ONOZ! It's a ketchup volcano! Or Tómatsósa eldfjall, if you will. Run away (or toward, depending on how your tastes are)!

I had a teacher who gave a creative writing assignment of "I stepped into my TV set and...". I figured I'd mess with the assignment and just list the damage to the TV and the parts that would be needed to repair it. To my surprise, the teacher liked it and said it was very creative.

So, skystates.us, you make an illegal phone call to a number on the DNC list, and your pitch is I give you $3000, do unpaid work for you "as training" for 4 months, THEN you start jobhunting for me? Hard pass.

Aside from threats of legal action, words designed to attract the attention of NSA, and descriptions of grievous bodily harm, one of things I like to throw to robocallers is "grackle borgward" (one of Goulash's weird lines from Bored of the Rings). Weirdly, the last results in the fastest hangups.

Looking at old Artomatic photos, found one I liked of Barry S. Schmetter's exhibit. I got curious as to what he was up to these days, only to find out he'd died in 2023. That hit me harder than I expected, we didn't know each other, I'd just seen his art a few times.

If you post a link to an article that's paywalled, you don't get to complain to me about responding to the headline without reading the article.

Reading Mary Roach's new book "Replaceable You" [2025, W. W. Norton], there's a description of how human tears form layers, aided by a "brush-like scaffold that extends into the tear film", known as a glycocalyx. Curious, I looked for a picture of this, the first one I found was bemusing.

"What are those little brown things in my rice?" "Those are seeds, they're for flavor." "I don't want seeds in my rice!" I've got some bad news for you...

My sweetie and I were playing Wordle and noticed our patterns were the same, so we looked at the actual words we had played, which turned to also be identical. People say we think alike, and this would be evidence of that.

I was working on one project involving bus routes, and would get these periodic dumps of bus schedules in very messy CSV. I wrestled with it for a while, but then discovered I could fetch the structured data in General Transit Feed Specification format via an API. I wish I had known that earlier!

I'm not likely to download your stupid money funnel game anyway, but if you can't even get a simple word spelled correctly in your ad? Public mockery.

Sending me unwanted texts begging for money is bad enough, but flooding me with over sixty texts at once? Instablock, and I'm blackballing your entire campaign.

On a data recovery project, customer wanted a count of unique files recovered, as quickly as possible. Instead of worrying about efficiency, a couple of shell commands and a few minutes was enough. find . -type f -exec sum {} \; > sums sed -e "s/ \..*//g" < sums | sort | uniq | wc -l

For decades, I thought Abba‘s song “Take a Chance on Me” included the lyrics “If you‘re all alone, well I‘m pretty versatile”. But while watching The Muppet Show with captions, I found out they‘re really singing “If you‘re all alone when the pretty birds have flown”. Huh.

We're enjoying the show "Reginald the Vampire", starring the ever-appealing Jacob Batalon, and saw it's based on a "Fat Vampire" book. While travelling, we find a "Fat Vampire" book, autographed by the author! The story and characters are different, turns out there are two books with that title.

I was today years old when I realized "Palmolive" is palm + olive, two popular oils for making soap products.

I don't get drug ads in general, and in particular the ones that don't even give any indication of what condition the product is intended to treat. While I can glean that it's a monoclonal antibody by the -mab in "guselkumab", that's not much use.

I tried playing some 2D games with a graphics tablet. For some "hammer the bad guys" type games (for example, the "Whack a Zombie" minigame in Plants vs Zombies) that take a lot of precision clicking in a hurry, it utterly rules.

I don't understand these game ads. They show a freezing woman and child in a room with a broken window and no heat, and give you a choice of helping them by either painting the walls or picking up the trash.

A phototherapy lamp company closed their doors a while back and I bought some of their stock in bulk. Now what am I going to do with what's essentially a bunch of oddly-colored fluorescent lamps?

Watching a Technology Connections segment on humidifiers, I was distracted by a pile of boxes of miniature light bulbs. I wondered why he has so many bulbs. Then another shot revealed a pinball machine, which explains that neatly.

I bought a broken tunable helium-neon laser on eBay many moons ago. A few weeks ago, I coaxed the first laser light out of it (orange, interestingly enough). Soon I was able to get two reds and an orange out of it, but no more. On Christmas, it began lasing yellow!

Tested by experiment: "White Noise" is not a Christmas movie. That is all.

TFW you finally read the information sheet for a medication you've been taking for a long time and under "side effects" it lists ... Confusion.

