There are two of us talking in circles, and one of us who wants to leave. -- Sarah McLachlan, Circle
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

Ross the Plumber

When you install a toilet, you actually place it directly on top of the finished floor, not against the subfloor.
The reason I point this out is because when I moved into my house, I had to cut about an inch off of the bathroom door. This is because years upon years of flooring had been installed without mining though previous generations. The floor in my bathroom is sheet vinyl. Under that sheet vinyl is vinyl tile. Under that, I believe, is a strata of linoleum, and beneath that, I dunno, maybe dinosaur fossils or spam or something. At the lowest layer is pine, which was the original floor of the entire house. As far as I can tell, the pine is still in fine shape, but many of the other layers have started to deteriorate. The result of this is that over the past few years, my toilet has started to cant to the right. A full repair of this is going to require reflooring the entire bathroom, a task I plan to undertake as soon as Leah and I can sort out exactly how we want it to look.
Unfortunately, though, earlier in the week, the tilt reached a point where it damaged the seal where water goes into the tank. Since this was kind of an urgent repair, I decided to go ahead and do it straight away rather than waiting for the weekend. So, I removed the supply pipe to the toilet, replaced the cracked plastic nut, and reattached everything, checked for leaks, and, right around eleven PM, Eastern Standard Time, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, I pulled myself out of the toilet.
And so did America.
Not bad for a night’s work.
Addendum: Proposition 8 is up in California. In a hundred years, teachers are going to be explaining how the same day we elected our first African-American president, we also voted to officially declare a whole class of citizens to be inferior and took away the right to marry which they had enjoyed for several months. Teachers will stress the irony of this. The students will probably think that Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama were childhood friends,

ITCXXXIX: Fun with art

Seen in the Tremont Grand hotel in Baltimore:

it139

This is a neat visual effect wherein it looks like the hot french maid on the mural is interacting with the strange cabinet, which almost makes it seem like the maid is in the room with you. And by “the room”, I mean “the mens room,” which is where this mural was.

Cutting off your nose

None of our enemies are afraid of Obama; why would they be? On the other hand, all of our enemies are afraid of John McCain

— Ed Rogers
The problem is, most of our allies are afraid of him too. And a pretty fair percentage of us are afraid of a Palin vice-presidency.
In other news, the McCain camp has recently discovered that Osama Bin Laden is a big fan of breathing an oxygen-nitrogen mixture. They have moved immediately to remove the substance, commonly known by its street-name, “Air”, from their campaign headquarters. The inexplicable choking deaths of several staffers has delayed the release of their new series of attack ads, titled “Obama: He performs many of the same biological functions as OSAMA BIN LADEN. And HITLER.”
In a shocking twist, however, certain republicans are now backing a dark horse independent candidate, Leo the MGM Lion, after discovering that while America’s enemies are afraid of John McCain, they are freaking terrified of lions.

ITCXXXVIII: Thank you for patronizing us

Years ago, when I was in High School, the paper covers we were required to put on our textbooks started featuring advertisements from various local businesses. On the inside cover, it said “These businesses have contributed to your local board of education. Please patronize them.” And so I did.
On a note not entirely unrelated, when I was young, there was a restaurant in my home town called “Golden Corral”. It was a normal family style restaurant, sort of similar to Sizzler. The things I recall the most were their very nice salad bar, and the incredibly delicious buttered toast slice you got with your meal.
Well, Golden Corral closed down at some point, after being robbed at gunpoint like three times in as many months, and the restaurant has since been converted into a sporting goods store.
So when, a few months ago, Leah and I went into a Golden Corral restaurant, I was surprised to find it was nothing like I remembered; it’s just a supergiant buffet now, which is awesome in its own way, though I do miss the toast.
But as a buffet, the rules are a bit different than a traditional restaurant: namely, you stand in a line at the door and when you get to the end of the line, you pay a rate based on the number of diners, and are led to a seat, and this is pretty much the end of the waitstaff’s involvement with you, other than to clean up your wreckage from time to time.
Here is a sign posted by the register, where you pay your bill before you have received any service:

it138

If on the other hand, you don’t want good service, make sure you tell your server and feel free not to tip.

