Hurricane Irene NYC Damage Report

Non-metereologist RoBeast Rollie reporting here from the No-No Zone in the middle of Manhattan. I hit the street early this morning to see the latest disaster that I slept through. For the most part, there were more dogs and amateur photographers out than branches down. Thumbs up, NYC.

Here's my round up of the urban destruction:

Umbrellas have been mutilated.

Balloons have been abandoned.

Drum Circles are cancelled. 

Looters are running rampant. 

Unemployment has not been halted. 

And businesses continue to get their typo on. 

In all seriousness, it's still potentially dangerous out there, so be careful. I was a few steps away from getting hit by a metal rod falling from one of the blue awnings in the picture below.

Some tourists saw it happen and I told them, "I wouldn't go that way if I were you." They responded, "Maybe we should go back to the hotel."

Branch down on Laguardia Pl.

Off of Bleecker St. 

Evil fog and a large branch being cleared looking South on Broadway.

If you can fight the cabin fever, it's probably best to just stay inside and wait for the branches to be cleared and the flood waters to recede. You bought all that damn food so you may as well stay wherever you are, eat it, and ponder this message:

... and the Media too.  

Cheap Halloween Costumes: Beetlejuice

This is pretty old news, but Harry Badface alerted me to an article about an Etsy site charging $500 for a Adam and Barbara Maitland Halloween costume, so I felt I should post something in case anyone else wants to do something for less money.

Halloween is big deal for the RoBeastress and I, and in 2009, we decided to do our first couples' costume. Our choice was a bit ambitious and we knew there wasn't going to be an off-the-rack version of the couple from Beetlejuice, so we had no choice but to take the Do-It-Yourself route. DIY Halloween costumes are exciting and inexpensive, and the results are usually extra satisfying. There's also lots of preparation and trial and error involved, so it helps to have lots of patience. The RoBeastress and I are not patient, but fortunately, she's a certified genius and I'm an aesthetic wacko. Let's see what I can remember.

The front of the Adam face took shape with two cheap masquerade masks.

The top was a baseball/hockey cap with the brim cut off. 

A glove stuffed with newspaper through the hole in the hat made up the back and then the whole thing was taped up. Man, I was fat in 2009.

While the final shape of the RoBeastress' mask looked a lot more complicated than mine, it was actually a lot easier to accomplish. (Certainly a lot easier than trying to post fucking pictures in Blogger and add captions to them without screwing up your entire layout.)

She basically made a large oval with newspaper and papier mached it. After it dried, she cut it in half, emptied out the newspaper, then reinforced the shell with more papier mache. She discovered that technique from this guy's awesome YouTubes.

Here's the two halves of the hollow egg shell linked with some cardboard, pre-papier mache.

My first papier mache experiment was not as successful. I tried using ripped bedsheets with the glue mixture because I wanted to achieve a more fleshy texture. It instead came out super wrinkly:

I ended up peeling it all off and started over with the more traditional newspaper technique. Results were much smoother:

While I was busy having my wrinkly crisis, the RoBeastress made her giant tongue (tape and coat hanger wire)....

...and baked some teeth (Fimo modeling clay shaped into tiny squares and made tooth-like with a Phillips' head screwdriver).

Here are the finished faces after being painted, glued, and eyballed (those were like a quarter a piece):

We got some of that one-way Ninja black cloth to fill in the holes where you could see our skin. The RoBeastress donned additional black face paint in case of flash photography, and I shaved off my beard because Alec Baldwin didn't have an awesome beard in the movie. The RoBeastress and Geena Davis share the curly hair gene, so there was no work needed there.

Here are a couple full body shots (no black face paint on the 2nd one):

We ended up winning the costume contest at the bar and the prize was more than we paid for materials to make it. So let that be a lesson to you--get out there and DIYFS.

A+ 'n Us!

This brilliant flipchart has been posted in our largest conference room all day. While I can't take credit for it, I'm still happy that there's been two large meetings in there already.

What's crazy is Abbott Nutrition United States is a real acronym. They've even got a Facebook Page where they'll presumably discuss the serious economic ramifications of Abbott Nutrition and London Stock EXchange.

Dog Years

It's been a while since I last vandalized Wikipedia, so I went for a big target today. I hit up one of my favorite dimensions: Time. My addition is about halfway down the page, and I think the subtly paid off. After 4 hours, it still hasn't been taken down yet!

Click on the image below for the original size (and read the caption for bonus points).

+25 Points to Slytherin IN MY PANTS

In honor of the newly released Harry Potter film (thank god its over, I can't handle another book with 300 FUCKING PAGES ABOUT CAMPING AND WALKING AROUND IN THE FUCKING FOREST), I bring you this gem of sexting from my personal collection. Ain't no sexting like some drunken Harry Potter sexting! HAWT. And also, yes this is what I'm doing when I'm hanging out in the blue lion in between saving the universe and potty-training my own little adorable Princess of Power. ENJOY. Maybe I'll post more now that baby is not gnawing on my lifeforce every, single day. NO PROMISES, but I'll try.









