I don’t usually embed comics here. What I mean to say is that I don’t believe I’ve ever embedded an XKCD comic here, but I found this one particularly compelling:
I would challenge each of you to deliberately spread words of kindness this weekend. Except if you’re talking to a werewolf. You probably shouldn’t talk to werewolves at all. It’s a full moon tonight after all. Keep your silver bullets on hand.
The NRA Meeting was a lot of fun, but we had a lot of fun outside of the show floor. JayG posted a picture of Jennifer taking a picture of both of their Nikon D3100s. Here’s the picture I took of him taking that picture:
I looked for the picture she took of the two cameras, but it appears that she hasn’t yet loaded it on the server. We may have to put out a formal request for her to post said picture. Jennifer? We’re talking about you! 
It was cold.
Ammo was hard to get.
Few showed up.
The results were great.
We are keeping our fingers crossed that 2014 will be better.
This morning I attempted to pop open a can of Pepsi Throwback, but apparently the top of the can was not scored deeply enough for the opening tab to function properly, and I wound up with an unopened can and the separated pull tab in my hand. Not to be discouraged, I used the can opener in my Leatherman to open the can, and enjoy my Pepsi. this brought back memories of my childhood. When I was around seven years old, I liked to use my finger to push the flap of can top flat against the underside of the lid for some reason. I honestly have no idea why that held such appeal to me. When my dad saw me doing this on several occasions, he mistakenly thought that I was dropping the pull tab into the can, and he’d take the drink away from me, citing that I could accidentally swallow the pull tab and injure myself. He never understood my explanation when I tried to clarify that in reality, there was no loose metal in the can. I would often drink diet sodas, because the aspartame would give me such a buzz. In fact, I’d often eat artificial sweetener tabs like mints for the same head rush. At the time I never made the connection that the subsequent skull-throbbing headache was a direct result of the aspartame. I always had headaches when I was younger. When I started avoiding that crap, the headaches disappeared. As I have matured, artificial sweeteners stopped giving me any kind of buzz, but the headaches are still guaranteed, often accompanied by nausea. Sometimes I wish that everything was so simple as misunderstandings over soft drink cans and avoiding the wrong food additives.
EDMOND, Okla. (AP) — A 2-acre grass fire in Edmond has been extinguished and fire crews said a squirrel may have been behind the blaze.
Source here.
Seriously, guys? I’ve got an eye on you. Squirrel season starts in six days and I’ve got a new bow sling to review.
I have a solitaire app on my phone that I enjoy playing from time to time. On one of its ‘updates’, it started this annoying little habit of displaying an advertisement prior to dealing my cards. During deer season, this was particularly bothersome when it was a video commercial with sound. Fortunately, it’s usually just an image, or a video with a play button, as opposed to one that auto starts. For example, something like this:
Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep the car on the road when I’m trying to clear off some stupid public safety announcement so I can play solitaire?
Every now and then, I’ll see a store display that just stinks of some out-of-touch marketing mind doing something that they think will be clever, not taking into account reality or people or human nature. At the local office supply store, there is a Sharpie marker display that is set up as a try-before-you-buy affair. It is a colorful display with racks of markers in different colors, and at waist height, it has a paper scratchpad and a couple pads of Post-Its. One must be careful how they design a promotional store display. It is nothing short of laughable that whatever aforementioned marketing guru did not foresee the shortcomings in this otherwise clever marketing piece.
See, people can’t leave well enough alone. If you leave an opportunity to make havoc, someone will take you up on the offer. How many times have you seen a prank video based around the placement of a mysterious button, and the filming of passers by pressing it to see what will happen? Indeed, I would defy you to leave what appears to be a very large firecracker someplace with a lighter, and see how many people try to light it. It’s irresistible. As another example, on Sunday, one of the local grocery stores had a rack full of herbs. I could not help myself and had to do a little rearranging.
Are you going to the grocery store? Remind me to one who works there.
So, Sharpie has this great display where people can try out many colors of their permanent markers.
They even provided a little pad of paper for people to try out their markers on. There’s a sign over the paper that reads, “Try Me”. And surely, nobody would mark anywhere but the provided paper, right?
“Try Me” you say? Don’t mind if I do!
