What is the sound of no hands clapping?: The Quest for the Clapper

Brother and I both found ourselves at the old homestead for xmas. It's unusual for us to see each other and communicate in person instead of virtually. Brother said it was odd to see me as a real person rather than thinking of me as just another of his online friends.

Perhaps to celebrate this rare occurence, the day after xmas we undertook a quest...The Quest for the Clapper!

In cast you've been living in a cave without a television set, the Clapper is an intermediary device that goes between an appliance and an outlet. It allows you to turn on the appliance, such as a lamp, by clapping your hands. I'm sure you've seen the commercials for this as they have been running for years and years and years. Ch-ch-ch-chia! and the Clapper commercials seem to come together every year during the holiday season.

Brother finally succumbed to the years of subtle brainwashing and decided he really needed a Clapper. In truth, he does have a pretty good use for it. A blurb online pushes the Clapper by asking, "Are you ever too tired to even turn on a lamp?" I can assure you this is not the reason Brother wants a Clapper. I believe anyone buying one for that reason may have problems best addressed by a doctor instead of the Clapper, but anyway....

Clapper commercials led us to believe we could find the wondrous device at a certain large, nationwide discount store and two large nationwide drugstores. Brother and I visited every instance of the stores in a 25 mile radius with no success. We found lots of other "as seen on TV" devices such as personal hair removers, Chia pets, Billy Blanks Tae-Bo trainers, and others, but no Clapper. These stores carried the Clapper, but were all sold out. We had no idea the Clapper was such a desirable device. For years we've been derogating the Clapper commercials, never thinking that every other home in the United States, nay North America, has a Clapper or will have a Clapper soon. By the time we'd been to a few stores with no luck, I even decided that I needed a Clapper. If everyone else wants one, why shouldn't I?

Clap on. Clap off. Clap on, clap off. The Clapper!

Some stuff that Brother has been thinking about today...

I've thought of a cool way to handle unwanted door-to-door magazine sellers, donation requestors, and such: as soon as you see the person at the door is NOT someone you know, immediately say "Good morning! Have you accepted our Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?" Continue in this vein until the person goes away. If you can get your hands on a few copies of The Watchtower, this will add realism to your act.

The other day, I saw an ad for The Clapper. You may remember this gadget -- it allows you to turn lights on and off by clapping. I haven't seen a Clapper ad in years, and had thought that they were out of production, but apparently not. The ad said Kmart and Walgreen's had them, but I stopped in a Walgreen's today and found none. I actually have need for a Clapper, so I'll need to remember to check any other Walgreen's or Kmarts I run across.

I have a similar gadget that works by means of a remote control unit, but this creates the nuisance of remembering where I left the control. I saw another gadge in Lowe's called the Lamp Commander, which worked by voice. I decided that it was too much hassle, as it required you to loudly and clearly say "Lamp Commander! Lights on!" I would just feel silly doing that, and I could walk through the darkened room to the light switch in less time than it would take me to say that, especially if it didn't register the first time.

I've been gradually getting back into my exercises, after slacking off during the summer (it's too hot!) Since I really hate the process of shifting weight plates around whenever I want to do a different exercise, I tend to leave a loaded bar set up, figuring that it can sit there until I do that exercise again. This becomes a problem eventually, as I run out of plates. I was thinking today that there's a simple solution: buy some more plates!

I haven't bought any new plates since 1999, when I got the pair of 50-pounders. Prior to that was a pair of 25-pounders in about 1994, and prior to that was buying the weight set in the first place, in late 1992. Being naturally cheap AND spending so many years as a college student tend to cause a person problems with the whole idea of buying more stuff. While living at my parents' house, I used to grab stuff from my father's shop and hang it on the bar for more weight: C-clamps, chain, lawn tractor wheel rims, etc. While this is very "old school", it's also a nuisance for record-keeping, as you typically have no idea how much all this stuff weighs.

Since a guy at work was talking about the Conan movies the other day, I was remembering the narration for them, done by the guy who played the wizard (Mako). He's also the guy who does the voice of Aku in the Cartoon Network "Samurai Jack" cartoon. Anyway, I was thinking that a narration by Mako would make a cool answering machine message:

"In a distant land... in the time before the seas drank Atlantis... there lived -- Brother... destined to wear the jewelled crown of Aquillonia... upon a troubled brow! Even now... so great is his fame, that many call upon him! His days and his nights are filled with mighty deeds!

