Wallpaper Psychology

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Kirk M

I don’t often write a post about my Lady Laurie, not because she isn’t interesting (she most certainly is) or that she isn’t rather unique (she has the uniqueness market cornered) or that she isn’t even somewhat unusual at times (I plead the fifth), it’s simply because she’s promised me that if I did write anything about her beyond mentioning her name only I would shortly thereafter find myself missing a few vital parts. And since I’m rather fond of my parts I’ve abstained up till now.

However, this time it’s different. This time it has to do with wallpaper so obviously it’s an important topic.

You see, I put my foot down (I begged her permission) and told her I was going to write this post (she gave me her permission) and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it (I have to do the laundry and feed the cats for a year). And now that I’ve finally set things straight (I should be able to walk upright within a couple days), here it is.

Laurie’s wall paper psychology

The idea here is simple and concerns desktop wallpaper. That’s right, that image/photo/drawing or what-have-you that one plasters all over the desktop of one’s Windows/OSX/Linux-distro-of-one’s-choice. Now, I don’t know if any of you have some sort of personal psychology or belief system that lies behind the wallpaper you might choose to adorn your desktop other than it’s a darn nice image/photo/drawing or what-have-you but seeing as how people are people and how people as individuals can be very, shall we say, unique at times I thought Laurie’s chosen wallpaper would be a fine example of how this type of wallpaper psychology might work. It does for her apparently.

Disclaimer: the following “wallpapers” are not guaranteed to fit the width of your oversized 28 inch display. Some of them might not be even as big as 300 x 400 okay? Also, neither the author nor his lovely wife are liable if these wallpapers don’t prevent or engender anything in particular nor if you do or do not receive enlightenment, get hit by lightening and/or blown up by a nuclear blast or any other foolish thing.

One other thing: I’m not poking fun here simply because it actually appears to work.

***************

The first one’s easy. It’s obviously aimed at promoting peace and contentment within herself when she is feeling a bit anxious or is just generally pissed off at the days happenings. (click images to en-zoomen)

The second one deals with enticing her to fall asleep at day’s end. Apparently it is said that thinking of a waterfall helps you to fall asleep so this one often adorns her screen before shutting down for the night (she hits the pillow and is out like a light. I, on the other hand, just lay there awake for hours and grow older).

Now we get a little deeper. This next one is to prepare her, at the beginning of the day, to be annoyed. This is to prevent her from, you guessed it, becoming annoyed.

This one deals with my honey’s disaffection with thunderstorms, it’s associated lightning and the prevention thereof. This wallpaper goes up every time a special weather statement about bad thunderstorms coming our way hits The Weather Channel. The scary thing about it is that while everyone else around us is getting clobbered—we’re not.

And, of course, to protect her from the effects of the full moon:

Last but not least, these last two have a dual purpose. The first and foremost purpose is to prevent her from blowing up at people when they’re not being reasonable (spelled: Anal-Retentive-Morons). The second purpose is to keep us and everybody else from being blasted to pieces by a nuclear explosion. Or several of them for that matter. A fine preventative measure if you ask me.

And…
(a blast from the past)

So there you have it. How to steer yourself around life’s everyday challenges via your desktop wallpaper. And if anyone is wondering what I use for desktop wallpaper…

Good thing I have her around isn’t it?

Too Wet to Burn

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Kirk M

The amazing and wonderfully comfortable thing about most vets is that when you happen to meet up with another vet on the way to wherever you need to be, say at my local VA medical facility, conversation is often picked up as if you’d been good friends all along. No preamble or awkward hellos as usually is the case when meeting someone you don’t know for the first time. And this very thing happened down at the White River Junction VA yesterday while on my way back to the parking lot.

“I heard a decent joke the other day”, he said as if we were picking up a never ending conversation.

“And what was that?”, I responded. And this is what he told:

A man dies and ends up standing in a line of people waiting to see Saint Peter. As the line becomes shorter he notices that St. Peter is waving his arms about pointing in 3 different directions as he sends the newly deceased on their way.

As time went on he became very curious as to what all this was about so when it finally became his turn to stand in from of St. Peter he asked him what all the pointing was for.

“Say Peter”, he asked. “I noticed you were pointing people in different directions and I was wondering what that was all about.”

“Well, said St. Peter, “That’s easy”. “You see, over in that direction is the Pearly Gates and this direction over here is where people go who are scheduled to burn in Hell”

“And what about all those people standing over there?”, the man asked.

“Oh”, said Peter. Those are New Englanders scheduled for Hell”. They’re too wet to burn”.

I chuckled all the way back to the Jeep.

