you scream-a, i scream-a

Summer 2008 was a real fine time. But it’s over. Here’s a brief summary of what made mine so summery: weekly tubing trips on multiple rivers (rain or shine), conquering amusement parks on two coasts, Blue Hole, Krause Springs, Barton Springs, fireworks, Super Soakers, rope swings, using water guns to put out fires started by artillery shells, et cetera, et cetera.

Robert sums it up well here.

Moving on. Texas Monthly just came out with their rundown of the top 25 swimming holes in Texas. Without consulting me. The list is polluted with poor judgement. Let’s pick it apart. Here’s the short version:

1. Barton Springs (the crowd favorite)
2. Blue Hole (the rope swing ultimate)
3. Brinks Crossing –
4. Balmorhea State Park –
5. Hamilton Pool (pretty to look at, but there’s no where to sit/not worth the drive)
6. Garner State Park –
7. Schlitterbahn West (compared to Hurricane Harbor, I guess it could qualify as a swimming hole)
8. Deep Eddy Pool (borrrring, except for the bratty children)
9. Medina River –
10. Fort Clark Springs –
11. Krause Springs (should rank #3, has camping, a waterfall, a rope swing, a pool, and pretty.)
12. Ratcliff Lake Recreation Area –
13. City Tube Chute (the concrete tube chute leading into the Comal river? not a swimming hole.)
14. Lake Raven –
15. Utopia City Park (never been, but love the name)
16. Burger’s Lake (decent)
17. The Quince –
18. The Slab –
19. Cypress Bend Park –
20. Lake Fryer at Wolf Creek Park –
21. Rio Vista Park –
22. Hunt Crossing –
23. Village Creek State Park –
24. Blanco State Park –
25. Hancock Springs Pool –

You can find the long version here.

So I’ve only been to about half of these. My major beef is the inclusion of Schlitterbahn West. Come on– that’s just controversial. Stop provoking me Texas Monthly. And Deep Eddy over Krause Springs? Laughable. Krause wins that showdown any day, any time, no question. Deep Eddy Pool? What a snooze. But there is one close call. #1 Barton Springs vs. #2 Blue Hole. I love them both, but Blue Hole should be #1. What does it have that Barton Springs doesn’t? Two words: Tarzan style rope swings.

You can even hear the rope swinger say “yeah baby” under his breath, just like Tarzan. In fact, this swing is so jumanji, it requires a second rope to tow it up to the launch branch. Kind of like how the space shuttle requires those disposable booster rockets to get it into outer space. See:

We’ve all belly flopped before, but have you ever seen a back flop? Only at Blue Hole:

And then there were these young pups, the ring swing jocks. The ring swing was only graspable at it’s apex, and you still had to run and jump to catch it. And time it all just right. Kind of Olympic. Most of these youngsters never even got wet. They’d just swing out over the water, then land back on land. See:

These locals had also developed a whole language to describe the ring swing’s behavior. For example, a hard to grab swing was “a nasty”. “Outside” and “inside” were used to indicate the swing’s distance from a nearby tree hazard. Doing a cannonball beneath a dry swinger was called a “car wash”. Precious talk like that.

Now. Another problem I have with TM, is that almost all of these swimming holes are in and around Austin. Their list should be called the “top 25 swimming holes in CENTRAL Texas”. Because I hear there are some amazing hot springs out West.

Now. You could argue that Blue Hole doesn’t have a springboard like Barton Springs. Here is where the contest becomes a matter of taste. Rope swings or spring boards? Blue Hole or Barton Springs? Which do you prefer? It’s a cake vs. pie issue.

And in case you were wondering, you CAN have a pizza delivered to Blue Hole. I saw someone do it. I also saw some girl in a bikini cuddling with her pet snake. I don’t know which was better, the snake or the pizza.

V-MAIL PARTY:

Tags: barton springs, blue hole, deep eddy pool is boring, hamilton pool, krause springs, rope swings, summer fun, texas monthly makes mistakes, texas monthly top 25 swimming holes, texas swimming holes

Please send it to:

Attn: Public Relations

1211 E. 52nd St. #1

Austin, TX 78723

(Thanks to Caitlin for the idea.)