To put a new coin cell in our key fob, I opened it, unfortunately, releasing a little metal slider that retains the mechanical key, whose spring pinged away and vanished. I found a suitable replacement, but it sprang off too. A less suitable one stayed, but, flustered, I put the cell in backwards.

For a GISHWHES challenge to generate mascots, I selected some animals, drew their front and back ends, and wrote a program to select two, join them, and combine their names. Once, it chose "octopus" twice, yielding "ocotpoctopus". This became a running joke. www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUFm...

Grump.

I think it's time to re-share an old pic I took of Sammy knocking over the Christmas tree.

"Did you set the parking brake?" "Yeah, that's how I roll, er, don't roll."

On Southwest, they tell you "the sole indication for you to get out of your seats is when the seat belt light turns off", but the they say "wait until the plane is stopped and the seat belt light turns off", which is *two* indications.

Trying to check bsky this morning, got flickering messages like "Hmm, some kind of issue occurred when contacting the feed server. Please let the feed owner know about this issue." and "r.countGraphemes is not a function". Weird.

Went to mail some packages, but the printer stopped working on the last label. Copied the label to a thumb drive and went to the library to print it. Library computer didn't like the thumb drive. Went back home, uploaded the label to a server. Went back to the library, printed out the label.

Got a weird job interview where I was asked to fill out a document describing my experience. Belatedly, I realized I was using my default spellings (such as ”coördinate“ and ”façade”), and wondered if they’d assume I’d used an LLM to help with the writing.

After some dental work, I was instructed to chew only on one side. It's not really a big deal, but it made a few specific foods (such as tortellini) particularly unsatisfying for some reason. I haven't figured out what it is about those foods.

After falling down the stairs a while back, I paid more attention to how I use the stairs. Apparently some part of my brain decided it felt nice to wrap my toes around the edge of the steps, but that has the side effect of making me use stairs like "Victorian death stairs". Toes are important.

Well, we did a thing. Legally married now, making the paperwork correspond with reality. Whee!

At a former job, was told to make fake "Gantt" charts by coloring boxes in Excel. Seemed tedious, so I automated it. Probably took about as long. Then they changed the parameters. Took me a few seconds to rerun. Repeat a few times. Traded hours of work for a few minutes coding. Made a meme.

Had a discussion with my dental hygienist about toothbrushes. We both prefer soft straight bristles and a compact head, but those have become hard to find in stores. Currently, I buy mine online here: www.kleenteeth.com/oral-b-indic...

I bought these "Frosty the Snowman" themed chocolate double crisp candies, but it wasn't obvious how to open them. The packaging has an irregular outline to accommodate the characters, forming a notch between Frosty's head and the broom, but using that to open it tears off Frosty's head!

I don't know who needs to understand this chart when dealilng with hearing impaired people, but it would be nice if more people did.

I had a little sad when I thought I'd hit the bottom of my to-read pile. Nope, there's more! Thanks, David Gerrold, for being friendly and selling me your books!

Sat down for our annual watching of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, only to find out Peacock paywalled it. I'm sure the bean counters will be pleased when a bunch of people fall for it and they rake in a bunch of cash, but this is basically the death of NBC.

Been looking forward to the Aerosmith/Yungblud collaboration, hoping that it would contain either Rag Doll or Love in an Elevator, both of which would utterly rock. Alas, neither one is there. Still, I'm expecting to enjoy all the tracks.

There's a particular thing I cook in the microwave and every time it seems the dish gets turned around 180°. At first I thought this was just random, then realized the tray rotates at 2RPM and I run it for 15 seconds.

I've enjoyed the "Now You See Movies" and have been eagerly anticipating the third installment. For those who like the franchise, it's a worthy addition, with the flashy Robin Hood antics we've come to love. The new additions have the screen presence to work with the existing strong cast, too.

Got a video test signal generator cheap as surplus. With the end of analog TV, a bunch of pro level gear is suddenly affordable.

I wanted to test some old neon pinball score displays, so I put together the proper connector, programmed an Arduino to generate the appropriate control signals, and used my ancient Heathkit power supply as a source of 190V. Success!

Without downloading any new pics, describe your gender

I've long been a fan of Papermate's Flair Ultrafine felt tip pens. However, they don't show up in stores any more, so I buy them in bulk online. This makes me worry that they'll stop making them. Even now, it's hard to find the non-multicolor sets. The Pilot RazorPoint is a poor substitute.