Todd Stadler's blog

Words, words, words

I woke up yesterday and had a very clear memory of my dream, which involved flying in a passenger jet at a very low altitude through the main courtyard of Rice University, and then climbing very steeply once we got to the end. During this rapid ascent, the writer for the Portland Mercury was commenting on the plane's abilities, and she did so using the word "scutive".

So it was that when I woke up, I was curious whether "scutive" was a real word. In the dream, it was used to mean "unnecessarily cautious" — there were those in the aerospace industry, apparently, who thought the plane we were on was not capable of the steep ascent we were making.

I had no knowledge of the word, and so I was excited at the prospect that my brain had remembered some word it had heard once, but which had been lost to my conscious memory.

Sadly, upon thumbing through my beloved (if often ignored in this digital age) unabridged dictionary, I found that there was no such word as "scutive". And while Google has several pages of results for that seemingly made-up word, they all appear to be corruptions of words like "executive" or "consecutive" as mangled by optical character recognition software.

But there was a bright side. For, unlike Google, which only shows you what you're trying to find, my unabridged dictionary has the charming tendency to send me off on wild goose chases in which, en route to paging to one word, I find another word of interest.

In this way, while futilely trying to find "scutive" in the dictionary, I found the following fantastic words instead:

Usufruct: (noun) The right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured. (From Roman law; of more interest to me is the etymology, which obviously derives from the idea of using fruit.)

Tatterdemalion: 1 (noun) A person in tattered clothing; a shabby person. 2 (adjective) ragged; unkempt or dilapidated.

Futilitarian: (adjective) Believing that human hopes are vain, and human strivings unjustified. (Again, the humor is in the derivation.)

What's to be done about nuclear waste?

In an apparently serious discussion of whether it would be feasible to dispose of nuclear waste by firing it into the sun using a magnetic rail gun, I found the following series of comments to be very humorous for some reason:

Egnor: You ask why it wouldn't work? First of all, you speak of "magnetic rail guns" as if they're mature, well-developed technology. Have you ever seen one? That's because they don't exist, except as tiny prototypes. We haven't got any that shoot stuff into orbit, let alone at the Sun.

Kimble: If we already have tiny prototype railguns, then perhaps we just need enough of these? We could fire millions of tiny canisters.

Vernon: Tiny cannisters would be too small. At the high speed needed to make the cannisters leave the planet, they would burn up in the atmosphere, just like most small meteors do. Only large cannisters can have enough heat-shielding to protect their contents.

Kimble: Unless they don't need to leave the atmosphere — perhaps we could generate a tiny sun. It would orbit the earth at a height of fifty metres (far enough to clear the tops of small buildings).

I realize that I haven't contributed a lick of original content in posting that, but rather have only edited someone else's content by removing the less interesting comments to improve the flow.

Still, the content's from almost a decade ago, and I'd like to think I'm doing a service by bringing back some of the Web's retro content. Because we all know how hopping this blog is, and how very many of my minions I'm capable of sending out by sheer force of my recommendation.

And so I ask: why aren't we building tiny suns to deal with our nuclear waste problem?

Nephew Park

Do you remember Jurassic Park? The idea was that someone had perfected a technique of regenerating dinosaurs using bits of fossilized DNA. He wanted to create an island safari park where people could experience the dinosaurs up close, while of course protected from the various dangers inherent to them. And then everything went wrong and the velociraptors got out and people died and hey, that's a UNIX system.

I bring this up because Project Nephew similarly went horribly, horribly wrong. Except instead of velociraptors scurrying about, it was some sort of stomach virus. Not that the difference mattered much to those involved.

Project Nephew, for those not aware, is the name I gave to the visit from Rachel (Julia's sister) and David (her five-month-old son, my nephew). It was supposed to be a happy time. A time for cuddles and laughs. A time for us to teach David how to drink a real, Northwest-style IPA. You know, typical aunt-and-uncle stuff.

But the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men, they say, end up covered in vomit, desperately wishing to fall asleep. Something like that.

It all started on Tuesday, when Rachel fell ill. I felt sorry for her, of course, as this meant not only discomfort for her, but also the canceling of social engagements. At least Julia had the week off for spring break, so there was someone to comfort Rachel and take care of David.

