All Hallow's Eve

Here is a series of pictures I took while wearing my green plastic army man Halloween costume.

In order to show off our costumes, we threw a Butterknife Estates Halloween party. Our friends, Cleopatra and Michael Jackson fan, brought their karaoke machine.

Bret starred as Dr. Horrible
Jared went as the Phantom of the Opera.
Harrison was this creep.

This is what midterms can do to a man.

The scourge of mouth ulcers rages on. For context, let's just review what a typical canker sore looks like:
For three or four weeks I've been plagued with a cough and a runny nose. Then, I developed what I thought was a sore throat. With all the hype surrounding H1N1, I was relieved to discover it was merely a (non-contagious) canker sore...on my uvula.


I'm not convinced I should be relieved. This is the painful.

Sonic Booms: in plain English

Kendra asked me once how sonic booms work. I had to admit that I didn't know. But I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge, so I decided to find out! Here's an email I sent to her:

Dear Kendra,

I've done some research and it seems that in order to understand sonic booms, one must first understand shockwaves. Shockwaves are aptly named because they come at you by surprise. If you had a medium, say air or water, and something in it were traveling toward you like a bee or a shark, you would be able to tell because of the motion of the waves as well as the sounds that these produce. This gives you and the particles of water or air that sit next to you a little warning to get out of the way.

Not to say that molecules are sentient...more like it starts jostling them gradually and they build up energy to move out of the way.

But imagine if the bee flew fast. As fast or faster than those waves it's producing. The molecules wouldn't see it coming! It would be quite a shock for them when they have to suddenly get out of the way with no warning. You've seen waves...they go up and down, up and down, nice and smooth-like. But shockwaves are like a sudden step up in pressure, density, or velocity, etc. with no graduality.

What do you and your molecule friends do now? You've just hit a wall. You scream. You make noise. You start panicking. This causes a panic among all the other particles that have already hit the wall. Pretty much all the molecules that have already smacked up against it run around frantically.

Okay, so there is no wall and molecules can't scream and even if they could you wouldn't hear them. The stepped-up wave that the bee is causing just gave them a whole bunch of energy. They can spend that energy however they want, and a cheap way to get rid of it is to pass it along behind them to cause audible sound waves.

As long as the bee is traveling as fast or faster than those waves it's producing in the air it is producing a shockwave. You generally only hear one boom from a jet (or two booms; one from the nose, one from the tail) because it passed you. But if you could somehow keep up with it (just below and behind it) you might just hear it continuously...'course, you'd be making a shockwave of your own if that were the case and things might get complicated.

Shockwaves can come from many things: supersonic jets, detonations, Japanese bullet trains in tunnels, and even whips. The proper crack of a good whip is a miniature sonic boom; the tail of the whip actually travels faster than the local speed of sound.

For more information, try this site

Or just search for shockwaves or sonic booms on Wikipedia.org

Love,
Thad.

What's your favorite cologne?

What's your favorite cologne?

I'm not asking because I've suddenly developed an interest in fragrance. Quite the opposite. I'm coming down to the last few drops of the bottle of Old Spice aftershave that I was given as a twelve-year-old at an extended Gillespie family Christmas party. Since I'll be buying a new scent anyway, I thought I'd find out what's good, especially if this one lasts as long as the first.

Gentlemen, what do you use?
Ladies, what flavors do you like to smell on your paramour?

Joke of the Day

I used to be the director of BYC meetings back in my youth. At age 17 I was in charge, even outranking the adults in the meeting (sort of). One of my abuses of power included my own version of the meeting agenda which included a "joke of the day." (A real rebel, I know).

I treated it as a serious and important part of each meeting, even assigning people to bring next meeting's joke. One particular week I assigned Rebecca Wilson to the joke and she accepted.

When the next meeting began, a month later, I asked to be reminded who had been assigned joke of the day. She responded that she had, and as she opened a piece of paper she read,

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

First, I had never heard this and I loved it. So clever. So elegant.

