The first law: The ratio of finished projects to the number of posts and comments naturally approaches zero.

The second law: If the ratio begins at zero, it is unlikely ever to increase.

This helps explain the phenomenon where someone shows up on a forum for writers and starts talking about their fabulous novel which they never do finish.

These are the pinnacle of their various sub-memes.

I don’t know the attribute for the second one, and the third is a re-creation of one I saw on a 1980s-bands-themed thread. The first one, though, is from ghoti on LiveJournal.

Finally, the best lolcat ever, also with no known attribution.

God speed, indeed.

[tags]lolcats, im-in-ur, invisible, i-has-a-flava[/tags]

We^* fed Liza last night from about 8:00 P.M. to 8:30.

She next ate around 3 A.M.

That’s seven hours. Seven hours, I should add, that she mostly spent asleep.

I have no idea if she’ll keep doing this. I can only hope so.

^*This is, of course, an extremely generous use of the word “we”.

This is how I found Liza this morning. Her velcro swaddle blanket is suppose to stay closed and keep her snuggly all night. I guess it doesn’t work so well any more or maybe she’s Supergirl.

And a bonus baby product: the bumbo seat. Designed to keep baby upright, as long as she can hold her head up. (Stephen is just off camera waiting to catch when she pitches forward.)

We’re back, baby!

David Lee Roth: Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody (1985)

I swear, people used to think David Lee Roth was cool. I mean, he got all the girls, and guys thought he was something else. I still think he’s something else, only now it’s in a “holy cow he’s a goof” kind of way. Here he smirks his way through sub-Weird-Al-style parodies of videos from Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Poison, Billy Idol, Richard Simmons (!) and more. He also spends some time terrifying the “Censorship Bored” with his fringed chaps. This, kids, is what music videos used to look like. Oh, and don’t miss “Eddie Van Halen” cleaning the floor at the very beginning.

Van Halen: Right Now (1991)

I don’t think I can improve on Beavis’s take on this video: “Huh, huh, right now David Lee Roth wants his old job back.”

As you have all figured out by now, my zombies post was part of the Blog Like It’s the End of the World. Now that we have all collectively beaten back the zombie hordes, I thought I’d mention that parts of the previous post were real.

We do have the shotgun I talked about. When Misty’s dad cheerfully told me how it had broken his nose and his dad’s nose and his dad’s dad’s nose, I determined that I’d never fire that thing ever. Not that I have ammunition for it — if you tried to put modern shotgun shells in the thing, you’d blow the barrel open. The shotgun used to hang in our guest room. When we converted it to Liza’s bedroom, Misty wouldn’t let me leave it in there. I even mentioned that it would be useful to have out when Liza started bringing home gentlemen callers, but no dice. Storme did point out that I’d be better off putting it in plain sight in the living room anyway.

Redstone Arsenal is close by, and did make and store chemical munitions once upon a time. They don’t any more, though.

AS FAR AS I KNOW.

And sorry, Amy and Jeff. I didn’t know your voicemail music was to throw any phone-using zombies off your trail.

Also: zoloooooolmbies!

Misty’s dad gave us a shotgun a while back. It was originally Misty’s great-granddad’s, and dates to the 1880s. It’s broken the noses of three generations of Clarks, so of course it’s a family heirloom.

I never thought I’d fire it. As old as it is, getting ammunition for it is difficult. You have to order it special. I did order some, just because I had to fire the gun at some point.

That point was this afternoon. I was at home helping take care of Eli and Liza while Misty went to the doctor, and after she came back, well, it seemed like the opportune time.

Of course it broke my nose.

I don’t actually know that it’s broken, but it hurts terribly, and there’s blood all down the front of my shirt. I wouldn’t have even gone through with firing the gun except for the two zombies that were trying to break into my house.

I’ve canvassed the neighborhood. Not that many people made it home from work. Lucky I was here, I suppose. My next door neighbor Richie was home. It looked like he’d been bitten by one of the other zombies, which he’d killed with a handy axe. The bite looked bad, so I shot him in the face. I remembered to compensate for the kickback this time. With Liza, Eli and Misty next door, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Redstone Arsenal isn’t too far south of me. When the Army created the arsenal in World War II, it was used to create and store chemical munitions. They shut that part of the base down years and years ago, or so they claimed. Needless to say, it’s clear where the zombies came from. I’d have wondered if it was due to the NASA center here in town, but they haven’t really been in the business of going to space and bringing back things they found for a long time.

I tried to contact some of my friends. Geof‘s last Twitter post just says, “Rrrrrrrgh.” Amy and Jeff‘s phone now plays Zombie Me over and over again.

It’s just as well. Even though Amy and Jeff live so close to us, their cars both require high-octane gas and aren’t that fuel efficient. We’re loading up and getting out of Dodge before the zombies overrun us. I’ve been trying to figure out our best plan. The big family car gets so-so gas mileage but has a 14-gallon tank. As I calculated just this afternoon, my new Fit is getting some 36 miles to the gallon, but it only has a 10-gallon tank. Decisions, decisions.

If any of you read this and — I can’t stress this enough — aren’t yet zombies, call me on my cell phone, assuming power doesn’t go out. If you can’t reach me, I’m headed towards Tennessee. There’s a place we intend to hole up. If we can hold off the zombies, fine. If not, we’ll at least have fun dying.

Can zombies track you by the smell of blood? I’d stop to shower and change before we go, but the kids are scared and I’ve wasted too much time on this post as it is.

Man. Zombies.

[tags]zombies, shotgun, broken nose, buckshot-it’s-what’s-for-breakfast[/tags]

Veronica Mars “officially dead”.

Just last year, TIME Magazine named You as their person of the year. Yes, you.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

I was skeptical. Sure, you can occasionally sift through the online dross and discover gold. But Sturgeon’s Law hasn’t been repealed. 90% of everything is crud, and that percentage might be higher on the Internet.

Then I began seeing evidence that user-generated content and aggregated effort could work wonders. Joshua Micah Marshall set the readers of Talking Points Memo to searching the Justice Department’s 3,000 pages of information on the potentially political dismissal of U.S. attorneys. People figured out the lonelygirl15 hoax. The lolcat phenomenon took off.

And now I have proof positive that You, by which I mean all of us schlubs on the Internet, are the future of media and democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you High School: A Big Waste of Time, by Bambi, as seen on Associated Content.

The article starts out promisingly by undermining any point it might make:

The following article is based on my own high school experience and may or may not be what you experienced or how your high school may have been set up.

It takes off from there. The article discusses how “[m]any teachers seem to be just that, teachers, not teachers.” It explains how school is all about things you don’t need for real life, like Algebra 2. And finally:

In addition, I’ve been out of school for not even 6 months now. I can’t think of a single thing that I remember.

Associated Content, with your user-generated content about school and The Infamous Pike Place Market and The Truth About Bottled Water, you have shown me the future.