I have attained another level in my ‘adult’ base class by becoming a strong adopter of hot morning beverages.

In other words, I now drink coffee more than anything else, all morning long. Just like my parents, and my grandparents, and so forth.

Now, my beverage of choice is coffee, but I’m not going to be elitist about this. While I myself haven’t gone for one of the prestige classes built around Latte or Chai Tea, and I haven’t taken the disadvantage “Expensive Name Brand Vendor Only” in order to qualify for a higher social standing prestige class, I can appreciate what a delightfully diverse culture the hot morning beverage crowd has become.

Still. For me, it’s all about the coffee.

Coffee like you get in the generic can, with the color dot that says “not too strong, not too light, straight down the middle like a wuss afraid to fight”.

I’m interested in branching out, I keep an open mind. I’m not prejudiced, I like experimenting with the occasional Celestial Seasonings blend, a Mocha or a Latte, just for a taste of something different.

Seasonal coffees like Pumpkin Spice on a cold winter morning, mmmmm, yummy.

I found the Cinnamon-flavored coffee was amazing. It won my heart, yes it did.

I went back to get cases to stock up, only to find it gone without a trace. No location code, no shelf space, and the store has never carried it again.

It has become the Coffee That Must Not Be Named. Truly, it’s flavor was good, but now that I cannot have it, it has become that most exquisite of tastes, exotic and mysterious, never to be equalled.

I think, in fact, that the reason it was pulled was because it was too seductive.

It posed a threat to our modern American way of life. Homeland Security labeled cinnamon coffee a terrorist threat, and took it away, never to be seen again. If you listen close, you can hear the rubber hoses beat the beans and smell the grounds burn under the glare of the high-intensity lights.

Coffee that good? Too dangerous for mere mortals to comprehend or consume without terrifying effects.

I don’t like to think on the horrors that poor coffee may be suffering in a cell in Gitmo.

Instead, I like to think that the cinnamon coffee I sampled and now desire above all other blends was destined for the hallowed halls of Asgard, and it was a simple UPS sorting error that sent it to lowly Aldi’s Store #78545 instead.

A terrible fate may have been averted in the nick of time. Who could say what wonders or terrors my typing fingers may have bashed out under it’s divine influence?

The world will never know. The world was not MEANT to know!

Whew! Crisis averted.

Wait.

Oh, right. Coffee.

I be drinking coffee, and by coffee I mean a hot brew. I do not drink chilled coffee. To me, chilled coffee is what happens when you’re writing a long blog post, bring the cup up to take a sip, and make a face. Blech! Cold coffee. Shudder.

Nothing for it then but to prove geek cred by applying microwave radiation directly on tepid liquid, infusing pure, raw power into my beverage, power born of SCIENCE!

This post is not meant to be a passionate statement about coffee. That’s a bonus.

No, this is meant to be a message for all those like me who delight in the drinking of a nice, hot drink now and then.

While my hero Jack Reacher has his own thoughts on the perfect vessel to drink coffee from, what I like is a heavy ceramic mug, thick walled and oversized.

When we visited Walt Disney World, I saw the perfect mug, and carefully carted it back intact to our home on the other side of the country.

I have now been testing this mug. I’m not gonna endorse a mug until I’ve put it through it’s paces.

Well, I’m here to tell you, this mug is the cats meow.

I happily present to you, the Tigger Coffee Mug.

Now, I understand your concern when you see the words “oversized”.

Yeah right, heard that one before. What, it can hold a whole extra teaspoon? I need the ounces to be weighty, I have typing to do!

Allow me to reassure you. It is, indeed, oversized.

Here is my mug next to my other beverage of choice for the purposes of comparison.

There. That sucker will EAT the mountain dew can. Step off, dew, You’ve been warned.

So there you have it, my friends. When you’ve got a payload as powerful as coffee, shouldn’t you have a delivery system that shows the world you are SERIOUS about what you do?

Of course you should. :)

Has anyone ever told you this before?

“Oh, it was no big deal. It was just a blown fuse. I replaced it, we’re good to go”

Just so you know, that saying is a test.

A lot of things in life are tests, and it can be hard to recognize it when one comes around.

This post is in the way of a public service message for those of you that aren’t all too sure what “a blown fuse” means, and don’t want to look stupid or ignorant when someone tells you this in the future.

From now on, instead of nodding your head and walking away feeling vaguely worried, I’m going to arm you with science so you know what they’re saying… and what pointed questions to ask.

