Everyday Stupidities

First, an announcement: The house pictured a week ago and described a week prior has been repainted as you see here. Speculation is that judging by the way the yard has been cleaned up, snazzy new things such as a storage shed have been added, and other Bill Ding-approved renovations have taken place, the person who praised the local football team has been evicted. :) Compare and contrast to how it looked a week ago, as seen two entries ago.

The title of today's entry comes from a poster I saw in a used bookstore today, which was created by Crimethic (whose website no longer exists, or I'd be able to quote the text directly). I found a couple interesting books there:
• The Fotygraft Album: Shown to the New Neighbor by Rebecca Sparks Peters, Age Eleven by Frank Wing (1915) - sort of a cross between my found photos with silly captions site Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul or (more accurately) greeting card/book authors MikWright and Art Linkletter's House Party 'Kids Say The Darndest Things'. A family photo album gets silly descriptions by a backwoods girl, and the images in the book are sketches rather than photos but were likely derived from real photos, predating all the above references (but not predating Linkletter himself, who born in 1912).
• F*CK this book by Bodhi Oser (2005) - interesting concept, the man took a spin off George Carlin's routine about how we should replace the word "kill" in the old clichés with the word "f*ck", and he made up stickers with the F-word on them that he put strategically on signs around town then took photos. I knew I had to have it when I saw the sign at the park that was revised to say "please do not f*ck the pigeons." Guerilla art? Mayhaps.

Last week was really bizarre for me in the computer regard. Tuesday morning, I got up early and did some stuff on the computer before I went to work. I got home that night, turned on the computer, and the 17" monitor just sat and clicked at me, lights dimming every time to show the monitor was making an honest effort to kick in but the little engine just couldn't. Grrr. My room is a computer parts graveyard so I pulled out the fuzzy 15" monitor I'd picked up the 17" inch (free from someone on CraigsList) to replace. The next morning I went to a local recycler and bought a 19" monitor for quite reasonable. That night, I plugged it in and it too was fuzzy AND the colors kept slipping into the red zone. Grrr. The next morning, I went back to the recycler and traded up for a 17" flatscreen. I know, I always said I'd never go LCD but necessity makes for strange bedfellows. It's bright, it's clear, it's got 1280x1024 resolution without being cramped, and... after an hour it suddenly made the clouds in my Point Defiance waterfront background into red electric plasma. Attractive but only for a minute. Grrr. Hmm, slapping the side isn't fixing it, and powering it off for an hour fixes it but isn't the solution I seek. I did some out-of-warranty surgery with a screwdriver, found that some of the wires in the gangleon on the back of the LCD panel might be interfering with each other, and wiggled them just a little bit to solve the issue. Not before making everything turn plasma green but it's all in how you wiggle it; a little tape to secure things was applied. Things are happy again at Mushy's computer for the moment, and I need to reclaim a cubic yard of floor space in my room by taking three working-or-not CRT monitors to the recycler.

I don't have much else to snark on at the moment (translation: "man, I had a good one in mind yesterday but damned if I can remember it now...") so I'll leave you for the moment with two more local photos of icicle liiiiiights! Click 'em for bigger. No, honest, if I wanted to do this for fun, I'd start a Flickr group - there have been even dumber topics given groups, and with fewer pictures/examples that I can conjure. The left image is from near a popular intersection, and the right image is from four houses away from the previous flakes-and-icicles example. And a word from their neighbors: Guys, y'all bringing down property values.