...

I just...I can't...there are no words. You just have to see this for yourself.

Conjoined Twins: Abigail and Brittany Hensel

Prepare to have your jaw drop.

What The Hell Is Matter With You People?

Don't Like Dancing Cowboys? Results Say You Do

I know I'm not clicking on those damned irritating ads, but clearly some of you out there must be. And whoever you are, you are directly responsible for this:

"One thing we will probably expand to the nth degree are the dancing silhouette ads," he said. "It's a great opportunity to double down on a proven winner."

The people who respond positively to these ads are the same people who respond positively having commercials blast out at twice the volume of TV shows.
Nice going people; more dancing silhouettes are just what I fucking needed.

It's Electric

Check out this video of a guy shooting electricity through his fingertips:



As Pete from Family Guy might say, "Dat is...awesome!"

The Power Of Parody

I can't find an easy way to link directly to the clips, but go here and check out Stephen Colbert's interview with author Dinesh D'Souza.
The interesting thing about this interview is that you can see just how effective Colbert's Ultra-Conservative persona can be in pointing out the fundamental flaws in Ultra-Conservativism. By agreeing with D'Souza - who has written a book claiming that Liberalism and a lack of "traditional American values" is responsible for 9/11 - and, in fact, agreeing with him to the extreme, Colbert draws attention to just how ridiculous D'Souza's position really is much more effectively than arguing from a contrary position ever could.
(Though Jon Stewart did a fine job of skewering him a while back in a Daily Show interview.)
The other thing that I find amusing is that someone named Dinesh D'Souza is touting traditional American values. I'm sure he fits right in with the traditional values crowd.
Most people who espouse "traditional values" would be afraid to get on the same plane with him.

Crazy Hot Italian Picture

At long last I've gotten around to doing a picture of the Crazy Hot Italian Chick herself, Giada De Laurentis.



Okay, so she's not in a bra/bikini, or nude, as most of the picture-seekrs would like (Hey, it's not like I would mind either), but I think it's a good representative image of her, what with the crazed, too-wide smile. Seriously, sometimes she looks like she's been a victim of the Joker's toxic "laughing gas."
Still, despite the crazed look with the too-wide smile, her tendency to over-Italianize her pronunciation of words, the way, as B-Side over at TVGasm (do a search for "Giada" to find his various entries on her) suggested, she looks as though she's biting into a triple-decker sandwich no matter how small the morsel she's eating actually is, and that all-too Italian shnozz, she is undeniably hot, and is worth of portraiture.
That's kind of tricky, though, as there really aren't a lot of pictures of her out there (whether of the nude/bra/bikini variety or not), so I don't have much source material. I guess I could sift through my copies of her cookbooks to see what I can find.
Oh, and there is an inaccuracy in this picture in that she doesn't appear to be pregnant, though I did put her in the proper scale.
Okay, all smart ass remarks aside, people, I seriously don't know if is now or has ever been pregnant. I also know that she is not a dwarf, but what I don't know is why so many of you are wondering whether or not she is. If you did end up here on a "giada dwarf?" kind of search, please, please, PLEASE leave a comment explaining why you were ever wondering that in the first place. It'll only take a couple of minutes of your valuable dwarf porn searching time to leave a note saying something like, "This boy at my school told me she's a dwarf," or whatever. I just want to know why. Is that so much to ask?
The only explanation I've been able to come up with is that her head is, apparently, fairly large. That's what I've seen other people saying, at any rate, though I've never really noticed, as I've always been too distracted by the psychotic gleam in her eyes and the seemingly imminent threat of being bitten. I think it's more a matter of her neck being really skinny, but whatever.
Oh, and on an equally amusing note, someone else came here the other day searching for pictures of Giada from "before her nose job."
If that nose she's sporting now is an "after," I damn sure don't want to see the "before."