I’ve been watching this display for a while. When it first went in, although pristine, I recognized it for the degenerative folly that it would eventually become. Here’s part of the display which shows a picture of a little girl a few months ago:
And, more recently:
I <3 poop
LOL! Beware of the quips of marker wielding idiots! The differences are subtle, but clearly more artists have contributed as time has gone by. People even took the opportunity to mark on the shelving to the side of the display.
Here, you can see that someone wrote a greeting to the world not once, but twice, just in case the world wasn’t paying attention the first time. World, you’ve been greeted. And finally, there was at least one brony representing:
They at least had the decency to leave the message on one of the provided Post Its instead of defacing the display or store property. I realize that most of this graffiti is likely the work of under attended children, but it illustrates a part of human nature that never really goes away. As we mature, we learn to rise above it, but it never fades completely. We’ll always have that prankster that wants to press the button or rearrange the herbs or scrawl “I <3 poop" in a speech bubble on the Sharpie display. Note to all you marketing people out there; make your product labeling witty and humorous enough that your prospective customers won't want to deface it when their attention is drawn to it.
Because seriously, who would want to mess up a perfectly good jar of Awesomesauce?
I’m sorry for how… …manic my posting has been. It seems that right as I get into the habit of daily blog entries something random occurs and all of a sudden you get nothing for two weeks or so. Well, I don’t have a whole lot to report this morning, but I thought you deserved some kind of update. It may have been a mistake to incorporate bacon into two meals yesterday. Weird dreams were had by all. Perhaps even weirder than this:
However, they weren’t nearly as weird as the time I had the epic dream about the evil corporation that was transforming me into a sasquatch and Jennifer into some kind of electric babe, and we were supposed to forget each other in the whole transformation process. That one pretty well took the weird cake for me, and yet it was cohesive enough a story that I could probably write it into a pretty entertaining narrative. I’ve been wanting to do that, but I’m trying to decide whether I should write it in first person or limited third. And then, do I write it as myself, or change identification for the sake of the write up?
In Jennifer’s dreaming, we had to run some miscreants out of LawDog‘s flower bed, threatening them that they had trespassed into the wrong garden, and then we all had a party. In my dream, my parents dismantled my car, so I had a sleep-over in a car shop with my best buds (because that’s totally what grown men do), until the place got overrun by people doing some kind of battle drills, and then this random chick from YouTube kissed my neck in something of an emotional breakdown, and they had to drag her away.
So, yeah. The dreams were weird but not all that weird in the grand scheme of things. I may see what it would take to set up a parallel page here where I can post some fiction work, and get some of that down. Or, should I simply create a “fictional narrative” category and post it in line here, as some other bloggers tend to do? Also, I’d love your input about the form of my write up of the previously mentioned weird dream – whether I ought to go first or third person, and whether I should rename characters or roll with it like it happened in my unconscious mind.
The weather has been weird this year. We have had our cold spells, and we even got a little snow on the ground. But, it’s been warm enough for the last few days that a coat hasn’t been necessary. That’s weird for January in Oklahoma. Although for a few years we had an odd neighbor who wore shorts all year, even in the snow. I didn’t think he even owned any long pants until he got all dressed up in his khakis and button down one day. Anyway, I don’t know that there’s any truth to global warming, but why should that keep us from doing our part to help save the planet? In the last year, we’ve made some ecologically smart changes in our life. Jennifer started using this special climate control shampoo.
And then, she stepped it up a notch and recycled her hair.
I’ve been trying renewable shaving with limited success.
I switched to zero-emission hunting and we’ve been eating as much free range meat as we can.
Please note my naturally cooling unbifurcated garment. We once posed in an electric car.
And we’ve been using organic heaters.
And, we even set Jay G on fire!
Alright, so that last one didn’t really help the environment so much – it was mostly just for fun. Besides that, he made this face at me:
Tell me you wouldn’t have set him on fire yourself! Yeah, that might have not really happened. Nerd beer was involved and the details get a little fuzzy.
At any rate, we were under a tornado watch this morning. That just doesn’t happen in January. We didn’t get blown away, but we did get a lot of much-needed rain. And, now you can see how hard we’ve been working to combat climate change. So, what are you doing to make the world a better place?
*No bloggers were actually harmed or set on fire in the composition of this post. We here at evylrobot.com do not condone violence against gun bloggers. Any likenesses to any characters, real or imaginary, might or might not be a weird coincidence. Also, squirrels are tasty.