Nagged and Tagged

Doctor Phat Tony has called me a weirdo, even after I pimped his swag. However, in a most egregious and futile attempt to use reverse psychology, he tagged me with the duty to reply to his meme. What an amazingly transparent ploy; with no obvious hope of success.

So, without further ado, here are my five weird behaviors...

I have this irrational compulsion to fill the gas tank to the top, after it drops below the halfway point. I know the truck has plenty of extra capacity, even when the needle rests on -E-. It is also equipped with a blinding little orange gas pump symbol, that begins to hypnotically tease you, to the rhythm of a dying ocean of petrol, gasping at a healthy margin of two gallons. I have only seen the little Toyota tidy bowl man's lantern twice in the six years I have piloted the ship. I can only attribute this behavior to suffering at the hands of both my sister and mother, who often preferred to keep an empty can in the trunk, knowing that the inevitable negligence would lead to several hours of Zen meditation, while I bring rescue, or venture forth with their can.

In a not entirely unrelated compulsion, I always have to have redundancy in household mechanisms that require it. This means spare bulbs, spare blades, etc. Even snap off utility knives, with spare blades in the handle already, must have spare blades outside the handle. I know it's crazy, but there it is.

When I decide it is mentally fashionable to eat a particular food or combination of food, I usually eat it on march of days, get sick of it, then move on to the next interesting combination. For instance, I will pick something like beans and rice. For two weeks, it's navy beans, lima beans, kidney beans, pinto beans in combination with white rice, long grain, short grain, brown rice etc. Then I can't look at beans and rice for months. Then it's wrap sandwiches. Then it's meat and potatoes. Then it's salads in all varieties. This might be related to apartment living while working 50hrs a week on top of chemistry/physics classes at night, that required experiments involving factors and permutations. This excuse sounded as good as a hasty analysis of global warming.
So I went with it.

Much like Uber, I enjoy home experiments, of the scientific variety. DISCLAIMER: Do not try these at home, kiddies.I built a 250kV Tesla coil from PVC pipe, an automotive starting coil, carriage bolt spark gap and a homemade capacitor. You can stand next to this thing, while it generates ozone and six inch violet bolts of electricity. A loose shop light bulb in your hand, glows as bright as day. Another fun trick was filling a medium size thick plastic jug halfway, with water, an entire can of Red Devil lye. You then carefully drop sticks of aluminum foil in to generate large volumes of hydrogen. You fill trash bags with the hydrogen, and let them float off. You need plenty of head space and a decent snow bank to put the bottle in, since the exothermic reaction causes the water to boil violently. I might try my hand at a CO2 laser, or a home made fuel cell. That hydrogen experiment might come in handy for the latter.

Be careful. Boiling water with chunks of raw lye floating in it, can ruin your day. I always wear safety glasses, gloves etc. Don't be a dope, by say, filling your basement with hydrogen, when you have a lit pilot somewhere. The supreme being gaveth you your biological tools. Your raging curiosity can taketh them away. For our secular crowd, Charles Darwin always has his loving eye on you.

My last weird behavior is openly testing public situations and people that annoy me. My previous post, Magnetic Personality, is a perfect example. No doubt, I was tagged a weirdo there. I can't stand being put through a process, which has had all of it's original use and meaning stripped away. The public school system and the registry of motor vehicles are other good examples. There is nothing to be gained, in the humor department, by testing them.

Here are the links to Dr. Phat Tony's other victims:

Uber, JimmyB, Stella Piccolo, and Wyatt

Should I? What the heck. Tag this sidebar seniors and senoritas. (I know Wyatt tagged most of you guys, but now the pressure is on.)

GunnNutt, TylerD, Peakah, Katey, and FIAR

P.S. - In a completely unrelated event, I had to use my towstrap to pull several colleagues out of the snowbound parking lot at work, yesterday. As I was driving home, I noticed a guy in an exceptionally small and fragile vehicle, completely bogged in a slushy delta, at the mouth of another branch of the neighboring industrial park. I stopped to help. As I approached, I noticed the Kerry for Pres. bumper sticker on the back, along with all kinds of environmental paraphernalia. If only I had that Bush 2004 sticker on the truck. Damn! So, I took my evil conservative 4wd truck, hooked up the strap, and pulled his little hybrid hynie out of the polar soup. All thanks and salutations poured out. If only he knew.

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