The Internet Slacker

Materials you’ll need:

• Scissors,
• Glue,
• Tinfoil,
• Pencils (@ 75 – 100),
• Home Smoke Alarms (@ 3,279),
• Play-Doh ™ brand play-dough,
• One (1) Lead Vest “borrowed” from a hospital’s X-Ray unit or your dentist.

Step One: Cut the tinfoil sheets into thin, long rectangles about one (1) centimetres wide, by (8) centimetres long. Prepare about four dozen or so.

Step Two: Remove the wood coverings of the pencils and grind the graphite rods by hand or with a small coffee grinder. Grind into fine particles.

Step Three: Combine the graphite powder with the Play-Doh ™. By weight, add 3 parts graphite to 1 part Play-Doh ™.

Step Four: Shape the graphite dough into small two centimetre sized cubes. Wrap a tinfoil rectangle around each. Make around forty-eight (48) cubes.

Step Five: Locate and remove the tiny amount of radioactive Americium from your approximately three thousand two hundred and seventy-nine (3, 279) smoke alarms.

(Helpful Hint: Large apartment buildings are often the best locations to find smoke alarms. Merely sneak into such buildings and, with a broom handle, run down the hallways while knocking the alarms off the ceilings. If anyone asks what you’re doing, inform them you are the fire alarm inspector and that you forgot your ladder.)

Step Six: Combine the Americium bits into a sphere approximately the size of a baseball. Remember to wear the lead vest you acquired from the health service you chose to grossly abuse.

(Helpful Hint: To store your Americium ball in between experiments, wrap the lead vest around the sphere and place it in your bathtub. Then find a new place where you can bathe.)

Caution! Improper storage of the radioactive sphere may result in:

• House pets experiencing spontaneous combustion.
• Large sores appearing on your room-mate who inadvertently took a long shower in your now-radioactive bathtub.
• Emergence of super-powers, if by “super-powers” we mean “super-melanoma”.

Step Seven: Stack the graphite & Play-Dough ™ cubes, each wrapped in tinfoil, around the ball of radioactive Americium in a square pattern. Wrap the top of this large cube with a sheet of tinfoil.

Step Eight: If properly constructed, the radiation from the Americium sphere will bounce off the sides of the graphite-Play-Doh cubes stacked around it and flow upwards through the thin sheet of tin foil. The top of the cube will grow hot. Very hot. Very, very hot. Congratulations! You’ve just made your first nuclear reactor!

What You Can Do With Your Home-Made Nuclear Reactor:

• Use the hot top of your reactor as an oven element to cook food in a frying pan, on a grill, or a wok. Now you can enjoy bacon that only took you .003 of a second to cook!
• In the winter, your nuclear reactor will heat your home to a cheery 113 degree Celsius!
• The radiation created by your home nuclear reactor is perfect to sterilize cookware of all germs. Other house-hold items you can sterilize are towels, pets, and the mailman.

How to Turn Your Home-Made Nuclear Reactor into a Thermonuclear Bomb to Get Rid of Unwanted Neighbours and, Hell, the Whole Neighbourhood:

• Place your home-made nuclear reactor in your microwave.
• Set microwave to “High” and the timer for five minutes. Hit start button on microwave.
• Run.

Next Week’s Home Project: Turning a Thousand Cheap Laser Key Pointers into a Mega-Laser Capable of Stunning Airplane Pilots at 30,000 Feet!

“Pull Me”

I want to hold you,

I want to kiss you,

I want to know you,

But you don’t know me.

Girl, I pursue you,

Attracted to you,

Distracted by you,

My soul isn’t free.

Well, here I go again.

Back on the circle that brings me back to you,

Well, here’s a show we can

Make of the spectacle of me chasing you.

Oh baby, you got my soul in your hands,

Oh lady, I give in to all your demands,

Pretty girl, I really just can’t understand,

The way you pull me,

Pull me without your hands.

(chorus)

Oh baby pull me,

Pull me pull me pull me pull me.

Oh gracious lady,

Just pull me pull me pull me pull me.

I will not struggle,

When you pull me pull me pull me pull me,

I won’t be trouble,

If you’ll just pull me pull me pull me.

(end chorus)

I want to hold you,

(While you pull, pull, pull onto me)

I want to kiss you,

(When I push, push, push into you)

I want to know you,

(Oh most, most, most biblically)

But you won’t know me.

(‘Til you pull pull pull onto me)

Girl, I pursue you,

(And it’s easy when you’re pulling me)

Attracted to you,

(I know you won’t give it up easily)

Distracted by you,

(But it’s only you that I can see)

And my soul just isn’t…

My soul isn’t free.

(chorus x2)

A high-pitched voice comes from the back of the living room. Strom can’t see what the hell it is but he’s guessing Mannering can because all of a sudden his partner is turning to flee, his skin complexion gone white. Strom wants to make a Michael Jackson joke at this point but he’s positive Mannering wouldn’t get the reference.

“I WANT TO LIVE!” yells a high-pitched child’s voice from the darkness.

“JESUS MERCY!” yells Mannering.

A MicroApple brand bubblechip media player, about the size of a large book, sails past Mannering’s head and smashes against the wall. Stromb winces. Damn, those things are expensive.

