About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
The next few posts are from a collection of Funny Emails I’ve gathered over many years. They come from a time before email was common—a time long before social media. Back then we didn’t have the vast onslaught of material as there is now. The online world was much smaller, slower. And because the Era of the Image hadn’t arrived, the funny emails were usually just text.
A “pack rat” by nature, I saved those that really tickled my fancy. That was possible (and sensible) then; these days there’s too much to save, and one can count (more or less) on it remaining in place “out there” if you need it again. (That in itself is an amazing thing: we live in an era of an online, free, permanent information resource.)
I’m starting off with one of my very favorites: an examination of the implications of assuming Santa is real…
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10 Comments | tags: Bruce Springsteen, Christmas, humor, Reindeer, Santa, Santa Claus, Santa science, sleigh, xkcd | posted in From My Collection
Winter has arrived!
(click pics for full size)
Knowing me, you’d be pretty sure I couldn’t resist posting on 12/12/12, the last Golden Date of this century. If I was going to post anything this month, surely I’d come out of hiatus (even if just briefly) for that! On the other hand, knowing me, you’d know I have a really strong and stubborn contrarian streak and would be even more likely to defy expectations and not post!
Of course, if you really knew me, then you’d know that I knew you knew that I’d know you knew that I… um… wait,… lost my place there.
The point is, knowing or not knowing isn’t the point; the point is snowing! As in, “It was.” All of a sudden, like. A lot!
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19 Comments | tags: 12/12/12, hiatus, POV-Ray, snow, winter | posted in Life
Did you?
11 Comments | tags: Election 2012, vote | posted in Life
I need a break while I focus on the new job and regain some sense of balance. I will be back, so keep your hands off my stuff!
While I’m gone, feel free to browse through the archives… there may (or may not) be a secret treasure map encoded in previous posts… anything is possible…
35 Comments | tags: hiatus | posted in Life
(Click on pics for full-size.)
The new job has continued to really suck up my creative juices, which has made it very hard to write blog posts. It’s not for lack of ideas, I have months’ worth of those in the pipeline. The problem is that my job now consists of writing lots of formal documents and endless emails to try to get others to implement designs.
That makes other writing seem like more of the same; just another day banging out thoughts and ideas. Not fun. I miss the fun. Unless this job stabilizes somehow, I may have to all but give up blogging until I retire. (Fortunately, that could be as soon as this June… I’m very tempted!)
Anyway, for now, a post from last year from my all-but-defunct baseball blog:
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9 Comments | tags: Alexi Casilla, Minnesota Twins, Target Field, Toronto Blue Jays | posted in Baseball
Today you get a re-post of a post from last year at this time. And it was a re-post then, as well. It’s piece I wrote several years ago for a writing exercise in another venue. I thought it turned out pretty well, and I still like it after so many years, so I thought it was worth sharing again.
The original writing exercise (and it was just an exercise; there were no winners or judges) was to write a short piece from the point of view of a pumpkin. The exercise was given to us around this time—fall—just before Halloween. (It was the same guy who gave us an exercise to write a piece from the point of view of our car!)
Most writers took the tack that pumpkins suffered horribly at this time of year. Naturally, I took a different tack, and so I give you…
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9 Comments | tags: dirt, Gourdian, gourds, humor, Jack-O-Lantern, kiss a Gourdian, orange, pumpkins, vines | posted in Writing
So there was a small happy hour thing after work where I got to see a couple of friends I haven’t seen in a long while and eat some tasty appetizers. It was at a place I’d never visited, so that was an added plus. The onion rings were very tasty, the deep-fried cheese ravioli and the jalapeno cheese curds were pretty good, and the wings weren’t bad.
Then I got a speeding ticket on the way home. Had me dead to rights, so I can’t complain. Gonna be expensive, but such is life. Considering I’d had a couple of beers, it could have gotten sticky, so I’m really not complaining. Two beers, lots of food and three hours, so I’m very sure I was fully sober and legal, but the cop could have made it ugly.
Then there was some sort of political debate thingy on TV I felt compelled to watch before I could turn to what I really wanted to watch… The Giants winning the NLCS!
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8 Comments | tags: Detroit Tigers, NLCS, onion rings, San Francisco Giants, speeding ticket, St. Louis Cardinals, World Series | posted in Baseball
I usually lean towards descriptive writing more than prescriptive writing. I feel more comfortable describing my views and experiences than I do trying to prescribe a path for others.
But some blog articles I’ve read in the last months have made me wonder if I should try a prescriptive approach. This is something new for me, and I already sense a challenging path. How likely is it that someone who would benefit will read such a post, and how likely is it they would follow any prescription I might offer? And of course, what makes me think I can offer any prescription for another person’s life?
In any event, for whatever it’s worth, this prescription is labeled for those who feel dissatisfied with life, who feel a gap between what is and what they feel ought to be.
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11 Comments | tags: half-full half-empty, peace and quiet, stillness, Stoicism, stop and smell the roses, turn off the cell phone | posted in Life, Philosophy
You probably have some idea of what infinity means. Something that is infinite goes on forever. But it might surprise you to know that there are different kinds of infinity, and some are bigger than others!
As an example, a circle has an infinite number of points. (Yet the circumference of the circle has finite length.) Compare that to a straight line with infinite length. Both have infinitely many points but does the finite length circle have fewer? [The answer is no.]
To understand all this, we have to first talk a bit about numbers.
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32 Comments | tags: countable, counting numbers, Georg Cantor, infinity, irrational numbers, natural numbers, pi, rational numbers, uncountable | posted in Math, Science
This seems to be my week for having blog contests catch my attention. Last Saturday the Count of Three captured me, and today it’s the Photo Challenge from WordPress.
I’m not normally a photographer, so I don’t usually pay much attention to that Challenge, but this week’s reminded me of a photo I’ve been looking for an excuse to use.
The Challenge read:
SILHOUETTE. The proper definition of a silhouette is “the outline of a body viewed as circumscribing a mass.” In photography, often we achieve that effect by putting light behind the object whose silhouette we want to capture, effectively darkening out the features of the subject instead of highlighting them.
And I immediately thought of this (admittedly a bit of a gag entry):
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20 Comments | tags: Deconstructing Harry, fuzzy, optical illusion, Photo Challenge, postaday, Robin Williams, silhouette, soft focus, Woody Allen | posted in Life
Logos con carne 