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Archive for category Humor

Close Dog

Mar 3

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

I’ve already written about Katherine’s reaction to having her four lower teeth extracted (“I want glue teeth“).  Lately she’s been a bit more OCD than usual — it comes and goes, but at the moment she really wants cupboard doors closed and pots centered on their trivets, etc.

Robin was privileged to see the newest manifestation of this yesterday.  Katherine was in the office with one of her teachers, working on programs, while Robin was working on the computer.  Also, Aurora (Rora), our female Sheltie, was in the office as well.  And she was panting — likely due to the fact that with all the floor lamps on in that room as well as the computers it turns into a reasonable facsimile of an Easy Bake oven.

This canine behavior, though, was apparently unacceptable to Katherine, so she expressed her objections forcefully:  “Close dog!”  “I want close dog!”  “Yes close dog!”

I’m not sure whether Robin took the dog out of the room or if Rora just settled down and stopped panting, but apparently the problem was solved without the use of duct tape, so all was once again well.

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So I Rewired It…

Mar 1

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Family, Humor | No Comments

One of Katherine’s more annoying recent habits is to flip off the light switch in our office.  That wouldn’t be so bad, except that the switch is a half-hot that controls some, but not all, of the outlets in the room.  My webserver and my own computer are not on it (although the monitor is) but the main email computer and the one Robin uses for her work are on it.

So after about the fifth time Katherine killed power to Robin’s computer this past week I decided to rewire the switch to a flat plate and remove the control over the outlets.  This was a pretty trivial change compared to some of the work I’ve done in our basement over the past couple of years, but it was pretty satisfying.

So far Katherine hasn’t made any comments about the lack of the switch — we were out of the house enough yesterday that I’m not sure she noticed.  I’ll be interested to see her reaction when she finally figures it out — I hope it won’t be to go over and shut down the computers manually…

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Ferb, I Know What We’re Going To Do Today

Feb 8

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor, Reviews | 2 Comments

I don’t really watch a lot of cartoons these days.  I’m pretty busy with 3 kids, plus I generally prefer to read or play on the computer rather than watch TV.  When we do watch TV it’s usually The Biggest Loser or American Idol — shows that Robin and I both like and that we watch together.

On weekend mornings, however, we usually turn the TV on for Thomas and Katherine, and what they generally watch are cartoons.  They watch a wide variety of different shows, but the one that always gets me to sit down and watch with them is Disney’s Phineas and Ferb.

This is a very cute show that combines kid-friendly situations and antics with humor that appeals to both kids and adults.  And unlike The Simpsons, the two aren’t really separate; there are not really two levels to the show.  If you’re laughing, your kid probably is too.

An episode of Phineas and Ferb is fairly structured.  The premise is that it is summer vacation, and the eponymous brothers are trying to find fun things to do to occupy the day.  Phineas (it’s almost always Phineas) comes up with a Big Idea, which they set about implementing.  This usually ends up being some mammoth construction or engineering project, such as building a giant car wash, rollercoaster, or day spa.  Phineas, the short redhead, is the “mouth” of the group and the idea man, and Ferb is the technical genius (although neither boy is a complete slouch in the other’s area of strength).

The major obstacle is almost always the boys’ older sister Candace, who plays Daffy Duck to the boys’ Bugs.  Early on, she catches on to their plan and tries (inevitably futilely) to “bust” them by dragging their mom over to see whatever giant construct the boys have put together in the backyard.

Depending on the episode, some of Phineas and Ferb’s friends might show up to participate in whatever the scheme might be.  The most commonly appearing are Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, the overachieving Fireside Girl and the ballerina to Phineas’s Harrison Bergeron; Baljeet Patel, an East Indian supergenius and geek; and Buford Van Stomm, a tough kid who oscillates between bullying and friendly behavior.

Candace, besides her obsession with “busting” the brothers, is even more obsessed with fawning over her boyfriend Jeremy, and she often ends up madly juggling these two imperatives (often failing amusingly) as the plot unfurls.

At the same time as this is happening, there is almost always a side plot involving the boys’ pet platypus Perry.  Perry is actually a secret agent known as “Agent P”, and gets summoned to his secret underground base under the kids’ backyard to receive a mission briefing from Major Monogram, the head of the Agency.  This mission always involves dealing with the nefarious schemes of Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz, a crazed evil genius who invariably hatches some grandiose plot rooted in one of his many childhood traumas.

