Drunken Pumpkin

A short and succinct guide to teaching children proper handling of knives.

Submitted by Ken A. almost two weeks ago… sorry Ken, it did get grabbed by a spam filter and I just found it today.

Pyrophage mentioned last week that he was surprised that I hadn’t put anything up in honor of George Carlin’s death. I’ve actually been working on a tribute video to Carlin since last Monday, when I first heard the news. Last night I pretty well finished the tribute video and was watching the semi-final edit (I found a couple of changes I want to make) when I realized that the video’s size has yet to be addressed - it’s running a bit over an hour and a half in length. While I doubt that any of Carlin’s fans would take issue with watching Carlin’s material and interviews for an hour and a half, the amount of time required to load a video of that size through most internet connections would be substantial. So, I’ll be spending much of this week working on cutting the video into bite-sized chunks and getting it up ASAIC (as soon as I can).

My apologies for the lack of material on the Pumpkin over the past week; it’s all in preparation to deluge you with much Carlin.

Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. So it is time for the American president to take part in the annual ritual of sparing the life of the National Thanksgiving Turkey.

Neither Rumsfeld nor Gonzales were available for comment.

Okay, I admit it…as something special for Halloween, I broke the Pumpkin. If you tried visiting the site sometime between noon on Halloween and yesterday evening, you may have found that while the main index page was still available the rest of the site no longer existed.

Apparently a change I made to the code behind the scenes here at the DruPum had unforeseen consequences (don’t they all?). The issue was relatively easy to fix and the site appears to be fully functional again, or at least as functional as it was prior to my poking around like a blind monkey.

The good news is, sharp eyes of site visitors brought this to our attention after a short 30 hours of downtime.

Can you hear the Mission Impossible theme music playing in the background? Unfortunately nothing so dramatic to follow.

I have been down with something vaguely bubonic for the past week, however I’m feeling much better now. Despite my malady, the emails have been stacking up and not all of them have been trying to sell me Viagra or Cialis, so I have a stack of material to upload to the Pumpkin.

In other words, just a short note to let the world rejoice that I’m back and will begin catching up on the backlog over the next 12 hours.

I found this video that represents fairly accurately my experiences when working out at the gym.

I realized I apparently haven’t been thinking much for the past few days - you’d think that after doing this for over a year it would have become habit, but I have too many habits as it is, can’t justify adding another one to the collection currently.

Anyway, to make up for my lack of thought I’ll be posted a couple a day (still only the good ones) to provide some new information for rumination.

Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric are working with Stirling Energy Systems, a Phoenix startup that has paired a large and efficient solar dish with a 200-year-old Stirling engine design.

Stirling Energy Systems is planning to build two separate solar farms, one with the capacity to generate 500 megawatts of electricity in the Mojave Desert near Victorville, California, for SoCal Edison, and a 300-megawatt plant in the Imperial Valley, near Calexico, California, for SDG&E. The utilities have signed 20-year deals to buy all the juice the farms can turn out, and have options to expand the plants if they are successful.

The full article is available at Wired.com

…and I believe that in the near future we will probably be shaking things up with regard to the layout of the site. The byline on the Drunken Pumpkin is ‘Amusing Ourselves’ and we’ve got some new ideas.

Given that fact, if there is anything that any of our regular visitors (yes, we really do have regular visitors) can think of that they feel would improve their experiences while visiting the Drunken Pumpkin, please email Pyrophage or myself so that we can make sure to incorporate any and all of your suggestions.

Hell, we’ll even take suggestions from irregular visitors, we’re not picky.