If I Am to Die on a Trapeze

I will be turning 27 at the end of this year. While 26 fell firmly into the camp of Good, But Dumb Years along with 22, 23, and 24, 27 has a special magic to it.

It's not the square year 25 was, a simple 5². No, 27 is 3³. That's three to the third. It's perfect. You could write it in base-3 as 1,000. It's so mathematically beautiful I appreciate it without even comprehending its exact importance.

For the rest of the world, 27 means I am going to die.

No, this is not some preemptive strike à la Logan's Run. The Twenty-Seven Club is a collection of famous and sometimes infamous persons throughout rock & roll history–though it is often expanded to include film and other media–who have all died at the age of 27. Principally among them Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Brian Jones all within three years of each other, then later Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and a number of other musicians without a J-name.

Just as I had gotten over the nagging suspicion I would be struck to death by a bus before I turned 25, I have discovered a wonderful new sense of paranoia. And a deadline:

I must achieve fame and notoriety in the next 18 months so that my "untimely" death will include me among these delightful degenerates. I must also knock out my bucket list in this time, which means I have to make a bucket list.

Right now, the only thing I want to do before I die is take a $586 ten week trapeze workshop at the end of which I put on a "recital" for all my friends and family.

You heard me. I went for the first a friend's birthday recently and loved every terrifying minute of it, and it turns out I was pretty good. $586 is a lot to lay-out for a couple months of fun, certainly more than a gym membership, but my time is short and I certainly can't take the money with me when I go. However, this does pose something of a problem for me:

That is one hell of a good way to die.

I don't mean to imply any safety concerns, far from it. The class I had was highly monitored and seemed safe as anything else. Batman-level catastrophes would have to simultaneously occur to defeat the safety precautions put in place by this school. I mean to say it is such a fun way to go I almost want it to be my sign-off.

"Dave died? How?"

"Oh, it was an unfortunate trapeze incident."

Yes, please. It definitely sounds better than "drug overdose" or "drunk driver," the preferred methods of 27 Club alumni. You say, "Cancer," and people just make that pitying sigh. "Oh, that sucks." You know what to say about cancer. You know what no one shy of a ring master has ever had a prepared response for?

"Unfortunate trapeze incident."

If I get to heaven and they ask me how I died, and I said, smirking of course, "An unfortunate trapeze incident," they would usher me backstage with my VIP tickets and tour jacket, and tell me that Jimi wanted to meet me after the show.

Or they'd call me a bullshitter, because who ever dies in "an unfortunate trapeze incident"?

Of Things to Come

The Sound A Doggy Makes is no longer a daily.


With the exception of a few sick days which were made up for shortly after I regained conscious wellness, this page has been updated with something, ideally something comedic or amusing, for 1,585 days. That's just over four and a half years, and I figure four and a half is a good time for a kid to realize there's no Santa Claus.

So it's over. The daily updates, I mean. I took a weekend off and I feel better about it. Most updates have been a chore, and the better posts get buried under a pile of in-jokes and funny license plate photos. Here's a photo of a store I live near:

Click to embiggen.

Anything to get that sweet Top-Three listing in the phone book, eh?


… That's not a blog post. That's a tweet. An Instagram. At a stretch, a Tumbl. I deserve to be seen as better than that, and you deserve to have better content.

So now The Sound A Doggy Makes is going to have fresh content when it's damn-well ready and fully baked. Yeah, if I think "Aardvark Insurance" is hilarious, you'll probably get a whif of it on one of my social platforms. If I Photoshop something funny for work and it's a hit, maybe I'll share it here. But this is the last time you're getting "LOOK WHAT I FOUND YOUR GUYS! HURRR!"




TLDR: Sound A Doggy Makes is on hiatus while I work on other projects, and will resume more intermittent posting as I create new, worthwhile things that don't fall under their own banners.

Additionally, the long-term plan is to hopefully start up a new, larger platform that will curate the best material from these last 4.5 years into a more distilled form of awesome, minus the cat pictures and license plates.


I hope we had fun.

-Dave

Honey, I Broke the Physics

I put Honey, I Shrunk the Kids up on the big screen at work today, then spent about 20 minutes re-researching thr fundamental forces of nature to try and work out how Szalinski's shrink ray operates.

By his own words—either in this film or the first sequel, I forget which—Szalinski states the machine works to reduce the great amount of empty space in what is typically considered "solid" matter.

To achieve this, the device would have to affective lot lessen the coefficient of the Weak Nuclear Force, which governs the behavior of fermions such as electrons. This would allow them to maintain stable orbits far closer to the nucleus of their atoms, thereby allowing molecular bonds to be formed from atoms functionally "smaller" in so far as each atom would now occupy less volumethan previously.

Now, Szalinski says nothing of changing any mass, however it is quite clear from the experimental results that weight has been scaled down proportionately with volume of the shrunken subjects, so it can only be that mass too has been affected. This requires that the machine also interact with the Higgs Field in such a way as to shift down the subject's mass as they shrink.


Notes:

1) Altering the coefficients of the fundamental forces is completely impossible and would likely break physics within the space provided, killing anything within, probably horribly.

2) There isn't actually any "empty space" in an atom to remove. I mean you can't remove a nothing, but the emptiness is really teaming with quantum foam if virtual particles infinitely coming into and out of existence, powering the dark energies and probabilities of the world.

Bieber Fever Leads to Chills, Mania, Withdrawal

I almost didn't have a blog ready for today. Then this happened:

Drugs Found of Justin Bieber Tour Bus | BBC

Somewhere there's a joke about him and Selena Gomez writhing on the floor of the bus, pupils dilated and the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack playing in the background, autotuned for some reason, but, you know what?

No.

No, Justin Bieber is about to hit the "Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman" stage in his little career, and all I have to do to laugh is sit back and wait for him to start lifting weights and try to star in a movie like Mark Wahlberg, because this train wreck is about to get good.

On Overreacting

This is the package of bubbles we are not allowed to sell where I work, because it uses the word "colored."

Honestly, if this were an issue, I'd be more upset as an African American that white people overreacted and then denied me the purchase of something purple.

A Little Perspective

Sometimes I get a a sense of the actual scale of the universe, or buildings, or just really big plants–sometimes I just consider that a worm has a heart–and when I do this, I get a mild panic attack/bout of vertigo. Douglas Adams described a torture device call the Total Perspective Vortex that drives you insane by giving you an exacting display of your insignificance in the universe in a very similar manner.

The above image has been circling the Internet for several days with varying notes attached to it. It is a still image of the Martian dusk sky taken by the Mars Curiosity rover depicting (from horizon up) Venus, Jupiter, and Earth.

Recall that the small dot seen here is divided infinitesimally by the microbes scurrying across its surface, warring over imagined slights and invisible markers, hording certain mineral elements and trading them in exchange for other elements with which to hopefully damage other little microbe people.

And a few of them are hoping to get up off that small dot and visit other small dots and maybe one day not have imagined slights or invisible markers, so they drove a nuclear-fueled RC Power Wheels they shot out of a capsule in a bullet in a cannon to the nearest dot they could find and took this picture to show us the most zoomed-out selfie you'll see all week.

And here you were watching Dancing with the Stars.

The Diary of Lisa Frank

When I go to Hell, and they ask me why I think I wound up there, if I can remember no other fun I had while winding down that path, I will show them this. And then I shall waltz into my well-deserved Hell condo and rule over the Plains of Fire as a Discordant Lord.

Good times.