The Town in her Hair

Modern Dance Planet

This Seemed Crazy

Chachi

Johnny's Horcrux

Can I Show You My Canyon?

My Hair Has a Little Mustache

He Finally Went Down.

The Man from Foreign

Tick Biter

Savannah Smells

Runaway Ralph

Wisconsin, your post card is here.

These are kind of hard to find now. It's a post card of Wisconsin featuring a dense drawing of everything there is to be found in the state. Start planning your summer vacation today! Such attractions as "tires", "paper", and "shipping" await your gaping eye-holes! Reserve your place now, for some first-class dairying, unless you're a stupid jerk.

Get on down to Wisconsin, before all the rocks have been stood on.

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Western Electric Trimline Phone - Convergence of technologies.

"Technological convergence" is the combination of devices through a kind of evolution. The most notable of which is the modern cellular telephone. Behold the first (or at least a first) baby step: the Trimline phone, by Western Electric.

You can probably find a cranky person who'll tell you that phones have gotten too complicated, and that they try to be too many things. Your phone has basically become a pocket computer. Sometimes, my desktop PC goes a week without me powering it on, because I can do email, listen to music or podcasts, mess with the web and, if I get desperate, talk to another human being with it.

There are things that phones aren't very successful at yet. Mine doesn't hold my entire music collection, which requires a minimum of 80Gb. But, it can hold an admirable amount of music... certainly more than I, strictly speaking, need to have with me at a given moment. I look forward to carrying a phone in my pocket that can accomodate a 128Gb micro SD card. Those are the ones that are the size of your pinky nail and pose a realistic inhalation threat, should you be brave enough to prize it out of your phone with a set of tweezers. The cell phone is pretty amazing. It is known.

Check it out. "Decorator colors, including new rust and chocolate brown." Brown is making a hideous comeback, people. Keep your eyes peeled for metallic brown paint on new model cars. I think I saw a brown Ford Fusion the other day. My eyes still feel like they didn't wipe thoroughly.

Back in 1980, Western Electric Trimline phone had the (apparently) boast-worthy feature of combining the keypad with the handset. I dimly recall using one for the first time and thinking it was pretty spiffy. Back in '80, you could probably find someone crabby enough to complain that the Trimline was "too fancy" and that phones should be simple like in the olden times, when you had to dial on the base, or better still, you had to crank the crank on the base and shout for Mabel to connect you with the Sheriff, if you heard someone rooting around in your coal shed late at night. Incidentally, this phrase can, even now, be quite suggestive if you work your eyebrows the right way upon utterance.

So, yeah. It's all relative. Combining the two halves of the same device was noteworthy in 1980, just as combining too many communications devices can be a frustration to some people today. For my next feat, I will augur the controversially combined technologies of The Distant Future. Let us remember that those who forget the future are doomed to do it anyway. Let's not forget to not combine the following...

Telephone and Hover-Skis

Telephone and Oscillation Overthruster

Telephone and Microwave Vibrator

Telephone and Nanoblimp

Telephone and Interocitor

Telephone and Trans-Cranial Bore

Telephone and Nuclear Pipe Organ

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Kooking Kornir - Animal Lung Sconosciuto!

Today we bring you another Fictionalized Settlement Day feast suggestion. Wow your guests with the taste of old Roma: Animal Lung Sconosciuto!

Begin by selecting an animal lung from your neighborhood open-air market's animal segment vendor. Choose the animal according to the number of guests you need to feed. A sheep lung will feed just two people romantically, but a sperm whale lung can feed an average old-world village, and will require a specially reinforced table.

If you happen to know that your family enjoys a char-grilled sort of flavor, ask your old-world market vendor if he has any lungs donated by animals that were chain smokers who died of emphysema. Almost all people and animals in old Europe smoke cigarettes - sometimes two or three at once, so it shouldn't be hard to source a "smoked lung".

Enhance your old-world market experience by wearing a sun hat held on with a gauzy scarf. Also, hold hands with someone and laugh randomly. Consider twirling.

Bring home your carefully chosen animal lung in a paper grocery bag with celery and an inedible loaf of long, thin bread sticking out of the top. Once inside your home, discard these.