Decorate the envelope too.  I want to brighten the mail man’s day.  The first 50 letter writers will receive a prize, and I’ll post my favorite right here, so don’t forget to include a return address. Contest ends August 30, 2009.

Tags: address, fan mail, optimism

And in defense of not doing it:

Tags: not writing

Robert and I have a plan.  His idea.  It’s like a twist on Found Magazine?  Like Selected Shorts with anonymous content + video?  I don’t know.  We’ll see.  Here is a very rough sketch, which I’m only posting to remind him that we need to get after it.  Rated PG for 90’s era profanity.

Tags: found magazine, selected shorts

Here’s a leftover from a Philadelphia trip back in June.  We spent all day at Valley Forge National Park, chasing deer through waist high weeds, George Washington style.  When we got home, Keaton made this discovery:

Scene of the attack. You can barely make out a deer on the horizon, escaping our George Washington impersonations.

Tags: the weeds, valley forge national park

Here is, like, a three-year old recording of, like, someone explaining, like, what constitutes fun.  Used without permission, but WITH, like, good intentions.  The world needs to know what, and what isn’t, considered fun by someone who knew.

Tags: fun, what fun is not, what is fun

Though I’ve never used it out of necessity, slydial allows you to leave someone a voicemail without their phone ever actually ringing.  Where was this when I needed it like a year ago?  Here are some of the sinister “slydial situations” advertised on their site:

Great NYT review here.

Tags: deceit, slydial, voicemail

Satirical maps of WWI:

More here.

Tags: maps, satirical maps, WWI

First off, a word of caution for those of you thinking about buying/consuming black tea in bulk: baby steps. If infused in excess, it can lead to the irregular heartbeat I’m currently enduring.

Now. Inspired by Olympic fever, I paid a visit to the IRS this morning. Somebody has to pay for those bronze medals. I’ve decided to memorialize the agony of the experience here, so that I may never again make the same Turbo Tax mistakes that led me to a strip mall at 825 Rundberg Lane.

See, after spending two hours in the IRS phone tree last week, a robot revealed that I was paying taxes for 2008 in advance, instead of what was owed for 2007, resulting in hefty penalties (stiff fines). Unable to finish this by phone, I had to visit the local IRS office in person.  As you’ll see, I treated it like a field trip.

Austin’s IRS office is neighbored by a Dollar General, which seemed appropriate upon my exit.

The office opens at 8:30 a.m., so I showed up at 8:45 expecting to sail in while the civil servants were still fresh. But in light of my recent losing streak, the line out the door wasn’t a huge shocker.  It was like waiting in line for a roller coaster ride of boredom and disappointment.

A security guard ushered me in before the sun broke through the clouds, so that was nice.

Once inside, I took a number and read some of their literature in the waiting area.

The landscape was about what you’d expect. Florescent lights, cubicles, total bleakness.

Digital queues hung overhead like thought bubbles (too flowery?):

Once I saw several “no cameras” signs, I felt the urge to engineer a “Fox 7 On Your Side” style undercover exposé. But my phone doesn’t do video. And there wasn’t anything to uncover, since the cruelty of the IRS is already world famous.

After a half hour, my number was called over the loudspeaker, and I reported to cubicle ten, slid open the door, and looked the man in the eye. In this case, the taxman was actually a taxwoman, who was nice enough, except that she was bug-eyed.  And for reasons unknown, whenever I encounter a bug-eyed person, I become bug-eyed too.  So eye contact was difficult to impossible.  Just out of the gate, and I was already rattled.

I tried to sustain a sympathetic, cooperative air. Because I realize “IRS agent” is just above “garbage man” on the most thankless jobs list.  Using this “I feel your pain” approach, I planned to talk my way out of the penalties that had been unjustly levied against me.  I once talked my way out of 800 dollars in library fines.  Just showing off.

