Last Post for September

I like to think that we are made of anti-matter and not matter. But if that was the case it wouldn't matter because we would call anti-matter matter and matter anti-matter.

I shall return this weekend for a real post.

On Blogs, Fame, and cross dressing:

Lately I have become enamored with the Next Blog button. For hours, I will click through all that Blogger has to offer. And the sad truth is that not many of the blogs on here are worth reading. I mean, really, between finding fifty blogs in a row about fashion(Perhaps Blogger thinks I could use a hot new fall look, but dresses and high heels are not my things. At least not my public things.) and the countless "DAVIS FAMILY ADVENTURES LOL" blogs, it can start to look hopeless.

Yes, I just drew myself in drag. Yes, I look fabulous.

I don't care what human walking sticks are wearing down the runway. I don't care that little baby Allan said his first word today, unless that word is Ron Burgundy or something obscene. I don't care what you think of the latest NFL draft. I don't care about your spin on the political scene in our country.

But I'm sure you don't care about me crashing my sister's car. I highly doubt anybody really wants to hear me complain about my job. But the one difference I notice is that most everybody is trying to become famous with their blogs. In fact, a study I recently read about found that when asking children what they want to be when they grow up, the most common answer was 'famous'. Not 'a famous writer' or 'a famous actor', just famous. It's sad that the only ambition the future generation seems to have amounts to "HEY LOOK AT ME EVERYONE. HEY. LOOK. ARE YOU LOOKING YET? HEY"

People used to become famous because they did extraordinary things. All it took was glorifying one or two perfectly ordinary people doing nothing special, and all of a sudden everybody thinks they deserve to be famous too. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting some degree of fame -I'd be a liar and a hypocrite if I said I don't want lots of people to read this blog or listen to my music- but to me, the reason why you're famous is more important. What did you contribute? Why should people remember your name instead of the billions of others on this planet? If you have nothing useful to say or contribute to society, there is no reason society should put you on a pedestal.

I guess until I complete my plans of world domination and become Big Brother I can't control the things people decide to devote their attention to.

My evil lair is gonna be the shit.

The reason I do not have my driver's license:

Disclaimer: This is the first real post I have made entirely on my iMac. As such, the drawings will suck even more than usual while I get used to using Paintbrush.



In Pennsylvania, you have to be sixteen to get your driver's permit. I know most kids are excited for this time, because for them it means freedom. I was not excited. It wasn't even that I didn't want to be able to drive, I was mostly just apathetic about the whole idea. I had recently moved into the center of town where everything is pretty much within walking distance, so I had absolutely no reason to be excited about driving.

As it was, I finally got my permit about three or four months after my birthday. This is about how I felt about that:

After a week or so, my sister decides "Hey! Why don't we go driving? I'll take you to a parking lot and you can just take it easy and get used to it." I agree, so she drives about five blocks from my house to a school. I take the wheel and putt around the parking lot at about three or five miles an hour and I start to realize, "Hey, this is fun! I like driving!"

I practice pulling into parking spaces for a little while and then my sister says "Why don't you take the car around the block?" So I leave the safety of my parking lot and turn left on to the real road. I navigate the block successfully and by this time I'm feeling a bit smug. I can totally drive. I got this. I pull into the lot again and park in a space. "Now what?" I ask.

"I don't know."

So I drive back to the road and turn right this time. Now what I had failed to remember is that this road leads to a hill. And of course, on hills objects with wheels will pick up momentum. I was not prepared at all. The car began traveling faster and faster, so I panicked.

 

 My brain had frozen up. But I was quickly entering an intersection that looked like this:

So since I had totally forgotten that cars come equipped with mechanisms that allow them to stop, I had three choices.

1) Crash into the house on the corner, leap out of the car and start yelling "Who the hell parked in my spot?!"
2) Smash into the car parked in front of the house
3) Mow down the stop sign and pray the telephone pole will stop me.

I chose option number three.

A lady came rushing out of the house, and having just watched an idiot teenager crash his sister's Taurus into a telephone pole, she was understandably excited. "Oh my Gawd, are you guys okay?" We muttered some embarrassed response, and I was literally shaking with adrenaline and guilt. I kept apologizing to my sister, but displaying that classic elder-sibling wisdom, she simply smiled at me and said "Don't worry about it. The insurance will cover it."

And it's a damn good thing that it did, too. If you've ever examined a road sign closely, you will know that the signs are on a long piece of metal that bolts into a shorter piece of metal that actually sticks in the ground.

This piece of metal tore up the underside of my sister's vehicle, and it cost over three grand to have it all fixed.

And that is why I have not gotten my driver's license.

Embarrassing stories from childhood, part one.

