How's it sit? Pretty cunning, don'tchya think?

"A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything."

updates abound

Well I haven't written anything substantive in the past month or so, but much has been happening in the life of The Sprocketplug.

1) I have a new girlfriend. The Fighting Librarian
She's cooler than a slap bracelet and hotter than princess Leia in a metallic bikini.

2) I broke my foot (pictured below). It's been three weeks and I no longer need the crutches, but it still hurts, forcing me to walk not unlike the living dead.



3) I bought an Xbox 360 which, indirectly, lead to the breaking of my foot.

4) I made the most kick ass halloween costume of my life.



So you can't really see the whole thing but I got
a) Leather holster
b) replica .36 calibur pistol
c) lambskin vest
d) leather cowboy boots with spurs
e) little cigars

et alius, making me look like Clint Eastwood in his "man with no name" series. It was so fun. We went to high street and i hobbled around with my cowboy boot on one foot and my walking cast on the other. Two vicodin and a vodka martini later I was having the time of my life. hot girlfriend on my arm, surrounded by costumes of every sort, 'twas a night to remember. I was in a little pain for the next two days due to the fact that I wasn't supposed to be walking without crutches, but it was well worth it.

5) I got Barack Obama elected by giving him Ohio.

No thanks necessary, I was just doing my job to keep the world safe. Plus, I owed it to you guys after the 2004 election.

I hope you all are well!!!

-SP

High-larious

In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?

YES WE CAN!

whoa

www.nytimes.com

The Happening On BluRay

With the DVD and Blu-Ray releases of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening," I feel it my duty to once again implore you to avoid this film in any and all of its nefarious forms.
Even if you are given a free copy of this film by a beloved friend or relative, I beg of you, do not watch it. If you are captured by a band of marauding pirates and given the choice between walking the plank and watching the DVD with director's commentary, I urge you to seriously contemplate your decision.

I wish you all a wonderful day.

-SP

Doing manly things.

So, I brought my shotgun back to Ohio with me and I decided it was time to give her a thorough cleaning. Since I had never done such a thing I went out to a Gander Mountain and bought the necessary supplies. Next was finding the owners manual for my Mossberg 500-A online and reading how to dis- and then reassemble my firearm.

Before:


During:



Oh shit, I didn't mean to disassemble the safety:



after about 3 hours and a dozen websites detailing the assembly of the safety mechanism:



Complete! Now who's ready for the Zombie Apocalypse?

Realizations

New for Autumn!

I'm adding this to all my syllabi

Zombies: Should the zombie apocalypse occur during this quarter, all students will be excused from attending class.


rawr

...and the world spins madly on.

I believe in imagination, the hopeless romantic, the quixotic hero, the villain with the handlebar mustache, and honeycrisp apples. I believe King Arthur was real, I believe there is life on other planets, I believe there is life on this planet. I believe in the
smooth, straight flight of a monster backhand huck into the endzone. I believe that America should adopt the metric system, cover the roadways with solar panels and send a human to mars. I believe in the perseverance of the human spirit, the undeniable power of a brilliant idea, and that everyone looks beautiful by candlelight. I believe in fantasies, heartache, and that moment before climax when the world stands absolutely still.


Your turn.

Thank you for this, Carl.

http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/

Which also reminds me of this http://qntm.org/?board, and this http://qntm.org/?geocide

Funny stuff what with the end of days upon us.

I'm feeling good, are you guys?

_SprocketPlug_

My Summer Vacation.

Statistical Scavenger Hunt

In order for my students to collect their final project, they had to go on a quasi-scavenger hunt. This was the video that launched the hunt.

background: we did a lot of examples involving Hannah Montana during the term.

Bouncetastic

So far so good

The joke I invented today:

Q: How can you make stir-fry in space?

A: With a moon wok!




So funny. Not 15 minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Gubbins and I were eating our chinese food and we started talking about porpoises. I told him they're difficult to own, because you have to milk them three times a day.

Mr. Gubbins: I wonder what you can make with porpoise milk.
Sprocketplug: Seabiscuits?


I'm on a freaking roll.

Bouncy castle party tomorrow. Be there or be square. fotos and video to follow.

