Saturday, January 14, 2006
With my recent tattoo proving to be generally good advice that I'm doing my best to follow, I seem to be on the cusp of a series of major life changes (some good, some bad) that will neccessitate me to turn both palms toward my face on a regular basis. That said, I had a very nice day today playing with Nefarious and then going to the beach with her and Michael and Dorian where we ate and talked tech on an upcoming megaproject. I think I'm going to have to add another employee (a la Phil) to BME's roster within a few weeks but first there is some other chaos to sort out.
Well, I'm off to bug Rachel and if she doesn't want to be bugged, it's either video editing time or finishing roughing out a new magnetic implants article. Smell ya later.
This is a word geek entry. Check out the various styles of knuckle tattoos below:
The left and right examples are the most common ways of doing lettering on fingers — one or two words are placed on the fingers and are read from left to right. Pretty basic and not too confusing. Getting a little more complicated you've got the example in the middle where the word is split between two hands, and can only be read when the fingers are intermeshed like this — the hands on their own read
“EULT” and
“QAIY”, but when combined spell out
“EQUALITY” in this example.
That's cool and all, but of course “EULT” and “QAIY” are gibberish by themselves. I got to thinking that there must be at least a few combinations of words that are valid both as four letter words and as meshed eight letter words, so I wrote a little application to analyze my dictionary files to find out. Here's a few examples that I discovered:
| First hand |
Second hand |
|
Combined |
| LORD |
BODE |
BLOODRED |
| CLIT |
ALSO |
CALLISTO |
| CERE |
HEIR |
CHEERIER |
| ONES |
CUTS |
COUNTESS |
| ELSE |
NITE |
ENLISTEE |
| GONE |
RUDD |
GROUNDED |
| MENS |
EKES |
MEEKNESS |
| PAMS |
SLIT |
PSALMIST |
| COLD |
SHOE |
SCHOOLED |
| TERM |
HOES |
THEOREMS |
| WIDE |
ERIS |
WEIRDIES |
I'm not buying “WEIRDIES” being much of a word but my dictionary claims it is! In addition to the eleven I've listed above, I found twenty six more combinations of four letter words that could be meshed into valid eight letter words in this way… Does this mean I have too much time on my hands? Or just that I'm a fool when it comes to deciding how the limited time I have gets consumed?
I think my favorite is “PAMS SLIT” because it sounds so nasty, but the true meaning is the oh-so-holy and not at all nasty “PSALMIST”… “COLD SHOE” is pretty funny too.
Oh yeah, and while I've got you: ModBlog is back!
Thursday, January 12, 2006
I'll have a nice big BME update posted shortly, but I got tattooed today by my friend Ronan at King of Fools today. I'm not sure how well it will hold since this location is a bit of a crap shoot, but here's what we did this afternoon:
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
You know, it's funny… I have had around a hundred piercings, multiple body parts bifurcated, about a dozen implants, as well as brandings, cuttings, and fifty or sixty hours of tattoos, but I always feel on edge when I'm about to get blood drawn… I hope the stuff that happened today was productive, and that I haven't waited too long to do it and let it escalate beyond the point of no return.
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Earlier today Nefarious and I (and my mechanic) drove out into the desert to visit the guys who are doing the transmission rebuild on my Manta Montage. As I've mentioned it's kind of an odd backwoods region — like you almost expect to stumble across the Cahulawassee River and some kid playing the banjo. Anyway, sitting there in the midst of it is my car:
They've completely disassembled it and put it back together, finding nothing wrong with the transmission… The current theory is that the problem still lies in the shifter, which we'd cobbled together from a mid-engine kit designed to be used with Type IV Volkswagen transmissions (ie. a VW bus) in custom vehicles… This however is not a 4-speed VW tranny but a 5-speed transmission out of an older Porsche 911 so the range of motion may be a little off.
Although I'd thought this kit was going to solve my problems, it looks like we're going back to my original plan of transplanting a cable-based shifter such as one out of a Fiero… They tell me they have a guy they work with that's done such a job before, so Attempt III of this project begins on Monday. Fingers crossed! At least labor is inexpensive in Mexico and I hope they all get a kick out of the car.
I've been thinking that Phil or someone down here needs to start a “VW Bugs of Mexico” blog because there are so many different sorts of sand rails, Baja bugs, Things, and oddball custom jobs driving the streets here since they still manufactured the Beetle up until I think two years ago in Mexico. For simple starters, here's a couple Baja bugs; a red one and a blue one:
Or maybe you prefer one with the roof chopped off?
Perhaps you're a fellow that prefers hot rods? Here's one that's not got a chopped
off roof but simply a
chopped roof. The whole job was very home made but it still looked great — the owner seemed quite tickled that someone would pull over to take photos of his creation.
Anyway, I could go on and on about these but I have work to do!
