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Here are the three different shirt styles Berg and I made the other day. Each one was painted with an airbrush and stencils using water-based paint on cotton shirts. The shirts were $2 bucks a piece at Walgreens, pretty good I feel. The paint, while water-based, claims to be good for textiles. After painting, we let the paint dry, and then heat-set the ink with an iron. None of them have been through the wash yet, but I’m not expecting any problems.

The first stencil is one I made from a photo of my bike. It was cut on paperboard (the back of a cereal box) so the lines aren’t as precise as they could be.

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Berg drew this stencil freehand, and cut it right there on paperboard. The stencil only has one bottle, but he used a nice repetition to show it falling. Pretty shnixy!

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This stencil uses some odd found objects, such as a leafy branch, a key, an old-fashioned syringe and a plastic star to produce a bizarre image. There is a lot of weird imagery in this one… Look for the crucifix, then the phallus, then the drug imagery, then the phoenix, and then the suggestion that we are addicted to our artificial ways. Then step back, and remember that it is just a t-shirt.

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Well, it has been a busy few days. On monday night, Berg and I busted out the airbrushes and stencil stock, cut some stencils, and made some T-Shirts! Then on Tuesday night, Billy and I started a batch of Belgian Strong Dark Ale brewing. We used pure oxygen to oxygenate the wort, and this morning, only 7 hours after pitching the yeast, it was already bubbling quite vigorously. Something tells me this is going to be a good batch.

Anyway, I’m in a huge hurry, we have many things to get ready before leaving town on Friday the 1st. We’ll be out of town until the 8th, and there will be only sporadic updates during that time period.

However, pictures of the shirts are in order, so check these out. I’ll post more details about them later tonight, when I get some time.

Madalene began the day with a job interview, and ended it by beginning a road trip to see some friends. She’ll be gone for four days. During her trip she will probably go to a party, eat at a restraunt, and feel a fetus’s heart beat.

As for myself, I have some things to do, of which, at least some will probably get done:

• Set up a RAID array.
• Burn CDs for my neighbor who wants a good introduction to ambient electronic music.
• Clean up the indoor garden, and repot the peppers.
• Go to the bank.
• Clean up my computer room.
• Return a book to the library, and a movie to the video rental store.
• Rebuild the front hub on my bicycle. However, this may involve me having to purchase a thin metric wrench for disassembling the hub. Whether or not I can purchase said wrench will be determined by my visit to the bank.

• Do more research into airbrushing my bicycle’s frame. Special acid-based primers are required for painting aluminum, and I need to find a cheap source of said primer.

  Whew, that sure is a lot of stuff.

Thanks to my Mother, I have to offer for you a link to a wonderful description of why email disclaimers are totally stupid.

I’m sure you’ve seen the type, something to the effect of “This email is intended only for the addressee shown. Any action taken by persons not among the intended recipients is strictly prohibited. This email does not represent official policy or statement by the sending organization. Blah blah blah blah blah.”

Stupid Email Disclaimers is well written, with some legal backup, as well as examples of various types of problems associated with disclaimers, and examples of various disclaimers themselves.

These statements are not only completely unenforcable, they actually leave you open to legal problems, and can cause you big trouble if people take the disclaimer too literally. What they boil down to is pompous legal fluff meant to scare people into submission, rather than anything based on substance or real laws. Don’t bother using them.

Tonight Berg, Caroline, Barb, Madalene and I fixed some nice pasta and enjoyed it with a glass of Chianti. It was very pleasant.

Saturday night however, Berg and I engaged in another sort of fun. On a whim, we went out and bought airbrushes and some paint. The airbrushes were aquired at Harbor Freight Tools for 5 bucks a piece. A few more dollars for fittings and paint, and we had them connected to my air compressor, and were doodling on a big piece of oriented strain plywood in the back yard. After some more practice, our next project will be to paint my bicycle. The bike is good, but it has no paint, since someone decided to remove all the paint with a sander long before the bike entered my possession. The frame is aluminum, so the lack of paint isn’t a problem, but it presents a nice blank canvas for some airbrushing. Disassembly will be necessary in order to protect vitals such as brakes and drive train, but the drivetrain needs serious work anyway, and the hubs all need rebuilding, so those can be done at the same time.

If you’d like to see our oh-so-pretty practice board, here are the photos. You can tell that we only have two colors of paint so far. Black and blue. However, flourescent colors are going to be purchased for the bike.

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Last night I went to see the movie Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns which is a documentary about the band They Might Be Giants. It was quite charming, though is really geared towards people who already really like them. If you don’t know much about the band, or aren’t very into them, you might find the movie a bit boring. However, if you are like me, and have enjoyed TMBG consistently for many years, you’ll probably like it.