In his agent persona, Perry sports a stylish fedora, and although he can’t talk, he communicates very effectively using eye rolls and other facial expressions.  As his struggle with Doctor Doofenshmirtz reaches its climax, whatever bizarre device the Doctor has created usually misfires and either inadvertently resolves whatever jam the kids are in, snatches victory away from Candace just as she’s about to bust the brothers, or saves the day for Candace just as she’s on the verge of doing something monumentally stupid in front of Jeremy.

It’s all put together with excellent comic timing, and the voice work is great.   Candace and Dr. D. in particular are excellently done — Candace constantly skates the edge of hysteria while still projecting a unique personality, and the Doctor delivers some incredibly bizarre dialog with feeling and humanity.  Another appealing thing about the show is that the animation is fairly normal-looking instead of the almost aggressively ugly drawings in some other kids’ shows.

But the thing that really makes the show shine is the message and the relationships between the characters.  Despite Candace always trying to bust the brothers, she really loves them and has worked hard to protect them when they needed it.  In turn, Phineas and Ferb always try to help Candace out when she’s distraught over something (usually Jeremy).  Likewise, Perry and Dr. D., even though they’re each other’s “nemesis”, have each gone out of the way to protect the other when something seriously threatening is happening, and in fact exchanged gifts during the Christmas special episode.

All in all, the show presents kids using their imaginations and having good clean fun while displaying positive personality traits and resolving conflicts in a healthy way.  And it’s freaking hilarious!

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The Fading Dream

Feb 5

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Games, Humor | 3 Comments

There is a once-great nation in the world today — a nation seemingly strong and powerful, but riddled with internal decay.  A land with an uncertain future.

This nation was founded in time immemorial by an intrepid few — settlers from a far more powerful country, who brought their culture along with them to this new, virgin land.  Over time the prevailing mores and social structures would change, but in the early days the new land was in many ways very similar to the old country.

The forests, plains, and mountains of this new land were vast, but required hard work to fully develop.  The first settlers of this nation prized self-improvement and expected that they would improve themselves with time.  This bred a spirit of rugged individualism, but also fostered cooperation.  Paradoxically, their self-reliance and desire to better themselves drove them to work together to achieve ever greater achievements.

It wasn’t long before the new nation eclipsed the old, boasting more settlers and far greater wealth, despite the greater age of the mother country.  The rest of the world started to look to the new land as the leader in innovation, and immigration boomed to unprecedented heights as settlers from all over the world wanted a piece of the “good life”.

Unfortunately, with the increase of population came poverty and other social ills, and political pressure increased to provide support for the ever-increasing members of society that couldn’t seem to be productive or carry their own weight.  The original culture, where skills were prized as essential for both personal and societal advantage, began to be replaced by a growing sense of entitlement — that the nation itself owed its citizens an ever-increasing standard of living, regardless of whether the people could produce it or not.

The politicians, of course, were more than willing to give in.  The currency underwent severe inflation as the administration sought to assure everyone a basic standard of living, and although ever more sophisticated consumer goods became available, the prices continued to rise to astronomical levels.  Unfortunately for the administration, however, the hyperinflation didn’t have the desired effect.  Currency was more plentiful, but you still had to earn that currency yourself, and not everyone was able to hold a job.

The next step was to provide full employment through a menial public works program.  Legions of the underclass flocked to these simpler, less-demanding jobs as a means to achieve their dreams.  But this type of employment was considered unpleasant and degrading, and the citizens agitated for their leaders to provide a mechanism whereby they could work in businesses of their choice, but be guaranteed a certain level of income regardless of their actual profitability.  This was a far cry from the successful giant corporations of the nation’s early days, which were large industrial enterprises that employed many workers with a high degree of competition for positions.  Workers were expected to be skilled in those days and those who couldn’t pull their weight were thrown out with little concern.  These new businesses were smaller, and government subsidies (at the cost of pushing the inflation rate ever higher) reduced the risk these businesses needed to assume.

In the end, even this was superseded by an almost Marxist regime.  No longer would small businesses be formed via a person’s circle of friends and acquaintances.  What about those people who didn’t have contacts even competent enough to file the government paperwork and go through the motions required to collect their paycheck?  The government solution was to remove the limit on the number of businesses a person could be a partner in, and at the same time randomly match aspiring business owners together, in the hopes that the more entrepreneurial types would carry the load for the less capable since they could collect an additional government paycheck for a small additional amount of work.