DoFollow Spam and Other Comment Type Improvements

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Kirk M

dofollow not Within the last several months there’s been a change in the comment spam that’s plagued bloggers ever since the dregs of society first found out how they could benefit from leaving their crap in the comment sections of posts. You know the type; 20 offers for prescription medications along with another 15 offers to “stiffen our resolve” as it were.

These “spamments” used to be left by spam bots (the spammers got lazy in other words) but recently it seems humans have gotten back into it since anti-spam type plugins have become so effective. So now I’ve been getting these types of spamments of late (not all of them have been this good but there’s been quite a few):

I’m not really sure we would all be in trouble that quickly…let me explain. Let’s assume they did actually come up with a drug that did extend peoples lives to 100 years old. Well, you know it would be under patent, so for 17.5 years, it would be expensive as gold, so only the rich could afford it. Even after the patent expired, the generic version would probably be expensive, so probably only the middle class in developed countries would be able to afford it. So, at least we would have a little bit of time before the world population numbers started exploding.

But, unfortunately, the ultimate effect of something like this would be to send the population number sky high. Could you imagine a world with 20 billion people in it? It’s possible…with life extension.

This one I found lurking in the comments section of a couple posts back. It was left by a guy called “Electronic Cigarettes”. Now that’s a fairly well thought out comment, the type of comment I’d be glad to see here at Just Thinkin’–but not by some guy named “Electronic Cigarettes”.

And he’s not the first, not by a long shot but rather than getting into a long dissertation about the other types of sweet smelling human generated garbage comments that keep coming my way, I’ve decided to finally make some changes here.

I’ve turned off “DoFollow” for this blog. It’s become a spam magnate for these new types of spamment. Don’t know how much simpler I can put it than that. Every time I leave the plugin activated lately I end up with a dozen or so of the above type comments per day and it pains me to dump some of them (like the one above) simply because they’re so good. However, if I deactivate the plugin, within a few days these types of “spamments” stop coming. So after many weeks of deliberation and arguing with myself—off she goes and I’m really sorry about that.

But not to leave everyone in the lurch I’ve added the CommentLuv plugin to my repertoire of WordPress plugins for everyone’s enjoyment. I’ve seen this thing in action every time I stop by Sixty’s or Grandad’s place of business and I thought this might be a fine way to make up for having to turn off the link Luv so to speak.

And last but not least, there’s this:

TinyMceComments

I also followed Grandad on this one and installed the TinyMCEComments plugin in order to fancy up my comments box. Unfortunately it has a slight problem with CommentLuv in that if CommentLuv’s check box is checked before the website field in the comment form is filled in, CommentLuv won’t work. If that’s what happens to you then just recheck the box and all is well and I left a little reminder about this down below the comment form.

*sigh*

It’s always something.

Ever have days when you feel like this?

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Kirk M

Sometimes there are days when the “stupid” just overwhelms.

funny pictures of cats with captions

Ever have one of those days?

The 2nd coming is at hand and commenting on blogs?

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Kirk M

A tree was cut in Ireland in the town of Rathkeale. And within the patterns of the rings along with the unique shape of the stump of the tree someone stated that they saw the Virgin Mary.

It only takes one you know.

Okay, so another stain in the cloth, shadow on the wall, puddle on the ground, blob of melted ice cream and now the stump of a tree is being hailed as portraying the image of, if not Christ, someone closely associated to Himself and in this case, his mother.

I abstain from promoting any personal opinion of this “discovery” as I tend to shy away from this kind of religious fervor—it gives me a rash.

If this wasn’t enough for one day it appears that the image in the stump at Rathkeale may possibly have been the precursor to the Second Coming as well (I say this with an extremely small grain of salt) although if this is true He picked a rather strange place to make his appearance—in a blog post’s comments section.

Yes, JCII, who claims he is the second coming of Christ has made his personal appearance at Bock the Robber’s blog, specifically in the comments section of the post in the above hyperlink. As to whether he’s the genuine article or not is highly debatable but he is very well written and write he does when he gets going.

But that’s not all. The comment section alone is well worth reading if you need a guffaw or two or three and there’s plenty to read at 99 comments so far and counting.

Have a care though, Bock’s blog is not for visitors who are faint of heart as things are rather down to earth there. Not that he isn’t a very intelligent and educated lad, he is, but he does not suffer from the foolishness of political correctness in any way shape or form and for that I admire him.

May the farce be with you.