Because of this... Brother cannot heed your call this day! I... his chronicler... can only bid you speak your plea to this machine... but wait for the sound of the gong! Brother will soon hear your words, and will return your call in the fullness of time... IF you are found worthy!"

GONNNNNNNGGGGGG!!!

In which Brother dabbles in the manufacture of sporting goods...

If we let our freedom of expression be controlled by our fear of unwholesome individuals being directed to our blogs by Google, then the terrorists have ALREADY WON!!

Yesterday, I made a punching bag (like boxers use) out of a duffel bag, a year's worth of plastic grocery bags, some duct tape, a little rope, some sand, and a well-placed tree. Sure, I could have gone to the sporting goods store and bought one (in fact, if I waited until I drove to my parents' place for Christmas, I wouldn't have even had to go out of my way), but that's not very creative, now is it?

First impressions: it works quite well, although I might have made it just a bit too hard. This should be easy to fix, or I could just leave it that way and wrap my hands to cushion them until either (A) the bag softens from the pounding, or (B) my hands adapt to the unaccustomed stresses. I guess I shouldn't have expected my hands to still be as tough as they were 12 years ago, when I was hitting a bag on a regular basis.

Since I also expect to hit this bag with palm heels, chops, elbows, and the occasional stick weapon, I don't want it too soft. Padding my hands and taking it easy on the punching seems like the most practical course.

My co-worker, who enters toughman contests for fun, went out and bought a bag this weekend at the sports store. Not very creative. You could argue that he NEEDS a professionally-made bag, since he's training (if you want to call what he does "training") for competition, but I don't see how his bag would permit him to do anything that mine doesn't.

Now I'm planning to take the bag outside and carry it around on my shoulder, experiment with climbing stairs, etc. This is a classic "old school" exercise method, and I've been wanting to try it out, since I hate running. Obviously, trying this with metal weights would have been rather dangerous, so I've wisely held off until I have something I can drop on my foot without shattering the metatarsals.

The opinions expressed by Brother are his own and are not intended to represent the opinions of Sister

Aaaaiieeee!!! Noooooo!!!

Although I very much agree that Avril Lavigne is not the greatest singer in the world, please don't take Brother's other advice about doing yourself in. But, I respect Brother's right to write what he chooses here.

Unfortunately, I can imagine the search engine searches that that post are going to bring to the blog. :-O

Avril Lavigne is the Herald of the End Times... plus, helpful advice for the suicidally-depressed!

I was watching the sketch comedy show "Mad TV" last night. The first thing I noticed was that the cast has completely changed since I last saw it. The second thing I noticed was that they've apparently FINALLY realized that they don't need to have that horrible "Stuart" character in EVERY DAMN EPISODE, the way they used to a few years ago.

Their musical guest was this Avril Lavigne person, who must be fairly popular, since her name shows up on the front page of Yahoo in the list of "Most Popular Searches" (this is why I know how to spell "Lavigne"). After hearing her sing, I am sorry to report that the standards of vocal performance in this culture are continuing to drop faster than an F-15 under full thrust with its nose pointed squarely at the ground.

This girl seemed to have absolutely no idea what her own voice sounds like. She drifted aimlessly back and forth between a near-whisper and something that sounded like the mating call of the African elephant, with no apparent correlation between her tone of voice and the lyrics of the song. She repeatedly tried to sing in a register which her voice clearly could not produce, resulting in the same sort of cracking and hissing that my own voice produces when I try to imitate the high-pitched, shrieking voices of most 80's rock stars.

The performance was genuinely unpleasant to listen to, and I can't imagine why people would pay money to hear this girl. She was a BAD singer... just plain BAD! My first thought, upon hearing her, was "Has this girl had any voice lessons or ANYTHING?"

The song itself was some depressing piece of garbage about a young girl who was going to run away from home or kill herself or something. I remember seeing mention on a discussion board that Ms. Lavigne's fan base is primarily 14-year-old girls, and this song certainly seems to support that assertion, as only a 14-year-old Goth girl with the razor blade already pressed against her wrist would want to hear something like that.

Either there are an awful lot of terminally-depressed 14-year-old girls out there, or it has become fashionable in teen girl circles to PRETEND to be depressed in order to look cool. If the latter, then Ms. Lavigne had better be saving her money, because as soon as the fashion changes, she'll be working at Wal-Mart to support her drug habit.