I finally got my iMac issues all sorted out(had to get a wireless router) so hopefully now updates can be a bit more consistent. I was going to say frequent, but given my schedule the past few days, I'll be out of things to talk about in a week if I post any more often and then this blog will die off until I do something cool or at least kinda interesting. Then perhaps I could write again.


Just so this doesn't feel like a waste of space, here are three embarrassing stories from before I had learned how to remember things:

1: "Is this yo baby?"

I was very young at this time, at the very oldest I could have only been a year and a half old. While my family was living in Wisconsin, the house we lived in had a big screened in porch, complete with doggie flap in the front door. Apparently, while my mother was cooking, she let me crawl/stumble around, figuring I wouldn't get far. Of course, I crawled out the doggie door and into the street. A few minutes later, my mother answers a knock at the door to a stranger holding me in his arms. Even as an infant I wanted to run away, I guess.

2: We wish you a merry Christmas

This was also from the time we lived in Wisconsin. I found a spare bulb for a string of Christmas lights and because babies are stupid, I ate it.

My parents did not find this out immediately, but I'm sure the wait made the surprise even better. I wish someone would have taken a picture of my diaper just so I would have some proof. I don't think anybody else in the history of ever has uttered that phrase before. Ah, the smell of innovation.

3: I really like Ford F-150s.

Around the time I started learning to speak, I had developed a fascination with trucks of all sorts. Dump trucks, fire trucks, pickup trucks, monster trucks, I loved them all. Now, the funny thing with kids and learning to talk is they always have some sort of cutesy speech impediment while the child wraps its brain around the concept of making articulate sounds from organs previously devoted to gibberish, crying, and yelling. I had one such problem that wasn't always so cute.

Trucks are everywhere. And when your toddler loves them dearly but pronounces the letters tr as an f, it can make you never want to take your kid anywhere ever again.

P.S. I know I referred to a child as "it" above... but I dislike using "his or her" so much I'd rather come off as a desensitized asshole than use it. I actually kinda like kids, if you must know.

DuBois Graffiti Showcase: Sandy Bridge Edition

The other day I found my digital camera for the first time in months. So naturally, I had to go play mister photographer. It seems like every hooligan with a dollar and a valid ID wants the world to know something badly enough to deface public property.

Hi Sammi!

I like this one. It actually looks like graffiti.

 

Har har.

Once I got up close, I found some really cool artwork by someone going by the name of Chubson. Who are you Chubson? And where can I find more of your work?

Hair? Eyepatch? I honestly do not know.

D'aaawwwww.

This one is my favorite.

EXTRA CREDIT:

 

EDIT: I don't know how the hell I forgot to post this one. It's so simple, yet elegant.

I vote we rename the bridge.

I am worried my niece may become a lesbian.

Not that there's anything wrong with that... But I came home from work to find this window open:

I fear she is getting some mixed signals about genders..

A brief interlude

When you work a full time job and you have many hobbies, you have to learn to split up your time wisely. By nature and/or upbringing, I simply cannot do this. So what usually happens is I pick one thing and work at it mercilessly until I am burned out, then trying to find time for my other projects. This is why my blog posts have been a little sporadic. Between working, two bands, making jewelry, maintaining some semblance of a social life and trying to start a zine in my hometown, I barely have the time to watch a cartoon, let alone write a post.

I don't really know where I was going with that or why you needed to hear it. I was just trying to post before bed and couldn't think of anything. So here are some pictures from my sketchbook. These are all from the era when I was obsessed with pastels.

 

 

 

I should not be near a computer right now.

It is six twenty AM eastern standard time as of right now. I have been up all night doing all sorts of productive things, and now, while I wait for a load of laundry to finish(and more importantly my bagel bites to finish cooking. Hooray breakfast!) I am trying with all of my half asleep might to keep some of that nervous energy that I've been running on for the past four hours. So this post is an ode to my new favorite movie of all time, Machete.

I, like most everyone else, got my first glorious taste of Machete's badassery from the fake trailer packaged with Planet Terror, which is another fine film deserving of its own post. I was completely stunned, and watched the Machete trailer at least five times before letting the actual movie play.

This is why Planet Terror is second best movie ever.

 Despite the above awesomeness, Planet Terror is The Sound of Music compared to Machete. Robert Rodriguez has created the best movie that has ever been made. Nothing else can come close to what this movie delivers,

Let's go down the check list for an awesome action movie:

Boobs: Oh lord yes. A nude Lindsay Lohan(albeit with a body double in the most revealing scenes), Jessica Alba, and some nice ladies whose names I did not catch in the credits. Boob quota has most certainly been reached.