In fact, Julia even offered Tuesday night to feed and change David when he woke up in the middle of the night, which I much appreciated, since I was still going to work the next morning. Or so I thought, he said with no small amount of foreshadowing.

Yes, foreshadowing. For several hours before David woke up to tell us he was hungry, Julia woke up to tell me she was ... not. She communicated this, not in her usual fashion of saying to me, "Todd, I'm not very hungry," but rather with a complex system of movements that involved her jumping over me, out of bed, and down the hall, quickly, to the bathroom. There were sounds involved, as well, but these will be left as an exercise for the reader.

"The bastard viruses got Julia, too!" I might have said in an overdramatization of the week's events, shaking my fist at the sky and vowing to kill every last one of them (the fact that they are technically not alive notwithstanding).

This left me in the unique position of being the only person in the house who was (1) not ill and (2) able to feed himself and others. Which meant that, mere hours after Julia woke me up to say she felt awful, David woke me up to tell me that he also felt lousy, but for entirely different reasons.

Fortunately, David's malaise was easily dealt with (or so I foreshadowingly thought), as all I had to do was make up a bottle of his formula and sit there with him in my arms while I thought about how professional parents probably know how to choose feeding positions that don't cause various body parts to hurt and/or fall asleep.

"There! Now, that wasn't so bad was it? I just might get used to this baby thing! Middle-of-the-night feedings aren't so bad! Boy, some parents really complain for nothing!" (Let the reader understand: this is highly complex foreshadowing.)

I was even so chipper that I felt up for changing David's diaper, which was clearly soaked. (Dear reader: are you expecting the foreshadowing's antecedent to appear here? You will be disappointed.) With Julia's help (as much as she was able to offer in her virus-addled state, lying on the hallway floor, nearly passed out — and yet such was my novicehood that she was still more knowledgeable than I), I eventually wrangled David out of his clothes and diaper, and into a nice, clean, notably lighter diaper.

"There! It was a little frustrating, but I did it! I changed a diaper! I was a little slaphappy from being tired, but David found it all rather humorous, and I laughed along with him."

Then Julia said something. "Did you say something?" I asked her. "No," she said, in a way that sounded like part of a very banal conversation — unless, of course, you had been predisposed to heavy amounts of foreshadowing and were very wary at this point of unreliable narrators.

"That's odd," I thought. "If that sound didn't come from Julia, then it must have come from David. More precisely ... David's diaper!"

Yes, the little stinker (and I use that phrase in its most literal sense) decided to poop in his pristine diaper mere seconds after I put it on him. My desire to lecture him on environmental issues, however, was overcome by a much greater emotion. Namely, fear. Fear of having to change a diaper ... in that way.

I mean, it was one thing to have changed a wet diaper. That's all well and good. Who hasn't dealt with someone else's urine at one time or another?

But poop. ... Poop. ... Poop?

(On an completely unrelated note, let's have a vocabulary quiz. Do you know a more common phrase for "non-productive emesis"? I do!)

As if the prospect of a poop-filled diaper wasn't daunting (read: nauseating) enough, a pre-changing inspection revealed that David had chosen to critique my previous diaper installation, noting that the slightly loose fashion in which I'd fastened the tabs made for a less than hermetic seal around his legs. I'll let you work out how he did that.

To make an excruciatingly drawn-out story merely unbearably long, I changed a poopy diaper, and some poopy pajamas, which certainly moves me well forward in the pantheon of human achievement, I should think. And all was settled and quiet, that night.

... Except that you forgot that I still had some leftover foreshadowing! Aha!

Yes, the next morning, I, the last healthy person standing, was knocked off my feet and onto the couch. Or the futon, or any horizontal surface not previously covered with a whimpering, flu-riddled human frame.

And there we remained for two days. Four people, unable to move — three due to overpowering illness, and one because he simply hadn't learned to propel himself in a meaningful sense. Yet. (No, ignore that, that foreshadowing still points to the future.)

And then, let's see. I got better. Sorry to cut the story off like that, but there's not a lot to say about two days of groaning and consuming little but water and rice and still, somehow, having to tend to a baby somehow unaware of his fellow humans' suffering.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention, Julia and I committed to a life of abstinence.

