You refuse to use salt? You are to clearing snow what Britney Spears is to parenting. But, although she may neglect and occasionally drop her children, the kids have a Kevin Federline to publicly appear to care for them. That’s right Seattle, things have gotten so bad you need a grossly underachieving and exceptionally horrific white rapper to lower your self-image enough only to remind you of your own absurd stupidity.

You’re scared of environmentalists getting on your case for polluting the Sound? Grow a pair. Rod Blagojevich could probably curse out little children on national television and get away with it. To tell you the truth he probably already has, but it just doesn’t get enough airplay because of all the other things he’s done without regard to others. With that kind of commitment to idiocy, you should be joining Tony Blair in accepting the Medal of Freedom for blindly following a coalition of the moronic.

I’m done. And am going to sleep.

To paraphase, the ice and snow packed streets of Seattle exist by design. The city wants to use rubber plows on its trucks to prevent damage to streets, preventing much of the ice from being scraped off, caking the streets with packed down ice and snow. Also, the city prefers to use sand in place of salt, as they claim it to be more environmentally friendly.

I let Seattle off because I just didn’t think they had the capacity in trucks or salt to get the job done because it rarely snows here. However, all the city’s streets have been been plowed multiple times. The fact that there’s an sheet of ice covering every street is downright depressing. And using environmental friendliness towards the Sound as an excuse for not salting is ridiculous. While there is some environmental effects, sand also poses its own issues, not to mention the fact that most snowbound cities use salt or other chemicals. Also, I’d think the bus hanging over I-5, the rerouting and shutdown of half of public transit, and the seeming halt of the city would be enough to make getting streets clear a priority, regardless of the costs.

Rant over.

Things that have since come to my attention:

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was aptly named (considering there was a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe… hey, it took me a while, lay off…)
• Noble mice are fairly annoying
• How could NONE of the Narnian’s not know where Aslan was? I mean:
  1. Its been a few hundred years
  2. I don’t believe Narnia to be an infinite land
  3. Shouldn’t Aslan care about what’s happened? And if he could stop it with all his magical powers (standing in one place for five minutes), why didn’t he before?

  Come on…

Other observations:

• Don’t get me started on Kung Fu Panda…: how unrealistic can you get?
• Building a power efficient and cool htpc for less than $500 is difficult: And either way, it won’t end up being a Mac Mini
• I’m debt free!: and now poor…
• This: Gotta love the inability to deal with semi-frozen water
• I haven’t left my apartment in four days and am running out of food: i hate snow. i hate oncall. i hate pagers. i hate you. (no, i don’t hate you, unless you’re on my list, but it was the logical progression)

I was paged this morning, so I’m up extra early, and, while I’m waiting for a deployment to finish, I thought I’d do some blog work.

Current observations and subsequent realizations :

• I’m incredibly hungry: i should eat breakfast
• leo’s no longer one of my biggest tags!: he will be again after this post
• xkcd cartoon: complete and utter truth
• Grim Optimism: Woke up early, but not early enough. Reminds me of the subject of my dreams
• 32nm: I feel bad for my former employer, then really happy I was never given the slip…
• Deep Throat dies: why was Mark Felt called Deep Throat again? According to the love of my life:
  

  Howard Simons, the managing editor of the Post during Watergate, dubbed the secret informant “Deep Throat” as an allusion to the notorious eponymous pornographic movie which was a mainstream cause célèbre at the time. The name was also a play on the journalism term “deep background,” referring to information provided by a secret source that, by agreement, will not be reported directly.

In other news, this xkcd cartoon reminded me of my participation in the World’s Largest Marshmallow Fight (ever) at Oakton Park in Skokie.

And in case you’re questioning whether this really existed:

In Illinois, 2,500 kids showed up at a park one winter to throw “snowballs” at each other. What they threw were 130,000 soft, sweet ones. Organizers were trying to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for the “World’s Largest Marshmallow Fight.”

- http://www.homeschoolgazette.org/FlabFacts.html

And its cold. Like low 30’s cold.

Here’s the part where I plea for some mercy from Zeus, but I can’t come up with anything clever, because well, if I were to be in Chicago, things would be much worse. Ah, stupid optimism.

(insert witty transistion here)

For whatever reason, the topic of why people blew on video game cartridges has come up a few times the last couple days, so I decided to investigate the true reason.

It appears issue of the cartridges was partly due to the accumulation of dust, as according to Videogamey,

“Though they were considered to be practically indestructible compared to scratch-prone CDs, video game cartridges would sometimes simply stop working. Especially in the NES and Sega Genesis era, an aging, dust-prone game console would sometimes simply not boot up the cartridge you inserted.”

Dust accumulated on both the cartridge and system, and the process of taking cartridges out and putting them back, was probably what was actually getting things to work. It is true that blowing increased

“conductivity on the cartridge contacts by lining them with a thin (on in some cases a thick) layer of moisture by way of human breath (spit, bacteria, and whatever else is in the person’s mouth doing the blowing … yuck).” (DP Mythbusters)

However, if you’ve seen the cartridges and system, the contacts were fairly large, so its likely there was an accumulation of dust that was worsened by the accumulation of crap from your mouth, which in turn degraded the contacts even more.

cue shooting star