Mean Mr. Mustard sent me this amusing link from Digital Cuttlefish about a guy who was ticketed for going outside the bicycle lane.  He was offended, so he made a video to prove his point. You shouldn't get ticketed for doing what's safe and what makes sense. The weekend before last, a woman stopped in the middle of the road, no stop sign, talking on her cell phone, and tried to wave me across an intersection. I wouldn't go. So she waved harder, all the while talking. I wouldn't go. So she gestured at me to go, and I shook my head "no". It's drivers, and cyclists, doing what's unexpected, like stopping in the middle of the road and not paying attention, that ends up getting you killed by the person who rear ends them and pushes them over you, or goes around them without looking for why they're stopped. I don't encourage that sort of behavior.

Object Oriented...

Last night I had a dream about how a serial killer was stalking local picnics and killing families of picnickers.  More of a nightmare, because it was sort of gruesome.  Mean Mr. Mustard and Erik the Hairy Swede showed up to discuss how best to combat the killer, and we all had an argument about the best method.  I said we should put a weapon in each picnic basket.  Mean Mr. Mustard said that was dumb, and we should give each individual a weapon.  Erik said we should treat each outing separately and the weapon should be associated with the picnicking event, not the basket or a person.  At which point I woke up and realized my dream was not about picnicking or about serial killers, but about appropriate object oriented programming.

Kyle's Next Birthday

Dude...you so need plushie Meeples. They come in so many colors. You could....could... well, you could... um.... well... ORGY!!!! Or maybe that's a little too pedobear for you? Come to think of it, a rainbow of colored men is sort of gay. And I mean that without the quotes. You might as well be painting the letters on the back of your S-A-T-U-R-N. Regardless, be prepared for a few throw pillows come next August. It'll still be less emasculating than what I get Mean Mr. Mustard.

Mean Mr. Mustard's Birthday Gift

Last year I gave Mean Mr. Mustard the Menorah Game for his birthday. For my birthday, he gave it back to me explaining that it just wasn't his kind of game (I haven't forgotten about you Sank, it's coming soon). He checked in with me to see if I was upset, and I wasn't, but I told him if I was, I'd just get back at him some other time. He might think his birthday gift this year was retribution, but as I explained to him, it fulfilled many requirements that made it perfect:

1. Boing Boing approved. Mr. Mustard reads Boing Boing all the time. I know because he forwards posts to me to make sure I don't miss the funniest ones.
2. Hipster/Trendy – it's Museum of Modern Art sanctioned. I'd have to shop at The Tate to move up the culturally cool scale.
3. It's not a game, in line with the returned Menorah Game.
4. It's not Jewish (not exactly...see below) – the Menorah Game was originally because there was a question around how Jewish he was and how Jewish his wife thought he was, spurred by a 10 cent off question on the Caribou Coffee chalk board.
5. Our company has discontinued their free fruit program. Payday bananas have gone away and you have to bring your own to work. Those bananas must be protected when you transport them, to protect them from bruising and mushing in your backpack, softsided-orange corporate lunchbox, or car seat.
6. Mean Mr. Mustard's a vegetarian. The gift is specifically vegetarian in nature. You could use them with sausages, but they’d get ruined.
7. When containing bananas, they are yellow like his nickname, Mean Mr. Mustard.
8. They can’t be construed counter to a safe and respectful workplace since we lost the free fruit. They're a practical response to fruit portability. When we lost free fruit, everyone should have received two.
9. They’re useful for his fetish needs, should he so desire.

Here's a picture of what I gave him, courtesy of Boing Boing and MOMA. A pair of Banana Bunkers (and two bananas to get him started). I strongly recommend enjoying the comments at Boing Boing, and as a fun game, try to locate the one that talks about the appropriateness of banana bunkers for your Jewish friends.

Responses - Wordle, Mean Mr. Mustard

A reply to Jonathan Feinberg first, as I personally offended Wordle, much to Klund's amusement. This is presumably what he took umbrage with "Wordle is cool. It's just not accurate." So I'll clarify, although up until that point in the post I'd been pointing out that the cloud generated didn't capture the essence of my blog. Not that Wordle had a problem, only that the resulting cloud wasn't accurate in the sense that it wasn't representative - e.g. as dissociated from the Wordle program. That may sound like criticism of Wordle, but it's not. Wordle did it's job with what it had - that doesn't make the result any more indicative of the content of NodToNothing.

My real issue, and I could have phrased it better, is that when I pointed at a completely different month by putting that month's URL into Wordle, in order to grab the details that weren't related to the last 100 posts in the Atom feed and generate something a bit more representative based on what I hoped was a more representative month squarely in the middle of geocaching and bicycling season, Wordle instead regrabbed the Atom feed for the last month, not the content from the month I selected. That's understandable as well. After all, if it just grabbed the URL and went on it's merry way, it would probably have to parse out all the HTML and CSS-type tags. I sympathize with using a structured Atom or RSS feed and forgoing that mess. I could resolve a bit of that by using the paste-into-a-textbox function, but that was painful as I ended up grabbing the tags (meaning some words were counted twice) and some of the template information, which didn't turn out well. My assertion that the Technorati cloud was more accurate was in no way a reference to a program or algorithm, but only to how Technorati tracked my tags, resulting in a cloud based on what I had personally tagged as important in my blog and that seemed to capture keywords more appropriate to what it's about: bicycling, geocaching, Eryn, beer, and for some reason, the City of Rosemount.

To give Mr. Feinberg a nod (to something, not nothing), and perhaps invite a retaliation from Dave Sifry, Mr. Feinberg's Wordle program a.) creates more aesthetically pleasing clouds and b.) is no doubt more accurate in assessing the actual content cloud of my blog from an appropriate dump of text than Technorati's cloud is, which relies on my own ability to tag my content with appropriate metadata, a skill of questionable ability in anyone who isn't an information architect with a library science background.


I have a much shorter response for Mean Mr. Mustard, who commented on the post Pain. Despite my choice of language in the post, it was still a better call overall than telling an architect at work today, "You can blow me off any time. You're only two minutes away." Fortunately, I've switched jobs enough times that no one realized, or was unwilling to comment upon it, that I was snickering at my own stupidity as I transitioned to a new topic. And, on a more personal note directed specifically at you, I appreciate that I have so many a**holes in my life, so that only one had to have hemorrhoid surgery. I hope your back feels better soon.

Mr. Mustard Turns 50

Last year I got Mean Mr. Mustard (pretty soon I'm going to have to just point at Facebook profiles instead of blogs) The Menorah Game for his 49th birthday. It required a lot of work, and I'm not so sure he was impressed. So this year, I went a little easier on the effort and gave him two framed photos of Alyson Hannigan in her T.V. Guide elf outfit, including green and white thigh-high stockings. He DID say at one point when I was referring to Sarah Michelle Geller that Buffy wasn't his favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer character. Willow is. I took this to mean Alyson Hannigan is hotter, not that Willow is a much cooler character, because the second option labels him as a bit of a nerdy fanboy instead of a virile young turk. I guess I should have been able to sort that one out on my own now that he's 50. Regardless, I'm sure his wife doesn't approve of the pictures of Alyson Hannigan that will eventually be in the frames secreted away behind family photos. I count that as a minor win. Happy belated 50th birthday, MMM.