June 2005
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I knew it!
02 June, 2005 at 04:44 PM by Ren | Permalink
Speaking with my good friend, the Batman this morning, we had the IM conversation that follows below:
Batman: we have had 7 heat sink/fan problems; i think i got a rattling computer in the C lab and god knows what else
Ren: hehehehe FUN!
Batman: yeah, makes my life interesting[short pause in the conversation]
Batman: cuts the boredom of being stuck in a lad with no classes in the morning
Ren: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Batman: OMFG
Ren: you almost made me spit Dr. Pepper on my monitor.
Batman: for your viewing pleasure this morning
god im tired
I always suspected things about that Batman.
Note how he tries to play it off by being tired
I knew it--Freudian typos never lie, after all.
Modern Marvels
09 June, 2005 at 08:45 PM by Ren | Permalink
Before I get started, let me take this opportunity to make an announcement: Shan Dar's employer now blocks this website because of my potty mouth.
I'm pr0n, y'all!
There's just too many people to thank; I don't know where to begin. All I know is that without all of my pervy friends, I wouldn't have this honor today.
Thank you. Thank you all.
Right. So I'm watching the History Channel's Modern Marvels. On this show they talk about some technological marvel of the modern age (hence the show's apt name). Just before commercial breaks, they run a text bumper with a factoid about the subject they're covering.
For instance, if they were doing an episode on bridges, a bump before commercials might read:
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco contains enough steel cable to wrap around the Earth three times.
Moderately interesting tidbits, but nothing really earth-shattering. Well, not so today; today's episode is about the butcher. Quite the modern marvel, apparently. The best part of this ep, though, is the bumps. Through the whole episode, the bumps bear little resemblance to the segment that aired before them. Here's some choice selections:
Ancient Romans sometimes roasted a chicken, stuffed inside a roasted goose, stuffed inside a roasted pig that was then stuffed inside a cow and roasted.
That bump showed up after something about the butcher in history. I think. The sheer weirdness of it threw me off.
Anyway, this factoid basically points out two things that an omnivore like me already knew:
- Meat is eminently stuffable
- Ancient Romans were ridiculously decadent f*ckers
Romans sure knew how to go over the top, didn't they? Not content to merely stuff a chicken or a goose (or a pig or cow for that matter), they took it to the next level. They went there.
I can see it now, some wealthy Roman praetor sitting at his villa overlooking the Tiber thinking to himself, "you know, I really like stuffed and roasted livestock. I love roasted chicken, roasted goose; hell, I'll even go for some roast pig or cow. But how can I enjoy all these tastes at once and show history that my society was among the most decadent of all time? I've got it! I'll stuff a chicken into a goose, stuff that into a pig, and then stuff all of that into a cow and roast it! Brilliant!!" The only thing that could possibly top that would be dipping the entire thing in chocolate, slathering it with batter and deep frying it.
As if that first bump wasn't random enough, the second one was equally bizarre:
A popular treat in St. Louis and Chicago stockyards at the height of the last century was a brain sandwich...made from thin slices of a cow's brain.
Yum! I'll have two, please. To be fair, this bump wasn't nearly as random as the orgy of Roman meat stuffing. I don't think anything could be that off. No, this bump was preceded by a segment on the industrial scale of meat production in the early 21st Century. So I suppose a bump on the eating habits of stockyard workers in Chicago in 1898 is moderately related. Sort of.
Doesn't really matter, though, because just watching all that meat being cut up made me hunger for one big-ass brain sandwich (with extra medula oblongata!), let me tell you!
Sadly, the bump for the fourth segment wasn't nearly as entertaining. The segment was about food safety, specifically e. coli and Mad Cow Disease--the bump had to do with the prevention of Mad Cow in the U.S. food supply.
But really. Brain sandwiches and quad-stuffed cow? That's TV Gold right there.