Rantings Diversified

Man, sometimes it just pisses me off to walk into a 7-11 to buy a bottle of water and I have to settle for a liter instead of a quart or the fact that the venerable 302 CID V8 motor is now a 5 liter. What’s up with all this base-10 stuff?

0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, Cripes I’m bored already. See!

I hope to prove to you, my dear readers (all four of you), that the good old Imperial measurements are far superior to all this metricfornication that the UN is foisting upon us.

First off let’s look at the basis of the two differing systems. Imperial measurements use the inch. Everyone knows what an inch is. Why do you think they call it an inch worm? There is no meter worm I’m familiar with, is there? No.

A meter, by the way, is 39.37 inches. Now who figured that one and why would they use such an odd number? This whole metrical system is just downright dull. A Millie-meter is 1/1000^th of a meter. So what? That is way too small to worry about. Well you see, my dearies, they break it down even further with nano,nano-meters. Apparently they really liked Mork and Mindy. Going the other way they get even more ridiculous. Apparently they came up with this measurement called a Kill-O-meter. These rocket scientists just lined up a thousand meters and gave it its own name. Geez, and these guys are Rocket Scientists? Remind me not to go to the moon in an EU rocket. I forgot to mention that this silly Kill-O-meter is used to measure road distance in New Zealand and it doesn’t even come close to a mile. The mile, by the way, seems to make a lot more sense to measure long distances. I’ll get to that later. Back to the meter. If you cut a meter into 100 pieces then you get a Scent-O-meter. Yea, I know that stinks but that is exactly what they do. Did I happen to mention that these guys are Rocket Scientists?

Have any of yous’ noticed a pattern here? They take a meter and either add more meters or cut it into base-10. Boring!

So the whole premise of this silliness is a standard unit of measure based on…..hold on! Ready?

Ten

WTF? Does this make any sense to anyone other than my X-wife who is an engineer? I didn’t think so.

So let’s look at a system of measurement that makes more sense.

SAE or as you foreigners feel the need to put it, Imperial.

Inch

Twelve of them equals a foot. Three of those equals a Yard.

100 yards is a football field. 90 feet is the distance to first base. 66.5 feet goes from home plate to the pitchers mound but I digress.

1760 yards equals a Mile. A Mile is also 5280 feet.

One mile is eight furlongs. One mile is 52.8 chains (An Engineering Chain as opposed to a Gunter’s chain which is 80 to the mile). One mile is 63360 inches. Which makes perfect sense since you all remember that there are 12 inches to the foot and 3 feet to the yard and 1760 yards to the mile so a mile being 52.8 Chains falls right in line. Right? Still with me?

OK, now that we all agree that this mecticfornication stuff is horse hockey we can move on to measurement of volume.

There are three teaspoons to a tablespoon and 16 tablespoons to a cup and two cups to a pint and two pints to a quart (kort, if you live up the coal region) and four quarts to the gallon.

How easy is this? What’s not to understand?

If you wish to move this out further it gets easier. One barrel of oil equals 42 gallons but a barrel is actually only 31.5 gallons, ya’ know. One gallon is also 32 gill. Like I needed to tell you this. Of course we all know that a hogshead is 63 gallons and I’m damn glad it is, personally.

OK, so if a gallon is the same as 384 dessertspoons and a cup is the same as two gill then a five pound of rack of ribs shall cook almost but not quite the same as 2 Kill-O-grams of tofu! Right?

Don’t even get me started on temperature. Geez! Please tell me why everybody and their brother feels the need to set ZERO at a different point.

Zero DEGF is 32 and Zero DEGC is 0 and Zero DEGK is -459.57 and if you give 2 shits the others are ….ya’ know what? No one gives a shit so……

I shall tell you here and now that to acquiesce to my UN backed international buds I shall from here on tell temperature as KELVIN and talk of volume and length as inches, feet, yards and miles.

So there you go!

Today is suppose to be a high of 282 degK and I know this because my outdoor thermometer is only 10 cubits away.

This is too too funny.

What if 24 were filmed in 1994 

K8, I shall get you back for tagging me. Mark my words.
Roishe. Let’s get this one over with, shall we? It took two full containers of St. Johns Wort before I could remember why I was doing this.
This evil evil meme is a twisted form of Chinese Whispers and goes like this:
There are a set of statements below that are all of the form:”The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the statements, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.
For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My Ancestry:
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Archy.
My great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Why Now?
My great-great-great-great grandparent is Hipparchia.
My great-great-great grandfathers are Archaeopteryx and Kiefus.
My great-great grandfather is Catnapping.
My great grandmother is BirdAnonymous
My grandmother is Baino.
My Mom is K8 the Gr8
My statements:

The best “bad” movie in comedy is: Grandma’s Boy
The best “worst earworm” in 80’s music is: Electric Avenue by Eddie Grant
The best “re-readable novel” in school-days literature is: “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
The best “female-fronted” band in Rock and Roll is Blondie

Now for the fun part. I hereby pass this P.I.T.A. MEME to:

Kate at Because I said so

Cravey at What can’t be looked for

Wordnerd at Jambalaya!