If I were into twitter, this is what I’d be tweeting

  • Yesterday on the way to work, there was a sign at the top of the exit that said “Lane closed 1500 feet ahead”. About 50 feet past that, the lane was closed for some road work. I assume that the road work being done was “install a more accurate sign”.
  • xkcd proposed that YouTube commenters be forced to listen to their comments read aloud before they are posted. This is now a (sadly optional) feature of YouTube. I for one welcome our new stick-figure overlords
  • Yesterday evening on the way home from work, there was a sign in downtown Baltimore that said “2 left lanes closed ahead,” so I got over. The “2” had been affixed over the original text of the sign when they had upgraded the lane closure. Suddenly, I had to fight my way over another lane, as just up ahead, 3 lanes were closed. Is this the month of inaccurate road signs?
  • A friend of mine is pregnant and close to her due date. The past few months, I have heard the word “cervix” spoken aloud more often than in the entire rest of my life. It really does sound like the name of a Doctor Who monster.
  • Joe the Plumber, as it turns out, is a tax cheat. Also, he’s not even really named Joe. And does not have a license to plumb.
  • At work, a word we use a lot is “releasability”, which spellcheckers everywhere tell me is not a real word, although “releasable” is. A colleague suggested that anything which is -able ought have an associated -ability (just as I think any adjective has an associated -ly adverb. I bluely believe this to be the case), but perhaps the problem is that what we have is actually “release ability” rather than “releasability”, much as he, being able to ride a bicycle, has a “bicycle ability”. I pointed out that “bicycle ability” and “bicyclability” are very different things: “bicyclability” would mean “the capacity to become a bicycle”. My colleague has bicycle ability; carbon fiber has a certain bicyclability (though I would argue that aluminum has a higher bicyclability, because it is far more able to become a bicycle — while carbon fiber bikes are excellent, it requires much more effort to hew a bicycle out of carbon fiber.). The only being I know of who possesses both bicycle ability and bicyclability is Cy-Kill, leader of the renegade Go-Bots
  • Stuck in head most of the time now: Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac. In spite of this, I think that it is one of the only songs which is actually better if you hear the Kids Incorporated cover.
  • It is so weird that as we demand larger and higher-definition TVs, and video snobs insist that even the sight of a standard-dev TV makes them want to puke and all that, we simultaneously are more than ever willing to huddle around a QVGA low-bitrate image on YouTube.
  • Also, it is really amazing how quickly you stop minding that when you watch standard definition tv on a high def TV without correcting for the aspect ratio, everyone is a third again too wide. In fact, whent I watch video from my computer (which is smart enough to automatically correct the aspect), everything looks too narrow.

Say it ain’t so, Joe

Joe the Plumber Speaks (via Politco

McCain was solid in his performance,” he says. “I still don’t know where he stands,” he says of Obama. “I’m middle class. I can’t have my taxes raised any more.”
He also says he actually isn’t in the bracket where Obama would raise his taxes — but he’s worried that Obama will shift the bracket down.
He also said that, in his encounter with Obama, the Illinois Senator “a tap dance…almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.”

So… Obama won’t raise your taxes, but you don’t trust him because maybe he’s lying. But McCain on the other hand you just trust implicitly. McCain, many of whose statments have been proven to be lies, many of whose statements Karl Rove has said do not pass the test of truth — Karl Rove — you’re going to believe without question. McCain’s tax plan cuts your taxes less than Obama’s, but you’re thinking “But maybe Obama’s Tax Plan is a lie and he’s really going to raise my taxes.” But never would you broke the idea that John McCain might be lying. McCain, who sat there and told bald-faced lies which have been thoroughly debunked you believe, while Obama is “tap dancing.” How could you now know where he stands? He just told you where he stands.
You know the truth. You have been told the truth. You are choosing to ignore the truth.
Repeat the chorus, folks, “That’s not stupidity. That’s insanity”
It’s funny how no one ever says “Y’know, McCain’s plans all sound good… But what if he’s lying and really hates America? I mean, there’s no evidence, but how can we know for sure that he didn’t go all Stockholm Syndrome while he was a POW and now hates America and if elected will raise taxes for everyone and, I dunno, eat babies?”

Fair and Balanced

Bill Ayers is a Distinguished Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also founded an organization which did some violent terrorist-y things many years ago. He was never convicted of being a terrorist, but neither has he ever recanted his radical views.
He’s been fundamental in the reform of Chicago’s school system, and was Chicago’s 1997 Citizen of the Year.
He was heavily involved with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Project and the Woods Fund of Chicago.
Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) was on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Project and was involved with the Woods Fund of Chicago.
To Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, this is hugely important. After all, if Obama really loved America, he wouldn’t associate with a Citizen of the Year former convicted terrorist.
According to John McCain, when presented with an opportunity to be part of a project which distributed a $50 million grant to public schools in Chicago, or with a project that in 2006 distributed $3.1 million to local organizations in order to help with poverty relief, Senator Obama should have said “Sorry, charity is not as important as snubbing a man who did something really bad a very long time ago and has done lots of good things ever since.”
Things Senator McCain seems to dislike:

  • Charity
  • Unconvicted former domestic terrorists
  • Sex education

Things Senator McCain seems to like:

Incidentally…
Among Senator McCain’s 13 cars is a 2007 Ford half-ton pickup truck. About Henry Ford, someone once said “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” That someone was Adolph Hitler. Now, why would a true patriot like John McCain drive a car made by a company founded by a raging antisemite and Nazi-sympathizer?