Just kidding. But man, do I have a lot more respect for parents. It's all (relatively) fun and games with the baby ... until the viruses (or the velociraptors) come for you.

My, uh ... horse

I kind of feel like the folks at Hasbro dropped the ball here.

Fig. A: My Little Ponies and their offspring/destroyer, Gargantuus

While walking through my local Fred Meyer the other day, I noticed My Little Ponies (at bottom in the photo) that were, well, not little. And, frankly, probably not ponies. I'll get to that.

(It's true that they also weren't even mine — strike three! — but I presume that the titular first-person pronoun refers to Mr. Hasbro, stemming from the fact that you don't technically purchase My Little Pony, you just consent to a long-term lease from the corporation, which retains all rights.)

Anyhow, as I understand it, the appeal of My Little Ponies lies in combing, say, Pinkie Pie's hair while thinking how nice it is to own a pony just like you've always wanted — especially one that is pink, has a pearlescent mane, and doesn't actually require feeding or cleaning up after and can be tossed in a bin when Mom tells you to clean up your room. Because it's, you know, diminuitive. Oh, and also presents very little danger of trampling you due to its very limited range, if any, of movement.

Again, as I understand it, one topic these toys are not created to encourage thinking about is reproduction. Specifically the very problematic reproduction so obviously suggested in the photo above.

Let me explain. Of course, it's always troublesome when a community of single-gendered, yet seemingly asexual creatures manages to create offspring. Is there an as-yet-unobserved My Little Stud? (I will preclude the possibility of budding out of hand because, frankly, I find it distasteful.)

Assuming that My Little Stallion does reside at the Hasbro factory, there is still the rather troubling size of these equine young. Even if we assume that My Little Dam gave birth to a baby exhibiting such gigantism, it is likely that that mother is no longer with us, perhaps long ago having been crushed under the weight of the amniotic sac from which her monstrous offspring emerged.

And even if she did manage to survive the the birthing process, the mother was almost certainly crushed by her baby when it learned to roll onto its back and, subsequently, onto its mom.

No, biological reasoning argues against these babies being those of My Little Ponies. Anything that, in its infancy, has a volume that I'd estimate to be a buttload greater than a commonly accepted meiminorequusulian volume will clearly not grow up to be My Little Pony!

It is instead likely that some sort of equine cuckoo species has deposited its young among My Little Ponies, tricking them into raising its infants until such time as the interloper young can turn on their caretakers and, indeed, the entire community of My Little Ponies.

In short, Pinkie Pie, this spells the end. Comb your mane, prance, and frolic. For tomorrow you die.

Old news: in-laws on the Web

Let's pretend that I use this blog to keep you updated on the daily — or, at least, weekly? monthly? — events in my life. What's happened lately, you ask?

Well, Julia's sister Kimb got married to a nice drummer named Joel. Never can go wrong marrying drummers, I always say. (Dear random Web acquaintance, did you know I'm a drummer? No? Please don't make me explain all my little in-jokes. It totally kills my flow.)

Julia and I had a good time visiting Houston, seeing both her and my parents, and, as always, having some tasty food. Not to mention getting to wear t-shirts in February, one of the few months when weather in Houston is reasonable.

But I know that you come to this blog for the hard-hitting Todd-centric news. I hear you cry, "All this fluff about your in-laws is nice, but what's the 'Todd' angle?"

Well, I made Joel and Kimb's wedding Web site. (I have now made wedding Web sites for all of the Melton sisters, though, yes, one of them is my wife.)

Their friend Erin had designed a cool invitation featuring the birds, skyline, and the wedding's brown-and-red color scheme.

There wasn't a lot of content to put on the site, so I used it as an excuse to play with animation that would otherwise probably be rather annoying.

I was going to make the birds a bit more interactive, such that they flew in the first time you visited and then only stirred if you moused over them. However, Kimb liked the birds flying in every time, and I needed to finish the site before they sent out the invitations, so it is what you see.

Anyhow, it was nice to be able to hone my skills on a small, fun site.

But frankly, at this point, I'm more excited for Kimb and Joel and their new life together.