Faecebook blows!
There I said and I said it out loud. What an insidious application it is. Now in all fairness I have to say it is better than My Space and a whole lot more relaxed than Linked-In. This post was inspired by Baino who wrote about personal appvertising and how it’s being used in Faecebook.
Let’s rewind to last June when an old friend who lives overseas asked me to join Faecebook so we could keep in touch on a regular basis. I did though with some reservations. I added my picture and started typing in a whole lot of information about myself but still holding to my privacy. I don’t care if all of you (all yins’) know that I live in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area or that I like Triumph motorcycles. I do, on both counts.
Well then came the adding of the applications. Ok, so I added an app that let me send virtual flowers to folks. That is actually the one I liked. I like giving flowers be they virtual or real. They make people smile and that’s a good thing. Though some people get flowers from you and send off a memo stating, “Got ur flowers…very nice…thank you…”. But I digress.
Then someone wanted to turn me into a vampire. I don’t think so. After that another person wanted to turn me into a werewolf. WTF? People then started insisting that I list every book I have ever read or worst yet every album or CD I have ever listened to. Are you not well? That last request would be a full time job for the next seven years. Well along came the requests to start throwing stuff at people. First you need to know that this is an extension of POKING people. You see in Faecebook you can send someone a virtual poke. Kind of like saying….,”Yo, sup?”, but in a Faecebook kinda’ way. Throwing a haggis at a bud of yours is pretty funny but still kinda’ sophomoric.
I was able to link my blog to my Faecebook account as well as other blogs I like but and there is always a BUT, I had to tell Faecebook what kind of posts I like. Cut me a break! All I want to do is link to other blogs I read on a daily basis.
This is where I started thinking that this app was written by some right-proper C**ts. But I soldiered on anyway. You see for all it’s downfalls I was still able to chat most every day with my friend so it was OK. Well then everyone and their brother started asking to be my friend. What’s up with that shit? I was happy to approve a bunch of folks I either know or are bloggers who scribblings I like reading. Well I even added the gay guy from Philly because he was an EAGLES fan. I mean WTH, he’s an EAGLES fan! Well I even added the local TV sports network because they carry EAGLES news. Ok, so I ended up removing them because of all the adverts they sent to me. And speaking of adverts…

Social Media introduced a Facebook application called Food Fight which they creatively call a “Throw app” (rocket scientists these geeks), Typically, the app allows Facebookers to purchase virtual food items and throw them – at virtual friends. It plays off the Facebook “poke”, a kind of online hello.(Well hello- o-o haggis!)But you don’t pay real currency for this virtual food. You pay virtual dollars. And you acquire these virtual dollars by giving up personal information. (Did you know that kiddies? I wondered why I had so many $ in my growing gift app.) Food Fight is part of a larger network of tools used for “appvertising”. That personal info will eventually be used for marketing purposes.(so if you don’t want to be bothered by virtual junk mail – be careful!) What happens is the advertisements you receive will not only know who you are but also your friends, your spouse or those you holy grail: personalised advertising. An example might be: “Christmas is coming soon and Baino would lov a special gift from Qantas, like a round-the-world-air-first-class-air-fare or a holiday in Vanuatu!” (can’t blame a girl for trying) The thing is . . . all the information is given up voluntarily when you’re on Facebook.

That last bit was bold face stolen directly from Bainos post of 24 October, 2007.
So to wrap this all together and up I removed all my information from Faecebook. My old friend responsible for my foray into Faecebook stopped responding to me, for whatever reason, so I decided that at that point there was no longer a need for this crap. I decided to delete myself from Faecebook. Did I happen to mention that you can NOT delete your Faecebook account? Oh no, no my little consumers, you can not. You can de-activate it but you can never be released from it. It shall haunt you forever more. 
OK, here is what I did.
I first deleted all the applications attached to it. I then, one by one, deleted all my messages. After that I edited my account and removed all information. Since you cannot remove your email address I changed mine to nunya.business@fuckyou.com.
I then deleted all my photos. The last thing I did was to delete all my friends, one by one. The really last thing was to dig through the application to see what I missed. Once I was sure that I had not missed anything I checked the “deactivate my account” button and jumped through their hoops including typing a reason for leaving. I used the old, short and sweet reason of, Eat me you Clowns.
Sorry Faecebook but I graduated from Junior High school quite awhile ago.
By the way, if you want to keep in touch with me, I have access to email, skype, post mail, my blog and I even have this new fangled invention called a telephone.
So for me, Faecebook can S**k my D**k!

UPDATE:  FAECEBOOK FACTS

Thanks for the link, Baino.

One year ago today I bought my house.  As an anniversary present I had a bit of landscaping done today.  Check out the photos below and see if you can tell what they did.

Before
 

After