People living longer | Thursday ponderings

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Kirk M

I read an article in the New York Times today that stated that researchers have discovered an antibiotic that appears to prolong life in mice:

Rapamycin treatment had the remarkable effect of extending life even though it was not started in the right dose until the mice had lived 600 days — equivalent to a person at age 60. Most interventions that prolong life in mice, including a very low-calorie diet, need to be started early in life to show any effect.

Antibiotic Delayed Aging in Mice – NYTimes.com

So this is a good thing? Okay, so it will most likely take at least another decade or so before anything will be proven with any certainty at all but as I fully intend to still be living at that point I really have to wonder if this is a good or thing or not.

Improving quality of life for the elderly is always a consideration of course and if this new discovery pans out and shows that the effects of this antibiotic can most assuredly improve that the lives of the elderly than fine and dandy. However, I would have serious reservations if the normal aging process would also be delayed for those who start taking an anti-aging wonder drug while they’re still in their 20’s and 30’s.

Why?

Can you imagine having a bunch of adults running around who are still able to have children well into their 60’s? All personal feelings aside for the moment, I really don’t think the world can support this. It’s already overloaded as it is, it certainly doesn’t need any more of us stomping around on it. So if, in the future, an anti-aging drug becomes readily available perhaps it should be restricted to those already considered elderly. Say at legal retirement age? Make those “Golden years” really worth living?

Wouldn’t that just cause a hullabaloo. Anyway…

If that wasn’t the case then we’d need a way off obviously. If Gene Rodenberry was right and well before the 22nd century people had the average life span of around 140 years give or take, then we’d definitely have to have a way off this planet. Just a few other planets that we could ~~screw up~~ live on so we didn’t end up totally destroying this one with our over abundant population.

People living longer—what a concept to ponder for an hour or so during those rainy weekend afternoons. Considering how much trouble we can cause ourselves (“We have met the enemy and he is us!” - Pogo), would this really be a good thing?

Spending the 4th of July in Island Pond

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Kirk M

We took Long Meadow Farms Quilts to Island Pond, VT this forth of July just to see if the tent would blow away this time. Actually that’s not true since we brought both her old station wagon and my old Jeep Cherokee, the latter to which we secured her display tent. The wind did indeed blow but no matter how hard it tried the old Jeep and subsequently the display tent that was tied to it did not end up in the pond.

The Pond
(A few wannabe swimmers—too cold though) Too cold for swimming

Our friend Kathy was putting up a booth there to see if she might get a few of the cats she takes care of adopted off and she invited us to go along this year. Since Laurie has been trying to do at least 3 or 4 local shows each year we said why not? We had the Jeep for ballast didn’t we?

Our friend Kathy is a one woman humane society for stray and abandoned cats (she currently has 31 plus 2 litters of kittens to contend with). How she does it I’ll never know. I’ve been to her home on several occasions keeping her PC updated and despite the number of feline type guests that may be staying (indoors only) it always seemed as if no more like only 2 or 3 hanging around at one time. And how she manages to accomplish this little miracle I’ll also never know. Unfortunately it busted loose with the rain while I was out and about with the camera and didn’t get a chance to snap a picture of her booth.

I did manage to snap a couple photos of Laurie’s display tent before the rain broke loose.

Long Meadow Farms booth
(Doesn’t she blend in well?)

Long Meadow Farms Quilts booth

And, of course, there’s always that one thing that ends up missing even though it was just put down where she could find it.

Can't find it

I really wanted to get a picture of one of the many downpours we had to put up with interspersed with bits of sunshine here and there but when I went for my camera while we took shelter in the booth I realized I had left it in the ballast…er…Jeep. So here’s a reasonable facsimile to give you a good idea what we had to put up with every 40 minutes or so.

Downpour

Now a typical Vermont type “celebration on the green” like the 4th of July wouldn’t be complete without entertainment now would it?

To wit:

Morning entertainment
(A guy singing to country music we couldn’t hear. We heard the guy…not the music)

Afternoon Entertainment
(The Merry Men—much better and very good. Nearly all instrumentals too)

Merry Makers
And last but not least, the traditional pony rides for the kids.

(Looks more like a small horse to me but hey, this is Vermont)

Pony rides

I actually asked them if I could possible have a ride too (I never had pony rides when I was a kid) but they said I wasn’t short enough and besides, I scared the horses.

So except for the rain and not getting a pony ride, we were happy with the whole affair if not very tired and achy when we finally had the booth broke down and the vehicles loaded back up. Will we do it again next year? I’d say the chances were pretty good although these days you never know what’s going to happen a week down the road never mind a whole year.

If we do though, the rain can definitely stay home—and I’m getting a pony ride if even if I have to bribe them.