A Firm Grounding

Here’s the deal. If you’re reading this, you’re plenty smart enough and educated enough to understand what a fuse is, and what it means. You might just need a frame of reference.

Don’t panic. This won’t get technical.

You know your electronics runs on a power source we call electricity.

There are lots of technical terms used when discussing electricity, how it’s measured, how to calculate volts and amps, etc.

You don’t need to know any of that to live your life.

What you need to know is, how does it make that iPod spin out music, and can my iPod electrocute me if I drop it in water?

Quick answer: No.

We can functionally describe electricity as being similar to water. Water that is unaffected by gravity… but that loves finding a path to the deep, dark underworld.

What do I mean?

Let’s look at how water functions.

Water, when flowing, pushes things in front of it. The force of water pushing on things in it’s path can be used to get work done. The stronger the flow (or current), the more it can push, the more it can do.

Electricity works much the same way.

Picture a flowing stream or babbling brook. If there is a building on the riverbank, and that building has a waterwheel dipping into the river’s current, the force of the flowing water pushes on the paddles that are at the bottom, moving them forward, turning the wheel so that the next paddle dips into the current, and the rotation of the wheel continues, forever and ever, amen, ’til the river rises and the cows come home.

That waterwheel rotates on a shaft, and the shaft goes into the building, and what you get is a turning shaft inside a big building, powered by the flow of water. You can then attach stuff like gears and things, linkages and doodads, and get working machinery… powered purely by water. Triphammers, mill wheels, saws and drills and all sorts of stuff can be powered in this way.

Well, electricity is the same exact thing.

Except… instead of electricity flowing as water does, pulled down by gravity following the lowest surface it can find, electricity is special water that flows wherever it can find a conductive surface to carry it into the ground.

Electricity always heads for the easiest, simplest, fastest connection to the deep earth it can find. It follows the path of least resistance.

What is a conductive surface? Well, it depends on how strong the current of the electricity is, really.

Things like metal and water can be great conductors. Electricity touching metal will go straight to wherever the metal is touching the ground at the best point.

Rubber and the air can both be very good insulators, blocking the flow of electricity dead in it’s tracks. Plastic is pretty good at that, too.

But the more power, the more force, the more oomph in the electricity, the more resistance (or insulation) the electricity can overcome.

At high enough levels, the electricity can even jump through the air, conducting through the air itself to get to the ground. We call that an arc, and that’s some serious high power fry your ass mojo.

Why, if there is enough current in the electricity, YOU can be a conductor! You are a lot more conductive than the air, by the way. A LOT more conductive than the air.

Safety First

Let’s have a brief experiment to illustrate this point.

Say you take a metal knife, and you stick it in a wall outlet… the electricity will instantly see that if it flows through the metal knife, and then through your body, it can reach the ground through your knees where you’re touching it, and off it goes.

At this point, you will either get blasted away from the outlet because the electricity flowing through your body from your hand to your knees caused your muscles to spasm, OR you will get locked rigidly to that knife, taking the juice constantly, because your muscles all just convulsed and locked up.

This can be a fun experiment, because if your friend or loved one sees you there unmoving or unresponsive, they might run over to grab you and pull you away… and IF they are suddenly a better conductor (say they are in bare feet while you’re wearing jeans) than you are, now the electricity sees a BETTER conductive path of least resistance through them, and BOOM, they get zapped too.

Quick fun fact: In the Marines, when you’re going to work with electricity, we used to make safety devices. What these were, were long wooden sticks covered in rubber, with a metal hook screwed into one end and also covered with rubber. They were for when a Marine grabbed a live wire, convulsed, and you had to get them free without electricuting yourself. You could grab the 8′ long rubber-coated hook off the wall, and either hook them and drag them away or just whack them good with the rubber stick.

Oh no? Oh, hell yes.

Are you paying attention now?

Just to ease your worried mind, you should know that there are two kinds of electricity… direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The kind of electricity in your wall outlets and in your home is all AC, or alternating current. Think of it as special electricity that pulses instead of just staying strong and steady. It pulses so fast you wouldn’t notice it without special gear, but your muscles will know the difference, because if you get zapped by AC, the first pulse may lock your muscles up and cause them to contract but the next pulse will convulse you and blast you free.

Direct Current, now… that shit will lock you up, holmes.