(What do you mean "What drug habit?"? She's in the music industry! Besides, I figure she MUST have been on some pretty strong dope the day she said "Well, I sound damn good! Time to make a demo tape!" Sadly, some record executive was apparently on the same dope.)

If you had told me that her fan base was mostly male, I could have accepted it more readily, as she did appear rather pretty, and with the appropriate marketing, might have sold CD's based on the video and the picture on the album cover, just like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson and Shania Twain and Jennifer Lopez, and nearly every OTHER major female performer to appear in the last ten or fifteen years. Selling to young girls, however, suggests either an awful lot of lesbianism among young girls, or a disturbingly widespread trend of depression and self-hatred in that demographic.

Okay, I realize that's nothing new, but it ALSO supports my initial assertion that standards of vocal performance are disappearing... if they're actually LISTENING to the music, then they're either as tone-deaf and devoid of rhythm as Ms. Lavigne herself, or they're SO depressed that they don't even care whether their "Oh-I-hate-myself-and-want-to-die-but-
am-too-weak-willed-to-actually-kill-myself" music is well done or not. And that's just sad!

For our readers who may actually BE young girls considering suicide, I'd like to mention this intriguing method suggested by a poster to the Straight Dope Message Board (don't remember his name -- it was Japanese... Fuji Kotomitsu or something like that):

Stand on top of a tall building. Tie a noose of piano wire around your neck, then anchor it so its length will be maybe 30 feet less than the height of the building. Then, tie a sturdy rope around yourself in harness fashion (see any climbing or rescue manual), anchoring it so its length is maybe 15 feet less than the height of the building. Then, use Krazy Glue to affix your hand firmly to your head, and wait for it to set. Now jump.

You end up dangling just above the startled passers-by, with your own severed head grasped firmly in your hand. Now THAT'S an attention-getter! Thanks, Fuji!

Anyway, to sum up: as a singer, Avril Lavigne isn't fit to warm Bing Crosby's throat oil... young teen girls are clearly insane... and if you MUST kill yourself, be creative--those cops and reporters are already bored silly by sleeping-pill overdoses and half-hearted wrist-slittings.

Class dismissed.

In which Brother foresees a future filled with fat, pale, near-sighted soldiers...

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65885,00.html

Hopefully, the link above will be clickable. If not, copy and paste it into your brower's address bar.

According to the story above, the US military is finally putting armed battle droids into service. There are some cool pictures in the article of the droids: machines with tank-like tracks and emplacements for various types of ordnance. At the moment, the machines are remotely operated by human controllers, although the military has hopes of making them more autonomous if artificial intelligence technology gets advanced enough.

It's interesting to speculate how this will impact our culture's attitude toward war and the military. The logical development from this point would be to eventually have no human soldiers on the battlefield at all, except where needed to interact with the locals. It's possible that even that will come to be viewed as an unnecessary risk--a relatively harmless-looking vehicle (like the robot ambulance in the article) could roll up to a group of refugees or whatever and deploy a video screen / speaker arrangement, allowing an officer fluent in the local language to appear and do any questioning or deliver any instructions necessary. The vehicle could even carry food and other supplies for distribution to the locals, or ferry them out of the battle zone.

Granted, this might not be as reassuring to the locals as a human soldier with a truck, but since when have Americans worried much about things like that? And how reassuring is a heavily-armed, strange-looking foreigner who has, in all probability, just killed some of your neighbors? I think I'd be more comfortable with the machine--at least it's not likely to panic and shoot me because I brought my hand out from behind my back too quickly. Many Third-Worlders might find the machine intimidating, though, since they are less accustomed to such things than we are, but again, since when have Americans worried about that?

As robots do more of the dangerous jobs, there will be less need for humans to do them. Soldiers will gradually be converted into console-jockeys, who put in eight hours behind a keyboard and monitor, then head back to the barracks. Physical fitness standards will most likely begin to decline, since there will be no more need for a soldier to carry a heavy pack, hike long distances, etc. (Granted, the military has no actual NEED to reduce the fitness standards, but there will undoubtedly be lobbying to reduce them, once there is no actual need for high levels of fitness.)

These operators will feel less involvement with the action, since they aren't actually in it. It'll be like a video game--as soon as you shut the game off, you're no longer running through a labyrinthine castle killing vampires, you're sitting in your apartment wondering if you have any frozen pizza.