An Open Letter To The Lady In Her 50s Who Wore Shorts To Super Target

Greetings,

On behalf of everyone present I want to thank you for wearing shorts as you ventured out to do your shopping at Super Target today.
I have to say that I'm positively thrilled that you didn't allow little things like near-freezing temperatures and a sense of propriety to prevent you from presenting yourself to the world in shorts that would be too scandalously short even for Richard Simmons to be seen wearing.
Wintry conditions and a sense of shame, however, should not deprive the world of the sight of those glorious gams, with their bone-white color, rippled thighs, dry, chafed knees, and scores of thin, blue varicose webs, and so I must thank you for not giving in to the temptation to dress more appropriately for the weather and your age.

With Gratitude,

Jon
(Writing on behalf of himself and his fellow shoppers)

Faster Closes, Sweet Water, Creating A Heroic Niece, And All You Need To Know About The Golden Globes

So far the extra 3 GB of RAM has been making a substantial difference in performance.
Interestingly enough, while it has sped up the launch time of Photoshop, the biggest difference I’ve noticed is how much faster Photoshop closes now.
I know why that is (and won’t get into it for the benefit of the technically impaired/uninterested), but it’s still kind of interesting, and what’s more, I’m surprised to learn just how much it delights me to see it close that quickly. I guess I didn’t realize how much it irritated me to watch it just hang there on the screen and listen to the hard drive grinding away while I waited for it to close after clicking the X.
Beyond that, though, there’s just a general boost in Hugin’s pep, which I’m sure will eventually disappear the way that computer pep always does when you’re running Windows.
But I’ll enjoy it while it lasts.
My niece Jourdan, via my MySpace page, has hit me up to do a Heroic Portrait of her, leaving the actual details of the image up to my imagination.
I’m not really sure what to draw. I thought about being a smart ass and drawing her as a serious, studious young woman who manages to stay out of trouble – in other words as her complete opposite – but decided that might be too subtle for her. Besides, that would be more about my fantasy vision of her than her vision of herself.
I guess I’ll think of something eventually, though, for obvious reasons, I’ll have to dial back on the sexiness that I might normally put into a picture of a young woman, which is probably the biggest challenge.
As mentioned previously, we had a “team meeting” lunch today.
We met at a place in Centreville called Sweetwater Tavern, which is a place I’ve heard about a lot in my 4 years out here in NoVA, but where I’ve never eaten before.
I was on my way there and closing in on my turn when I was interrupted by a phone call from Scott, who was there and wondering why I wasn’t, as he thought we were meeting at 11:30, not 11:45, and for it to be after 11:30 and have me not be there was unusual.
In answering the phone I failed to notice my turn until it was too late, and so had to turn off at the next light to get myself turned back around.
On Scott’s recommendation I ordered the Drunken Ribeye, which was really, really good.
In fact, pretty much our whole group ordered the same thing, though I’m not sure on what the two stragglers whom we’d gotten tired of waiting for had ordered.
The food was very good, but, barring another team meeting, I don’t foresee myself eating there again anytime soon as it’s a bit of a drive to get there, it’s pricey, and it doesn’t seem the sort of place designed for casual dining by quite loners.
At least, not the sort of quiet loners who don’t drink, as it’s also a micro-brewery.
Last night I was sitting around watching a movie (Thank You For Smoking), and was puzzled by the sound of my phone ringing.
It was my mom calling to tell me that Kyra Sedgwick had one a Golden Globe for her role on the The Closer, which is a show that we both enjoy.
I didn’t tune in for the awards at all, though I did check out Michelle’s live blogging of it over at Best Week Ever.
Beyond these brief mentions, though, the total extent of Golden Globes coverage you’re likely to find here at Threshold is this entry from this time last year.
And what more do you really need?

Consider The Obligatory Comment About How "She Can Play With MY Wii Anytime" To Be Said

Girl in Bikini Plays Wii Sports

If you don't understand the appeal of this video you probably:

1. Aren't a guy
2. Are a guy, but are also gay
3. Don't understand how the Wii controller works.

Random Crappy Pictures

There are some pictures that I'd taken on my PDA that I've had sitting around for a while and have meant to post, but haven't gotten around to it, mostly because they're fairly shitty, what with the blurriness and whatnot.
Still, here they are, starting with a picture that I call Enemies.


