Today at work, I received this memo from our commander-in-chief:

Gentlemen

Some of you know that the urinal in the Corvus men’s room will occasionally get stuck in the “flush” position and overflow onto the floor. When it occurs (once or twice a year at this point), the only remedy (short of shutting off all water to the building) is the following:

1. Grab or grasp the flathead screwdriver above the bathroom’s fluorescent light fixture.
2. Remove the chrome “nut” (no comments necessary) – that should be only finger tight – from the front of the urinal plumbing.
3. Turn the embedded screw clockwise until the water to the urinal is shut off and the overflow ceases.
4. Look down at your now-wet shoes and quietly mutter “damn”.
5. With the screwdriver, tap on the bulbous area behind the nut (again – no comment necessary) to loosen any hard water particles that may have caused the overflow in the first place.
6. Carefully – turn the water back on, replace the nut and go on about your business. If for some reason, it begins to overflow again, shut it back off, make and post appropriate signage and contact the local authorities.

By working together comrades, we can assure a dry shoe future for ourselves and future generations.

(And by the way, if someone accidentally removes the official Corvus men’s room flathead screwdriver from it’s appointed place, we may find ourselves, literally, up sh*t creek without a paddle – well… p*ss creek anyway.)

BTW, I should note that where he mentions “turning the water off to the entire building” is not only funny, but entirely true — and yes, we scrambled to find a screwdriver the first couple of times it happened.

Hey you kids! Get off the DOJ’s lawn!

Reply with your caption in comments. winner will be given a sharp poke in the tookus.

There is this matrix:revolutions trailer-thing that has been floating around for a while now… it’s not a trailer, ’cause it doesn’t have trailer things on it… hunter believes it may have been cut together for entertainment tonight. well, in any case, i have it up here on thelocust.org, so if you know me, then AIM me and i’ll give you the URL. in the meantime, some shots:

This appears to be an Agent — perhaps Agent Smith and he’s cackling like mad. awesome.

yet another crazy dude. but he looks awesomely crazy. awesome.

For mah people in Chi-town, a train that says “Loop” on it. the “L” voice says: “This is The Matrix. Next is ROCK!”

Update: My sources inform me that this is the hidden trailer from the “Enter The Matrix” video game.

Yeah, that title isn’t dirty, is it? well, i happened to be watching a highlight from the Red Sox last night featuring Tim Wakefield, and I got to thinking: I should research Wakefield’s primary pitch, the knuckleball.

Google finds a trove of information, but the first link is the best — Knuckleball H.Q.. A bunch of info on throwing, hitting, and knuckleball lore. My personal fave: “You need the fingers of a safecracker and the mind of a Zen Bhuddist to throw it.” – Jim Bouton, Ball Four, and this anecdote — “Floyd Robinson actually swung at one that went BEHIND him…”

So, yeah, knuckleballers are an interesting lot. No one has become extremely successful with a knuckleball, but they certainly hold an interesting place in the baseball world. Many of them have had extremely long careers — Charlie Hough, Wilhelm Hoyt, and Phil Niekro all had 20 year-plus careers. However, along with the longevity that the knuckleball affords — there is the problem that the pitch is hard as hell to catch. A list of passed ball records (note the run-causing, game-winning passed ball list) shows that many of the catchers and lost games were from famous knuckleballers. As Bob Uecker explains, the best way to catch it is “wait’ll it stops rolling, then go pick it up.”

Finally, what happens when you put Boston’s Tim Wakefield up against Toronto’s Frank Castillo? (Keeping in mind that Toronto is an American League team, and they have the Designated Hitter rule, and Castillo is a pitcher with a .110 lifetime batting average) Here’s the punchline in video format.

Isn’t it some sort of cruel irony that…

Elvis Costello‘s “Radio, Radio” — a plea for radio to not be sucked dry by corporate intentions — is now a “classic rock” staple?

When developing a website — as I often find myself doing — one has to populate the various systems you create with “dummy data”. Some people like using random latin, some people use quotes from eccentric authors. Me? Well, sometimes I just make up odd little passages. This is one of my favorites (I came up with it yesterday while coding a “Careers” section of a clients website):

Well, i’ll have to tell you this, Bobby. It ain’t the most glorious profession on the face of God’s green, but there is a certain zen quality about it. Do you know what I mean? Well, maybe you do, I don’t know. I can never tell from that blank stare of yours. One day, you might be back there scraping some burnt gravy off the bottom of a stainless steel pot, and some song that you’ve heard for years comes on the radio. You’ve never really paid attention to it until now, because scraping the days remains off of a soon-again-to-be-spoiled pot is just not that interesting. Well, in the midst of all these dishes that will be dirty tomorrow, you realize what that song is saying. And you realize why you are washing dishes — not that you realize how you came to be there, but why you are being there. *Knock* knock*! Oh, yes, ahem — Bobby. Why don’t you come in and have a seat.

I tried finding example of test data that have gone embarassingly public. I received acclaim for naming my primary test persona for a site we did for Evenflo “Slapdash O’Halloran”, but that’s really my extent.

Score One for the Fat Kid is a band. They are from Cambridge, MA and just released their album “Plan B is for Suckers” back in March. They seem to be in a genre known as “math-rock”, and I don’t know if i’d say that. They remind me of something between Hum and maybe a little Uncle Tupelo thrown in there (at least the beginning of “Can You Name These Brain Structures”). Anyway, good pop-indie sensibilities with quirky lyrics and tight musicianship.

What really endeared me was this: an explanation of “the Creepy Claw” song that mentions Louisville and they name dropped the White Stripes, and they have a general disregard for music snobbery.

Oh, hey, I’ve got an idea — listen to a couple of tracks.

Woo! Hoo!

Smitty was back in town for a little while, taking a break from his Chicago abode.

We had a grand old time at the Outlook Inn…. pictures were taken and summarily galleried.

It was good seeing Nick, knowing that Joey is away in Colorado for some three months, and I’d be lonely as a microphone in a monastery if I were him. Holly, Katy, Brian, Matt, Sara, Hunter, Kelly and myself all made appearances. Even Hunter’s work-chum Sean was there, apparently coincidentally.

update: kelly takes a nap on the lawn

Huh? Wha? There is a “War on Critics” now? I have *got* to start keeping up with these wars.

update: Oh, wait. This is a far more accurate headline…

I don’t know who katie in sheffield is, but she IM’ed me out of the blue the other day, looking for conversation. Said she’d bumped into my website somehow. despite my attempts to get her to say how she came upon it, she didn’t answer. Well, anyway, she’s sent me an email with a link to her newly-created messageboard.