David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 186

This Post Is Just So I Can Find This Cartoon Easily From Now On

I do a lot of different posts for a lot of different reasons. Most of the time, I’m at least trying to be interesting for the people reading. However, this post is just so I can easily find this spoof of the overly common Footprints image.

You know the one, someone asking Jesus about footprints in the sand, how usually there were two sets but sometimes only one (hint: spots where Jesus carried). I see a lot of spoofs on these (the sand people walk single file to hide their numbers), but this is by far the best:

I want to have it handy so I can refer to it often.

Now I’m Jim Fowler Too Just Like John Price

I found myself thinking about John Price’s book Daddy Long Legs at work this morning. Specifically, I found myself thinking about the essay “Praying Mantis, or How I Became Jim Fowler” from that book as I became Jim Fowler (of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom fame) too.

The reason I was thinking about this was that I helped out a praying mantis. The “Praying Mantis, or How I Became Jim Fowler” involves Price rescuing a praying mantis from the window of a Chinese buffet restaurant at the insistence of his son.

Though I have no son to insist upon mantis rescue, I happened to notice a praying mantis on the granite floor of my office building lobby on the way up to work. I had no idea how it got in, or what it was even doing in downtown Denver, but I was pretty sure it was going to get squished pretty quickly there. I noticed it, but I was betting not everyone would. At the very least, I was sure that the floor of a highly trafficked office building held nothing of value for the mantis.

So, I got a notepad from security, scooped it up onto the notebook, and set it on one of the planters outside.

I wasn’t squeamish about touching it, but I was betting that mantis was probably relatively fragile. I didn’t want to just grab him and risk ripping it up.

Now, I probably didn’t help out the mantis as much as Price. After all, I just took the mantis to a planter outside. Price had taken his mantis to his acreage, where it would likely be as safe as a mantis can be. The middle of downtown Denver isn’t optimal for a mantis. However, I had no wooded area to take the mantis too. That planter outside had to at least be safer than the lobby floor inside.

Now we just have to hope for the best for the mantis.

So I’m On Twitter Now

So, I’m on twitter now. Decided my first tweet would be the quote from The Instructions that sounds like it’s about Twitter but isn’t: “What else but a twit? Is not a twit one who twitters?” Used to repeat that whenever anyone asked me if I was on Twitter.

Come follow me and watch me try to figure out what the heck Twitter is for. @DavidSAtkinson_

I’ve Got One Less Story Acceptance For This Year Than I Previously Announced

Well, I’ve got one less short story acceptance for this year than I previously announced. I publicized a while back that my story “No Way to Run a Railroad” had been accepted to run in Inktrap Magazine unfortunately, I just got an email that the magazine will be closing. As such, my story won’t run.

Apparently, they just couldn’t keep up the magazine any more. The work had become more than was possible. I can definitely understand. Journals require a staggering amount of time, and the people who run them still have to have lives. It sucks, but I wouldn’t dream of blaming them that my story won’t run. It’s cool that they really loved it, even if they won’t be able to publish it.

I’m sure it’ll be okay anyway. The fact they loved it means someone else will love it to. It’s just time to start looking around at where might be a good home for it since Inktrap Magazine is closing up shop.

The New Google Logo Changes EVERYTHING!

I don’t know if you’ve seen, but Google has changed it’s logo. Here’s a pic of the old and the new:

See it? The font is just slightly different, as well as the shadow. This changes EVERYTHING!

I mean, I already use Google as my primary search engine. Now I want to use them for everything. I want to use them as a coffee substitute. I want to use them to delaminate monkeys. I want to use them to build a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of Belgian waffles.

EVERYTHING!!!!!

I want to just start throwing piles of money at them. I want to bear their children. I want to vote them for president, as well as several deity positions.

EVERYTHING!!!!!

This is a total game changer, totally. There’s no way that I’m being facetious because the new and old logos look so similar to me that I think the change is largely pointless. I wonder how much money they spent on this.

Am I The Only One Who Thought The Mountain Had Already Been Officially Renamed Denali?

I was kind of surprised to hear that . I wasn’t surprised that the White House would do this. What surprised me was that I thought it had been done a long time ago.

