Anyone want to start a pool for how long until this guy gets outed? Closest without going over wins.

My money is on two weeks.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Shammy Butter! Some cyclist swear by butt lube in their bike shorts for saddle sore prevention. I have yet to try the stuff, but having done some distance cycling, I'm seriously tempted.

@Cpt Tim: I got a yellow jacket (sure as !@#$@! felt like one) down my shirt on my bike when I was sprinting to the train once. It happened as I was coming up to an intersection, and didn't have thought cycles to spare thinking about it. I got stung four times in the gut before I figured it out and swatted the thing. That was really entertaining.

Also: WE CAN'T DRY OUR CLOTHES HERE! THIS IS BAT COUNTRY!

@33: That's been my experience too with tattooed friends (full disclosure: no tats. Sorry, just long hair and crazy facial hair). The guy I know with the most tattoos has them because he had a few friends going to art school to become tattoo artists. He let them practice on him. He freely admits that he has a lot of not-so-great tattoos.

Oh, and he also has a very respectable engineering position at a large, well-known software company.

For that matter, I have (and had, some moved on to other, better positions) numerous coworkers (fellow engineers, &c.) who have plenty of tattoos. I work at a well-known high-tech company. Tattoos won't stop you from getting some of the better paying jobs in the country.

Thank you Mods, particularly Antinous and Teresa. Yours and the boinger's comments have been the most worthwhile to read for the last 900 or so. Some of us do appreciate the wit you bring to the job.

You guys put in a lot of overtime on this thread. It got pretty repetitive after comment 20, so I was mostly skimming.

I just wanted to get one post of support for you guys in, even though I know you've got thick enough skin to handle this beast.

As to the "post deletion issue", I'm pretty sure this is VB just trying to drum up some publicity and succeeding at trolling the BB community. So, I love BB, and I'm going to keep reading. Boingers, you aren't censors, and I don't see how you've broken any of your own principles. It's your party. I'm just glad I'm allowed in.

For those who are curious, it was roll call 437 (link). Double check on your rep. Mine voted against, so I'll be voting for her again next time around (Barbara Lee), but a lot of democrats voted for it.

I'll be glad to see the republicans go down hard this November, I'm sick of their hubris. I hold out zero hope that the democrats will save us. They are just lying, useless politicians.

Takuan, blacksmiths can be found. They aren't terribly common these days, but the SCA is a good place to look. The Crucible also teaches blacksmithing, and has an amazing master blacksmith who does commission work as well. (A lot of the SCA blacksmiths also teach, for those not in the Bay Area.)

Re: Anthony, #14: pretty much all metal is hard to weld without melting. In fact, I'd say nigh impossible, since that's what welding is.

The thing that makes aluminum hard to weld is that it is highly reactive with oxygen. Adding heat only makes this worse, so if you try to do it without a protective sheath gas (which Takuan referred to), you'll get a brittle Al2O3 joint.

That nice aluminum finish? It's aluminum oxide, as well, and it's called a "capping oxide". Since Al2O3 bonds are so tight, you have to use alternating current to break up the oxide instead of direct current.

The capping oxide has one other problem. Unlike chromium, aluminum's capping oxide isn't very good. Some oxygen diffuses through, and the oxide layer gets thicker over time (veeerrrry slowly). That means that the aluminum gets brittle and loses strength (decades later for thin pieces, like tent poles).

He is claiming that he seals it and powder coats it. This could prevent/slow the above effect enough to make the centuries claim reasonable.

However, powder coating is NOT steampunk. I'm sorry. It just isn't. That granular plasticky coating on your beige box? That's a powder coat. Steampunk? I think not.

On the other hand, it sounds like he's doing stuff with powder coats that no one else is (multi-color patterns using masks, &c.), which is pretty cool.

So that old favorite becomes:

"Dude, did you miss a maintenance interval? You might want to get your right parahippocampal gyrus adjusted."

@Bardfinn & Iguanoid: A lot of US water treatment plants already use digesters which produce methane in some quantity.

In my home town (Olympia, WA), the water treatment plant is out on the peninsula in the bay, and I grew about directly across the water. They just burned off the methane they produced--you could tell because they burn it in the atmosphere, so one of the stacks on the building is a giant torch that runs nearly continuously.

It probably would not run too large of a generator, but it would be something.

DOUGP, they burn up in the atmosphere. It happens all the time, we call them "shooting stars". A meteor has to be something like the size of a railroad car to reach the surface, and those just aren't terribly common.

Still haven't worked my way up to pork, though.

Dude, Scottfree, I have one word for you: Bacon.

Pork is on the fork in this house.

@Tenn: Trying to stay out of that database, eh?

The "teach people statistics" bit is never going to fly. I mean, what are politicians going to do with themselves in a world where that project has been successfully carried out?

See, now, maybe this is the BOFH speaking, but I'd just put the Mission Critical Solitaire version on all the workstations. Preferably configured to display the beautiful crash dump to the user.

If your users don't fear their computers, you're doing your job wrong.

I sent this to my wife. We had a hard time getting her score much past '2'.

Of course, the chart is all wrong. The #9 demerit should totally be a fiver.

Bird names really are great. Link.

Here's a good way to pull this off. It takes two people. Alice is walking along the street and flags down the google camera car and asks for directions. She also strikes up a conversation with the driver about the google street view gig. (You know, what's it like, do you just drive around? Is the pay good? &c.)

Meanwhile, Bob sneaks up on the car and secures the hood to the cameras.

Maxoid, to agree with you, have you tried Pollan's beloved eggs from pastured chickens? The shells are so thick, I just about have to put my hips into cracking them (and my hobbies include blacksmithing). The chickens I get my eggs from have a far superior diet to industrial chickens, or even "organic" chickens. The eggs are worth every penny for the flavor.

Besides, I, as do all of you, have to eat every day. Every day. Why wouldn't you want to enjoy it every time? There is nothing to dislike about his message.

@17 (JSG): Only the raw materials are being recycled. None of the cars are being used as spare parts--the insurance company already paid for all of them and didn't want Mazda (Ford) double dipping.

@kamimark #42: I think stuff like Einstuerzende Neubauten (who I also love) probably doesn't register to enough people to show up in the poll.

Also, they might very well have overlooked adding some of the more extreme forms of music into the poll--so overlooking Neubauten and their ilk would have been a built-in bias.

Then again, this might have been intentional. Since it registers as completely unlistenable to most people (and pain to some), it would have dominated their numbers, and thus the piece.

I like the idea, and execution is pretty good, but I got my hopes up before listening to it.

I must say, I was really hoping for more of a "Satan's Ice Cream Truck" + "Irony is a Dead Scene" mash-up, but with more bagpipes and cowboy.

I think it was this part of the description: "The most unwanted music ... veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition." This is a rather accurate description of The Dillinger Escape Plan's "Irony is a Dead Scene" EP, and having listened to that particular twenty minutes of chaos, "The Most Unwanted Song" just doesn't live up to the "veers wildly" and "abrupt transition" description. I would call it positively relaxed in this regard.

Still, nice. The "At Walmart" chorus gets funnier each time.