Liquid Inspiration Anew

Oh, happy days are here again! *sip*

Yes, after what was the longest week to ten days of my life (it seems now, looking back over it), my coffee pot has been replaced. *sip* Ahhhhhh...

It makes things easier since I've spent the past two days at home with sick kids. Well, the kid today isn't sick like she was yesterday, but she's still coughing up vibrant yellow mucus. Mmmm. I think I'll move on to my next thought before I take another sip of coffee.

What's that? I seem in a better mood? Not swearing so much? Actually somewhat pleasant? Well, it could be the coffee (90%), but it's probably also the two hour nap I took on the couch this morning after putting the boy on the bus and shipping him off to school (10%). And for some strange reason, my wife last night was like, "Are you sure you want to stay home with her today?" Well, honey, it's such a big sacrifice sleeping on the couch and drinking coffee all day, but I think I can make it. It is our wonderful beautiful daughter we're talking about.

So, if you're just sitting there this afternoon and I come busting in and dance you around the room, singing some bawdy sea shanty, you'll know that I really don't mean anything by it. Just smile, shake your head, maybe let a light blush touch your cheeks (I'll leave the decision as to which cheeks up to you) and think, "Oh, that Indefatigable One...he's all full of caffeinated goodness!"

Oh no. I better go. I'm almost to the bottom of this cup. Not to mention, the rest of the pot isn't going to drink itself. Although, if it did, that'd be a sight to behold. Plus, I'd be forced to make some more.

Because I can.

Oh, and by the way...I was wearing a pair of green pants on Saturday. I changed them at halftime, and look what happened!!! Clearly, I need to burn all my green clothes when football season comes around. Which is too bad, because I like wearing them on Thursdays...

Blargh

You'll excuse me if I'm a little addled. My wife broke the carafe for the coffee pot on Friday night, so I'm starting my third morning without coffee. It's horrible. A million howling voices are in my head, each vying for my attention, all of them demanding a caffeinated release to silence the other 999,999 voices. Fortunately, I'm making due with the muddy ditch water here at work and, even though it's not the finest coffee in the land, it was a dollar well spent.

I came to a sudden realization this weekend that sheds new light on the patheticdom that is my life. Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I was being all clever about telling you how to say "jump the shark" in Latin? I was telling you how I don't really watch any network shows?

Well, I was thinking about that this weekend while freezing my ass off taking my kids to their school carnival. My two favorite shows right now: Dirty Jobs and Phineas and Ferb. That's pretty much it. Now with Monk in its final season and both it and Psych having come to their fall finales, I'm left with a show about rolling around in shit all day and an animated show detailing the formulaic adventures of step brothers and their pet platypus.

Even my regularly-enjoyed shows, The Simpsons and House, fall at an inconvenient time for me. They come on while I'm trying to wrestle the agents of entropy into their rooms for the night put the kids to bed, and I can't afford DVR and I'm loathe to just record them and watch them later. I suppose I could try and catch them online, but...*shrugs*

I guess it's probably better, as I'm trying to push forward with my currents work(s) in progress, but still, even creative genius needs a night or two off to rot his mind with whatever amusements the flickering box in the room can offer me.

Anyway...

Wow...I can feel the coffee slowly suffusing strength and sanity back into my body. Oh, how I've missed you, demon of our modern age.

Apparently, I'm not the only one not watching enough television (that's what we call a ham-fisted segue, kids). These morons in Colorado with the weather-balloon kid would have done themselves a service had they only watched the Mythbusters in which they took, what, 45 weather balloons to lift someone off the ground? Sure, that was a full-grown man, but evens scaling it down, someone should have been like "Hmmm...maybe the math here is off a little bit...". I mean, I have a five-year-old boy, and I sure as fuck hope that I'm not 45 x what he is.

According to the sources I searched, it took over 4500 party balloons filled with helium to achieve lift-off. And that was just for a four-year-old.

A quick check of the math shows that it takes approximately 16 cubic feet of helium to lift one pound. Let's assume that a six year old weighs around 55 pounds, that'd require 880 cubic feet of helium to lift him. And that's just to lift him off the ground, not to shoot him off into the stratosphere like these people were claiming.

And here's the thing: no one called them on this until they found the boy hiding in a box in the attic. No one was like "Yeah, bullshit! There's not enough lift in that thing to take a six-year-old off into the the atmosphere." The media slurped it up like fucking nectar and ambrosia and now we're stuck with these two asshole parents on every fucking news outlet being total asshats.

Then I saw a bunch of comments on various news stories while I was doing the research for how many balloons it took for Mythbusters to lift someone off the ground, and they were predictably asinine, as well. "I'm praying for this family during their tragedy." (typos marking the author as being barely literate corrected) Well, I'm praying for you for being so fucking gullible you'd probably look to see if the word was written on the ceiling.

Okay, now that my hackles have been raised, here's something that might make you feel better. It did me, with a couple of notable exceptions. It's the 20 All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture, as compiled by Entertainment Weekly. My only complaints are that Batman is way cooler than Spider-Man and Super-Man, and I think Buffy should have been higher, but it's tough to argue with those who ranked above her.