Recruiting will certainly become easier, because the whole "risk your life, get tired and filthy, and be away from your family for months at a time" bit will be a thing of the past. For a while, operators will still need to be deployed to the general area of the conflict, but as soon as the bugs get worked out of large-scale satellite-uplink control for the droids, the operator will be able to sit in a cubicle at Fort Bragg and drive his battle droid through downtown Tehran (well, that IS our next likely target, isn't it?)

People won't have any worry about their kids joining the military, since the risks will be exactly the same as if the kids were going away to college. Once we get REALLY sensitive about risk, even the droid repairmen will remain at home (or at worst, well offshore aboard a carrier): droids will tow their damaged brethren back to the staging area, where they will be airlifted to the carrier or friendly territory for repair.

The military will have to devise a whole new set of criteria for medals and awards. The Purple Heart will be a thing of the past (surely we won't keep it around just for people who twist their ankles on the stairs of the droid-control building), and the only valid criteria for awards will be things like perfect attendance.

Oh, I suppose you could reward people for number of enemy killed and so forth, but our culture is already heavily-biased AWAY from using "damage to the enemy" as a reward criterion... we're far more oriented toward acknowledging suffering than toward acknowledging actual accomplishment in battle. In recent years, I can think of only two military personnel who have gotten any acclaim: one of them got lost in the desert, got captured, got rescued, and apparently accomplished absolutely nothing, while the other crashed his plane and ate a lot of bugs while waiting for pickup. He himself denied being a hero (and rightly so), but we forced the label on him anyway. SOMEBODY is out there shooting Iraqis, and SOMEBODY shot a bunch of possible Taliban personnel, but we don't hear about them. We don't even know the names of any of the people who RESCUED the two losers mentioned above.

So, a future soldier, when asked by a young woman in a bar what a particular colored stripe on his uniform signifies, will be stuck with some sadly un-sexy story like "I drove my bot through the slalom course faster than anybody else in my training platoon."

This, of course, will lead to increased business for the prostitutes in areas around military bases, since the soldiers will have a harder time picking up women, due to their lack of sexy, macho accomplishments.

In time, being a soldier will come to be no different from being an accountant or travel agent or dental assistant. You'll sit on your butt in front of a computer all day, then go home. In terms of what images end up in your memory, you'll STILL be no different from the average person, since the average person is playing "Droid Commander II" on his X-Box.

No more "support the troops", since the troops are cutting you off in traffic and dating your daughters (or sons... since a female soldier can turn knobs and hit buttons as well as a male... which brings up the interesting image of a woman eight months pregant being responsible for cleaning out a village full of insurgents!).

No more exciting war stories for the grandchildren, since your stories are identical to your non-military brother's stories of his computer-gaming triumphs.

No more place for the truly aggressive and combatively physical young men to go where they can apply their natural tendencies in a useful manner. I imagine this would result in some degree of increase in brawling and/or psychological trauma due to suppressed aggression... although maybe not much, since we seem to be breeding these tendencies out of our population, anyway.

With no risk and no personal stake for anyone, there would be no pressing reason for anyone to object to military solutions for more and more problems. President has a bug up his butt about, let's say, Madagascar? Send in the battle droids... who really cares? If we don't use the droids, my cousin the droid-driver will lose his Army job and have to move back in with us! And my nephew works for a company that makes droid wheel bearings!

Why does this remind me of that Star Trek episode where the two planets had been waging a simulated war for centuries, with disintegration booths for those deemed "killed"? In a hundred years, will we need an alien James T. Kirk to come along and try to convince us that war NEEDS to be messy and scary, so we actually have a reason to stop?

**Edited by Sister to make link at the top clickable.

Not really

Before Brother gets the wrong idea, let me say that I'm not necessarily intending to read every book on my wish list. That might happen, but it might not. It's a reminder for me when I'm looking for a book to read. Sometimes, too, I come across titles that sound interesting and want to remember them. I usually have a million little scraps of paper around my computer already so adding another scrap with book titles wouldn't help much. Thus, the wish list is a type of scrap of paper for me, but it's online and off my desk. AND, as long as I can remember my username and password (or not lose the scrap of paper on which they're written), I can always bring up my list. However, don't let that dissuade you, Brother, from any urge to buy me anything from my list.

As for the coffee books, I am addicted to caffeinated beverages, just not coffee in particular. Those books sounded interesting--a little social history, a bit about economics, probably some interesting coffee history tidbits. Fantastic!