Place your animal lung in an old-world baking pan shaped like the animal it may have come from. Spray the lung with AdhesiveCheese brand aerosol food spray. Drizzle with some kind of red. Place in an old-world baking oven for 45 minutes set to lung temperature. During baking, the lung juices will fill the pan and gradually evaporate away, leaving an oily orange film in the lung pan. Do not switch to a clean pan, as this film is good for "bread wiping", usually by uncles.

Garnish with lemon slices and parsley to give you something to scrape into the trash, because our Animal Lung Sconosciuto will leave your family gasping for more! Syödä!

Kooking Cornir - Frisky Little Mousse. Such a fancy feast!

Today we're going to make your family a dessert that's sure to have their whiskers twitching. Frisky Little Mousse!

Instead of wrestling with all that whipped cream and chocolate, try this short cut: buy some of that ice cream that comes in those little squat cans in the pet aisle. You'll need four or five of them to make this delicious mousse.

Combine the ice cream in a blender with 1/4 cup almonds. Blend until blended. Chill or freeze before serving.

Note that the high liver content of this type of ice cream may stiffen when frozen. As you can see in the picture, some strata of the ice cream have begun to separate from each other. No problem! You can easily hold it all together with a bit of hot glue as seen here. That should hold it together until after dinner.

Our Frisky Mousse not only is quick and easy to make. It'll keep your coat soft and shiny, too!

Kooking Kornir - Depilated Tribble Celebratory Meal Orb

Okay, spacemen! It's time to get this away party started by making your own depilated tribble celebratory meal orb! Set your phasers to FUN!

Of course, you won't have any "trouble" getting ahold of a tribble. If you've got one, you've got a thousand! So, first thing's first: lightly kill the tribble by exposing it to a hard vacuum. Where do you find that, you say? Why, pop it out the airlock, silly! You can use a Crewman Retention Tether to be sure it doesn't float away while it's dying. A few seconds should do it. Then reel it back in and get it back to the galley, stat! Those crewmen are hungry!

The best way to depilate your fuzzy little friend is to irradiate the carcass in the warp chamber. This is strictly against Starfleet regulations, but so it the consumption of alien life forms, so you're already through the looking glass! If you're on good terms with the engineer on duty, he/she should let you place the tribble in the warp chamber for a minute or two. (You'd better invite them to the party to avoid being reported for this transgression!) Irradiation should also serve to  brown the meat of the tribble. Who wants to eat an undercooked tribble? Illogical! During irradiation, if you feel your DNA getting altered, take a step or two away from the glowy parts.

Once the tribble hair is MIA, it's time to pulverize the innards by hitting it with a frying pan. Oh, fine - a SPACE frying pan. Set your frying pan to "creamy" and give the tribble a good whack or three. The consistency will be right when the tribble flattens slightly on a dish under one Earth gravity. No cheating by turning up the gravity!

Serve on a Romulan ceremonial speculum along with a tray of baked grain planks and you're ready to feed a Klingon horde! Just don't tell the captain what he's eating.

Lego Week Pt 1 - Space Legos!

We at P.A.G. Central Command have decided that this week is lego week. We'll be featuring high resolution scans of lego manuals and stuff like that. Why? Because legos are the greatest toy. They entertain, teach basic engineering and reward the urge to invent and build.

I remember that I was playing with the Alpha-1 Rocket Base the night that the hostages were freed from Iran, so that must have been 1980. At that time, space legos were new, I think, but I can't be bothered to check right now, as I'm on vacation. So there.

At that time in Lego History, specialized parts were still pretty novel. Cylinders! Wow! Holy jeez, radar dishes. I think that was a sweet spot in the ratio of special parts to regular old blocks, but maybe I'm biased. Now, it seems that you buy, say, a lego pirate ship, and you assemble front of boat to back of boat and you're done. Too many custom parts. Not enough room for imagination. Bah humbug.

What was really cool were the translucent parts. The Space Cruiser had a green sloped windshield and a pretty huge plate in clear yellow. These two parts pretty much insisted on being built into spaceships and fighter planes. That was reason enough to want the set.

That's the difference between a kid who has some legos and a kid who lives to build things. I got excited about a set because of the interesting parts it contained. The actual model you build was secondary.