Giggles

Mangled Metaphors Medley Mayhem, Maybe?

Giggles

There is nothing that warms my heart more than someone mangling a metaphor during a boring work meeting. It’s the verbal equivalent of slapstick comedy. It’s a sudden and unexpected fail, usually involving a very serious and maybe slightly pompous speaker getting tangled up in fancy rhetorical footwork they clearly were not ready to take on.

The List

We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.
It’s not rocket surgery.
Does the pope shit in the woods?
It will be a walk in the cake.
For all intensive purposes,…
If you can’t take the heat, spoil the soup.
We will jump off that bridge when we get to it.
You’ve got the tiger by the horns.
Up shit creek without a paddle.
Time wounds all heals.
The cows are coming home to roost.
Does a bear wear a funny hat?
You gotta take the balls by the horn.
Cut me some slacks!
That train has sailed.
The ship has left the station.
That’s a slippery door to open.
Flying by the seat of their tail.
Six of tom-ay-to, half a dozen of tom-ah-to.
You have to just roll with the flow.
Squeeze the lemon till the milk runs dry.
Catch two tigers with one toe.
I’m going to milk that lemon for all its worth.
Half of one, six dozen of another.
You don’t miss your water till hell freezes over.
Don’t count your horses before they hatch.
You’re counting your chickens before the cart.
Straight from the horse’s ass.
It’s more fun than shooting monkeys in a barrel.
You nailed it out of the park.
You gotta reap just what you saw.
You really pulled a rabbit out of your ass.

Braised Tangerine Tintype Beef Tongue

Art, Giggles

Prologue

In which we explore the process of exploration, and we take things and make other things from them for the purpose of being joyful in the process of exploration, and mix things up in a way that creates little mental explosions of aliveness, for no other purpose than to celebrate the uncircumscribeable, with a nod to Eraserhead and Quinn Martin. Oh, and also, pictures and tacos come out in the end.

Act I

Ingredients:

-One 8 pound beef tongue
-Chard
-One cake plate
-One 8×10 camera
-One 8×10 black enameled aluminum plate
-One studio with some lights
-Chemistry: collodion, silver nitrate, developer and fixer
-Two onion
-Two heads of garlic
-Three chipotle chilies
-Half a teaspoon oregano
-Eight bay leaves
-Five tangerines
-Salt and pepper to taste

tonguestudioshoot

Act II

-Take the beef tongue, the camera and the chemistry into the studio, and lay out the beef tongue onto the cake plate. Decorate the base with some chard leaves and carefully place your lights around the arrangement to highlight the features of the tongue.
-Take some pictures of it and adjust as needed.
-While you’re at it and in the studio, take more pictures of other stuff you happened to bring along.
-After a long day shooting, bring the tongue home, place it in the fridge and forget about it.
-Leave in fridge for four or five days until your wife starts asking what the hell you’re intending to do with that disgusting thing.
-Decide maybe you should make some decisions regarding what the next step is for the tongue.
-Look at a bunch of recipes online, decide to not follow any of them and wing it instead.

Act III

-Put the tongue in a large pot and cover with six quarts of water. Add one of the onion, one of the heads of garlic, and two of the chilies, all chopped. Add the bay leaves, salt and pepper and boil for 4 hours.
-Let the tongue cool and peel off the skin. Cut it in half and slice off a piece a decide it’s kind of weird and probably not quite cooked enough. Pretend you’re cool and that all the strange gristly fatty bits don’t freak you out at all.
-Decide it can be better…

This blog post is starting to be a little text heavy and we know that can be a problem with today’s typical 4 minute attention span reader. Here’s something completely random and unrelated that moves, for the purpose of keeping overactive brains engaged. It’s even interactive, so when you click in it, it does interactive multimedia!