Body count: Not totally sure, but at least a few hundred people. Some of the deaths are pretty spectacular. Check out the death of Steven Seagal's character Torrez at the end of the film, along with some motorcycle-gatling gun shenanigans.

Epic...ness? : Very epic. Like most action films, the bad guys were involved in a vast conspiracy involving mexican drug money, a Texas senator, and a group of vigilantes that shoot Mexicans crossing the border. And of course, His Awesomeness Machete gets sucked into the heart of things. 

The funny: Above all else, Machete is really goddamn funny. There's a fight scene with a weedwhacker, no less than 5 decapitations within the first ten minutes of the movie, a great scene where Machete kills someone with a thermometer, and so many other things that I wish I could tell you about without ruining everything that is great about this film.

The trouble with my job:

I work in the powdered metal industry. For those of you unfamiliar with the business, we take various metal powders(duh) and put them into big compacting machines which then compress the powder with several tons of force into the shape of a part. Disc shaped washers, small gears, threaded hex nuts, and countless other little metal doohickeys that you use all the time without even knowing it are all commonly made in factories just like the one I work in.

The next part of the process in making powdered metal parts is called sintering. This is simply sending the parts through a large furnace at temperatures varying from 1500 to 2100 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing the metal particles to bond together, and make a finished part. This is where I come in. My job is to load the parts into the furnace and unload them when they are coming out of the back, as well as checking key dimensions on the parts after sintering is complete. More or less, here is the entirety of a standard workday running parts made of iron powder via bad drawings:

Step 1: Blow loose powder off of parts.

Step 2: Slide parts from tray to furnace belt.

Step 3: Wait.

Step 4: Repeat steps 1-3 for fifty minutes

Step 5: Walk sixty feet to the other end of the furnace.

Step 6: Fill out part inspection sheet.


And then you get to repeat steps one thru six FOR TEN HOURS! WHOO PARTY CENTRAL!

Then there are two very special types of orders that I absolutely loathe to run: Stainless steel parts, and infiltrated parts. Both of these are pretty similar to running standard iron parts, but with a couple of exceptions that make them absolutely infuriating.

When sintering parts made of stainless steel, you have to use these stupid metal foil trays, otherwise the parts become contaminated and turn a lovely shade of green. Personally, I prefer them that way, but the customers buying the parts have a slightly differing opinion. Yet even when you use the trays that are supposed to prevent the discoloration of the parts, half the time the ones near the edge of the tray still end up with contaminants and even if that doesn't happen, this weird crusty gunk(I believe it is all the contaminants that get burned out of iron based parts) can fall onto the parts and ruin them anyway. Like I said, infuriating. And to top it all off, the trays smell awful when they come out of the furnace. As soon as you dump the parts out of the tray and into a barrel, your nose becomes the victim of a terrible tragedy. It's like someone took a shit in a pot of brackish coffee and then shot it up your nostrils with a turkey baster.

As if this wasn't enough to make me despise stainless steel, if any oxygen touches the parts while they are being sintered they are ruined. The brilliant solution to this problem is to pump a bunch of excess hydrogen into the furnace, which then catches fire. Fire, as you should know, needs oxygen to burn. So, no oxygen even stands a chance of touching the parts while they are being sintered. However, side effects may include loss of eyebrows, third degree burns, and drowning in your own sweat as the furnace belches fire at you all day long.

Infiltrated parts are not nearly as exciting as they sound. There is no espionage involved(I know, I was really disappointed too). What actually happens is you melt a set amount of copper into the part. This copper fills the gaps between particles, making them stronger. But of course, there's a catch. You have to put the parts on carbon plates, because if you don't, the copper will go right through them and melt into the furnace belt. I am not sure of the ramifications of this and even though I hate my job, it's not worth losing to such a stupid experiment. Additionally, the parts are not allowed to touch each other, unless of course you want a cluster of forty gears that will never, ever, EVER come apart.

And of course, the same unholy stench from the stainless steel trays radiates off of the carbon plates after they are run through the furnace, albeit to a lesser extent. But my absolute favorite part about running infiltration is the way the copper residue has to be scrubbed off of the part. Not only is this time consuming and very irritating, but the residue turns my sweat a color that somehow evokes Baja Blast Mountain Dew, snot, and piss all at the same time. I tried to draw something in MS Paint to illustrate this point, but there just is no way to find the proper color. I will have to obtain photographic evidence in order to make anyone understand.

Of course, there are lots of other, small things that bother me just like I'm sure everyone has little pet peeves in the workplace that drive them up the wall. And had I not been subjected to both of these atrocious tasks multiple times this past work week, I probably would not have written this at all. But as it is, I am in the market for a new job. Anything has to be better than this.

Well, almost anything....

I present to you

The very best picture on the internet, ever.

Real post later.