I don’t know why I haven’t made mention of this sooner — but Geoff has released his newest Flash game onto the web. It’s entitled “Urban Chopper Rescue” and is somewhat like Choplifter, except you have to put out fires started by meteorites and save people from burning buildings. It’s rad (and I helped)! I made the chopper noises (we recorded them at his desk), helped out in the scoreboard area, and I did a lot of play-testing as you might imagine. Hence, my awesomely great high-score! Geoff really outdid himself this time. Go and give it a play, whydontcha?

The flight-model on the helicopter is kinda hard, but you’ll get used to it. Here’s a hint: fly fast, and put out as many fires and rescue as many people as possible in each round, but try to finish the round with at least half of the time remaining!

I spent a good deal of my Sunday afternoon engaging in a sport that I’d like to call “toilet wrestling”. We had some issues with our master bath toilet constantly running as if the little valve in the tank wouldn’t shut off. An inspection of “the works” revealed that it was in fact the “filler valve” that had gone bad. (see illus.) Luckily, I had replaced one of these before, so Kelly and I went down to Home Despot and picked up a new one.

Get back home, turn off the water, drain the tank, install new FluidMaster® Anti-Siphon Fill Valve 400A, turn on water, fill tank, flush, HUZZAH! Triumph and exaltation. A smattering of applause. But I couldn’t leave well enough alone, could I? I noticed that when the toilet overflowed (as it would on occassion), it really overflowed. So I wanted to lower the water level in the tank, thereby saving a bit of water per flush. This required me to lower the fill valve, which required me to cut the overflow tube down to the recommended height. The fill tube on this toilet was from the original 1950′s installation, and was metal. So, I ran downstairs to fetch my handy hacksaw (everyone should own one with an assortment of blades). I had had the fill tube on the other toilet crack off in my hand when I was replacing the flapper valve, so I tried my best not to disturb this overflow tube, and make light strokes with the hacksaw, keeping my hand on the top of the tube. Perhaps I was a bit overzealous, perhaps this toilet was nearly 50 years old, but in any case, it snapped off in my hand. Dammit. Now I was going to have to take off the tank and everything.

So, to Home Depot again to get another FluidMaster® Flush Valve kit and a new tank/bowl gasket. Return home. On the bottom of a toilet tank there is an obscenely large nut that holds the flush valve/overflow tube in place. Since this was the original 1950′s installation, it was metal and hell of corroded and just plain funky. To top it off, they had apparently used some sort of plaster substance to seal/level the tank on the bowl. Following the advice of Chuck P., I used my rotary tool with a cutoff disc to cut the nut in half and lay waste to it’s holding power. Considering I had to borrow a giant monkey wrench last time, this went much, much better. I then installed the flush valve, and also installed the new tank/bowl gasket. Reconnect water. No geisers of water! What, wait a minute — minute drops of water around the hold-down screws. Dang! Repeat that process (with the leaks and all) maybe half a dozen times, and then I finally break down and slather silicone sealant on anything I think might be leaking. I sit on the couch and take a twenty-minute nap to allow the sealant to harden a bit, and put the tank back on the bowl. Tighten screws, turn on the water! Looks pretty good so far, but what is this? Now the line from the shutoff valve to the toilet is leaking! Dang! One problem leads to the next. But at least the hard part of sealing the toilet tank is done.

So, I short, I spent most of my Sunday with my arms wrapped around a toilet — not as a penance to the porceline goddess per se, but in something that appeared to be greco-roman toilet wrestling. Who was the victor? Me. (maybe).

One of my favorite British rock bands, Mclusky has called it quits, much to my dismay. I did not get a chance to see them when they played Cincinnati last year, and now they’ve gone and broken up! I think it’s only appropriate to post the lyrics to their song “Fuck this Band”. After reading you should read my previous post about Mclusky, and then hit their own site, mclusky.net.

Fuck this band
And their demon seed
Cos if they burst out
You're responsible

Yeah fuck this band
Cos their clothes don't fit
But their dancing clowns
Are incredible

Keep your passport near
There is no other disappointment here
There is no other disappointment here
There are no other obstacles

Fuck this band
Cos they swear too much
It's an obvious ploy
And irresponsible

Fuck this band
Yeah fuck their holes
But if they split up
You're responsible

Keep your passport near
There is no other disappointment here
There is no other disappointment here
There are no other obstacles

Fuck this band
And their foolish pride
Which lets them think
They can get away with this

Let me tell you a little story. There was once a great website called TheSpark.com. It was really, really funny and was always popping with new hilarious projects like the “Stinky Meat Project” the “Fat Project” and the “Date My Sister Project”. Some seriously funny writing! Well, they also made a site called “SparkNotes” which had a boatload of handy notes for high school and college-level students. This appears to be the start of the end. TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com were both bought up by iTurf.com (a teen-centric website with message boards, articles, etc, inexplicably headed by Delias.com, a clothing store). iTurf (and parent company Delias) was a little too heady with the Internet land-grab in 2000, and in November of 2000, Delias cut the cord, canned the staff of iTurf, and so affiliates like TheSpark and SparkNotes (among others) went into a little bit of a limbo. SparkNotes, however, had a relationship with Barnes & Noble to sell their SparkNotes study-guides (Cliff Notes, sorta). In March of 2001, TheSpark and SparkNotes is sold to Barnes & Noble for the paltry sum of $3,555 (according to this SEC filing).