-SP

My trip to target...

On my last trip to Target, I purchased the following items:

Walkie Talkie (14 mile max. range) x2
Antibiotic Cream
Eggs (2 dozen)
Stopwatch
Chocolate Syrup
Hot Fudge
Hydrogen Peroxide
Emergency Poncho (x2)


can anyone guess what I'll be up to tomorrow?

I'm in Minnesota, Bitches!

And glad of it.

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Celebrate by eating some British babies.

The Happening by M. Night Shyamalan

It sucks. Don't see it. Enough said.

-SP

...my cold dead hands.

Peter Goes to the NRA National Convention

Oh, Second, loveliest of all the amendments, you alone protect this country from another invasion of the Red Coats

Wow. Just wow.

I don't know if y'all follow 30 Rock, but it's gotta be one of my all time favorite television programs. I don't actually get television reception, but I watch them on www.hulu.com. Last week's episode is utter brilliance. It's especially delightful if you've seen the movie Amadeus.

Check it out if you have a little time:

Hulu.com

I'm gonna watch it again. hmmm hmmm funny.

More from Slashdot

Slashdot
Josh Fink brings us a CNN story discussing evidence found by researchers which indicates that humans came close to extinction roughly 70,000 years ago. A similar study by Stanford scientists suggests that droughts reduced the population to as few as 2,000 humans, who were scattered in small, isolated groups.

...

And then they all came together for the largest Orgy this planet has ever seen. They saved the species from extinction and had a super fun time doing it.

-SP

this is FUN!

More random quotes from sent emails spanning from april 2006 to 2007

---

This sucks.

I hate SAS.

If ever I encounter one of the original writers of this god forsaken program, I shall strike him/her in the genitals with a car antenna. after said strike, I shall hurl invective upon his/her writhing personage until such a time as my ire is sated.

---

It's not possible to completely randomize 5 mops with four people. It's good that you're accounting for order, though. There's some psychological effect: primacy and...something else... where people remember best and prefer most the thing that they saw first or last. It would be fun to give them the same mop twice and see if they give it different scores.

---

I'm Peter Sprangers and I endorse this message

---

Dude. That is totally whack. And by "whack" i mean stupid.

I have been soooo sick the past couple of days. I thought I was on my death bed. I saw Jesus. he told me that abstinence only programs are the work of the devil. then he told me to smoke pot. I love Jesus. Don't judge me!

---

Lauren, were you a single woman I would take you in a manly fashion.

---

I'm a heretic!!!!

sweet quiz.

i'm also lustful. could have fooled me.

---

...i'm fine, but for some burns on my leg making it hard for me to walk around...

---

Sure thing. Welcome to the P-Hat Allstars.

---

You'll not take my power without a coup de etat!

---

I need you to love me unconditionally for the rest of my life.

---

I love this bike more than my own penis.

---

Sonnet

This is for the afternoon we lay in the leaves
After it had been winter for half a year,
And I kissed you and unbuttoned your jeans
And touched you and made you smile, my dear.
And of all the good things that love means,
One of them is to touch you there
And make you smile, among the leaves,
And feel your wetness and your sweet short hair,
And kiss your breasts and put my tongue
Into the delirium between your soft pale thighs,
Because the winter has been much too long
And soon will come again, when this love dies.
I will hear sermons preached, and some of them be true,
But I will not regret that afternoon with you.

C.B. Trail

Cleaning out the closet

I was looking through my "sent mail" folder and I came across this email I sent April 15, 2006. Subject: you're my wonderwall


I think Oasis really had it going on. I mean, their name brings the image of a watery sanctuary in a cruel and uncaring desert like deserty thing. And then their song Wonderwall, I mean, it's brilliant. What is a wonderwall? What does it taste like? Do people put it in their pockets? Maybe you put pockets in wonderwalls.
"I said 'maybe, you're gonna be the one to save me.' afterall you're my
wonderwall."

...

good luck looking for your easter basket. my first guess would be to check the small tear in the space time continuum behind the couch. your mom created it late last fall and she's been dying to use it for something. be careful, though, you might reach in and pull out the 19th century. and i mean, where are you going to put a 19th century. there's no more room left in my closet and you don't own a big enough purse.

