The Santa Barbara Arts Commission has taken upon itself the task of de-beautifying Downtown Santa Barbara. In 8 locations along State Street, there are new pieces of art attracting thought, confusion, and homeless people. Among the more nobable is this gem:



The work, entitled W, is a thought provoking representation of the wheels of progress, a response or mirror of current world events, or perhaps a David and Goliath reference. And when I say these things, I'm not just making them up. I'm quoting the Santa Barbara Arts Commision webpage. The full interpretation is as follows:

At 834 State, artist Colin Gray, originally from England, creates a two-wheeled wooden sculpture, W, that has endured the slings and arrows of life…literally. Protruding from the 6 foot wheels are large wooden arrows that evoke a stint on the battlefield; the wheels of progress; a response or mirror of current world events; a David and Goliath metaphor; or perhaps simply the life of an artist putting his work out there for others to criticize. No matter how you see it the evocative sculpture, W, it will invite you to conjecture its meaning. Another of Gray’s public art work, Riddle Wheel, can also be seen at the Los Angeles’ MTA Authority Metro Rail at the Del Amo Station.

In all honesty, it looks like the Santa Barbara Youth Archery camp held practice at McDonalds. As my sister put it, "It's retardedly artsy."

When it comes to computer passwords, we all have our own little techniques in their creation. For example, I obsessively memorize things and use them for my own good. So instead of creating my own accounts, I merely memorize the passwords of other people's and use theirs instead.

Oddly enough, as I was reading through my brother's work email, he wrote a letter to his boss regarding company passwords. So if you're in need of a new password, you might want to follow a suggestion from a "professional." Here is the content of the email:

From: David Lee
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 4:27 PM
To: Alan; Joe; Marc; James
Subject: passwords

Should I try to make the passwords good and complicated (for example: _*E!q(M#, `:}(1BE`, BoL`FDL5, gj=)wfIG, etc…) or have it follow a pattern such as: aaa1111 where a is a random letter and 1 is a random number?

Or… should I just make the passwords purely for simplicity (for example: kittens, ilovebirds, puffpaint, knitting, etc…) or use those but append numbers or whatever.

I personally like the first example, but it is quite the hurdle to remember it. I'm open for opinions, comments, or suggestions.

--

David Lee

Every so often, I like to check who visits my blogs. I can usually put together the people I know with the IP location and so on. There's usually a few random ones I assume came from a mutual acquaintance, through a link, or randomly browsing blogs. Yet there is one visitor who never ceases to confuse me. I discovered this person by checking if anyone had linked my other blog to their own. Among the ones I already knew about was this unusual gem:

http://l3m0nad3.blogspot.com/2005/11/this-blog-awesome.html

While I would usually take this as a compliment, I am more simply confused. Someone thinks I use good phrases and words? Well, thank you. But I can think of much better writing found on the same page. Seriously, since when is "I showered" an example of a good phrase? I fall into a state of shock every time I think about this. It makes my head hurt.

It has come to my attention that not everyone reading this knows me very well. As a result, there are many who do not understand the Revolution. Our family has two dogs, Linus and Rigby, shown here in their finest outfits and held by my two siblings:



Linus, on the left, is the loser dog. He is much smaller and afraid of existence. Hence the irony of him starting a revolution. I can understand the confusion if one had not met or heard about the dog. But he does look pretty cute in Che's beret. Now, if you hadn't heard of Che, I guess the post would have been twice as confusing. I can understand... no, wait. There is no excuse for not recognizing or having heard of Che. I'm looking at you, Mr. Morris.

When I went to the grocery store today, I noticed they had the usual random shopping carts filled with assorted goods placed throughout the store. Not the kind casually placed there by a shopper too lazy to steer the cart over to the vegetables, but the kind strategically placed next to the meat island, full of non-perishable goods. I usually find these carts sitting around, but I've never been bold enough to actually shop through them, just in case it was someone's cart. It's sort of my motto for life: "When in doubt, make wild assumptions."

Today, I decided to construct the person to whom that shopping cart belonged. At first, it seemed kind of silly, but then I realized that most items in anyone's shopping cart could be construed as silly. Then it occurred to me: Why would anyone go to the grocery store solely to shop for items more commonly found at a drug store? Especially since there was one next door. The moral dilemma over, I decided to make fun of my theoretically fictitious shopper. The following is a narrative I am composing entirely on the spot:

Sammy Parks, a recent widower, lost his wife, car keys, and moral judgment in a freak boating accident. With his life finally reaching a stasis, he decided to take his two adopted Chinese children on a camping trip. Stocking up for the trip, he took the kids to the local grocery store (yes, shopping is a moral decision).

Actually, that ended up being kind of lame. Forget I ever wrote that.

Anyway, I felt the shopping cart was ridiculous. Among the things I can remember were a heavily discounted air mattress inflator, a giant bag of Tostitos, water balloons, and paint. Paint? Sammy, did you seriously buy paint at a grocery store? I didn't even know they sold the stuff.

Author's Note: Sorry about the lame post, guys. Give me a break. I come from a special family.

At lunch today, I noticed the restaurant was looking for help:



Yet upon closer inspection, I found their requirements a bit interesting:



Which leads me to the firm belief that as a society, we should allow—nay, support—graffiti, as long as it is humorous. Everytime I think of Bill Stickers, I get the giggles. I yearn for a society where everyone stives to brighten each others' day with humor. That is, of course, with the assumption that everyone has the same sense of humor as me. Otherwise there would just be a lot of stupid graffiti everywhere.

Come join the revolution.

"We all thought he was retarded, but it turns out he was just a communist."