So, from then on The Spark apparently becomes a bit of Bastard Child to Barnes & Noble. They focus more on SparkNotes, as that can produce revenue while, apparently, writing articles about decaying meat does not. I don’t know when Christian Rudder (the creator of TheSpark.com and SparkNotes.com) parted ways with TheB&NSpark, but it appears to be in early 2001 when Barnes & Noble bought TheSpark and SparkNotes from Delias. And now, as of June 2004, Barnes & Noble shut down TheSpark.com as we knew it, and put up a re-director from TheSpark to SparkNotes, which is minutely similar. I, among many, many others, were terribly dismayed to see this. Notsomuch the revival of SparkNotes.com (which I really didn’t visit that often), but for the complete and total scrapping of TheSpark.com and its content. It would have been one thing to shut down the site and swap it for something COMPLETLY different, but this is some sort of half-baked clownshoe attempt at melding SparkNotes with little tidbits of TheSpark.com. Why not just leave up an archive of TheSpark.com? Hard to say.

Now, for the bad news. According to the FAQ page on his latest web-venture, OKCupid.com, they sold all of their content to Barnes & Noble, and cannot get access to that old content (due to the deal I presume took place in 2001). I don’t pretend to know the particulars of that deal, but one must presume that Christian Rudder either A) got hosed/railroaded, B) took the money and ran or C) just washed his hands of what, on paper, seems like a great big implosion that TheSpark/SparkNotes was involved in. Also, hard to say.

If you want to read a cutesy history of SparkNotes, then read this. Perhaps I’ll dig a little further and flesh this out, but right now I’m just a little muddied with a feeling between fury and sadness.

Maytag. What do you think of when you see that name? Most likely, you’d be thinking “appliances”, and you’d be right. It is, however, also the name of a famous American Bleu Cheese, which gets its name from the famous Maytag family that started the Maytag appliance company. Their Maytag bleu cheese is probably the most abundant variety we have in the U.S., and was featured in a piece this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, in a piece entitled Little Big Cheese: Maytag’s Growing Niche Market. It quickly answered my question “Is Maytag bleu cheese in any way related to the Maytag company?”. So there is the first part of this little yarn.

The second part of the story comes in when Hunter mentioned that today’s Achewood strip had a bit of a continuity error citing a “public drunkeness” arrest outside of a saloon on September 8, 1932, more than a year before Prohibition would end in the United States. How observant! Whilst doing a little Googling about Prohibition, I found mention of Fritz Maytag in this Wikipedia article on Prohibition. That mentioning stated that he helped to restart the microbrewery/homebrewery movement that had essentially been suffocated by Prohibition by buying a controlling interest in the failing Anchor Brewing company in 1965 (read a good article on this here), saving it from being quite possibly the last speciality brewer in the United States to close. Now, Anchor Steam (and it’s brethren) can be enjoyed in 48 states, along side other notable “specialty” beers as Red Hook, Pete’s Wicked, and Sam Adams. Yay for Fritz Maytag!

Combine this with my recent infatuation with home-brewing, my love of the cartoon cats in Achewood, and my love of cheese, and you’ve got yourself a bona-fide co-inky-dink.

For a while now, I’ve been mulling the idea of registering a couple of new domains for my own personal use. FUZZROLL.COM is one that you folks might have heard of, and I have duly registered it today. Also, I’ve been thinking for a while now that THELOCUST.ORG is a little tired and really doesn’t suit me like it used to. It’s a bit of a pain to spell and half the time when I tell someone to go to “thelocust.org”, they inevitably leave of “the”. I don’t know why — they just do. In any case, I was looking for a shorter, more phonetic name and found BENTO.US (.org, .com and .net were taken). I don’t have any plans at the moment to abandon THELOCUST.ORG, so don’t get all afearin’. I’m not sure what I’ll do with BENTO.ORG just yet, so stay tuned on that front. I also registered BENWILSON.ORG, which will most likely become a portfolio/resume site for me. I’ve had a 80% finished portfolio thing I whipped up a while back, and that will probably go there.

So, in short, keep an eye out. Developments might be underway.

I will blatantly rip-off Metafilter‘s link to this listing of the Top 100 Toys.

I had quite a few of these things growing up — tho’ my favorite was probably a Radio Shack “Electronic Experimenters” kit like this one:

12 hours and 4 houses later, Kelly and I have returned home exhausted and both sad and happy that Christmas is over for this year. We had a great time at each house and are glad that we got to see everyone. Many presents were exchanged, though the I’m glad to know that we not only gave gifts to the Angel Tree program this year, but also helped out Hunter with his “Books for Caritas Kids” thing at B&N. It feels better to give back to those who have so little, and books are often the perfect gift.

Tomorrow we plan on doing nothing save for meeting the long-lost and far-flung friends at Wick’s Pizza on Baxter.

Merry Christmas all, and to all a good night.

Kelly and I managed to hack our way out of our driveway this afternoon, after sleeping until about noonish. This snow was an interesting one, as the initial layer (5 or 6 inches) were of sleet, the size and granularity of a snow-cone. The last 2 or 3 inches were of powdery regular snow. This combination allowed one to actually walk on the snow without it caving it around your feet, which in itself is pretty cool, but trying to shovel that stuff was a two person job! Kelly would break up the snow with a spade and I would shovel it off the drive. All in all, I estimate we shovelled somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 cubic feet of snow today.

After about 2 hours of that, we retired in-side and promptly took naps. Arising about 5ish, we headed out to get me some new gloves (and to survey the quality of our roads), get a bite to eat and get some cocoa. All were done in a timely fashion, and as you can see in the middle photo above, some folks don’t respect mother nature. Or, perhaps, got real drunk and slid down a 15 foot tall embankment into a drainage ditch. We, however, stayed inside the ruts and managed to get out and back with no troubles.

Now to watch Return of the King and quaff cocoa!

More photos in the 2004.12.22 – Snowstorm gallery.

It is straight-up snowstormin‘ here in Louisville and the 2004.12.22 – Snowstorm gallery is evidence there of.