Last night in Karate class I reached a two important milestones in my training. Firstly, I was able to tie my belt without begging for assistance from a more advanced student. That doesn’t sound like much, but it signals the moment when I transitioned from total and complete fool, to just a regular hapless newbie. The second milestone is that I’m no longer the newest person in class. We got a new student last night, and even though that doesn’t have anything to do with me personally, it does mean that I don’t feel as strange, since I’m now in ‘the middle’ instead of the very bottom. Granted, I’m still basically on the bottom, just lifted up a tiny bit now.

The second thing I’d like to discuss is a small movie idea. First, some background. At work each morning I have to fill a 10 liter container with liquid nitrogen from our large 230 liter storage tank in the loading dock. The 10 liters gives me plenty for all the presentations and demonstrations I’ll be doing during the day.

When the nitrogen is dispensed from the 230L storage tank into the smaller container, a huge plume of thick white fog is created. As the nitrogen leaves the tank it begins to boil immediately. Liquid nitrogen boils at -320 degrees F at standard pressure. Hence, in open air, there is no where on Earth where liquid nitrogen will not be boiling. This is the reason we refill the tank each day, in addition to the liquid nitrogen used during the shows, a certain amount is lost to evaporation as the day goes on.

Anyway, as the nitrogen boils, very cold nitrogen gas rises up from the surface, causing water vapor to condense out of the air, creating a white fog. This is the same principle as dry ice fog. Cold gas rushing into the open air causes the fog to condense. As I fill the tank, white fog spills out, covering the floor like a carpet, as a several foot high plume ejects straight out of the top of the container.

As I was filling the tank this morning, a building services employee walked into the dock and shouted, “What are you doing, fogging up my dock like this?!? You summoning demons or something in here?? Somebody call the preacher! This guy’s callin’ the dark spirits in here!” It was very funny, and we all got a good laugh about it. But it gave me an idea for a movie.

The Haunted Refrigerant Gas Delivery Man: A horrifying story of a refrigerant gas delivery man who died many years ago in a terrible nitrogen accident. However, due to the terrible circumstances of his mysterious death, he rose from the grave, and began to deliver gasses again, as a zombie! When he delivers a tank of liquid nitrogen to a facility, he curses it, causing the tank to release the spirits of the damned, instead of liquid nitrogen. Victims are frozen with fear, and then the spirits consume them, and suck them back into the storage tank.

Sounds like a blockbuster, right?

I had a strange dream last night as I was drifting off to sleep. The dream was contained within a brief episode of hypnagogia (also spelled hypnogogia, I’m uncertain which is correct), which is the transition point between waking reality and dream that occurs as you are falling asleep in the evening. In this state, you are still awake, but your brain may begin dreaming a bit early, giving vivid and lucid dreams that slide in and out of your mind as your brain shifts gears into sleep. Sometimes this can also result in a sudden ‘falling’ sensation as your perceptions shift between your waking self, and your dreaming self. If you ever experience little ‘starts’ as you are falling asleep, causing you to twitch because you suddenly felt like you were falling, you were probably experiencing a form of hypnagogia.

The dream itself was of me reading a book in bed. In reality, I had recently been reading one, but it wasn’t in my hands anymore. The strange thing though was that it was a pop-up book with 3-D pictures of women. The women were wearing old fashioned clothing, and were posing as if modeling it. I started to get disturbed when I realized that every single woman had the face of former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. The founder of our national interstate highway system was smiling back at me from numerous images of posing pop-up women. It was very strange, but the dream ended as soon as it began. The whole dream was probably encased within a less than 60 second block, but it felt like a long time. It was very real, and I experienced a strong sense of confusion as I slid out of the dream and back into a more wakeful mindset, and I realized that I was no longer holding the book. I tried to remember where I had set it down, when I realized that I didn’t have a pop-up book of Ike Eisenhower wearing women’s clothing, not to mention the fact that such a book probably doesn’t exist anywhere.

P.S. If you have such a book, or know where I could find one, I’d be much appreciative.

Where, oh, where has this site gone? Well, unfortunately a rocky server migration combined with some odd DNS problems has rendered this site and Cowboys of Justice largely inoperable for the past few days. This includes email, so if you’ve sent me something either here or via cowboy-mail, or are concerned about your cowboymail account, then be sure to resent any correspondence.

Cowboymail is mostly operational right now. In the very least, it is receiving mail, though sending mail may or may not work at the moment. I’m on the prowl though, and it should be fixed soon.

This website lost its last few posts, which is why the last post in the archives is about a week and a half old. I have no rememberance of what I had posted after that date, so its just lost to the void. If anyone remembers, or better yet, has some sort of copy of the post (maybe a cached RSS feed or something?) I would be eternally grateful for the reminder and/or data!

Anyway, normal operation will be resuming shortly, thanks for bearing with me.