gwax’s rumblings

I saw The Aristocrats yesterday and it was even better than I expected. Well, truth be told, I had mixed expectations but the movie turned out to be really funny. It’s certainly not for children or those who find dirty (and I mean truly dirty) humor offensive. For those that haven’t heard of it, The Aristocrats is a documentary about a joke, one joke, that has a long history of being told by comedians for comedians. You might not think that a movie about a single joke would be funny all the way through, but this one is and I highly recommend it.

Team Vanguard decided to go the route of hiring a more experience mechanical engineer so I won’t be working for a boatbuilder in Rhode Island any time soon. Truth be told, I’ve been starting to think that it’d be a bit of a dead end way for me to go and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to stay for more than a couple of years. Although the experience might have been fun and I might’ve learned a few things, I expect there are better things for me to do. I expect this sounds a bit like a sour grapes story but my only real annoyance at this point is that I didn’t even get an interview. Anyway, I guess this puts me back at the drawing boards with regards to figuring out what I want to do with myself, though that doesn’t really matter until I leave the Cape and my shoulder starts to work again.

george is the #16 most common male name.
0.927% of men in the US are named george.
Around 1135575 US men are named george!
source namestatistics.com

waksman is a very rare last name.
Very few last names in the US are waksman.
Be proud of your unique last name!
source namestatistics.com

I went to see the orthopedic surgeon again today for a follow up look at my shoulder and he took some X-Rays and it turns out that I chipped my scapula. This means that my glenoid labrum is probably torn; the glenoid labrum is the soft tissue that extends from the scapula to make a soft cup sort of thing for the joint. The chipped piece of scapula will have either torn itself entirely free or is still connected to the glenoid labrum. If the chip is connected to the glenoid labrum it will prevent proper healing and I will need surgery; if it has floated free it can probably be ignored and the glenoid labrum should hopefully be able to heal itself with time. In order to find out how the status of my soft tissue I’m going to have to get an MRI sometime next week and then make another follow up appointment.

The future of my shoulder recovery is now dependant on the MRI results. If the chip has dragged the glenoid along with it, I’ll get surgery, which will be followed by 6 weeks of immobilization and recovery and then 3 months of physical therapy. However, if I’m lucky, the problem can be ignored and I can start physical therapy soon and have a working arm again in a month or so.

Since optimism has been building me up for big let downs of late, I think that I’ll just go with the pessimist approach and work on accepting that I’m going to have to get surgery and have a bum shoulder for the next 5 months. It’s almost as though I couldn’t just let myself be happy and have a good summer, so I added a sour vein through the summer. I guess that I’ll just tack this up as another example of the way my luck runs.

Valkyries

This was the end result of a Scrabble game that my friend Dave and I played a couple nights ago. I post because it’s the first 300+ point game of Scrabble I’ve ever played.

The blanks were ‘B’ in “RIBBING” and ‘S’ in “QUALMS”. The final score was Dave: 308, George: 305.

Seems like it’s probably not real, but if it is I’d totally vote for him for president.

It turns out that I no longer dislike lobster. In fact, I have moved on to rather enjoying the taste of the little buggers.

There’s a wonderful form of art known as Rock Balancing Art, where you, simply, balance rocks on top of each other. It may seem simple but some people have done some rather fantastic things with regards to balancing rocks. One such example is a short film called Balancing Point (watch online), where some guy theatrically knocked down balanced rocks and then reversed the film; the effect is rather uncanny.

SonicWALL Internet Security offers content filtering services and via their website, you can look up the rating (right column, down a little) of a website. Apparently, my blog is rated “Category 22 - Games”, while my homepage is “Category 64 - Unrated”. I guess that means that I run a gaming blog; fancy that.

sudo su

I’ve been playing a wonderful conversational game of late, having generic conversations. The game works a little like this, instead of having an actual conversation, you express the generic underlying conversation or make vague, general statements. It’s a little hard to grasp from that description, so here’s an example.

A: Statement of inquiry.

B: Acknowledgement of inquiry. Vague half-answer meant to divert topic.

A: Statement drawing focus to diversion but accepting it and changing topic.

C: Bold statement regarding new topic meant to draw attention to self.

B: Veiled statement of distaste for forceful interjection. Empty statement to lighten conversation.

A: Witty banter.

C: Short joke that’s not very good.

A: Really terribly joke.

B: Statement about a current event.

etcetera

Of course, this is a poor example because I had to come up with it on my own to illustrate a point. Certainly though, one can use varying levels of vagueness and generality. It’s a great deal of fun and can be rather challenging to keep things generic but interesting without repeating oneself or devolving into meaninglessness.

Someone’s gone and invented Bacon Ice Cream. Details over at the apostropher. Sweet lord, bacon ice cream!

I present, for your amusement, four different versions of how I dislocated my shoulder: the short version, the ninja version, the timetravel version and the long version.

Short version: I fell mostly off my boat.

Ninja version: I was ambushed by a group of ninjas and, after killing four of them, one landed a hit with a greathammer on my left shoulder. I proceeded to spin around, kick the head off the ninja that hit me and then finished the remaining two off with a punch through both of their chests.

Timetravel version: I came back from the future, hit myself in the shoulder with a wooden bat, said, “You’ll thank me later” and returned to the future.

Long version: I was sailing over to Great Harbor with my friend Dave and my brother Joe. We saw Andy Grant out on his houseboat and decided to stop in and say hi. We were tying off my boat to his houseboat and I was getting ready to get off onto Andy’s boat. Then my boat shifted underneath me and I lost my balance and fell between my boat and Andy’s houseboat. Since I had been trying to keep my balance my arms were out at my sides and my left arm came down across my boat’s right hull. So there I was lying, floating in the water thinking, hmm, my arm kind of hurts, oh well and decided it was best to climb out. When I tried to climb out, I realized that my left arm wasn’t able to exert any force and hurt when I tried so I mentioned to Dave and Andy that my arm wasn’t working quite right and really hurt so I thought that I’d lie in the water a bit. A little more of this and I explained that my arm really hurt, more than anything else in my life ever had but, not really saying it in any more than the tone I’d use if I’d scraped my knee, Dave and Andy figured I was just complaining. Eventually, I got them to haul me out of the water and around that point, we all realized that my shoulder was about four inches below where it ought to be and that something was seriously wrong. So, I sat down at Andy’s picnic table and took stock of how much pain I was in and realized that I was starting to go into shock. So, I calmly explained that I was going into shock and asked for a life-jacket to use as a pillow. We then managed to hail someone on a nearby houseboat and borrow a skiff to motor me to shore. Since they’d already called 911, there was a recue crew on shore followed shortly by an Ambulance, which took me to Falmouth Hospital. En route and during my hour and a half wait in the hospital, I was given a few injections of morphine, which did the fantastic job of making my pain only thoroughly unbearable instead of mind-destroyingly overwhelming. Then they gave me anaesthesia and I woke up in a bed with a sling and less pain. Since then the sling has remained and will for another 3 weeks, after which point I will be able to start using my left arm again.