Sometimes when I’m half asleep I speak in tongues. Does this ever happen to you? They call it “somniloquy“. With me it often happens when I’m on the verge of passing out after a night of drinking with my brother, and he always tries to maximize the experience by egging me on. One night he transcribed our conversation. I offer that transcript here for your entertainment:

Mattdude: Shit is fucked up is what it is… selling the ice rings.

Voidious: What’s fucked up about selling the ice rings?

Mattdude: You don’t have to spend anything.

Voidious: Why would I care about spending anything?

Mattdude: ‘Cuz… it’s expenditures yo.

Voidious: So what you’re saying is that I need to buy some ice rings.

Mattdude: No… I’m just saying that…

Voidious: That what?

Mattdude: That Google needs to fucking kiss my ass.

Voidious: Why do you say that?

Mattdude: Dude, don’t toy with me dude… Do not be toying with me yo. I can tell, yo, when I’m being toyed with yo.

Voidious: Dude I thought we were talking about ice rings.

Mattdude: Dude, I got my special no-fuck-with-me glasses on dude. I think there’s something Rachel wants to say to me yo.

Voidious: Well, I dunno dude.

On another occasion he recorded a video of my half-conscious ramblings, but I’ll save that for a future post.

I get a lot of ideas that never manifest as fully realized blog posts. Ok, maybe “fully realized” isn’t the right phrase. “Half baked” is more accurate, but I digress. Anyway, all my posts start as a few words in a digital sticky note, followed by a slow fleshing-out in a text file. If I’m lucky, they finally, hopefully, become reasonably coherent posts.

Most don’t, however. They linger, languish, even, for months and years on end. These undeveloped, orphan thoughts stare at me day after day until eventually I just tune them out. I know I’ll never cultivate them but I just can’t admit it to myself.

So rather than letting these ideas fester and rot, I present them to you. Here are my currently pending incomplete thoughts. Links to any notes I compiled are provided after each summary. Perhaps someone out there can develop them further because, apparently, I sure as hell won’t.

Star Wars vs. Star Trek

The idea here was to create an objective comparison of the two legendary franchises. No subjective interpretation or philosophical discussions, just hard data: box office, advertising, and merchandising revenue, viewing hours, and any other objective measure of success I could imagine. It was easy to find box office revenue for the feature films and I was just getting started on viewing hours, but then I realized the whole endeavor would be far too difficult. How would I determine revenue from advertising? Should I also account for novels, comics, video games, and all the myriad “expanded universe” properties? The data could probably be obtained somewhere, somehow, likely after exhausting research and leg work, but I’m way too lazy for all of that.
View Notes for “Star Wars vs. Star Trek”.

Fox Mulder Ultimate Rant

This one was inspired by an episode of The Simpsons featuring Dana Scully and Fox Mulder from The X-Files. I recalled a hilarious rant by Mulder in that episode which perfectly lampooned his wacky but passionate character. I thought it would be a riot to string together most or all of Mulder’s ramblings about government conspiracy into a single, ultimate rant. I was off to a good start, but it just proved too hard to find enough appropriate quotes and combine them in a sensible way.
View Notes for “Fox Mulder Ultimate Rant”.

Why Burn Notice is Better than Lost

Of all my unrealized ideas this was closest to fruition. It seemed like a very simple premise: explain why I enjoy one television program more than another. I was all proud of myself for coming up with the idea to correlate the differences between the two shows to the contrast between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The idea never evolved beyond a few bullet points.
View notes for “Why Burn Notice is Better than Lost“.

100 Reasons to Keep Smoking

I’ve had this idea in mind for years. It occurred to me one day as I lit up while stuck in traffic. I experienced a glimmer of euphoria as my thoughts drifted away from the insufferable delay and toward getting my nicotine fix. Being able to smoke made the traffic more bearable. I started thinking of other good reasons to keep smoking: suppresses appetite, gives cause to carry a lighter which can come in handy, things like that. Furthermore, it seemed like a radical thing to put out there. Everybody talks about how you should stop smoking, so why not be different and propose reasons to keep smoking? At the very least, it might get a rise out of the vocal anti-smoker crowd. >;-]

Laziness Manifesto

It pains me a little to include this here, but after so many years of dwelling on the idea I think it’s time to let it go. In fact, I’ve grown comfortable believing that not pursuing this idea honors its essence more than actually doing anything with it. The concept was basically that “laziness” has been the prime motivator for all of humanity’s greatest inventions. Every great piece of technology we have was created because someone wanted to do less work.

Well there you have it. I hereby cast these neglected seedlings out into the interwebz, in the hopes they take root and grow. If not, that’s ok, at least I have a clean slate.

Well hello there! Isn’t this a pleasant surprise? After our last encounter I naturally assumed you’d moved on to more fulfilling pursuits, but I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you decided to return. As always, my innate sense of decorum precludes me from speculating on your reasons for doing so, considering the frustratingly hollow nature of a post such as this one. To do so would be as futile as the very post itself, for as we both know, you are still reading it. Why concern ourselves with your motivations, knowing that neither of us will ever discover them?

I can say with some degree of pride that, unlike last time, the purpose (such as it is) of this particular piece of mind-numbing drivel is not merely to provide myself with superficial optical comfort, but rather to ascertain whether or not Facebook Notes will properly import my blog entries. As you know, I would never be so callous as to fill this space with mere placeholder text, though I’m sure we’d both agree that a few paragraphs of “lorem ipsum” would be equally enlightening, perhaps even more so.

However worthless the above text may be, and no matter how much agony you must have experienced while reading it, the fact is, we are communicating. In the end, what does it matter what is said? What difference does it make whether I type this word or that one, when it is clear that you will read whatever words appear before your eyes, as you are right now?

Obviously, we don’t need words to understand each other.

Why doesn’t my bank know what language I speak?

I’ve held an account with this bank for about fifteen years, and yet every time I visit an ATM machine, I must select my language before proceeding with the transaction. The choices are “English” and “Spanish”.

For the sake of argument, let’s disregard the fact that only 13% of the United States population speaks Spanish, compared to 82% for English according to Wikipedia.

Let’s not even consider that in the suburban, white, yuppie community in which I live, those percentages are surely skewed even more in favor of English (I’d guess 99%, but I confess I have no actual data to back that up).

So, dismissing the fact that most people speak English, why the hell doesn’t my bank know that I, Mattdude, who has used this very ATM hundreds of times, speak English, even though I’ve selected English each and every time? Nevermind that all communications between myself and my bank over the past fifteen years have been in English, you would think at the very least the system could “remember” my choice from the last visit and automatically select English. Perhaps it could include a secondary option lower on the screen to change the language, you know, just in case I became a fluent Spanish speaker since my last visit.

We’re not talking about profoundly complex algorithms here. This is the most basic of interface issues which millions of developers, large and small, have already grasped. There’s simply no reason a large institution can’t do the same.

As if to mock me further, the newer ATMs in the area display a “Checking for preferences” message before beginning the transaction, and then proceed to make me select a language. Lol.

After about a year of waiting, my cat, Pluto, the Twisted Black Maxta, has finally made his way onto Stuff on My Cat! He joins Simon on the list of doadly kitties to be immortalized at SOMC. Big thanks to my brother Voidious for taking the photos and submitting them.

Actually, I’m even more fond of this photo (tentatively titled “Recursive Kitty” :). Voidious sent that one in some months later, thinking perhaps the first had been lost somehow. Hopefully it will be posted at SOMC sometime down the road.

Click here for Pluto’s fifteen minutes of fame.