Second, I think she was the only person ever to remember and follow through with her commitment. This was an assignment above all others of such a trivial nature that it was very easy for most of us to wing it. We would be caught on the spot and try to think about some tired joke that most everyone knew.

But, kudos to Rebecca, who put some thought into her task and pulled through with quality. Her response, in microcosm, is the kind of thing most every leader hopes his followers will provide. I'd go as far as to say she magnified her calling that day.

Projectoritis Season Is Back Again

Many years ago, a friend brought a big blue jug to Butterknife Estates with a paper attached to the side. It had a sad picture of me and a call for donations to cure my malady: projectoritis. The donations helped and for months my disease had been in remission. Until now.
In April, the lamp in my projector went sour. So I bought a new one. I found a compatible model online and installed it. Little did I know, this lamp was generic. And should a generic lamp ever so much as breathe the same air as my projector, the warranty would be void.

One expects some cataclysmic sign from a warranty sucked into the void, but I received none until much later.

The first intimation came when my symptoms began to return: slow power-on, or none at all, unless I unplugged and restarted. I knew I needed to send it in to EIKI before my (now imaginary) warranty expired. I put it off, because I could get it to work, it just didn't work as it was designed. Weeks went by. Finally, I bit my lip and shipped it in under the assumption that I wouldn't need to pay anything more than shipping. After all, even if my warranty was expired I could just refuse service and have them ship it back, right? RIGHT!?

Well, when I told the technician it was a generic lamp, that was it. He revoked my warranty retroactively on the spot. In a subsequent email I was informed that a "$75.00 non-refundable fee applies to all non-warranty lamp replacement estimates that are declined. Ex: If a unit is sent in as a "warranty repair" but is determined to be "non-warranty" upon inspection, the $75.00 fee will apply if the estimate is declined." So, now they were going to charge me $75 if I asked them to do nothing! Plus a mandatory $30 for return shipping. A new lamp would cost $380 on top of this.

I felt bilked.

Since $105 was already a sunk cost, I opted to throw in the extra money for a new lamp, but not without making a little noise. Here is the letter I included with my credit card payment:

Cheryl,

I faxed in my order form for a new lamp a couple of days ago. I hope that my projector is on its way back soon. Please keep me advised on status updates.

I have a few complaints to register:

1. My original projector lamp expired after only 50% of its life expectancy. If a product's reliability is much lower than advertised, it makes me question the trustworthiness of the company.
2. I tried to locate a new lamp for sale on EIKI.com only to learn that the company website does not sell parts for its warranty products. I was directed by customer service to look elsewhere for it.
3. I located a lamp for a reasonable price from another supplier. It was advertised as a "compatible model", but I didn't bat an eye at that, because I was unaware that installing a generic brand lamp would void my warranty. This could have been pointed out when I sent you an email requesting an estimate for a new lamp.
4. I sent it to EIKI for further investigation under the express understanding that my warranty was intact. When it was discovered that a generic lamp had been installed, my projector lost its warranty and a mandatory fee of $75 plus $30 for shipping was demanded. That's a $105 extortion fee. Had I known my warranty was void, I would not have sent it in at all. Clearer communication on this legal loophole beforehand would have preserved my respect for your company.
5. I have placed an order for a new lamp through your company's sales department, even though I now have deep-seated resentment and suspicion of EIKI's policies. This will likely be my last transaction with you, and the beginning of word-of-mouth warnings for my friends, family, and employers, unless I have reason to believe something has changed.

Yours,
Thad Gillespie

In conclusion, don't bother with the EIKI brand. The products fail, the customer service agents withhold information, and the policies are used to cheat customers.

#Bretsays

Thad: "Bret, Curtis has an article ready for publishing. It's been reviewed, even."
Bret: "good."

[Bret looks over the article to be published at whatdomormonsbelieve.com]

Bret: "Curtis put a weird picture in there."
Thad: "Oh?"
Bret: "He did it in paint. And he's no guru."

To keep up with more of Bret's words, follow me on twitter: mrmcplad
To see the picture, visit our gospely website on Monday the 14th (when it shall be published).