Where do you mostly find DC (Direct Current)? Why you find it INSIDE a lot of pwoerful electronics like TVs, stereos, microwave ovens, motors, air conditioners, all that kind of stuff. AFTER where the AC power cord comes into the gizmo, goes through a transformer and some other stuffs, and gets distributed throughout the thingie as nice, smooth DC voltage.

THIS IS WHY YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO SCREW AROUND INSIDE ELECTRONICS WITHOUT TRAINING. 

So.

Electricity is like water, it pushes stuff in front of it. It is supposed to start at, say, a wall outlet or breaker box. Then it flows through a conductive material, like metal wire, that is covered in a insulating material like rubber to keep it IN the wire, goes into a gizmo, pushes stuff around inside the gizmo to make it move and get work done… and then, believe it or not, goes right back out a second insulated metal wire and back into the wall outlet, return to sender.

It makes a complete circuit.

This is why, if you look at an AC power cord, it is two wires, each wrapped in rubber to isolate them from each other. One is the supply of juice TO teh gizxmo, the other is the return pipe FROM teh gizmo. They are commonly called the ‘Hot” and the “Neutral”, respectively. The hot is usually coated with black rubber, and the neutral is coated with white, when found in American wiring diagrams or inside a junction box.

You often also find a third wire. It is colored green inside gizmos, and it is called the ground wire.

Why? Because the ground wire does NOT carry any juice at all. None. It is dead as a doornail… and it is there to save your life.

The ground wire is attached to the deepest, darkest pit of black underground wetness there is anywhere near your house. It is THE favorite path for current to flow.

The ground wire is plugged into your gear, fixed to metal parts like the case… and is supposed to be a safety. If the hot or the neutral gets cut or shorted, instead of you getting killed by touching the metal case of your stereo, the power goes through the case, to the ground wire, and down to that inky it of blackness where all electricity finds it’s home instead.

It also provides a wonderful way of making sure you don’t get outside sources of electricity, like static electricity, interfering within your delicate electronics like your Xbox 360. If you zap the case, the ground wire bleeds the electricity off to ground so it never zaps the guts of the machine.

But what about fuses, you idiot!

It is normal to put a fuse in the wire at different points.

Breakers in your electrical panel in your house are, essentially, fuses too.

What a fuse is, is a wire designed to melt at a certain temperature, enclosed in a VERY insulative holder. It’s just the same as wire, but if it gets too hot, it melts. 

Fuses melt when they get too hot, and when that happens, no more path for the current to flow. Electricity stops flowing, because the wire just got cut. The gizmo stops working… because the electricity HAS to flow for it to push or otherwise make the gizmo do stuff.

So, if a fuse is designed to melt when it gets too hot, what causes it to heat up?

Electricity does.

More specifically, the amperage in the electricity.

What is amperage? 

You don’t need to know exactly what it is, but it can help to think of it like this.

Now, this is completely and totally wrong, and yet it may help. Professionals, if you think I’ve taken liberties before this, hold onto your hats. It’s all in a good cause.

When you see a sign saying # of volts, # of amps, think of it like this.

The amount of volts is the size of pipe the electricity is traveling in. The more volts, the bigger the flow of electricity can be, the more work it COULD do.

The amount of amps is the actual POWER, the push, the big honking wave that is flowing through the pipe, doing the actual work.

To complete this horrible analogy, the stuff that the electricity is pushing in whatever gizmo you’ve got? That is the resistance. The more it resists the amps trying to push it, the more amps you need to provide to get it to go.

Here is why you should care.

You could have 480 volts on the line, a huge pipe. But if there are only .2 milliamps in the circuit, an itty bitty amount of current, you can grab the bare wire in your hand and only feel a tickle.

If you lick a 9 volt battery, getting your tongue on both prongs at once and feel the electricity flow across your taste buds from one pole to another, it won’t blow your ass up because the amps are very low.

But if you grabbed that same 480 volt wire, and there were 20 or more amps on there… if those 20 amps of force decided to flow through YOU as the fastest way to get to the ground, if YOU became the “path of current flow”, then you can die, cooked from the inside out, with your feet blown off and still steaming in your boots.

I’m not kidding around here.

What makes a fuse melt?

Amps of force performing work, pushing through things that offer resistance, generate heat.

If there is too little wire to handle all the amps flowing through it, that wire will, literally, melt.

The reason you have circuit breakers in your house is to prevent you plugging in too many things on one circuit or loop of wire, drawing a SHOTLOAD of amps through the wires in the walls of your house to power all that crap, melting the wires buried in your walls and setting your house on fire.