I mean, I hear people refer to Denali from time to time. I’m trying to remember the last time I heard someone reference Mount McKinley. The usage seemed pretty much universal for anyone I ever heard refer to the mountain, and I remember most people I heard talking not like the fact that the government had once renamed and already named mountain. As such, I thought the name had been officially changed long ago.

It hadn’t. Who knew?

Apparently, most people other than me must have known that the name hadn’t been officially changed a long time ago, as there are quite a number of people pleased with the change and a few people upset about it. I’m not entirely sure why some people are miffed though. Perhaps there are some diehard McKinley fans still out there. It’s hard to say.

We’ll see if this has any big effects. Frankly, I can’t imagine it would since so many were already calling it Denali anyway.

Some Denver Restaurants Are Too Popular To Frequent

Denver is a really hot city right now. The population is booming. That can be a good thing, but it can be bad as well. There are some good places to eat here, but some of them can get so popular that one might as well not go. Sometimes it’s because you just can’t get in. Other times it impacts quality. Devil’s Food Bakery & Cookery is a perfect example.

My wife and I went there for Sunday brunch recently. We’ve been before and like it a great deal. The food is well made, made using good food, and is definitely a chef type creation as opposed to just using cooks. We knew it was going to be crowded and that the crowd would impact service. Still, I think the crowd has gotten to the point that quality was impacted and we might not eat there again. It just isn’t working.

For example, my wife got chicken and waffles and I got a pancake as part of our order. It took a long time to be seated and to get food, but that was all cool. We expected that. What I didn’t expect was that the crowds impacted the service to the point that the gravy on my wife’s waffles had turned them completely soggy and my pancake was ice cold. Due to the crowds, they just couldn’t get the food to us in a timely enough fashion that it was still good.

I still ate my pancake, but it wasn’t very good. My wife skipped the waffles entirely.

Do I think they did something wrong? No. It was just that crowded and they couldn’t help it. However, the time it took between cooking and when they could get the food to us really ruined those items of the meal. It just isn’t worth going when those are the circumstances. It’s no good trying for food that good when the situation makes it so that the food isn’t as good any more.

It isn’t their fault, but it just isn’t worth it. I would rather have gotten a breakfast sandwich at McDonald’s.

What Kind Of Animated Burger Gif Did I Find?

I found myself wondering what a google images search for “burger animated gif” would turn up. It’s not like burgers are animated. Would it be time lapse of a rotting burger? Would it be a dancing burger? I decided to check and see what the first result was that struck me as interesting.

Yup, it’s an animated gif of a cat chasing a burger.

My Wife Is Clever

My wife is clever. Recently, we decided to visit a museum in NYC. We showed up, and saw an endless line to buy tickets. It was a crowded museum. There were even different queues to wait in to get in depending on when your ticket was for. However, the queues to get in were empty. Only the line to buy tickets was long. It looked like an hour at least.

“I wonder if they sell tickets on their web site,” my wife commented. She pulled out her phone and checked. Moments later, we’d bought tickets. All we had to do was wait the minute or two before they showed up in her email. I don’t know what time set they were supposed to be for, but when we went up to a guard to ask which queue to wait in based on the tickets we had, he waved us right inside the museum.

I think some of the same people were still waiting in line to buy tickets by the time we had explored the entire museum and left. I’m really grateful we didn’t try to buy tickets on site.

My wife is clever.

Subway Wait More A Temperature Concern Than A Time One

I would think that I would have been most concerned about travel time on the subway in the recent trip the wife and I took to NYC. After all, the longer the subway takes to arrive, the longer it takes us to travel where we were going. However, though I was concerned about how long it was taking subways to arrive, temperature was a bigger concern.

To explain, NYC was pretty warm while we were there. The subways are air conditioned. The subway stations are not. Thus, it could get pretty stifling while waiting for the subway. The longer the subway took to arrive, the more stifling it became.

Honestly, some times I didn’t even care about how long it was going to take me to get where I was going. I just wanted to get back into the air conditioning. I almost started getting on other subways, ones going other places.

It was hot.

Maybe they do that on purpose. You’re so grateful to get into the cool once the subway arrives that you completely forget about any subway delays.

I bet that’s a strategy.