What did I Fu**ing SAY?????

Referring to Previous post


Slashdot
opencity writes
"The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."



Why can't we just make sexbots like everyone wants. We don't want robots that will fight, we want robots that will love.
See also: XKCD

Surrender

Do not surrender your grief so quickly
Let it cut more deeply
Let it ferment and season you
As few human or divine ingredients can

Something is missing in my heart tonight
That has made made my eyes so soft
And my voice so tender
And my need of God so absolutely clear.


Hafiz

Remembering a great man.

I have been weighed, I have been measured...

I got my student evaluations back from last quarter and I've decided to show you some of the more entertaining comments. They were, on the whole, quite good, but these stood out:

What do you see as strengths of the instructor?

Funniest man alive
Well groomed beard
extreme cuteness
none
he actually did a good job…
being awesome
his arms
WHITESNAKE FOREVER!!!!


What do you see as areas of improvement for the instructor?

Overused 80’s cartoon references
bad handwriting
remember to take rats out of your pockets
taste in music
a little scatterbrained at times
consider removing facial hair
Peter has no weaknesses
not going on so many rabbit trails
some examples are too far fetched, e.g. Ninjas and shurikens???

A day at the beach

One of my all time favorite things to do.

south of the mason dixon

I made it to Florida after 12 hours of travel. Tornados in Atlanta, fog is Columbus, and our plane was attacked by gremlins that live in the clouds. I've been flying for probably 20 years and I've never been scared while up in the wild blue yonder, but friends I was shakin' in my boots on the flight from c-bus to atlanta. Ah, well, I've arrived safe and sound. Now my week will be devoted to hanging out with the padre, drinking beers by the pool, and catching up on some reading. Has anyone read Doris Lessing? I picked up the Golden Notebook and I'm interested to see what she has to say.

I'm also half way through Hitchins' God is not Great. I'll have more to say on that later, but it's decent. I think there's a fundamental flaw in saying "Religion Poisons Everything" in as much as it is to say "Christians hate Black people." There are obviously sects or factions that are extremist but blanket statements rarely convey the truth. As Obi Wan once said "only the Sith deal in absolutes."

Hope y'all get a chance to break for spring.

-SP

Christopher Moore!

I wrote Christopher Moore an email and I got a response about 1.5 minutes later:



Peter:

Thanks for the nice note. I'm glad the books are working for you. I'll try to keep
them coming. Right now I'm working on a comedy set in Medieval England. Beyond that,
who knows? I should finish the new one today. (cross your fingers)

Happy Reading,
Chris




>Hi Christopher,
>
>I just wanted to write to say thanks for all the wonderful books. I just
>started reading your novels and I have to admit you're the funniest
>son-of-a-bitch I've ever read. Thanks again, and please keep them coming.

>Sincerely,
>Peter


Was that a stock reply? I don't think so. I'm tickled that he actually read my email.

Just sneaking in under the 1 month mark

From Slashdot:

"The Planetary Society invited participants to compete for $50,000 in prizes by designing a mission to rendezvous with and 'tag' a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid. The asteroid Apophis was used as the target for the mission design because it will come closer to Earth in 2029 than the orbit of geostationary satellites. The winning mission design is called Foresight, and calls for the use of off-the-shelf parts to undercut the price of other proposals. Here's a PDF of the winning proposal."

Closer than the orbit of geostationary satellites?!?! That's pretty freaking close. That's like getting a hair cut from a guy firing an AK-47 100 yards away.
Imagine how bright that's going to be! I don't think there's much atmosphere up there to burn it up, but the sunlight reflecting is going to be dazzling. I can't wait! I just hope no one forgot to convert the calculations into ft-lbs...cause I haven't built my bomb shelter yet.

Speaking of which, question to my readers: what would you put in your bomb shelter for entertainment? I guess you can assume you'll have a power source.

-SP

Um.....wtf are they thinking?

Village Voice
New York city to criminalize possession of pollution detectors, Geiger counters, etc...