I call it that because every window on the back half of this car was shattered and patched with plastic. I didn't see any dents on the body, and couldn't really conceive of how this could have been the result of an accident, so I concluded that this person has enemies. Enemies with baseball bats.

Up next is a composition I call Hotel (Sans James Brolin and Connie Selecca).


If you don't get the Brolin/Selecca reference, you're probably a. younger than I am and/or b. less likely to retain the names of cast members of TV shows you probably never even watched than I am.
In any case, this is a shot of the hotel that my brother Brad and I stayed at when we were stuck in Detroit overnight on our way home to see our dad before he died back in October. The little raised balcony area on the right side is where I sat and wrote a Threshold entry when I found myself unable to sleep.
I've never mentioned it before, but I have to say that the only thing that made me choose to write an entry rather than hit the hotel bar that night was the fact that I knew that getting drunk would be the last thing my dad would ever want me to do.

And finally we have The Leaning Tower of Boredom.


One of the things my company likes to do best is spend money on Pointless Retarded Crap (PRC), little bits of expensive company progaganda which they hand out to us.
This happens most frequently on the heels of massive layoffs, leading us all to comment, after recognizing just how much money was probably spent on said PRC, that the expense is probably equal to the lost wages of someone who's been laid off.
The latest bit of PRC is a weird little cube thingie. It's actually several small plastic cubes covered in paper and held together in such a way that you can fold it around into slightly different shapes and reveal different printed surfaces, all of which have information that relates to business conduct and our rules for said conduct. Some surfaces have little ethically-related slogans, while others list a number that you can call to address any business conduct questions or concerns you might have. Still other surfaces stress the fact that all calls are anonymous in order to encourage you to rat out any and all co-workers who may be violating the standards.
In any case, on Saturday we had boxloads of the things sitting around, and hours and hours to kill. Here we see one of many structures I built using the cubes and various other materials found around the desk.
Simon referred to Scott and I as "uber nerds" for taking pictures of it. My picture turned out shitty, so Scott beamed the picture he'd taken with his PDA smart phone to my PDA via the IR ports, at which point we said, "Now we're uber nerds."
Of course, he has little room to talk, as at the time Simon was busy playing WoW, and is the only person I know, as I pointed out, who uses the "word" pwn3d without being ironic.

In any case, that's it for this installment of Random Crappy Pictures.

