ANNOUNCEMENT!

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Woe !  Despair !  Agony On Me !

“Where has the blog gone?” you say. “What’s happened? Have they found you?” is another question we get. “Is The Institute under siege?” No nothing so dramatic but that doesn’t mean we don’t have dramatic crap happening around here, because we do. Lots of it, and it’s the really dramatic kind too.

It’s computer trouble. How many times do you hear that now days? “We’re sorry but our computer system is down and we can’t you the results of your brain transplant until our tech gets here and he’s helping the folks at Burger Bloat get their system back online. They’ve got big trouble over there with people demanding their Giant eleven pound AchyBurger and Soggy Fries. We should have your results in the very near future, Sorry for any inconvenience.”

As you know if you know anything at all about The Institute, is that we try to keep our computer room rat-free. This has always been paramount to the running of our Cray computer system, the fastest, largest super-computer system in the English-speaking world, and we’ve been moderately successful given that our Cray computer is set up in a Tuff Shed so the heat it gives off doesn’t burn down the main building. We’d really be in a pickle if that happened, and as we were in a hurry to get it set up we decided against pouring a slab under the building and chose to set it on the bare ground instead. This was a time saving decision because we wanted to get it plugged in so we could get email and stuff. We see now in hindsight that it would have been better to pour the slab, as those pesky rats can burrow like some kind of demented badger, but it easy to throw stones now. It seemed like a good idea when we did it.

Unfortunately the Cray is where we store all of our images on those new little 3.5 floppy disks that are so handy. Well to cut to the chase here and save you some valuable time, some kind of Super Rat or maybe even a bunch of them found that the cables leading into the Cray tasted just like chicken and during this last snowstorm chewed through many of them and even ate some of the capacitors we hard wired into the cable for extra power. Well that tore it. Now we are scrambling like one of those monkeys with his football to try and salvage what we can. It looks like we are going to be able to save all of them (we hope) and will be back on the air, or I mean the page soon.

We are hoping that the government, that would be our government, seeing our distress would step in and provide us with one of their cast off NSA computers that they just throw in the dumpster if they get too many of them, suitably erased of all secret stuff of course, so we could get back to providing you with all the news and exposes, and events of little importance that you’ve come to depend on. So far they turned a deaf ear to our pleas. Perhaps if you wrote your representative a long letter asking them to intercede on our behalf they would show us some mercy and get us a computer muy pronto. But it would take all of you with some of you even writing two, or maybe several hundred letters to get their attention. So if you’re not doing anything right now, sit down and write like a crazy person. It may help, or it may get you on one of those lists the government keeps, we don’t know, but the effort counts. Thanks in advance for your support and we hope to be back up and running like the well oiled juggernaut of information you’ve come to love.

Remorseful Point

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Here it is another year gone by. You know what that means right? No, we’re not talking about your age. We’re talking about something much more important. That’s right you guessed it, Daylight Savings Time.

For those of you who are completely oblivious to the world around you, and you know who you are, Daylight Savings Time is when the Government automatically changes the arrangement the cosmos has for when we have night and day, and today is that day for one of the mandated changes.

Today it has been ordered and approved by a unanimous vote of people who run our lives that we shall, upon awakening, be 1 hour later in the day than we’d normally be. This was done so you, as a hard-working American, would get an extra hour of sleep and therefore would be more productive tomorrow because of the extra rest. But there are dangers. Let’s say you had an appointment with your lawyer for say 10:00am and you went there at your usual time you’d be an hour early and they’d get to charge you for that extra hour and you’d have to pay it because these are lawyers we’re dealing with here, and you’d be mad and feel stupid.

There is a lot of stigma attached to making this change from Regular Every Day Winter Time smoothly, orderly and correctly so you get that extra hour of sleep. If you muck it up and anybody sees it, you become that guy that can’t even do  the time change right and you’re considered a dumbass. And by the time the word gets around that you like totally screwed the pooch, time change-wise, you’re a Total dumbass. Almost everyone except those oblivious people we talked about earlier do not want to be a dumbass. People who made the change successfully are relentless in their criticism of the dumbass’s who didn’t. They will make fun of you. They will call you names. They will beat you with it like a circus monkey. They will beat you like a rented mule. Their smugness and arrogance knows no bounds. So the deal is don’t be a dumbass.

The shame can be so great for some people that they take the ultimate step. And that step happens to be off of Remorseful Point here at the Grand Canyon. Named for those people who got up too early thereby completely messing up the system well thought out as it is, and knowing what’s coming when people find out, they feel that they have no other recourse but to go to Remorseful Point and take the necessary step to reclaim their honor.

There have been groups formed, kind of like the safety nets they put up on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco to try and keep people from jumping, to try and help these poor souls deal with the shame, but most of  them sneak around them and make the plunge anyway. It’s like the gene pool has to have a way to keep itself healthy and society’s best efforts to overcome that won’t change nature.

So our recommendations to avoid the shame and heartache of screwing up the whole time change thing is to get totally hammered the night before, I mean toilet hugging, running around the neighborhood yelling “Where is Aunt Maud, I’ve got to find Aunt Maud”, looking for your car keys and not finding them because you swallowed them on a dare, that kind of hammered. It is guaranteed that you will not wake up an hour too early the following morning. In fact it will probably be late afternoon before you’ll even be able to lift your head. This will be considered cool by your peers as they will see that not only did you handle the time change well but you totally get the concept. The later you get up the cooler you are.

If you have any doubts about your ability to make the change as prescribed you’d best head for the nearest LiquorMart and get a jug of Everclear, the 190 proof stuff and make sure you’re covered. It’s a little late this morning to take those measures now unless of course you did screw things up and can not get to the Grand Canyon in time. Then I guess you’ll have to decide the best course of action to take. Hope you did well this year. And you’re not a total dumbass.