The nation wasn’t quite at “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, but it was close, and getting closer.  Could it really take long for them to take that one final step?

What’s that?  Oh, right!  What nation am I talking about?

Why, World of Warcraft, of course!

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Baby Eat Ham

Jan 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | 2 Comments

Katherine has been doing very well verbally lately since Christmas break.  Whether the cause is the reduction in stress from not having school for three weeks or just the increased time at home with people who (mostly) understand her, she is doing substantially more spontaneous commenting and complex requesting.  Rather than just fall back on her stock “I want help” phrase, which can be maddening when she won’t specify what it is that she wants, she’s now using complex and sometimes synthetic terms for things she wants.

For example, the Baby Einstein Meet the Orchestra movie for a long time was “white baby movie”, which is a good description but doesn’t narrow it down from the other Baby Einstein videos, which also come in white cases.  Just recently she further specified it as “orchestra movie” which is much more clear to us.

She also got a new Littlest Pet Shop playset for Christmas, and has been referring to it as “animal playground”, which is a description she’s definitely synthesized herself, since we just recently opened that toy up for her and I’m sure she hasn’t heard it before.  In addition to that, she’s also getting mad if Thomas tries to horn in on her new toys, which is pretty developmentally appropriate even if it does cause more friction between them at times.

Along with this increased verbosity, however, is coming some willfulness when it comes to diet.  She’s almost completely given up orange juice, and she’s balking at certain types of meat that she’s liked just fine in the not-so-distant past.  This last time it was ham.

We had a very nice little boneless ham that we were serving up for supper.  It was very tasty and tender, and Katherine ate the first bite just fine.  After that, however, the response every time we tried to get her to go for a piece was “no ham!”  We tried most of the usual incentives to get her to eat it, such as offering a chocolate chip cookie for dessert if she finished the ham, and then sweetening the deal with potato chips.  Usually that will work to get her started, but not this time.  Every gambit was met with “no ham!” and strong resistance.

Finally, after several rounds of this, Katherine took the fork and held it up to Robin’s lips and said “Mom eat ham!”  So Robin did.  This, of course, caused a light to go on in Katherine’s mind and she tried it again, only to be rebuffed.  Only one “get out of ham free” card per person.  So she turned to me, with “Dad eat ham!”  This was then followed with “Thomas eat ham!”, but that still left several pieces left on her plate.  The dogs would have volunteered to help, but they were disqualified on the grounds of inhumanity, so she got creative.  She scanned the room, and noticed that I was holding Jonathan.  She got a big smile on her face.

“Baby eat ham!”

Unfortunately, we had to make it clear that Jonathan doesn’t eat food yet, and so he was unable to help her dispose of the rest of her meat.  But it was certainly fun watching her use her brain and creativity to solve her “problem”.

We did, by the way, get her to eat the rest of the ham.  I was able to convince her that by coating it in Parmesan cheese, ordinary ham is transubstantiated into a foodstuff known as “cheese ham”, and this was acceptable to her where plain ham was not.  She ate the cheese ham, moved on, and that was the last of it.

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Special Holiday Edition

Dec 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor | No Comments

113002-the-onion-logo_large[1]What’s better during this season than the Onion’s commentary on holiday commercialism?

Enjoy!

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“Good Eats”

Dec 2

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Computer, Humor, Interactive Fiction, Writing and Philosophy | No Comments

alton_brown_geek_motivator[1]OK, this will be a special early post so I can get the link out there.  This month we’re hosting Dinner Club, and rather than our usual Iron Chef-style theme ingredient, we decided to go with an Alton Brown theme.

Part of the reason is that we’ve been watching a lot of Good Eats lately in the evenings after the two older kids are in bed but while Jonathan is still active.  Usually the choice is between Star Trek TNG and Good Eats as to decent shows to watch, and Alton has more… general appeal, shall we say.

So we came up with a comfort-food menu based on Alton Brown’s recipes, but I had a brainstorm after finishing the menu:  I’ve been working on interactive fiction lately — why not make an interactive menu?

I didn’t have enough time for that, but I did put together a short, themed interactive fiction work, loaded with Alton Brown quotes and quote-look-alikes, to serve as a companion piece — an appetizer if you will — to this month’s dinner club.

