Jeopar-rantwiki-dy!

Hey, it's late Sunday night as I write this. Another Monday is just hours away and has caught me unprepared. I know I'm getting to be a broken record, sorry. Thankfully I keep a bunch of lame ideas for blog posts in the hopper for these increasingly frequent difficult blogging times. I just type a title and a snippet of a thought and save it in the Drafts folder, hoping I'll think of something better and never have to use it.

Tonight I brought up the drafts folder, closed my eyes and stabbed a finger at the screen, and this is how you ended up reading even more dubious content from Rantwick. I will improve someday soon, I hope, but no promises.

Anyway, the fantastic idea for this post is to collect peoples's less-than-deep questions in the hopes that qualified answers will show up in the comments. I mean, everybody loves sitting around pondering the mysteries that feed the soul and give one a reason for living, but that's what religion and/or drugs are for.

Sometimes questions just pop up, shallow questions. Please post your decidedly-less-than-philosophical questions in the comments, and if you can answer any of the questions with COMPLETE confidence, do that too. I will update the body of the post with both new questions and new answers. I guess it's kind of like a reverse wikipedia that starts with questions. It's Jeopar-rantwiki-dy!

That part about being sure of your answers is important. We're all smart and can make good guesses about these things. I can provide any number of good guesses about my lame questions all by myself. I don't want guesses. I want answers you are certain of. I am not going to play fact-checker, so if I post an answer with your name on it you had better be certain it is right.

Speaking of fact-checking, please don't do any research to find the answers to these questions. I mean, any of us could do that. Let's see how we do with our own brains. Now, if one of the questions makes you crack a textbook from some course you took eons ago because you knew you knew the answer but wanted confirmation, that's different. You knew it in the first place, right?


My original post that was sitting in the drafts folder had three questions ready and waiting in it. I am going to post just one, the one that will best set the tone for online learning, enlightenment and mutual understanding:


Q1, from Rantwick: When you're taking muscle relaxants (for your back or whatever), how come you don't poop your pants?

Q2, from John Romeo Alpha: What is the actual, practical benefit of still having Daylight Savings Time?

Q3, from Kokorozashi: Is Wikipedia a bastion of the great democratization of knowledge, a harbinger of the end of civilization as we know it, or both?

A3, from Rantwick: The first thing you said. Or whatever you think, since it is, I'm afraid, a matter of opinion. I personally go with bastion.

Yer Pal,

R A N T W I C K

Spandex, Singing Fruit, Loaded, Leather, Moonroof

I discovered (or remembered) some stuff on youtube that I wanted to share. It all started with my last post. The youtube video for that one was entitled Spandex Commuter VS Electric Bike. Well, you know how youtube links to "related" videos you can look at after the one you chose to see? Well thanks to "Spandex" being in my title, I looked at "Mr Scruff - Spandex Man" after playing my video:

OK, not a lot to that one, I know. But after playing it, there was a link to this other "Mr Scruff" related item that I liked very much:

There were tons of "Mr Scruff" videos, from all kinds of different "authors". Turns out Mr Scruff is a prolific British DJ and artist. The singing fruit Mr Scruff video made me think about youtube and how much I like music at the same time, which resulted in my looking for some video of Don Ross, a mind-blowing guitarist that I had the great pleasure of seeing live about 5 months ago. The following will hold almost no interest for some of my readers. For those who play the guitar, however, it has the same kind of effect on them as that Danny MacAskill video has on cyclists.

It is insane that the only guitar you are hearing in that piece is his. Just one. Gah. Don Ross doesn't look like that any more, by the way. Most of that hair is gone. On stage he said young youtube commenters were telling him he looked like Hagrid from Harry Potter, so he thought it was time for a new look.

Anyway, I thought I would share, because this blog is at least in part a method of sharing stuff that most of my everyday local friends may not find interesting. There's always a like-minded freak who'll agree with me on the good old Internet. Not that you are a freak. I mean all the other freaks that come here. Not that everybody who comes here is a freak... I love that people come here to read my stuff. Even those freaks, the ones that aren't you.

Keep it Freaky,

R A N T W I C K

PS - In the interest of full disclosure, yes, I did watch that other spandex video of the woman in the green jump suit, and the one with the bobsledder splitting her spandex pants. Sometimes youtube is like a car crash... I know I shouldn't look, but I cannot tear my eyes away. We shall not speak of these things again.

Encounters With Rantwick, episode eleven: I Pass Something Annoying

It's wasn't a kidney stone, but oh, the pain!

I don't know about you, but when I pass another cyclist, I make a point of dropping them pretty quickly if I can. I do this because I hate it when somebody deems it necessary to pass me only to slow down and block my progress once they have done so. Sometimes when I'm kind of pumped up in the middle of a ride, I'll pass somebody going almost as fast as me. That is the worst, because then I feel obligated to kill myself rather than take a breather and allow them to pass me back. I get more exercise, but I always feel a bit stupid for caring whether I get overtaken by them. I mean, who cares, really?

This espisode of Encounters With Rantwick is all about a pass gone horribly wrong...

Any 2 wheels trump 4. Always, near as I can figure.

R A N T W I C K