But the tax lady was a talented actress.  She responded to my pedestrian tax questions as if speaking to a first grader.  Unacceptable.  So in my best adult man voice, I made my case.  My taxes were paid on time, but for the wrong year.  It was an accident, for which Turbo Tax was to blame.  Very simple, very easy to fix, very easy to wave the unfair fines.  Couldn’t she see that? After lots of gratuitous-looking keystrokes on her calculator, no.  She couldn’t see.  Had it been anybody else, I might have appealed her decision, but by then I just wanted to get away from her terrifying eyeballs.

The whole fiasco felt like being sent to the principal’s office for an offense you didn’t commit, then getting detention, despite your pristine academic record, no history of misbehavior, and a legitimate argument in your defense.  “It wasn’t me, it was Turbo Tax”.  I was punished for a crime I didn’t commit. Never again. I’m going to learn taxes inside and out, so that I win for 2008.  Or maybe I’ll shake down the people at Turbo Tax.

And now, today’s VOICEMAIL CODA:

Tags: irs, taxes, turbo tax

Remember the great feeling you had after experiencing your favorite song/movie/yard art for the first time? Can you remember it, the WOW factor? If this video doesn’t make you say “OH HELL YES”, then I feel sorry for you. Consider it the latest installment of “Ideas I Should Have Had First”:

From the Food Party website:

Food Party is a (would-be) TV cooking show with a spicy saigon kitchen-witch as your hostess, a cast of unruly puppets as culinary advisors, and a cavalcade of hip-hop/sports world celebrities as surprise dinner guests. Shot on location in a technicolor cardboard kitchen, each episode will instruct you on how to prepare wild gourmet multi-course meals with ingredients you probably have on hand in your kitchen already, such as pretzel rods, cheese puffs, eggs, sugar, secret ingredients, and pizza. After all, you never know who might show up for dinner.

I love it. I love it. I want to marry it. I love it. I nominate myself for President of The Food Party Fan Club.  In fact, this is now the Food Party Fan Club blog.  FOOD PAAAAARTY!!!

Tags: food party, i love food party, i want to marry food party, thu tran

Ever since I dunked my camera in the Comal, I’ve been reduced to fooling around with Photo Booth.  Did you know it can take video?  I didn’t.  Watch the trial and error at work:

Tags: air guitar, apple, karaoke, photo booth, u2, vertigo

Lately, I’ve been taking boatloads of Summer Fun pics.  And I’ve discovered a new (to me) favorite trick I like to call “videoing”.  It’s when you pretend to take a photo of friends, but you’re actually taking video while fumbling with the camera and repeating “hold it”.  Your friends will look ridiculous trying to remain cross-eyed for 30 seconds.  Let’s look at the first time I fell prey to the trick:

We look pretty dumb, right?  That day I instituted the 5 second rule: never hold a pose for more than 5 seconds, or you risk looking ridiculous.  And I don’t know about ya’ll, but a man in my position can not afford to be made to look ridiculous.  Now watch Robert fooling Caitlin:

Pretty fun, right?  Now I get Robert:

Another of Caitlin, an easy target:

So you get the idea. Now get out there and start making people look dumb.

Now.  As promised, your Moment of Voicemail (still working on a name):

Tags: digital camera, pranks, videoing

PROLOGUE: After you read this post, you’ll never want to leave me a voicemail again.  But since text messaging has largely replaced voicemails anyway, it shouldn’t be much of a loss.

SO.  I love technology.  In high school, I sat in the library drooling over the “What’s New” section of Popular Science.  I spent the equivalent of a month’s rent on a mini disc player before I could drive.  And I had one of those primitve mp3 players that could only hold like two hours of music.  At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I’ve always been what they call an early adopter.

Instead of Popular Science, I now keep up by reading Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch, and various other gizmo blogs.  But my favorite, and probably the most accessible and funny tech-y blog, belongs to David Pogue, New York Times Technology columnist. And a while back he wrote about a new voicemail service called YouMail, which he explains here:

FREE FUN YouMail, also in beta testing, is also dissatisfied with traditional voice mail. Its solution, though, is a complete surgical replacement of your carrier’s voice mail system. When you sign up at youmail.com, you’re instructed to reprogram your cellphone by typing in a series of codes. When it’s over, YouMail is your voice-mail service — not your cell carrier.