At Max Capacity

It was my intention to get a lot of stuff (for me) done this morning, so once I got up I resolved to spend less than the usual amount of time sitting around doing nothing.
Accomplishing that, I made my way first to Circuit City.
I have a process running on my computer(s) at all times that can sometimes eat up a lot of memory, and this, naturally, can cause issues when I’m working on processor and memory-intensive tasks like painting and image editing.
The obvious solution is to just kill the process when I’m going to be engaging in these tasks, but then the problem becomes remembering to start it back up afterwards.
In any case, last week I decided that to resolve this issue I would simply bump up the amount of RAM in my system.
My system is capable of supporting a total of 4 GB of RAM, and came with 1 GB installed, in the form of two 512 MB DIMMs. This left two slots open and meant that if I wanted to upgrade to the max I’d need to buy 4 GB and replace the two half GB DIMMs.
I opted to simply double the current amount by purchasing two more 512 MB DIMMs, creating a total of 2 GB of RAM. Why not go all out? Well, as mentioned, I’d have to replace the existing RAM rather than simply adding to it, which would, according to my research, cost me around $600.
Simply adding 1 GB at ~$150 seemed like the maximum bang for the buck point, so with that in mind I headed off to Best Buy.
(It should be noted that after going online to find the exact kind of RAM I needed, I wrote the specs down on a post-it note…which I then affixed to the back of my PDA. It was a hybrid low tech/high tech solution.)
Once I got there, though, I found that they had no 512 MB DIMMs in stock, and I hadn’t realized at the time that you didn’t need to pair the DIMMs, so it didn’t occur to me to just buy a 1 GB DIMM.
Over the weekend I made the discovery about not needing to pair the memory, and also found that employees of my company get a discount from PNY, a memory manufacturer. However, they did not have the kind of RAM I needed in stock.
So today I decided to check out Circuit City. I had grabbed a 1 GB DIMM and was considering buying two, as it would bring me up to 3 GB and still keep the cost well below the $600 that 4 GB would set me back, but they only had one DIMM in stock.
Ultimately I decided to check the other Best Buy that I was near, but they didn’t have any of the RAM I needed.
On the way back to Leesburg I stopped at the other Best Buy to see if they’d replenished their stock. They had 1 GB DIMMs in stock, and, in fact, had them on sale at such a price that buying 4 GB only cost about $50 more than buying 2 GB would have.
So, while it’s too late to make a long story short, the gist of it is that Hugin is now whizzing along with 4 GB of RAM installed.
I’d planned on going grocery shopping before going home, giving me enough time to get everything put away before my chiropractor appointment, but by the time I’d bought the RAM I only had enough time to go home, put the RAM in, make sure that I didn’t inadvertently fry anything in the process, and head over to the chiropractor, so I held off until after my appointment to get the groceries.
So all of that is done, and now here I am having completed all the tasks I set for myself today.
Because I’d forgotten to stick my post-it back onto my PDA, when I was at Best Buy I was operating from memory, ironically enough, as to what kind of memory I needed to buy. I was 99.9% sure I had the right kind, but went up to an employee to ask him to double-check for me. This was only after I was able to find one, as they’re never around when I want one, but are constantly besieging me when I don’t.
I found some kid who had that all-too common sort of teenage boy voice that suggests that either he has a permanent head cold or is mildly retarded (my vote is for the latter), and explained that I wanted him to confirm for me that this was the correct kind of memory.
He said, in his congested/brain damaged voice that he “don’t understand that computer stuff,” and so I went off in search of another, who understood that all I needed him to do was go to a memory maker’s Web site and do a search on my computer’s make and model using the database search that the site (like all memory manufacture sites) has. The site seemed to be broken, though, so he had to go to Dell’s site to find it.
Anyway, that was the bulk of the excitement for my day. I had the disturbing experience of being behind an elderly woman buying lingerie at Wal-Mart, but the less said about that the better.
Ahead of her was a woman who was making her shopping experience more difficult than it really needed to be. As I’ve said many, many times, buying stuff isn’t really that complicated. I should know; I just spent over $500 today with no real difficulty at all.
Yet somehow people manage to make it so, and I just don’t get it. Are they just overthinking it and operating from the theory that it must be more difficult than it appears to be on the surface?
Somehow I have my doubts about that, as there seems to be so little thinking actually involved. One can’t help but wonder how these people handle the actual challenges that life throws at them when they have such difficulty clearing one of the easier hurdles.
Of course, I can’t think of a better note on which to direct your attention to this clip from the Mike Judge film Idiocracy, which tells the story of a future in which natural selection has been thwarted. Enjoy!

Why Do I Always Have To Be So Negative?

I've added a new picture to my PicasaWeb album, and am now trying out the embedding feature here:

From Artwork

Looks like it worked.
The picture itself is a "negative space" exercise using a picture of Liz Phair as the reference.
Given that the source image was a high chontrast black and white picture with very little gray, I probably could have achieved very much the same effect by simply adjusting the Levels and Brightness and Contrast of the photo rather than drawing my own copy, but where's the fun in that?
Hmm, come to think of it, where's the fun in drawing my own copy?
Oh well.

New Newness

I've put up a public gallery of my crap...err, artwork over at PicasaWeb.
You can follow the link above or the one over on the right with my various other links.
It's mostly stuff you've already seen here, but now gathered in one convenient place that isn't here.

