John Lamansky

Earlier this evening, our doorbell rang. Hmm.

My mom opened the door, and there was a trick-or-treating boy and his mom. My mom, of course, was surprised. For one thing, it was 4:55 P.M., which was five minutes before trick-or-treating was supposed to begin in our town. Plus, we were not inviting trick-or-treaters.

So my mom asked “Is our porch light on?”
“Uh, yeah,” was the response.

My mom looked and, sure enough, our light was on. In our town, the illumination of the porch light or some other light on the front of the house was an indication of the invitation of trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

My mom then saw the paper boy walking away from our house and realized what had happened and explained to the expecting trick-or-treaters. The paper boy had apparantly activated our motion-sensitive porch light as he walked past our house.

Hmm… as the trick-or-treater and his mom approached our house, they probably saw the paper boy pass our residence, an event followed by the illumination of our porch light. I wonder…

Anyway, we now return to the trick-or-treaters standing outside our front door. My mom has finished her explanation.

Silence.

“Um, okay, I’ll see if I can find you something,” my mom said. So she headed for our pantry. I followed behind her, trying to explain that just because our light was on, “…legally, you don’t have to give them something…”

Anyway, my mom takes a bag of Snickers, opens it up, and drops one into the pillow case that the little boy was using as a container for donated candy. My mom was then, as she puts it, “stunned” to see the mother of the boy hold out a pillow case too. A second Snicker candy was given away.

And then, the boy held up his pillow case and said expectedly, “More!”

My mom did not honor that last request.

Bug control is what happens when John swats a mosquito that’s trying to bite him and it falls out of the air onto the Ctrl key of his computer…

(A post intended to be immediately after the fact…)

Written by yours truly, with the occasional family member contribution.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

1. Because he was mistaken for a turkey on Thanksgiving.
2. Because he was bored.
3. Because there was a LAN party on the other side.
4. Because he wanted to join the Gallant Genus Gallus Gathering.
5. Because his parents said he couldn’t.
6. Because the debt collector was after him.
7. Because he was a deserter from the United Chicken Army.
8. Because he didn’t want to be called a chicken.
9. For various reasons.
10. Because he saw a holographic field of corn on the other side.
11. Because he was immigrating to the neighboring farmyard.
12. Because the side of the road he was coming from had just opened a KFC franchise.
13. Because Chicken’s Suffrage activists were meeting on the other side.
14. Because he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his forefathers.
15. Because he wondered what it would be like to be hit by a car.
16. Because there was an appetizing grain of corn in the middle of the road.
17. Because the only other option was to cross the highway.
18. Because he was remote-controlled by the turkey.
19. Because he was running away from the rioters that were sick and tired of all of the chicken jokes.
20. So there would be 20 of these jokes instead of 19.

My dad is a carpenter who does marvelous construction work, and one day he got a sticky note from one of his customers that read:

I sure am pretty!!!! Thanks

I kid you not.

I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but you can never be told enough: when you’re blogging, emailing, or using other Internet forms of communication, you need to be careful about how you present things, because you no longer have inflections, body language, etc., at your disposal. One way to “replace” these is to use emotions (but then of course there are those people who say that a well-structured sentence shouldn’t need emotions, yada yada yada…). But once upon a time I was new to email, and I learned this “be careful what you say” lesson the hard way.

I once had a “email penpal” named Nicky who lived in Australia; he was my very first penpal. After we had been writing for some time, I decided that I wanted to tell him about the funny things that had happened to us recently.

Like the time our fireplace blew up and sent glass shards flying across the living room, leaving burn marks on the carpet? (On the more serious side, it was definitely a miracle that about 15 seconds before the explosion I felt a sudden impulse to get myself and my baby brother out of the living room.)

And remember that one early morning many years ago when the house filled up with smoke because the pop-up-timer mechanism on the toaster had broken? I proudly remembered my fire drill techniques and crawled across the kitchen floor, then quickly jumped up into standing position and yanked the toaster’s power plug out. (And then my parents wake up and say something like, “Why does the house smell like smoke?”) That piece of toast was in a sorry state… (to be more specific, the slice of bread looked like greasy charcoal and had probably shrunk about 25% due to extreme moisture loss).

I never heard from Nicky again. Perhaps I gave a slight impression of pyromania…

My toddler-aged brother Nate has made some cute “mistakes” when learning his manners. For example, “Can I share with you?” often means he wants something you have. And once when he had hurt me and had realized I had been hurt, he said something along the lines of, “It’s okay John, I forgive you.”

You’ve probably noticed that when you search on Google or another search engine, usually at least one of the ads on the side or top of the page is advertising eBay. Here are some eBay ads I’ve found during my online searching expeditions.

[Click here for another ad screenshot]

Apparantly, eBay is the first company to get into the “fresh-produce-ordered-online” business. Well, maybe not fresh produce, but…

So that’s what happened to the League of Nations!

This is verification of Peach’s claim on Finding Nemo.

I had always wondered what the “e” in “eBay” stood for…

Recently I received my driver’s permit. While studying, I found an online permit preparation quiz for the state of Washington, and one of the questions was:

Hmm… each of the options can mean very different things.

• Regulatory sign: Knives and forks must turn right.
• Warning sign: Beware of the dinnerware.
• Service sign: Restaurants to the right.

I wonder which choice is correct.

I read an article from Microsoft Watch that read:

The beta refresh also will include support for longer descriptions of spyware from Microsoft, Bryan said.

Of course, this is just a writing mistake, but still…

When I went to visit the Google homepage today, they had a “Google Moon” logo and a sentence that read:

See what the astronauts saw on July 20, 1969. Try Google Moon.

If you follow the link to moon.google.com, you’ll get a version of Google Maps that shows satellite imagery from the moon, along with information about the various lunar landings. Also check out the Google Moon FAQ, where they mention their G.C.H.E.E.S.E. research center that was announced on April Fool’s Day of 2004.

And when you’re looking at the Google Moon maps, just remember - don’t zoom in too close.