Why bother? First, because you can record a separate greeting for everyone you know. Your boss will hear you say: “This is Casey Robin, systems manager at Globodyne Technology. I’ll get back to you promptly. After all — your business is our business.”

Your love interest, however, will hear: “Hey there, huggalump. Miss you. Leave me a massage.”

(Hint: Don’t mix them up.)

You can even treat certain callers to something called Ditchmail. That’s when they hear, “This user is currently not accepting new messages. Goodbye!” (Disgruntled exes come to mind.)

For everyone else, you just record a generic greeting. You can also check your messages from the Web or any phone, save memorable ones to your computer, and forward messages to other people.

The Web site is still glitchy — for starters, a fix for Macs is in the works — and switching back to your old voice mail if you don’t care for YouMail isn’t exactly a one-click operation. But over all, YouMail is fun, and it has real uses; for example, you can let your friends know that you’re away on vacation, but not people who don’t need to know.

YouMail, too, is free during its testing phase; after the new year, it will be free if you’re willing to endure ads, and a few dollars a month otherwise. Note that YouMail isn’t ideal if you have Sprint, which charges you for “conditional forwarding” — a feature that YouMail requires.

Frankly, it is worth a few dollars to escape the minutes-burning, recorded instructions of cellular voice mail systems: “To leave a message, speak at the tone. When you’re finished, you may hang up … .”

You can read the whole thing here.

So I’ve been having fun with YouMail for a couple years now.  They consistently roll out new features.  Their latest, and by many votes creepiest, innovation is called Smart Greeting, which automatically greets callers with their own name, like this, “Hello John, Josh can’t get to the phone. Please leave a message after the tone.”  Smart Greeting does this by reading whatever is on the caller id.  Apparently, the voice of the robot is a creepy woman.  I’ve never actually heard it.  But I have saved lots of responses to the robotic voicemail woman.  Girls seem to hate it, guys seem to like it.  Here are the robot woman haters:

***WARNING: IF PROFANITY ISN’T YOUR THING, DO NOT LISTEN***

“get rid of it”

“i hate that woman saying my name”

“freakiest thing ever”

“goddd”

And the robot woman lovers:

“pretty neat”

“love it”

SO.  I got curious.  I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.  I called myself.  Here is a poor recording of what robot voicemail lady sounds like:

BUT WHAT DOES THE INTERNET THINK?  I want some feedback.

Moving on.  In the pre-Smart Greeting days, I created customized greetings for different callers.  These recordings were usually of me pretending to answer the phone, and then of course, the caller would hear the beep and be completely confused.  Here are some of those responses:

“change that you mail greeting”

“dude”

“like a cobra”

“you son of a bitch”

“hilarious”

“still going bowling?”

“i actually thought that was you”

“hahaha”

AND NOW, the mother of them all.  Listen closely to the ending.

“dead to me”

Tons more where those came from.  Maybe I’ll roll out a new one at the end of each post, like The Daily Show’s “Moment of Zen”.  For fun.  Stuff like this:

ADDENDUM: YouMail likes me.

Tags: davidpogue, voicemail, voicemail greetings, youmail

Goodbye, modicum of productivity.  Hello, time suck.

Tags: iphone, iphone app, itunes, scrabble

LINK

LINK

Tags: tentacles

Back in November, I took this photo of Caitlin while swimming:

Since then, it has become my most popular flickr photo, with over 500 views.  Wait, whaaat?  How is Caitlin’s armpit more popular than my classic photo of local bum posing with Wayne Coyne, singer for The Flaming Lips? Then her armpit received the following comment, since deleted by the author, which I found preserved in the form of a Facebook comment I left Caitlin:

i got the following flickr message today, in regard to your popular armpit photo:
“Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Armpit Forever, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.”
what do you think?