PS. If this kind of thing gets you excited, TPHD is available for sighs and moans and ALL CAPS TONE POEMS ABOUT LIFE. You can find him here on the twitter machine.


<3 - teh_Beauty aka D_S

Building a Better Mailbox

The RoBeastress has a never-ending supply of Crate & Barrell and Pottery Barn catalogs sent to her. Just once, I'd like to see these arrive in the mailbox instead:

Hello. Is it Steve you're looking for?

The Double D's are no coincidence.

Better Homes and Gardens doesn't show up, but I couldn't resist making this. 

YOU BABY!

There shouldn't really be anything particularly funny about this billboard for the IVF NJ Fertility Center, but it still cracks me up every time I see it.

When approaching it from a distance, all I can read is the taunt: YOU BABY. I've been passing it for six months now, so I know there's more to the message, but I still yell back at it "NO, YOU BABY!"

So insensitive.

   

Green Tree: Trolling Hippie Vegetarians Since 1894

I was behind this hippie-lovin' green tree-huggin' truck yesterday morning:

Wait, THE MEAT SPECIALIST?

Prime Beef? Fresh Fish?? ETC.???

I guess you could sum up that business with the name Green Tree, right? High-five!

  

Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer: SFW, but NSF... Hands?

I only know how to read Internet acronyms and pictures, so that's what the label on the Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer tells me: 


NSFH



To be fair, these things may be totally safe for work and hands, but are they really hygenic and effective? I use them at work occasionally, when I'm feeling guilty about using paper towels, but I'm not completely sold on the machine.

It sort of feels like you're playing Operation, lowering your hands down but being careful not to touch the sides or you'll get electro shocks. Ok, there's no shocks, but what does lurk on the surface? What if the person before you just decided to dry the piss off of their hands instead of washing, and they thought you had to touch the yellow things to turn the machine on? I don't know--I'm a blogger, not a doctor.

Usually, I think automatic sensors are a great feature, but making it a top load for hands seems like it would be a challenge for children, short folks, and people in wheelchairs. Because you can't trigger the blowers to start by putting your hands in the side holes, the only way around this oversight is to mount it very low on the wall. I think it would become awkward for everyone else at that point though. Having the blowers on the bottom seem to make these types of machines a bit more universal, but again, what do I know? I'm a blogger, not an engineer.

All right, so let's say you are able to get your hands in the damn thing. Because the blower doesn't immediately engage, you have to taunt it a bit. And for those few split seconds, you wonder if it is instead going to clamp down on your wrists and bite your hands completely off. The design certainly gives me flashbacks of the castration machine from The Ice Pirates, but what do I know? I'm a blogger, not a terrible movie from 1984.

If it didn't eat you by now, you probably feel the air blowing fairly intensely against your hands and fingers, knocking them into the sides a little bit, which I would think you'd want to avoid. If your hands aren't too wet, they are allegedly dry in about 12 seconds. That's pretty accurate even if they are really wet, but the extra water tends to drip down into the valley of the machine. There doesn't seem to be any type of drain or anything, so it either sits there, or continues its journey down the side of the machine to the floor. I don't know what normally happens to the water dispersed from a typical hand dryer. I guess it goes directly to the floor, or on your clothes. I think I prefer the ignorant bliss of seeing it magically disappear into thin air as opposed to seeing it sit there pooled up on the plastic. But what do I know? I'm a blogger, not a person who wants to continue blogging today.

Solved Mysteries: Twin Peaks

Bayonne-born actor Walter Olkewicz has a habit of strange encounters in bars. Most people probably remember him from Twin Peaks as Jacques Renault. Here he is trysting with Laura Palmer and shooting off a famous drunken non-sequitor at the seedy Canadian club One Eyed Jacks:

Little did we know, One Eyed Jacks was not the first watering hole where Olkewicz stirred up trouble. It turns out that he made a trip to bar in Boston nearly a decade earlier and shook up the status quo. There, he encountered Cheers regular Norm Peterson (George Wendt), an old buddy from the high school wrestling team.

In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Laura Palmer was the "Muffin," and in this second season Cheers episode, Olkewicz (as Wally Bodell) revealed Norm's infamous "M-"nickname: "Moonglow." He then made unwanted advances on Norm's wife Vera, and ultimately, in one of the silliest fight scenes ever filmed filmed, succumbed to the real Great Wendt on the floor of Cheers.

One has to wonder, was this the point where Olkewicz lost his mind? After being rebuffed by Vera and defeated by Norm, did he assume Wendt's identity and then throw himself into a world of drinking, drugs, and dangerous women? I really don't know--I haven't seen his Mr. Belvedere episode yet.

AKA - Safe for Fatties

Cheap Halloween Costumes: Friday the 13th

Screwdriver + Cherry Flavored Urinal Screen = Jason Voorhees

When Animals Attack Fashion

Do Do Use Double Positives

I don't don't know about you, but doesn't this not seem like the least worst shipping label Staples hasn't never not sold?

 

FuckYouTube?

I really can't wait to find out why this happened.

Advanced Minimally Invasive Surgery

Amputation was last considered minimally invasive in the 1800s, so I think it's time for a new mascot.