The circuit breaker is a fuse, designed to trip out or ‘break’ when it gets too hot… and capable of being reset. It trips when there are more amps flowing through it than the wires attached to it are capable of handling.

Circuit breakers are designed to be reset, on the assumption you know enough to unplug stuff from the appropriate outlet when one pops. Old school power panels had actual fuses that you had to replace… and many skilled and brilliant electricians would replace them, all right. With copper pennies. Sigh.

So, pop quiz because you know the answer now. What does a blown fuse mean?

It means that something got so hot it melted a piece of wire. It melted a piece of wire that was designed to melt for a reason; to protect something else from getting damaged from too much force/amps/electricity/power.

So now we come to the main event.

If a fuse blew, it didn’t do it out of spite, or vindictiveness.

That fuse blew because something somewhere else went wrong, and the fuse melted to protect your valuable shit, or even your life.

Why your life?

Because the most common place to stick a fuse is right where the wire comes into your gizmo from the power cord plugged into the wall. If that fuse melted, something somewhere in your gizmo suddenly decided to suck so much juice out of the wall it melted a wire… melted that wire before it melted something else. Or tripped a breaker in your power panel.

Or shorted right through you, blowing off your feet.

So if someone says to you, ”Oh, it was no big deal. It was just a blown fuse. I replaced it, we’re good to go”, the very next question you need to ask is, “What caused the fuse to blow?”

That is the test.

To know that a blown fuse is not the problem, a blown fuse PROTECTED you from the problem.

What caused the fuse to blow? Because if all you did was replace the fuse, what the hell is stopping whatever it was from causing it to blow again?

What if the reason the fuse blew, was that there is water somewhere inside the gizmo. Electricity likes to find the easiest path to ground, right? And water makes for a good conductor. the electricity doesn’t want to do work, it doesn’t want to flow through any resistance, it’s always looking for the easiest way out.

So there is water, and sometimes the gizmo moves, the water flows, touches somewhere that has electricity, and the electricity says “Ah HAH! I can bypass almost all this other shit, flow right through the water, take a shortcut, and go through this here control knob, through that person’s hand, down their arm, and ground myself on the metal arm of the chair. YAHOO! FREEDOM AT LAST!”

Kaboom.

Or maybe, and god this is common, maybe you’ve got a motor that is powered by electricity in your gizmo. Like your car. Or your air conditioner. The motor is physically moving, spinning round, from the force of electricity pushing it.

It takes a lot of amps to physically move a motor. Lots more than your iPod needs. Rule of thumb, if the electricity has to get a motor physically moving, it’s got a LOT of juice running through it. Moving parts take power.

The motor has all this power running through it, some insulation starts wearing away, or the bearing that lets the shaft turn nice and smooth starts binding up making the motor use a LOT more power to get that shaft to turn, and the heat from the increased amp draw builds up.

The fuse blows. It gets hot and melts, protecting your motor from turning into slag.

If this is caught right away, the motor can usually be fixed. Maybe by something as simple and easy as putting a bit of grease or oil on the bearing that the shaft turns on, reducing how hard the motor has to work.

But what do I see all the damn time?

“Fuse blew, I replaced it and got the device back in service.”

“What caused it to blow?”

“I dunno, probably just a power spike.”

“Nothing else went down, and the lights didn’t flicker. Go check it out, find out why it blew.”

“Okay.” *very grumpy*

A week passes.

The motor ‘burns out’, from too much heat because instead of greasing the motor bearings, the jackass replaced the fuses and didn’t ‘waste his time ‘troubleshooting the core problem.

I look inside at the fuses, wondering why the $20 fuses did not pop, protecting the $3000 motor from melting by blowing first, like they were designed to.

I see that the fuses, which are supposed to blow if the electrical current flow exceeds 20 amps, have been replaced by 30 amp fuses.

It takes a lot more heat to blow a 30 amp rated fuse than a 20 amp rated fuse. If the amps never rise above 30 amps, the wire inside will never heat up enough to melt.

But that motor sure did love the extra amps that drove it far harder than it was ever designed to, at a temperature it’s wires weren’t designed to handle. Wires melted, or maybe even the motor windings.

Meltdown. $3000 motor burnt to shit. Repairs and rewinding will probably cost about $1200.

Oh wow, but at least those $20 fuses are still in great shape, and the tech that decided to swap 20 amp fuses for 30 amp fuses so he wouldn’t have to keep replacing them when they blew over and over?