Act IV

-Cut up the tongue in about 10 chunks and saute the pieces in olive oil in a dutch oven. Add salt, oregano, one chopped onion, peeled garlic cloves from the second head, and finely chopped chili.
-Juice tangerine, remove seeds, and add the juice and the peel to the mix.
-Cover the dutch oven and place in oven at 325 for 4 hours, checking it occasionally to make sure it’s not getting too dry.
-Once it’s done, cut it into 1/2 inch slices and sprinkle with chopped white onion and cilantro, and squeeze lime juice on it.
-Serve it to your family and watch them give it the old college try, claim that they really like it but say they’re not really hungry.
-Eat a lot of it yourself because it’s pretty freakin’ good, actually.
-Eat tacos de lengua at lunch for the next 5 days.
-Have your family eventually admit to you they thought it was weird and disgusting, and please never make it again.
-Blog about it later because if you don’t blog about, how can you know for sure it actually happened?
final_dish

Epilog

In which one has better figure out what the hell to do with the cow’s feet that were purchased with the tongue, because they’s really starting to smell. I hear tendon soup is a thing… Thanks to Tintypebooth for the help with the tintypes.

tongueandfeet

How to get a 9 year old interested in programming

Electrons, Giggles

Osx has a nifty command line speech synthesizer called “say”. It allows you to type some text and hear it “spoken” by the ubiquitous synthesized robotic voice. First, open the terminal and show him how it works by typing:
say "hello, my name is Robert"
Then show him that you can type different sentences and let him play with that until he gets the hang of it. Make sure to include enough potty humor to ensure sufficient hilarity:
say "Even though I am a computer, I sometimes talk about farts."
That should get his attention. You can also include question marks and nonsensical words for extra extra fun:
say "Are you some kind of flarpy nunckenbarf?"
The next step is to introduce the concept of variables:
friend="John"
say "$friend is a complete idiot"
friend="My hamburger"
say "$friend is a complete idiot"
By this time, tears of laughter should be streaming down his face, but don’t let it stop you. This is where the comedic potential really starts paying off with the introduction of the “for” loop.
for friend in "alfred" "max"
do
say "$friend is a fizzlebutt"
done
And then show him how to pause between the sentences
for friend in "alfred" "max"
do
say "$friend is a fizzlebutt"
sleep 1
done
Finally, once he finally peels himself off the floor and catches his breath, you apply the final coup-de-grace with the help of the “if” statement:
for friend in "alfred" "max" "frank" "dave"
do
if [ "$friend" != "max" ]
then
say "$friend is a total moron"
sleep 1
else
say "$friend has bad breath"
sleep 1
fi
done
After you share these intoxicatingly powerful instruments of distraction with your son, I suggest you steer clear of the technology teacher at the school.

Hacking, Creativity, Process

Art, Electrons, Giggles, Thoughts

PlaneSander

I had a great time today! I took apart my belt sander. It’s a basic Black and Decker model I got at Home Depot which I have been abusing for the past two years to sand and polish the cement pots I make. In the end, considering the time it took me and the fact that it only costs $50, the sensible thing would probably have been to go out and buy a new one. The thing is I am curious; I wanted to see how the pieces necessary for the tool to function all fit together into one design, I wanted to see how big the motor is, what kind of gears and pulleys it uses, and if there are any cool pieces I can use for something else or are just cool to look at. In the end, I took all its pieces apart, cleaned up all the cement and wood dust that were clogged up in there and, lo and behold, when I put it back together, it worked!

Hacking is a vital activity that subverts the opaque technological structures that exert increasing control over our lives. Extensive data collection empowers large corporate entities to profile how we fit into marketing models and allows them to decide what we should or shouldn’t have access to in order to maximize profits. Accompanying this are the prevailing consumerist attitudes which dictate that the broken item should be thrown away and a new one bought. This wasteful assumption is enabled by the orgy of cheap goods globalization provides us with.  It sucks!

Opening up that belt sander represents my refusal to accept this status quo.  Though I don’t particularly like the word “hacker” because it conjures up the image of a social recluse with questionable personal  hygiene, impressive technical abilities, and a broken moral compass, what I associate hacking with are the creative endeavors borne from the spirit of questioning, exploring, and rearranging the prevailing attitudes and objects of our world. It attempts to figure out how something works, and whether the designers of that “thing” put it together in a way that attempts to control my behavior, and it further seeks to put that thing back together differently. The reasons for doing so can be varied: artistic, political and utilitarian, but usually a bit of all of the above.

Ultimately, I think what really compels me to open up a broken belt sander just to see what’s inside it is that it makes me happy. It allows me to experience a child like sense of discovery and excitement at understanding how something works and the happiness of integrating it into my own creative process. When I get lost in this process of disassembling and reassembling, breaking and building, cool things usually come out and it puts me in harmony with the world. It restores my sense of my own humanity. That’s why the name of this blog is relentlessplay; it’s meant to convey the urgency of keeping the spirit of play alive and well.