“Armpit”, one of my tags for the photo, seemed to be attracting armpit enthusiasts. Another user “favorited” the photo. If you click on this user’s “other favorites” you’ll find a thumbnail version of Caitlin’s armpit, surrounded by a sea of pornography thumbnails. If this wasn’t a family blog, I’d post the NSFW screen shot I took.

So we had an idea. Why not capitalize on Caitlin’s armpit’s popularity? We’re thinking a for-profit website, starring Caitlin’s underarms in various costumes/poses/locales–something to put her through art history school. Here’s a free preview:

Flickr photo set here. Now accepting submissions for possible domain names.

Tags: armpit, armpit forever, flickr, flickr pornography

My July Fourth Two Thousand Eight had it all. But since I don’t want to make anybody jealous, I’ll only list everything I can remember:

*Starting the day off by doing a five person cannonball into the tiny pool at Krause Springs, sending small children off on tidal waves. Our not-so-secret weapon was Lucius, who can’t be missed in the center of this photo.

*Going to a BBQ place with it’s own fireworks stand, which accepted credit cards.

*Tim firing an artillery shell in the middle of North Loop, which amazingly landed in the only brush pile in a 5 block radius. Which then caught fire. Which I then put out with my brand new Super Soaker Sneak Attack.

*Indoor water gunfire.

*Garrett repeatedly saying “Okay. Okay. No more fireworks inside the house”, then setting off another black cat.

*Hand held bottle rocket launches.

*Getting ambushed by EVERYONE/repeatedly running for my life. The holes burned into the back of my shirt are evidence that I wasn’t always fast enough. You can’t run from point blank.

HOLD ON. Can’t go on. Not doing the experience justice. Words can’t replace this kind of rocket red glare.

SO. Thanks for the burns memories:

ADDENDUM: I’ve decided to violate blogger etiquette by jacking Sarah’s videos from that night and posting them here. View them in their proper context here.

Threeway Roman Candle Battle from poshdeluxe on Vimeo.

Roman Candle Battle from poshdeluxe on Vimeo.

Epic Roman Candle Battle from poshdeluxe on Vimeo.

Power Tower from poshdeluxe on Vimeo.

Best Firework of the Night from poshdeluxe on Vimeo.

Tags: bottle rockets, fireworks, hootin and shootin, independence day, living it up, roman candles

I’m posting this just to scoop micaelklok, who has covered corporate logo makeovers here and here.

Review of the new Walmart logo here.

Tags: corporate logo, micaelklok, Walmart

For those of you who haven’t already heard my man babies speech, I blogged about it for the Chronicle here.  Flash mob/Improv Everwhere talk here.

Tags: austin chronicle, flash mob, improv everywhere, man babies

Behold, Charlton Heston’s gun bunker:

Check out the other pictures, including a two ton blast door guarding the entrance, over at my new favorite website, Glock Talk.

This photo has inspired me to create, if not an underground bunker, then a hidden water gun closet in my own home.  First, I need to talk this fellow into selling me his collection:

But since this plastic arsenal likely validates the owner’s existence, I may have to start from scratch.  For those of you not regularly checking my Amazon wish list, the Super Soaker Bottle Shot would be my first purchase.  Just look at it:

The website’s description has me sold:

“Make almost any plastic bottle (not included) your water supply! No more trips to the hose for a recharge – fill as many plastic bottles as you can carry with clean, clear tap water. Attach bottles (up to two liters!) to the blaster and launch a soaking blast to targets up to 20 feet away with every pump! It’s non-stop soaking fun, anytime, anywhere!”

Does anyone remember that game of Assassination from a few Summers ago?  The Chronicle covered it here.  Anybody want to get something like that going, so that I can justify buying the Bottle Shot?  I’m too lazy to organize it myself.

ALSO SEE: Gizmodo’s Ultimate Water Gun Battlemodo Royal

Tags: assassination, charlton heston, gun bunker, Super Soaker, water gun, water gun closet, water gun collection