Absinthe

On Wired.com today, I ran across the article "The Mystery of the Green Menace". It's about Ted Breaux, a chemist and environmental microbiologist who's used his knowledge to resurrect a true absinthe. Something that's been lost over a century of demonization and criminalization. Its a facinating read and the best thing is that a Google search turned up his company, Jade Liqueurs AND their worldwide distributor Liqueurs de France.

I'm deeply excited by the thought of sharing in the madness that fueled Van Gogh, Lautrec, Picasso and so many other great talents. Who wants to join me?

This time next week...

...we'll be exhausted but enjoying the fireworks. :)

There's only one thing missing from this otherwise perfect picture from 11/00. And this trip we'll finally get to set it right! We have to make sure and get several photos of the whole gang this trip. Yay!

And speaking of references nobody gets...

I came up with what I thought was THE perfect quote in a conversation with Christian the other day...but it was ruined by the fact that he didn't get the reference. So I called upon Lee and his parsley was just as orange. Dear readers, please tell me that ONE of you gets this:

Christian: I keep buying shaving cream thinking I'm out...and now I've got at least six cans.
Chris: Your supply of Illudium Phosdex is alarmingly high!

Come on...validate my geekiness. *sigh*

47 Reasons I Didn't Become A Cartoonist: Part 12

Good things come to those who wait

And in this case, it's the long awaited end of this series. These are my favorites from the bunch (for a variety of reasons).

My attempt at a witty Wacky Packages/Crazy Labels product parody.

Another attempt at observational humor. Because everyone's been asking that burning question "what irritates fleas?" It's really all about the drawing on this one, as its better fleshed out than most and the subjects have more character. Plus it has much more graphite per square inch than any of the series.

I know what you're saying...WTF? On vacation, my family stayed at a motel with a sign by the pool "Don't pee in our pool 'cause we don't swim in your toilet". Even at that young age, the weirdness of the sign stuck with me. And an early sign of my attraction to references that nobody else gets. Your parsley is SO orange.

Dirty Jobs

Reason number 717 I'll never be a pig farmer:
I don't want to jack off a pig.

At least with the horse they used an artificial vagina...but they still to hold it. Eww. I hope the host, Mike Rowe, is well paid for everything they put him through.

Best line from tonight's episode...delivered while cleaning up a sow for artificial insemination:
I don't want to be too rough with her, but this vulva's a disaster

Working with crazy people is fun...

Christian's reponse to the question "is there anything your almighty team can not do?":

You don’t know the half of it. Currently on our task list is “Restore the ozone in the ionosphere” (Karina’s doing some high altitude reconnaissance to the Van Allen belt next week) and “Feasibility of Inhabited Mars Bases.” Libby’s making Chris do a quick trip to MS’s secret moon base next month. Oops! Forget I said that last part.

And Rick's response to the age old question "who would win in a fight - a bear or a gorilla?":

Let’s see, a bear or a gorilla… that’s easy. I would win. First, I would go after the gorilla [he is the faster one]. I would first take him off his feet with a quick drop kick to the face. Then I would follow up with a big elbow from a near-by tree. The elbow to the chest would knock the wind out of the gorilla long enough for me to slap on the full nelson onto the gorilla. By this time, the bear is charging at us. This is when I would use the bear to kill the gorilla. As the bear is approaching me from behind [I still have the gorilla in the full nelson] I would wait till the last second and quickly spin around as the bear lunges after me. Thus, the bear would be attacking the gorilla and killing it [since the gorilla has no way of defending himself from the bear attack because I have the full nelson slapped on him].

As the bear backs off and lunges in for another attack, I quickly release the dead gorilla from the “Kong Nelson” hold I had on him and perform a quick spin kick to the bear’s face. Now stunned, I grab the bear and give him a German suplex. I then slap on the figure four, breaking one of the bear’s leg. Now with the bear slowed down, I maneuver around the bear and put the sleeper hold on the bear. Since the bear has shorter arms, there is now way the bear can grab me off his back or flip me off. Once the bear is asleep [thanks to me cutting off the flow of blood to his head, using the patented “Bear Claw Sleeper”] I’ll carry him over to a cliff and throw him off.

Oh my god...I shot my eye out

The Sunday before last I was cutting a bolt with a dremel tool. I had my safely glasses on, but at one point I felt a puff of dust in my left eye. Shit. It didn't hurt, so I hoped I'd gotten lucky and went about my day. That evening it was still irritiated, so I had Angie help me flush my eye with saline solution (yes...I know I should have done that in the first place. *sigh*). I figured I was likely fine and the irritation had come from poking at it through the afternoon trying to see if anything was in it. Monday I went to work and it didn't get any better. So I scheduled a doctor's appointment for the next morning. Looking at my eye that night, I saw a black dot on the edge of the iris...but I wasn't sure if it was part of my eye or not.

The doctor put some drops in my eye and looked at it under a blacklight to check for corneal abrasions. Everything looked normal. No big surprise, because if I did have one, I should have been in a lot of pain. Whew! It was even kind of cool because he brought me to the mirror so I could see my eye fluoresce under the light. Then he pulled out the Ophthalmoscope and checked for debris...and found that my black dot was indeed a piece of metal. He tried swabbing it out with a q-tip, but found that it must be below the surface. So the doctor was really nice and called up a buddy who's an opthamologist to get me squeezed into their schedule. Here's where things get really fun.

After a bit of a wait, the doctor checked out the dot and away we went. They gave me a numbing drop, let that sit for 10-15 minutes and gave me a second. From there, he removed the dot with a needle, swabbed the piece off with a q-tip, and used a drill to smooth out the disturbed surface. A needle. In my eye. Take a moment to squirm on that one. Actually it wasn't that bad and didn't hurt at all. It was like someone just touching my eye. But I didn't get off that easy. I told the doctor that my eye was also irritated all the way out on the side. So he swabbed it to make sure we got everything. Swabbing here was not a light dabbing. It was pulling back the eyelid, jamming in the q-tip, and running across the eye. I yelped...and spent the next couple days feeling like someone punched me in the eye from the inside.

Everything has been fine for a few days now. And dear readers, the important lesson is:
"Safety GOGGLES, not safety glasses"

Oh, and if you're squeamish...you probably shouldn't have read this. ;)