Giada: The Crazy Hot Italian Truth At Last!

Another long three days of work is behind me and I prepare to face four short days of not much of anything. Actually, I’m well into the facing of the nothing.
I do have chiropractor appointments this week, of course, and a team meeting lunch on Tuesday, but beyond that not much will be going on, though I should finally get around to getting an oil change. I also have to get the stupid state emission inspection, as it’s nearly time to renew my registration.
But that’s pretty much it in the way of excitement for the days ahead.
As usual, I’m not complaining about the lack of excitement, really. Not especially sure I’d want any, as it would probably involve people and they’d be getting in my way and yammering on in their irritating voices about random nonsense that I can’t even bring myself to pretend to give a shit about, and smelling bad and just generally annoying the hell out of me.
So I’m not complaining so much as I’m simply making an observation.
Speaking of observing, I’ve noticed a huge surge in traffic generated from Giada De Laurentis-related searches. Most of them are people wanting to know if she’s pregnant, an inexplicable number of them want to know if she’s a dwarf, and the rest want to know her bra size and/or see pictures of her said bra or at least a bikini.
While I’ll leave it up to them to find any such pictures that may – but probably don’t – exist for themselves, I will finally break my silence and tell you all the truth about what I know about the other items.
First off, yes, Giada is pregnant. She’s always pregnant. She’s been pregnant since puberty and will remain so until menopause. She has a rare medical condition called pregnantitus perpetualis which results in her being about three months’ pregnant at all times. This is how it can be that when you see an episode of her show filmed a year ago in which she appeared to be wearing a maternity outfit she can still be pregnant now.
The obvious question is, “When is the baby due?” As Giada is currently in her mid-thirties, I’d say anywhere from 10 to 15 years from now.
Next up, I will confirm what you eagle-eyed viewers have long suspected: Giada is a dwarf.
She’s spent her entire life keeping this a secret, only appearing in public in the presence of other dwarves so as to create the illusion of normal height, and Food Network has gone to great expense to build a kitchen set for her show that is in proportion to her height (which is actually 3’6”), making her appear to be a person of normal height. They also make use of proportionately-sized utensils and food items (I knew a guy who worked on the show. It was his job to trim cutlets of veal and other meats down to the correct size. He was fired for flubbing it with a rack of ribs on an episode that aired in the second season, an episode which has since been “lost,” and is referred to as the “Flintstones Incident,” given the uncanny similarity between the events of the show and the scene when Fred orders a rack of Brontosaurus ribs at the drive-up restaurant which cause his car to get tipped over.), and any exterior shots in which she is seen shopping or with friends are done using the kind of camera angles and forced perspective shots used to make the Hobbits appear so small in the Lord of the Rings movies.
On the special in which she traveled to Italy and visited may different locations it was impossible for Food Network to use their standard trickery. Fortunately, and here’s the big secret, everyone in Italy is also a dwarf.
That’s the only explanation for how she could be standing side-by-side with those people at the Barilla factory without appearing substantially shorter than them, and, in fact, actually appearing taller than some.
Also, when she was at that cheese place, that “huge” wheel of cheese was really only about the diameter of a basketball, and not even a regulation one at that.
So there you have it. Giada De Laurentis pregnant? Yes, always. Giada De Laurentis a dwarf? Yes, along with every other Italian person in the world.
As for her bra size, that’s a bit trickier to answer, as she is a dwarf who has all of the proportions of a normal-sized person, so while her breasts may appear to fall into normal size categories, they are actually too small to even be considered an A.
I guess I should apologize for keeping this a secret for so long by lying and saying that I didn’t know if she was pregnant and claiming that she was not a dwarf, but I have to say that it feels good to finally break free from the confines of the conspiracy and let the truth be known.
Also, I apologize for my use of politically incorrect terms. I suppose I should have said, “little person” and avoided referring to people as being “normal,” but what’s important is that the truth is finally out there.
And now that you know, don’t you feel better?