I used a couple of 3rd-party extensions and the core of one of my own proto-extensions to speed development, and after about 3-4 hours of work I ended up with “Good Eats”, an interactive menu.  Click on the link to run it directly in your web browser through Parchment, a Javascript interpreter.  The reason you can do this with this game and not with my competition game is because this one is small enough to fit in the old Infocom Z-machine format, which is the only one currently supported by Parchment.  You can, of course, also download the file directly and play it on your favorite standalone interpreter.

I hope you enjoy “Good Eats” as much as I enjoyed making it!  It was a nice break from longer, more involved projects; I now see the appeal Speed-IF has for participants where I didn’t before.

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Coasting

Nov 6

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

05-07_Honda_Odyssey_Touring[1]So let me tell you all about the trial I’m hearing!  Oh, wait — I could get thrown in jail for that?  OK, let me tell you about what’s going on with my entry in IFComp ‘09!  Wait — that’s a violation of Rule 5 and could get me disqualified?

OK, then let me tell you about something stupid I did last weekend!

The five of us had just gone out for our first family weekend at the zoo with Jonathan.  We had a good time, although we kept it a bit short for our first major outing.  The zoo is a good 20 miles away, at least, and so when we were almost back home, I happened to glance down and noticed that the low fuel light was on.  And the indicator was below empty.

The question then was what to do.  I was almost home — less than 5 minutes away.  But I was not sure at all that I had even 5 minutes of gas left.  So, thinking quickly, I diverted north on the final exit rather than south, and headed towards a nearby filling station while trying to preserve as much speed as possible.  Probably 2 miles short of the exit I needed, the engine gave out.  We were headed down a hill at the time, and I just switched into neutral and moved over to the shoulder to try to eke out as much extra distance as I could get.  We got to the bottom of the hill still going near 70, and started up the next one.

The exit we were waiting for was still over a mile away over the hill, and the minivan was slowing down every second.  We continued to climb the hill and slow, unsure all the time whether we were going to have enough kinetic energy to keep going.  As it happened, we hit the crest at about 30 mph, and coasted down the very slight incline on the other side of the peak all the way to the base of the off-ramp we needed, with the filling station in sight not 200 yards away.

A quick jaunt up to the station and back, and we had enough gas to get going again.  But I’m sure glad we made it up that hill.  That would have turned a 15-minute round trip into a 45-minute one, and with three tired kids in the car that would not have been pleasant at all, particularly for Robin who was stuck feeding Jonathan, who had just woken up hungry.

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Erfworld Relaunch

Oct 28

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Humor, Reviews, Websites | No Comments

BLOWUP_nomnomnom_640[1]I follow a few webcomics.  They make great bite-size reads when I’m waiting for a compile at work, or while eating an in-cube breakfast.  One of my favorites is one called Erfworld, created by Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi.  Erfworld follows the adventures of a gaming nerd who is summoned to a fantasy world as the “perfect warlord” that a hard-pressed, losing faction desperately needs.  The fantasy world follows all the conventions of a turn-based wargame, including movement points, levels, attack bonuses, and so forth, and Parson Gotti (the protagonist) has to learn all the details as he goes.  Unfortunately for him, his boss is both crazy and dim, his forces are vastly outnumbered, and no one trusts him.

The writing and art were both excellent, and as a gamer myself I was constantly laughing at the dense layer of in-jokes and game references almost every update.  Unfortunately, after completing the first installment of the comic, artist Jamie Noguchi got overcommitted and eventually decided to step down from illustrating Erfworld.  Rob Balder kept up with text-only updates, but they were sort of just marking time.

It looked like Erfworld was heading for a slow suffocation, but recently Rob announced that they will be relaunching today, October 28, with a new artist.  They’ve already revealed some of her art and it’s excellent!  I can’t wait to start the new installment of the comic; it looks like Rob is pushing the writing to deal more with the social ramifications of living in a world patterned after a fantasy-themed board wargame, which are pretty bizarre.  In turn, the concepts of free will and human rights Parson is importing seem just as alien to the Erfworlders.  Add in a major war to test Parson’s strategic chops, and this second book looks like it could be pretty awesome!

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Post Cop-Out Today

Oct 7

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Family, Humor | No Comments

lazy-cat5[1]Sorry, nothing of much note to report.  I’m rust-stripping the eaves at home; that’s about it.  I’ll upload some more pictures for tomorrow.

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