As I was turning the pages of the Santa Barbara News Press to find the most informative page in the paper, I saw an interesting article. This article was so interesting, it momentarily halted my search for the comics. In true News Press fashion, it took actual newspaper content and wrote an article on something related to it. This one happened to be about the upcoming movie, "How to Eat Fried Worms," based on the wildly popular book. Except, instead of actually being about the movie—which would have been nice; it was the first time I had heard about it—it was about why people don't actually eat worms. From what I remember about the article, the conclusion was that people don't eat worms because, well, they're worms.

Anyway, this is not the point. The article featured this still from the movie:



When I saw this picture, I was rather confused. As far as I could remember, the story was about a boy who moved to a new school and got involved in some sort of dare that required him to eat worms. The only inciting conflict I could remember was the new school issue. But by this picture, I was seriously wondering if it was about a clean cut Caucasian boy moving to an impoverished ghetto. Because out of all the background children, there are only two barely identifiable parts of white children you can see. Everyone else is of a much darker skin. Ah, fried worms. I get it.

After doing a little internet searching, I found the movie poster:



Incredibly, the racial ratio was back to the white, suburban standard: a majority of Caucasians and your token diversity character.

They kind of let me down. I was really wanting to see how the racial conflicts would come into play. Although, knowing our society, they would probably be about as relevant as a News Press article.

Apparently, I'm not using Google's Personalized Homepage to its fullest, so they (the government) decided to let me know about some helpful new things I can add to the page. This was the box they gave:

I thought it was a nice gesture of sorts, but the To-do List shocked me a little bit. Sophia B.? I've never even met her!

As I was sitting here reflecting on my High School days, my thoughts turned to a very specific tradition we had. Often on a Friday night, before we retired to someone's house to hang out or watch a movie, we would head down to the sketchy part of Santa Barbara to find prostitutes. This somewhat rare profession was most easily found on East Haley Street after sunset, around 10 pm. Our side of the evening would follow like this:

A group of us, maybe four or so, would pile into someone's car and we would head down there. Since Haley is a one way street, we would start near State Street and crawl our way down the street. For some reason, they were always on the right side of the street, so we'd use the right lane. Slowing down at each street corner, the passengers would make the decision whether we had found our specimen or it was merely a slutty pedestrian.

After making a few trips down there, we became more adept at our hobby. They would generally be the stationary ladies found alone on street corners, although sometimes accompanied by a male. This was always exciting for us. To find a business proposition in action was quite a big deal. It was the frosting on our cake of immorality.

Yet as much hype and excitement we let build into these adventures, I can't help but think how pathetic the whole situation was. The most it would ever result in was a car full of screaming, enthusiastic teenagers pointing at a human demoralized to a body. It was a sad, sad scene, but I would totally go do it again. After all, it's the world's oldest profession, and with a title like that, there has to be some dignity involved.

I think all products should come with more helpful and informative diagrams. Take plastic bags, for example. The natural thought of most human beings when faced with a plastic bag is their language equivalent of, "What a sweet bag! This would make a great ski mask! I must get another one for my baby!" Much to all our dismay, plastic bags are generally limited to one of two jobs:

1. Carrying things
2. Insulating the space between the fridge and the counter

But perhaps the most shocking piece of information one might discover is that plastic bags would not make great ski masks. In fact, such an act could lead to death. Or worse, serious injury. For this reason alone, we should all be forever thankful for the handy diagram, found on a fun-filled plastic bag:













It's like Keith Haring going for a darker theme.

For those of you who don't know my brother, you should be thankful. Just kidding (sort of). Sometimes he lives in his own little world that nobody else actually cares about. Take the following email, for example. As the IT guy for a local company, it was his responsibility to inform the employees of the Dell battery recall. He assumed the job of giving a chemistry lesson to the office of salespeople. While this might just be an over-informative email, I found humor in the fact that he's roughly half the age of everyone else in the office yet knows enough about chemistry to be filtered into the same category as any email beginning with "Fwd." Behold, the email:


From: David Lee
Sent: Wed 8/16/2006 12:13 PM
To: All SB Staff
Subject: Dell laptop battery recall

It has come to the attention of Dell that some models of their laptop stock have exploding batteries. Dell has issued a rather monumental recall-4.1 million laptops between April 1, 2004 and July 18, 2006 are considered explosive.



The technical explanation for the batteries explosiveness is that there are little bits of lithium ions floating around in a solution (with a Carbon anode and Cobalt Oxide cathode (very powerful oxidizer) on either ends) in the battery (which is generally part of how the battery works normally), but some of it inevitably escapes (on the affected models) the channel in which they are supposed to flow-causing micro shorting of the two ends of the batteries. The reason these batteries explode is because all these micro shorts are not exactly efficient and they produce heat. The more heat you have in the electric system, the more unstable it becomes (generally). The heat becomes too great (scorching hot batteries) and the solid lithium becomes more willing to give off lithium ions; the plastic barrier where the ions were leaking in the first place becomes weaker and lets more ions through; then an exponentially increasing amount of ions start shorting various battery components. As you could imagine, the ion party gets out of hand and the battery will catch aflame or worse, explode (along with the Cobalt Oxide to further make things worse).



So. now that we've got the chemistry covered, does anybody have a dell laptop that I could check to see if the battery recall is applicable to it?



An official link (just in case you don't believe me):

https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/Default.aspx



Dell laptop on fire at a Japanese press conference:

Starting August 21st, I will be participating in



The rules are posted here. Get ready for a wild and fun filled adventure of daily updates. Also, apparently anyone can join the contest, so if you feel up to it, let Ben know. Be back shortly.