Continue reading →

“Knocking on the front door is a good start,” he tells his wide-eyed partner. Strom motions Mannering to get the hell out of the van and follow him. The house itself doesn’t stand out from the surrounding neighborhood: it has an unkempt lawn, soot from various city emissions lightly coating its plastic exterior siding, cracked doorbell button, all the accoutrements of low income housing from the decades-past 20th century.

Since Strom is sure the buzzer is broken, he knocks on the door with more-than-polite force.

Mannering catches up to him. “You sure knocking is a good idea?”

“Quiet. Wait.”

A full minute passes and Strom only has to hush his naive partner once more; no response comes from another hard knocking. “Okay,” he tells Mannering. “The biological inhabitants are either dead or incapacitated. Let’s – ”

“What?!?” Mannering looks dismayed. “How do you know that?!?”

“Listen to me closely, young Padawan – ”

“Padawhat?”

Strom almost sighs again, stops himself, and shakes his head. Fucking kids these days. “Just open your goddamn eardrums and stop interrupting me. The call to this house was placed by one of the residents. The wife, it’s a het-couple, I think. Anyways, from my unjustifiably long years on this godforsaken job, I’ve learned in these situations that if the original complainants don’t answer a loud authoritative knock, there’s usually a very good reason, like being dead or bleeding all over the place which generally precludes the ability to answer their door. Understand?”

Mannering nods a fast, nervous affirmative. Strom is starting to get annoyed at his rookie partner’s eyes bugging out of his head. Mannering is beginning to look like a frightened security guard drawn in anime style. “So what do we do now?”

“We now have justifiable cause to enter the domicile.” Strom removes a one-time-use-only door override passcard from one of the many pockets on his black jumpsuit. The little orange and red plastic beauties can open almost any residential-level door but will also alert the corporation to the fact you’re using it… all to save their legal ass, of course. Opening someone’s locked entranceway after they called the corp for help pretty well guarantees legal protection from lawsuits so Strom isn’t sweating it.

The thick plastic door unlocks and Strom pushes it open. Of course everything is dark as Satan’s anus inside. It’s a guarantee on domestic calls that you won’t be able to see shit inside the house wherein great danger lurks to stab you in the ass with a handy kitchen butcher knife.

“You first”, Strom pushes Mannering in front of him . The young man begins to protest; in fact, he gets out a startled, “But I – ” and then Mannering is inside the house.

“Good job,” Strom says. “Look around, what do you see?”

Mannering’s only a few feet inside the place, he’s now a dark figure lit only by the blue flickering of flourescent streetlights coming in from the open entranceway. “Dark small hallway, even darker living room – AHHHHHH!!!”

“What? WHAT?!?” Strom yells.

(Part Four to Follow)

This is a sculpture of Rob Ford, made out of butter. Yes, butter. Ironic thing is, Ford’s actual fat content is higher than the statue.

Let’s get one thing straight: I never liked “Mayor” Rob Ford. I have a “sense” about people, a strong ability to feel the energies that make up the personality of the person. And the first moment I saw Ford, I knew the city of Toronto was in for a rough ride.

In fact, the first time I saw Rob Ford on TV, and listened to him babble in a self-serving manner, I turned to my friend Scooter and said, “I bet you, in a year or so, Ford’s going to be raising a lot of controversy about his actions.” And I was right.

(As an aside, my ability to predict future events unsettles me at times. I’ll write about a matter, or speak about it with a friend, and make a prediction that more often than not comes true. The biggest, most correct prediction I’ve made was when I told Scooter in 1999, “I think, in the next few years, the United States will suffer a very destructive act by terrorists.”)

Anyways, back to the now-disgraced Rob Ford. I wish I could run for Mayor, because I’d be everything Rob Ford ISN’T (except possibly the weight). I’d do my best to serve the public, such as really tackling the homeless problem in Toronto, for one example. And I’d go to all the yearly celebrations in Toronto – the Pride March, Caribanna, what have you – I’d go to them all to show my support (and grab free eats, possibly) for all the various cultures in our great city.

And that’s just the proverbial, “tip of the iceberg” of the goals I’d do my best to fulfill as Mayor. But we all know that’s never gonna happen. I’m just happy to know, compared to the national embarrassment Rob Ford, I’d be a great mayor. But then again, if you compare anybody with Ford, they’d be a great mayor. So vote for me, or get in the election race yourself, because all these so-called learned “politicians” like Ford are serving only themselves while the poor and homeless starve.

It’s funny that they say anyone can run for Mayor of Toronto, when the reality is you’d have to lay down the major bucks just to have your name on the ballot. Democracy in action, eh?

Well, I’ve rambled enough. Good-bye, ex-Mayor Rob “What’s in it for me?” Ford. You were a horrible embarrassment for Toronto, and the only good thing you can do for us now is leave City Hall and go back to coaching high school football, the only job in which you were semi-competent. By the way, Ford, all those youths you coach in football hate you, too.

Please bear with me as I aggregate all my schtuff onto this heah WordPress site! My articles are on the right, and I’ll be adding links, etc, in the next few days. Oh dear God the excitement! Yes.