Statistics and Cycles and Coffee... oh my!

Wow, that's quite a reading list!

Somehow, the books about custom motorcycles seem a bit out of place, there among the scholarly-sounding treatises on statistics and social sciences. If anybody's wondering, I know Sister pretty well, and I just can't see her riding a chopper.

I'd also be interested in knowing why there are two books on the list devoted to coffee. I've never seen Sister DRINK coffee, and no theories explaining her interest in it occur to me.

Finally, I'm sure all our readers join me in wanting to ask what the heck is up with "Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse"????

The prominent presence of the statistics-related book on the list reminds me of "The Cartoon Guide to Statistics" by Larry Goznik... or Groznik... or Gonzik (something like that). It's exactly what it sounds like: an introductory text on statistics, presented by means of cute little drawings and short blocks of text which use the simplest language possible to explain statistical concepts and methods.

The book strikes me as being quite easy to understand (although I've studied statistical analysis as part of my engineering schoolwork, so I may be a non-representative sample) and is often quite entertaining. Anyone wanting to learn what's up with this whole "statistics" deal would probably find this book to be an excellent starting point, especially for those who have a low tolerance for academic-style writing.

Sister will no doubt be pleased to hear that I found this book in my local library. Judging from the jacket copy, this Gronzik fellow has written several "Cartoon Guide to..." books on other subjects as well. I remember that one of them was a history text.

I don't really have much to say about coffee or motorcycles, except this little tidbit, told to me years ago by an avid "rice rocket" (Japanese motorcycle) enthusiast:

Question: "Why doesn't Harley-Davidson make televisions?"

Answer: "Because they can't get them to drip oil."

(Note: No defamation of Harley-Davidson, its fine American-made products, or the large, violent, and heavily-armed enthusiasts of same is intended. I've never owned a cycle and don't know what I'm talking about. Please don't hurt me.)

Wish books

I decided (for lack of anything better to write) to post my wish lists from Powells.com and Amazon.com. This is not a call for anyone to buy me these items. I use the wish list feature at both places more as a reminder of books I'm interested in than as a shopping guide for any third party.

Here it is... (Yes, yes, I could provide links for each title to the online bookstores, but, come on, you know you should look for these at your local library before you just go out and buy them. Find your library here.)

1. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg
2. Beyond Stitch and Bitch: Knitting as a Metaphor for Life by Afi-odelia Scruggs
3. Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
4. A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
5. The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg
6. The Development Dictionary by Wolfgang Sachs
7. The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin
8. Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch : Tales from a Bad Neighborhood by Hollis Gillespie
9. The Devil's Cup : A History of the World According to Coffee by Stewart Lee Allen
10.Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast
11.From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs by Andrew Weil
12.Choppers: Heavy Metal Art by Mike Seate
13.Art of the Chopper by Tom Zimberoff
14.Billy Lane: Chop Fiction: It's Not A Motorcycle Baby, It's A Chopper by Billy Lane
15.Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier by Megan Edwards
16.Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
17.The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition) by Alan Cooper
18.The Experts' Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do by Samantha Ettus
19.Confessions of a Slacker Mom by Muffy Mead-Ferro
20.The Bastard on the Couch : 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood, and Freedom by Daniel Jones
21.Creating a Web Page with HTML : Visual QuickProject Guide (Visual Quickproject Series) by Elizabeth Castro
22.Garden State Various Artists (Film Soundtrack)
23.Little Shop Of Horrors (1986 Film Soundtrack)
24.The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975 Film Soundtrack)
25.One Beat Sleater-Kinney (Album)
27.My Gentleman Friend (Dig) Blossom Dearie (Album)
28.Identity Crisis Shelby Lynne (Album)
29.Surviving Information Overload: The Clear, Practical Guide to Help You Stay on Top of What You Need to Know by Kevin A. Miller
30.My Baby Don't Tolerate Lyle Lovett (Album)
31.Los Lonely Boys Los Lonely Boys (Album)
32.The Mavericks The Mavericks (Album)
33.Definitive Collection Mavericks (Album)
34.Come from Heaven Alpha (Album)
35.Once Upon a Summertime Blossom Dearie (Album)
36.Living with Ghosts Patty Griffin (Album)
37.Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (Live Girls Series) by Michelle Tea
38.Found : The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World by Davy Rothbart
39.Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
40.The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System by Siva Vaidhyanathan