So, let's take this to the next level. Everyone needs to carry a permit in order to call 911. If you don't have a permit and you call 911, you'll be charged with inciting panic and severely prosecuted.

I for one, don't think that this: Cell phone detectors is such a bad idea.

What else should we outlaw so that people have the illusion of security?

Going Down on Madonna

Happy New Year, everyone. Let me tell you about my annual Minnesota vacation.

Christmas at my Uncle's house was business as usual. Because this is the one time every year that the whole clan meets in one place, the conversations remain almost exclusively superficial. "How are you doing?" "So, where are you now?" "What are you doing?" "Do you have a girlfriend?" which would be fine, if it weren't for the fact that each of the 2 dozen people ask you the exact same questions. At one point, I was standing in the kitchen talking with my aunt and just as I was answering the last question on the list, my uncle walks up behind me and asks, "How are you doing, where are you now?" at which point I pivot and begin reciting my answers from the top.

After eating from a great panoply of cheesy, greasy, or salty foods in which the only vegetarian option was raw vegetables and ranch dip (poor brother), I sat down with my grandfather for his and my Christmas State-Of-The-whatever-the-hell-grandpa-wants-to-talk-about address. When talking with my grandfather you are struck with the realization that no less than 97% of the things he says are completely derived from stock phrases, cliches, and aphorisms, peppered with the occasional malapropism.
After grandpa's startling explication of the relative proximity of similarly plumaged fowl, he went on to lend his support to the widely held scholarly opinion that the construction of ancient cities took more than 24 hours.
After giving me a nod and a wink as if to say, no need to thank me for the invaluable advice, he begins to tell a story.
Grandpa's stories wander through the realms of moral parable, historical fiction, non-fiction, and a genre i like to call incoherent sentence fragments. I know I'm walking the fine line between humorous observation and invective, but you have to realize that my grandpa is not senile, nor is he unintelligent. In fact, I have the sinking suspicion that he's playing some intricate game with the family, mentally laughing at us all while we try to follow what seems to be a mix of an aesop fable, a john wayne movie, and a collection of one-line jokes.
After his rousing tale, I excuse myself, and retreat to the circle of cousins, most of whom are my age. My cousins are, almost without exception, extremely interesting people. They are kind and funny, clever and well educated. I like this part of Christmas.

As for Madonna, well, on the 23rd of december, my beloved friends, Mr. and Mrs. Gubbins, and I were playing a game of Yahtzee. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, the rules are quite simple. You roll 5 dice and try to get certain outcomes, such as all sixes, 3 of one type and 2 of another, runs of 3 or 5 etc. At its most basic level, this is a game of chance. I am not an avid Yahtzee player, in fact I may have played once before in all of my days. However, on this fateful day, the gods were with me and I happened to play what could possible be the greatest game of yahtzee ever played in the history of the known universe. My final score was 670 points (or somewhere thereabouts), and from what I can gather, that's about what God's score would be were he to actually play dice in the universe. After I stopped dancing my wild "I'm-better-than-you" dance, and warmed up my vocal chords for a rousing "nee-ner nee-ner boo boo", Mr. Gubbins said, "That will probably be the best game of Yahtzee you will ever play." I exhaled the breathe that was supposed to carry the "nee-ner's" and began to ponder. Mr. Gubbins statement was most surely true. The planets would never align in such a way again to grant a mortal the awesome power bestowed unto me. I began to worry, did I peak too soon? Does this mark the slow downward spiral into obscurity? Will this laurel support my figurative weight until I'm 80, or will people say "Yeah, Sprocketplug played a good game of Yahtzee when he was 26, but he hasn't done squat since." Am I condemned to be just another Albert Einstein?
Dan Berg, in his song Tiger Woods, wrote

"I had a friend whose goal in life was to one day go down on Madonna, that was all he wanted, that was all, to one day do down on Madonna. And when my first was 34, he got his wish in Rome one night. He got to go down on Madonna in Rome one night in some hotel. And ever since he's been depressed. his life in shit from here on in. And all our friends just shake their heads and say too soon too soon too soon, he went down on Madonna too soon, too young too young too soon too soon...."

To what shall I devote the rest of my life?

-SP