Well, at least he had some piece and quiet for that week.

Wrapping this up

Now you know what a blown fuse really means. It means more juice, more power, more amps, more OOMPH just went through the thing than it was designed to safely handle, and the fuse blew before something SERIOUS happened. Read: expensive or dangerous.

If you simply replace the fuse, you are giving whatever it was a chance to do it again, shocking the system and risking damage from the fuse melting too SLOWLY to stop the big jolt of power from going through and doing it’s damage to the sensitive guts of your gear first.

If you replace the fuse with a BIGGER fuse, what you’re doing is saying, “I don’t like to live safely, or to save money. Fuck it, let the motor burn, just as long as it stops bugging me by popping all the time.”

Yes, a spike of power from the source can cause a fuse to blow or breaker to pop. A lightning strike on the main supply coming into your house, etc.

But if it did… you should have seen lights flicker, or had some other indication than just one thing popping a fuse.

At the very least, I hope that now you will feel confident whenever you are talking to someone about your car, or stereo, or air conditioner, or circuit breaker, to call them on the carpet if they feed you that old “It was just a fuse” line.

Today, it was just a fuse. Tomorrow, it’s the water pump, or the fan motor, or the overhead crane drive, or whatever it may be.

Or something compound in your car. I don’t care what it is, if it’s compound, it’s money.

This may not have helped you, but by God I’m glad to get that off my chest. Freaking idiot techs, I swear I’m going to start using the Big Safety Stick™ to give them a current test they won’t soon forget..

The best bit? I know some of you are going to buy this. I know it. I know you, oh yes I do. I’m not even sure Ursiheil is going to wait for the page to finish loading.

This is just fantastic.

Damnit, I’m shivering, this is so good.

Can I have your attention, please.

I am proud to announce to you, my fellow bacon loving bears, that you can now get down and dirty with your bacon, and it’s perfectly all right.

In fact, it’s what it’s for!

How many times have you said you loved bacon?

Well now you can! No, really, you really can love bacon. In fact, that’s what it’s DESIGNED for!

Now you, yes YOU, can get BACONLUBE.

Oh yeah, that’s right, this ain’t no April Fools, this is BACONLUBE for reals!

 To quote J & Ds Foods webstore;

You’ve always been a lover of bacon. Well, now you can be a bacon lover with baconlube, the world’s first bacon-flavored massage oil and personal lubricant.

Just… just think about all the things YOU could do with bacon-flavored massage oil AND PERSONAL LUBRICANT. And it’s safe for vegans!

It’s brought to you by the makers of bacon salt, so you know it’s got to be good. And well thought out. ALL the ramifications. Well thought out. Hours spent just thinking about it. A million and one uses.

It’s one small step for man, one giant leap for bear-kind.

Have you thought about what you could do with bacon-flavored massage oil AND LUBRICANT?

It’s thinking about what you’re thinking that is making me laugh my tits off, to paraphrase Lewis Black.

This is real, this is now. The future of bacon is TODAY! So get yours now.

Go! What about this idea could possibly give you reason for concern?

I don’t have to say any more, now do I?

Oh, and if you haven’t read Princess of Wands, seriously, what’s stopping you? Go read it, it’s an awesome standalone book. I’m not in it so it’s missing 100% in awesome bears, but other than that, it’s brilliant. As I’ve said before.

Today, I read my Warchief’s Command Board, and through the tears and the pain and the howling cries, all I could think was, “Oh Garrosh Hellscream NO!”

I would hereby like to nominate Garrosh Hellscream as writer of my favorite humor post of the year 2012. If someone else thinks they can top that, good luck and pack a lunch, you’re gonna have to camp that shit all day.

Well done. Just flat out well done.

I laughed, I cried, I fell down. It changed my life. The end. 

The Equipment Operator Song;

All I ever do is bitch and pout,
I start up the machine and then I shout,
“Will somebody come and help me out,
I fucked up the machine and I can’t figure it out.”

We did visit many parks in Orlando, including Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and the Animal Kingdom.

As you might imagine, we took a lot of pictures while we visited the various parks and resorts.

Cassie took many beautiful photos. They turned out wonderfully. Gorgeous sights and scenery suitable for all ages.

You don’t get to see those here.

You see, I took some pictures too.

Mine, you DO get to see.

I hereby present to you a Big Bear Butts view of the Marvelous Butts of Disney.

