices I would need to create the perfect sauce. I had them all, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, ground red pepper, and crushed red pepper. I also had my secret ingredient, the one thing that’s guaranteed to rip apart the stomach lining from any human being on the planet. I won’t tell you what it is, but you need to be licensed by the government in order to have it in your home.

Yeah, I got the hook up.

So I added all of the spices, including my secret ingredient, to the sauce and let the whole thing simmer. Then I added the meat-like product (which I am now convinced was sentient) and let the whole thing simmer for about fifteen minutes.

I swear I could hear the meat crying in agony the whole time.

This was going to be the best sauce I ever made. If any of you out there like spicy things the way I do, then you would have loved this sauce. I was crying as I ate this perfect concoction of spicy bliss, this wonderful, acidic nectar of the gods. It didn’t even bother me that I knew I was slowly destroying myself from the inside out.

Oh yeah, I knew I was a dead man come morning.

Throughout the meal I could feel this delicious, spicy, almost-sentient sludge burning a hole in my stomach as it sat there like a piece of white-hot lead in my stomach. I just knew that my anus would be a blistering, festering, open sore for the next four to seven days and that should I venture forth from my apartment people would die on the streets as I walked by. I knew all of this, but it just tasted so good I couldn’t stop eating it. Consequences be damned, I was going to enjoy my spicy meal because it was everything that I ever wanted in a sauce.

This sauce was so good it should go down in the history books as the greatest sauce ever conceived by man.

As I sat on my porcelain throne this morning, bent over double, breathing through my mouth, holding my knees and praying to god that the pain would stop, I knew that I only had myself to blame. I smiled as my sphincter convulsed in agony and the sweat formed on my brow and back. I knew that if it weren’t for my years of training in the back alleys of Chinatown, Korea-row and Indian-alley, eating anything with the little symbol for hot on the menu, I would have died during the night.

And you know what? It would have been worth it.