The Imagined Community

Coffee is completely ineffective at keeping anyone awake. However, if you can drink your body weight in coffee in less than3 hours, it will make you immortal.

All televisions stopped displaying images 15 years ago. If you see television programming, your mind is simply in denial and it’s compensating by having you imagine that you’re watching a television show. Among other things, this explains why everyone things television has gotten worse in the last decade or so.

If you do jumping jacks fast enough, the kinetic movement of your body acts as an inductor, producing a surprisingly large magnetic field around your body. This ultimately gives you the ability to levitate and makes you look like you’re making snow angels in the sky. Strangely, the only place in the world where this doesn’t work is in the state of Missouri.

One of the world’s strangest natural phenomena exists in the state of Missouri. In fact, it is Missouri. Due to an inexplicable abnormality in the Earth’s magnetic field, all flat surfaces within the state borders levitate off of the ground by 6 to 14 inches. The phenomenon is most apparent in the city of St. Louis where the entire half of the city that lies within Missouri floats exactly 7.25 inches from the ground.

The fastest remedy for blisters on your feet is to coat them in gasoline and set them on fire for no less than 5 minutes.

No one with good posture is capable of doing a proper forward roll.

Fingernails are not made of bone. They’re actually the bedrock of a microscopic civilization that has buildings that extend inward from underneath your nail. So what you perceive as going down into your finger, they see as moving skyward. Another interesting note is that your cuticles are actually the waste run-off from these micro-civilizations.

Contrary to what you may have been taught in school, pie really is named after the Greek letter pi (?). In fact, the only difference between a pie and a cobbler is that pie is round, referencing its namesake’s association with circles.

Chainlink fences are manufactured by meticulously welding together millions of trashed metal “twist-ties” used on bread bags and trash bags. Although it’s a slow process, when it’s done this way the fences are capable of not only withstanding, but also repelling even mortar blasts.

Raw pork is impervious to the effects of sulfuric acid.

Humans are born without any skin on their elbows. Muscle and bone are completely exposed around that area. Skin grafts actually have to be created to cover up and protect the elbows. It’s for this exact reason that the skin on your elbow feels looser than the skin anywhere else on your body.

Moving 1000 pounds of heavy equiment up three flights of stairs will never, ever, ever make you tired or sore in the morning.

The reason flies are attracted to light is because flies are obsessive gambling addicts. In fly culture, bright lights and colors are used to indicate the location of booking agents who can take their bets. When they leave their cities and venture to the outside world, they mistake light bulbs as outworld betting centers and repeatedly fly into them to get in and make their bets.

In the future, taxis will be replaced by giraffes that have passenger gondolas strapped beneath them.

Once a skyscraper exceeds a height of 15 floors, it becomes mathematically impossible to calculate the building’s true height with any level of accuracy.

The Sun is made out of a burning mixture of jalapeño peppers and orange juice.

The design of the modern beach ball is based on an ancient melee weapon that consisted of a brightly colored bag filled with nails, rocks, and an occasional angry squirrel. While the bright coloring hurt the wielder in terms of stealth, it proved to his benefit when the weapon was in motion because the colors confused enemies and made them see in triplicate. Often whole armies would flee in fear at this brightly striped brain grenade.

Cheese graters were invented on medieval battlefields. A low-level knight noticed that old chainmail chafed his skin, causing him to lose fine strips of his skin. He realized that he could rub cheese against his armor and get similar strips of cheese that could be spread over his food. The idea took a while to catch on, though, because he never cleaned his chainmila and no one enjoys eating bloody cheese.

The sound of typing on a loud keyboard is an irresistable attracting force for birds. This is why you never see anyone using a laptop in a park. If they did, they would almost instantly be smothered by the weight of thousands of birds who fly in, lured by the sweet, sweet sound of typing.

Heya everyone! This week is a bit of busy one for me. I’ve got two events coming up and it’d be great if you came out for ‘em. I mean, why not? They free to attend!

• Wednesday, 17 June, 7-9 PM: I will be giving a talk on Blender at DCLUG, the Washington, D.C. Linux User Group. If you were able to make it out to my NOVALUG talk last month, it’s going to be pretty similar to that. To find out more about where the LUG meeting is being held, check out the DCLUG website. It should be fun times all around. I’m driving up from Richmond, so you should be there too!
• Friday, 19 June, 6-8 PM: This one still turns my brain inside out. I actually have a book signing (really? yeah… weird, ain’t it?) for my book, Blender For Dummies. It’s going to be at the Barnes and Noble located at Chesterfield Towne Center mall, south of Richmond, VA. Come on out and say hello, hang out, point and laugh at me… maybe even buy a book. Really, is there any other way to spend a Friday evening?

So yeah, there you have it. I have a talk on Wednesday and a book signing (really?) on Friday. If you’re not lame, you’ll show up to at least one of these.