Let’s start off with those two rascally chipmunks, Chip and Dale. As you can see, these two were difficult to capture in the wild, although I tried several different angles, they defended their butts from direct viewing with skill and artistry. In the end, good solid profiles was the best I could arrange. I salute my opponents, and wish them well.

We will follow that gentle start with a look at the posteriors of those lovable toys from Toy Story. You’d think these would have been difficult, but I managed to get them all nailed to the wall. Oh yes, I got them, my pretties and their little horse, too.

Now I think it’s time to move over to the heroic side of Disney, with a few of my favorites from The Incredibles. Mrs Incredible was justifiably proud of her butt, but Frozone definitely stole the show with his butt shaking in the parade. He had all the moves, and I had a front row seat.

Now, rather than continue with specific themes, I’m going to assault your vision with butt after butt until you must stop and cry, ‘Enough!’

Whew! That was a lot of butts. Lumiere in particular was a pain in the… well, it was hard to get a crack at his… oh, heck, let’s just say the picture ain’t the greatest.

We ain’t done yet, though! I may be biased, but I saved the best butts for last.

I hereby present, in living color, the wonderful Big Bear Butts of Disney! Oh yeah, I went there.

I am particularly proud of the Baloo bear butt picture. I had to go deep into the jungle of The Animal Kingdom to go through the bushes and get behind that bear. Baloo was one heck of a difficult target to attack from the rear, JUST as you would expect from a highly skilled bear. In the end, this here Big Bear Butt got him, well, in the end.

I’ve got just a few last words on this project, I hope you’ll bear with me a moment.

First, this wouldn’t have been possible without the willing, nay EAGER assistance of my 9 year old son, Alex. He went that extra mile to keep on the lookout for butt shot opportunities, and yes, it turns out he is a crack shot indeed. He is directly responsible for there being any shot of Chip and Dale, and he actually called to my attention the wonderful opportunity to catch Eeyore in a vulnerable moment.

Cassie also contributed mightily to this project, indeed I’d say her perfect capture of the Lots O Huggin Bear was nothing short of spectacular.

Finally, I’d like to say that, while Alex went to great lengths to aid me in capturing the Butts of the Disney Princesses, going so far as to approach from one side for autographs so I could take pictures from the rear, in the end I could not in good conscience include them here.

In my opinion, it is one thing to take pictures in theme parks of anonymous actors in full body costumes and place them in a humourous suggestively-themed article. They are there for their pictures to be taken, and there is no way to identify the actor or actress within the costume. It’s something else entirely to take pictures of people who are merely wearing makeup and dressed in nice clothes, even if that makeup and those clothes are intended to resemble a famous character. They are still identifiable people, and portraying real people in any way other than respectfully wasn’t where I wanted to go with this.

So, no you don’t get my pictures of the butts of Snow White, Cindarella, Belle, Ariel, Mary Poppins or Alice.

But… they do exist. And isn’t the knowledge of their existing enough?

I think so.

Have a wonderful week, my friends, and enjoy imagining the kind of searches that will be bringing new readers to my door.

Right.

Okay, my sarcasm is being noted, but you’re still not buying the premise.

How about this.

Youtube or social media used to rant in the community about the boss you hate or the job you’ve got that sucks.

We invented social media, right? Our generation owns that. It’s our invention, those old fogies our parents weren’t smart enough or cool enough or radically crazy enough to shout their frustration across the entire geographical area for all time like we do. They may have invented those other things, but we’re the ones that took them and ran with them. They just didn’t have the imagination.

Right?

Ahem. Bullshit.

Check this out. :)

Warning… turn speakers on, and NSFW!!!

Welcome aboard the good ship Bear, we’ve got a high head of steam built up, all ahead full, next stop, the island of angry, scantily-clad bacon-eating bear men. 

I only said that last bit for the benefit of the search engine. It’s part of the blogging mini-game – what kind of traffic can we attract through innuendo or double entendre THIS week? WHAT?!? You’re a blogger and you’re not playing the mini-game? Uh oh.

Seriously though. This has been driving me bugshit for years, and it’s finally sent me RIGHT over the edge.

Look, I’m going to show you something. It may be something you have seen before.

This is a graphical representation of what is commonly called a “DVD disc”, which is stupidly redundant. A digital video disc disc? Really?

I’ve seen ‘em. Hopefully, you have too.

Now, I don’t know how much YOU understand about how these work.

From my recent experiences, I think this covers MOST of you out there;

Time to bust your bubble.

