The Laser Straight

OK, so I’m a lucky bastard that gets to work from home. Because of this, I often end up working odd hours. I sometimes end up going to bed around 3AM watching reruns of Conan O’Brien.

The commercials at 3AM are a different breed. You don’t see McDonalds, Ford or Sprite ads. You see countless get-rich-quick schemes, the Dale Earnhardt decorative clock and the pan with the collander built into the lid so you can drain your noodles without them all sliding down the drain leaving you frustrated and noodleless.

My personal favorite is the Laser Straight.

Now the Laser Straight isn’t anything special in itself, though I suppose $20 is a pretty good price for a laser level. But I love the commercial for other reasons.

A few seconds into the commercial, the announcer says that the Laser Straight uses “refractive lens technology”. That certainly sounds impressive. But to drive the point home, they even put a graphic up: “Refractive Lens Technology”. Amazing that they can bring us a technological breakthrough like refractive lens technology for a mere $19.99.

But wait a minute. Doesn’t “to refract” mean to bend light waves (assuming they’re not particles at the time, but that’s a whole other ball of tofu)? And don’t all lenses refract? I mean, isn’t that the sole purpose of a lens, to refract light? Hmmm, better check….

dictionary.com:

lens

1. A ground or molded piece of glass, plastic, or other transparent material with opposite surfaces either or both of which are curved, by means of which light rays are refracted so that they converge or diverge to form an image.

Yup. Lenses refract. Whoda thunk? So the Laser Straight has a fucking lens. Impressive.

Now as if the marvel of refractive lens technology wasn’t enough, if you act now you also receive the Laser Straight Studfinder. I don’t think lasers play any part in the Laser Straight Studfinder, because last time I checked lasers couldn’t penetrate sheetrock. Well, maybe some heavy-duty military black project lasers could, but then your walls would be all fucked up. But it is easy to find a stud if you burn holes in the drywall.

This is not a blog.

The last thing I want to do is jump on a bandwagon. No, wait, that’s the second-to-last thing I want to do. The last thing I want to do is to jump on a bandwagon late. You know, run to catch up to a bandwagon everybody else has jumped on 6 to 8 months ago. Or 12 to 24 months ago. Whatever and whenever, that’s the last thing I want to do. OK, maybe not the absolute last thing, I mean I have to consider that Spanish Inquisition shit where they’d make a slit in your abdomen, pull out your small intestine, nail it to a pole then whip you into walking around the pole while your intestines pull out and wrap around it. I mean sure, I’d rather jump on a bandwagon than go through that.

But anyway, this is not a blog.

This is just a place for me to put random bullshit I come up with rather than mailing it to all my friends. They probably get sick of my random bullshit in their inboxes. None of my friends have ever said “Gee Dave, I’m getting pretty sick of your random bullshit,” but then none have said “I really like getting random bullshit from you” either. So by putting it here, I can just tell them “Hey, go to this site (which isn’t really a blog despite looking an awful lot like one) anytime you feel like reading my random bullshit.”

Now, even though this is not a blog, it does have some traits it shares with a blog. For instance it’s hosted at blogspot.com. Always the geek, I considerred writing my own not-a-blog software. Actually, I did more than consider it, I started to write it. But like most of my projects, I lost interest long before it was complete, and after all there are people foolish enough to pay me to write code, so better to write the code that keeps putting cats on the table. But despite not having my custom not-a-blog software written, I continued to have stupid shit to say and therefore continued to annoy my friends. So blogspot it is. Even though this isn’t a blog.

Another bloglike trait of this non-blog is that it organizes posts by date. And allows user comments. Well can I help that? I mean, I gotta work with what blogspot gives me, you know? The fact that my custom not-a-blog software would have eventually incorprated these features in no way makes it more blog-like. OK, maybe blog-like, but a wise man once said “blog-like does not a blog make.” OK, it wasn’t a wise man, it was me.

And sure, blogspot doesn’t make me allow comments, and they certainly don’t make me allow anonymous ones. But as long as I’m posting random bullshit here for my friends to read (or more likely not read), who am I to say that the world-at-large can’t read them too? And if they can read them then shouldn’t they be allowed to comment on them? You know, free speech, communication revolution and all that?

But even given these blog-like traits, this is still not a blog. No, really. It’s not.