I suspect that they bonded over a shared love of hunting rodents.

Posted by: Boviate at 03:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This is a story told to me just yesterday. I cannot vouch for its truthfulness, except to say that the setup at least seems to be keeping in the character of the gentleman who told me the story.

One of my friends was living with his two brothers, all three being in various stages of college or grad school. As is common for young bachelors, the house was a disaster. Months worth of empty pizza boxes everywhere, soap scum in the shower, beer cans covering the tables, and so forth. And perhaps because they were brothers, they were having no luck working out a cleaning system – it always broke down into argument.

They decided they would hire a cleaning service to solve their problem. However, the hourly rate quoted by the maid service in the yellow pages was more that a trio of impecunious scholar/drunkards wished to spend. Then one of them had a genius idea.

In a different section of the yellow pages, there was an ad for a "stripper maid" service. This service was that a pair of young ladies would come to your abode and clean it while wearing abbreviated French maid costumes. The stroke of insight that launches this story, was that the stripper maids actually charged less per hour than the normal cleaners!

So they called up the stripper maids, and scheduled them to come by. They all felt it would be a bit creepy to leer at females while ones' siblings were right there, so they scheduled the ladies to arrive while the three brothers were all out at their respective classes. They left the front door unlocked, and a note taped to the door with instructions and the check for payment.

When they got home, they were displeased to discover that no work whatsoever had been done. Moreover, the check was still there, and attached to it was a new note: "This house is disgusting. You need a Roto-rooter for your living room. Don't call us again until it at least looks like people live here."

And thus ends their story. The moral, if one feels that every story needs a moral, is that even stripper maids have standards.

Or maybe the moral is that one should hire the correct people for the job. Either way.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It's just what the title says. Impressive work.

Here's the link!

Posted by: Boviate at 06:41 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Just two doors down from Hil's house is the home of her distant cousins Al and Mary. I believe that they've been living in that house not just since before Hil was born, but before Hil's parents were born.

I only went over to visit with them a few times, because each visit took forever. They loved to chat about anything and everything, and share fresh cookies. There was a time we stopped by at the end of a bike ride, all covered with sweat, and stayed an hour.

Once, Hil woke from a nap to the noise of hammering on her front porch. Al had come over and was installing a set of wind-chimes that he had just made. I think he thought she was at work, and he thought it would be fun for her to come home to a set of surprise windchimes. It was quite windy last night, and those same chimes were sounding constantly.

As men so often do, I bonded with Al over our shared military service. He told me that the only time he'd been outside of this city was during World War Two. He was an Army artilleryman, crewing 75mm howitzers in Italy and Germany. He came home from the war, married Mary, bought a house, and they raised three children in that house.

Al died yesterday, of pneumonia. He was 89.

As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-tones that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar–
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.
—A. Lincoln, "My Childhood Home I See Again." 1846.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This is terribly clever. And also quite respectful of the intended audience. Congrats to the Australian agency that commissioned this little bit of joy:

Posted by: Boviate at 10:34 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Well this is really something. I recognized over 3/4 of the clips.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:56 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Who said D&D is just a time-wasting hobby? I've just read an interesting summary of a new study. A cognitive scientist mentioned in casual dinner conversation that one of the open questions in his field is whether people fix their gaze on people's eyes, or on the center of their faces, where the eyes just happen to be.

The researcher's high-schooler son pointed out that many D&D monsters have eyes in places other than the center of their faces. (So do a fair number of horror movie monsters, but I guess the kid wasn't into that.) So they did an experiment: they hooked up a bunch of victims undergrads into gaze-monitoring kit, and showed them a variety of pictures from the D&D Monster Manual. It turns out that while gazes initially went to the center of the head, viewer focus shifted to the eyes as soon as they figured out where those eyes were.

The press release/news article is here. I am amused.

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Posted by: Boviate at 11:05 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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