Here is the secret, ancient truth behind the DVD;

IT’S NOT MAGIC, DUMBASS!!

Here is a simple procedure I’d like you to try at home.

Step 1 – Pick up a DVD disc and hold it in your hands.

Step 2 – Examine the disc. Discover that its form resembles a plane. No, not a fucking airplane. I mean that it’s got TWO SIDES.

Step 3 – Turn the disc over in your hands. See that it does, in fact, have two discrete sides. For the advanced user you can also discern an edge along the circumference, but let’s not get stupid here. We’re looking for data-bearing strata.

Step 4 – Look carefully at each side of the plane. One side will be shiny across the surface, and if you look very closely, you will see that rather than being perfectly smooth, the surface is actually grooved. At this point I would reference wax records and the needles that followed the groove, but that would date me as being really fucking old, since most of you probably don’t know what a record is, what a needle is, what needle fuzz is, what an RPM is, what ANALOG even means, which is all fine because it’s completely irrelevant to the discussion and is only mentioned because I AM that old and I can’t keep one single thought in my head without wandering all over the place getting lost in pointless digressions that detract from the original point which was OMIGOD wtf am I doing stop this stop it stop it move on holy shit are you even kidding me right now.

Step 5 – The side opposite your shiny grooved side should have some writing on it. If it has writing on it, anywhere on the surface of the disc but not if it is super shiny and has writing only on the inner rim, that side of the disc is the label side. That side can be as scratched and scored as you’d like, it doesn’t matter for shit. Knock yourself out.

Step 6 – If both sides have identical shiny grooved sides, DON’T PANIC! Some of the earliest DVDs were printed with a different version of the same movie, one version on each side. Usually widescreen on one side, and pan and scan on the other. In that case, if you look vewwy vewwy closely, you’ll see that there is writing on the inner ring on each side, sometimes saying something like “Tango and Cash Side A – Widescreen”. Now, don’t overthink this. If you can see “Tango and Cash Side A – Widescreen” facing you, then that means the other side of the disc ACTUALLY HAS THAT VERSION OF THE MOVIE.

Step 7- Embrace the idea that you hold in your hands a plane with two sides, and if you are looking at the label or a generously marked or labeled surface, then the content the label refers to is on the other side, the side that is facing away from you.

Step 8 – Look at the shiny side again. Imagine for a moment that the shiny side is the screen of your TV or monitor. You will be seeing your movie shown on that screen. Now, if the shiny is perfectly shiny, you will see a good image on the screen. If there are dots, hairs, smears, pits, cracks, holes, writing, paint, grease, scratches, warping, or BIG FUCKING CHUNKS MISSING, then it will be very difficult to see a clear image on the bleak lunar surface of your disc.

DO YOU GET IT?

You do not need to know more than that. You don’t need to hear about tracking lasers, and drive mechanisms, and dots and dashes and binary logic and Digital to Analog converters or ANY of that shit.

All you need to know is, shiny side smooth and pretty good, shiny side all scratched, broken and pitted is BAD.

So please, please, someone explain to me WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERY DVD I RENT, BORROW OR CHECK OUT FROM THE LIBRARY LOOK LIKE IT’S BEEN USED TO POLISH YOUR SANDPAPER COLLECTION, WITH OCCASIONAL USE AS A SUPPORTING PLATE TO HAMMER NAILS ON?!?!

This ain’t just today, this week or this month. For years now, if I get a movie from Blockbuster, from Netflix, from Redbox or the public library, every single one of them looks like they sideline as coasters at the national frisbee finals, said frisbee competition being held at a gravel pit where the players CAN’T CATCH SHIT.

NOT GOOD

What the fuck do you people DO with these things? It’s not a magic disc you stick in the player, and a movie comes out. There is, like, technology and shit in there! And let me be blunt, most DVD technology is still early days technology, where it’s a euphemism for “lots of delicate moving parts at high speed”.

I don’t get it. I’ve got DVDs I bought before there were even DVD players, back when you could get Blade Runner on DVD, and you couldn’t even get the player yet for less than $500. Don’t get me wrong, Blade Runner is the shit, and I mean the good shit not that wack shit that came from your cousin’s basement hydroponics Brew and Grow kit, but $500 to watch Blade Runner is not good either. I’ve got ancient DVDs, and they don’t loko like this.

we’re talking a time so long ago, that I bought a brand spanking new Playstation 2 to use as a DVD player, because the damn thing cost the same amount of money as the other DVD players on the market, so why the hell not? Maybe I’ll even buy a game for it some day. Now load up Empire Records and get me some popcorn.

