Month: October 2005

Laws, Rules, and Axioms, oh my!

Agnes Allen’s Law: Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
Army Laws: If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, pick it up. If you can’t pick it up, paint it.
Barth’s Distinction: There are two types of people: those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.
Bartz’s Law of Hokey Horsepuckery: The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its success.
Baruch’s Rule for Determining Old Age: Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Basic Law of Construction: Cut it large and kick it into place.
Becker’s Law: It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.
Benchley’s Law: Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
Berra’s Law: You can observe a lot just by watching.
Bicycle Law: All bicycles weigh 50 pounds: A 30-pound bicycle needs a 20-pound lock and chain. A 40-pound bicycle needs a 10-pound lock and chain. A 50-pound bicycle needs no lock or chain.
Boling’s Postulate: If you’re feeling good, don’t worry. You’ll get over it.
Bombeck’s Rule of Medicine: Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Boren’s Laws of the Bureaucracy: 1. When in doubt, mumble. 2. When in trouble, delegate. 3. When in charge, ponder.
Borstelmann’s Rule: If everything seems to be coming your way, you’re probably in the wrong lane.
Bralek’s Rule for Success: Trust only those who stand to lose as much as you do when things go wrong.
Brien’s First Law: At some time in the life cycle of virtually every organization, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out.
Cannon’s Comment: If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire.
Captain Penny’s Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool MOM.
Cardinal Conundrum: An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears this is true.
Character and Appearance Law: People don’t change; they only become more so.
Clarke’s Law of Revolutionary Ideas: Every revolutionary idea — in Science, Politics, Art or Whatever — evokes three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the three phrases: 1. “It is completely impossible — don’t waste my time.” 2. “It is possible, but it is not worth doing.” 3. “I said it was a good idea all along.”
Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Cleveland’s Highway Law: Highways in the worst need of repair naturally have low traffic counts, which results in low priority for repair work.
Clyde’s Law: If you have something to do, and you put it off long enough, chances are someone else will do it for you.
Cohen’s Law of Wisdom: Wisdom is considered a sign of weakness by the powerful because a wise man can lead without power but only a powerful man can lead without wisdom.
Cole’s Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.
Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.
Colvard’s Logical Premise: All probabilities are 50%. Either a thing will happen, or it won’t.
Commoner’s Three Laws of Ecology: 1. No action is without side-effects. 2. Nothing ever goes away. 3. There is no free lunch.
Cooper’s Law: All machines are amplifiers.
Dieter’s Law: The food that tastes the best has the highest number of calories.
Displaced Hassle Principle: To beat the bureaucracy, make your problem their problem.
Ducharm’s Axiom: If you view your problem closely enough, you will recognize yourself as part of the problem.
Dykstra’s Law: Everybody is somebody else’s weirdo.
Edelstein’s Advice: Don’t worry over what other people are thinking about you. They’re too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.
Ehrlich’s Rule: The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
Ettorre’s Observation: The other line moves faster. Corollary: Don’t try to change lines. The other line — the one you were in originally — will then move faster.
Farber’s Third Law: We’re all going down the same road in different directions
Finagle’s Laws of Information: 1. The information you have is not what you want. 2. The information you want is not what you need. 3. The information you need is not what you can obtain. 4. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.
Finnigan’s Law: The farther away the future is, the better it looks.
//
This one, of course, is from osaka bill (we are now looking for syndication in Romania and Latvia; drop me a line if you are interested and non-mafia)

The Ring of Fire

When I was a kid I used to make miniature gladiator rings in my backyard by digging a ring in the hard-packed dirt and filling it with water, so the gladiators inside the ring could not escape. The gladiators, of course, were ants, because ants are just badass. I used to hold these fights between red ants and black ants, in a ratio of about 10:1 because the red ants were so much bigger and stronger. The black ants basically acted like a bunch of sissies until the red ants started tearing them apart – then the group mind thing would kick in, and the black ants would swarm the red ones all at once, throwing themselves on their much larger and aggressive attackers.
The red ants could bite the black ones in half when they could get a hold of them, but the black ones would ride on their backs, out of reach. Pretty soon there would be a stalemate because the red ants didn’t try to help each other out. Which is where the Beam of Death (via my trusty plastic magnifying glass) and Ring of Fire (lighter fluid in the “moat”) came into play. The creed of the Ring of Fire was of course that All Must Die. All Must Be Purified with Fire (spoken, you will note, like a true pyro).
Back then, the concept of karma was still pretty much unknown to me. But it still felt wrong, somehow. Not as wrong as watching my friends shoot songbirds off of telephone wires with BB guns. Nor as wrong as the time this guy I was walking to the bus stop with threw a big rock at a horse, hitting it square in the chest, and stating afterward, simply, “fucking horses,” but still – wrong on some inexplicable yet instinctive level…
It is interesting that I wrote this post with a completely different ending in mind, but fitting that it shall should end like this.

Baby Got Banjo

Possibly the best cover of Baby Got Back (I hate that fucking song) ever made:
Thing a Week 5 – Baby Got Back
In the proud tradition of many white Americans who came before me I hereby steal and white-ify this thick and juicy piece of black culture. Watch for my album “Jonathan Coulton Sings Songs by Black People.”
I think I like this version even better that Richard Cheese’s. But RC’s Man in the Box still reigns supreme.

A nice Sunday

Yesterday Nam and I set out in the morning for a day in Osaka. My little brother has been studying capoeira with a group that practices in Shinsaibashi, and they were holding a west Japan tournament in Minatomachi. (My photos will hopefully be posted tonight.)
So we got to Osaka by utilizing the cheapest method available to individuals or small groups of people living on Awaji island for day trips to the mainland – the recently established one-day return ticket on the hydrofoil to KIX (2500 yen, including free parking).
We had lunch at Bombay Kitchen in Shinsaibashi (after all, God forgives sinners on the Sabbath as long as they eat at least two kinds of curry), and went to the capoeira tourney. I will leave my description of it to the photos I plan to post later, but overall it was pretty cool. There was a guy who was pulling flips and twists I would not have thought possible without using a wire. Anyways, that stuff comes later.
What I really want to get to is a conversation I had with my pal T, recently returned from Uzbekistan via Bangkok via Hong Kong. T has recently become bored with his incense importation/wholesaling and is curious to see how other people live. So he signed up with a temp agency and does temporary shit jobs just for kicks, even though he doesn’t need the minimum wage paychecks. Very inverse-punk. Or something.
So the job he’s doing today is at a kimchi factory near Tennoji. When I heard that, I told him it was his sacred duty to steal a vanful of rejected product from their dumpsters, but he declined. I guess middle age does that to you. So I settled for an employee discount that he mailed me about and will soon be the literal consumer of 1.2 kilos of kimchi for 1,000 yen (ten bucks). Awesome.
The best thing, though is the e-mail he just sent me to my cellphone. We had been ribbing him all yesterday about how much he was going to smell, how the garlicky tang of fresh kimchi is like Brut to Korean chicks, and how he should go to try hooking up in Tsuruhashi after work, etc. As it turns out, his biggest challenge is lunch in the factory cafeteria:
“I AM IN THE KIMCHI WORLD NOW、 A FUCKINGGOOD OBACHAN PUT A HUGE AMOUNT OF KIMCHI ON MY RICE. I CAN’T EAT ALL THIS SHIT BUT I SAID THANK YOU ANYWAY”.
Fucking priceless, I tell you.