I own DVDs from DVD technology pre-history, and do you know, I open the case and pull the things out, CAREFULLY holding them on the edges because you don’t touch the surface where the movie shit is, and the things are still shiny! SHINY!

And yet, I grab a movie that was released on DVD two weeks ago fro Redbox, and the thing looks like a buckshot mallard.

It came to a head last night, when I went to watch The Incredible Hulk.

I tried to watch it on DVD last November, but the disc had cracks on it so I returned it with notification, and then I think I chose a Harry Potter film as a replacement.

Well, I got it again from Netflix last night, determined to watch it, and this time I go to put it in all excited, got my Captain and Coke, got my easy chair, house is quiet, earphones work so I can blast the sound… the disc looks like it was, and I am not fucking joking, hit with finishing nails driven by a ball peen hammer.

I even turned the disc over, you could clearly see the impressions the nails made on the label side. That’s right, they went all the way through. Are you shitting me?

So, after yelling at Netflix on the phone, Cassie came to the rescue. Local library had TWO copies of the movie on the shelf, and were open until 9 PM.

Awright!

Off I go to the library, where I grab the first copy, open the case, check the disk… and see that while it may be about the Incredible Hulk, it looks like the aftermath of a land war in China.

I grab the second copy, and look, fearing the worst. At this point, I don’t even want to know how much worse it could get. It looks almost brand new, just a couple gentle scratches. Well…. more than a few, and some weren’t all that gentle. But it’s the only game in town.

I take that movie home, I watch all the way through to the end, and right when the Hulk and the Abomination are getting into it and the chopper is down and Betty Ross is about to go up in navgas flames, BOOM! Digital hash, white noise, the thing hits a perfect storm of scratches that end the show.

Are you kidding me?

People, let me explain something.

If you keep treating these things like total crap, and seriously, I don’t understand how you do it unless you hand rental discs to your 2 year old as a toy to distract them LITERALLY with “Ooh, shiny!”, then prices will go up, libraries will cut back on DVD budgets, and we will be left to shout from the heavens…

THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!

But how are you at staying focused and positive when things get difficult? When it takes effort?

Do you have the determination to keep going, to recognize that it’s go time, and to push ever harder?

When the raid wipes for the 157th time on Heroic Ragnaros, do you pull the plug and fake a power outage, or do you repair, refresh, swear and then step up to go again, determined to damn well put your very best effort in this time. Yes, you thought you did that last time, but you can do better.

You WILL do better.

Bacon. The power to get things done.

Do you have the bacon in YOU?

This was written by Sidhebane, and I hope you enjoy it. I thought it was just the thing to kick off the week with a smile.

The Death Knight (by Sidhebane, inspired by Kenny Rogers and BBB)

On a cold winter’s evening, on a tram bound for Stormwind,
I met up with a Death Knight, we were both too tired to queue.
So we took turns a-staring through the portals at the lake-bed
Until his head turned to me, said “I’d like to talk to you”

He said “Son, I’ve made a living out of reading monsters’ stances,
And knowing what their tricks were by the way they held their swords.
And if you don’t mind me saying, I can see you’re low on chances.
If you lend me some hitpoints, I might lend you some words.”

So I handed him my potion, and he swigged it in one motion,
Then he bummed a Healthstone, and chowed down on that too
And the night seemed frozen solid, as his armor frosted over
Said “If you’re going to be the tank, boy, the mobs will look to you.

You gotta know how to fight ‘em, know when to kite ‘em,
Know when to pop your shields, know when to run.
You don’t loot no corpses if there’s bad guys up and able,
There’ll be time enough for looting when the fight is done.”

Every tank should know, that the secret to survivin’,
is knowin’ what to blow away and knowin’ what to sheep.
‘Cause each PUG has a whiner, and each PUG has a bruiser,
And the best that you can hope for’s that your healer’s not asleep.

And as he finished talking, his armor came defrosted.
His shoulders seemed to slump and his ghoul keeled over dead,
And right there in the darkness, the Death Knight he cast Deathgate,
And still his final words, they seemed to echo in my head

“You gotta know how to fight ‘em, know when to kite ‘em,
Know when to pop your shields, know when to run.
You don’t loot no corpses if there’s bad guys up and able,
There’ll be time enough for looting when the fight is done.”