Blog-o-rama

I’m here for my second BFB (Blogging for Bagels) session at NextSpace. It’s been two weeks since my last post and it’s given me some time to think about the types of things I’d like to blog about. But since I’ve forgotten most of them by now, I’ll just blog about my stupid coffee cup.

When I first joined NextSpace, I kept forgetting to bring a coffee cup from home. In reality, I don’t have any coffee cups, I just use pint glasses because coffee cups are just too damned small. So one morning I set out to find a coffee cup locally in Santa Cruz. I didn’t really want a branded coffee cup, but I went to Lulu’s at the Octagon anyway and they only carry cups at their main store at the end of the Pacific Garden Mall. I ended up at the Longs drugs down the street, only to find that they had really cheap plastic travel mugs. I wanted a fricken ceramic mug damn it!

Out of desperation, I asked a nice old lady at the store if they carried any ceramic mugs. She said no, but just as I was leaving she mentioned a kiosk with “local artisan stuff”. You can always count on old people to be helpful, not like these young whipper-snappers that expect to, well, I’ll save that for another blog post.

So off to the kiosk I went. Unfortunately “local artisan” is another way of saying “cheap tourist crap”. However, they did have a ceramic coffee mug that actually holds more that 8 ounces of coffee. I’d tell you how much, but my graduated cylinder is in my “secret lab of evil” (spoken in the voice of Dr. Evil from Austin Powers). So I rushed to the checkout counter and coughed up (literally) like $13 for this fricken mug.

stupid-coffee-cup

So what’s wrong with this mug, other than the amount of extortion I paid for it? Let me count the ways… The mug has a bunch of surf related pictures on it, it’s very Santa Cruz, so that’s cool. I didn’t really think much of it until my co-entrepreneurs started commenting on “what a cool coffee cup” it was and “where did I get it”. This is where my disgruntlement started.

At first glance you might think this mug was made in Santa Cruz, but it doesn’t even say Santa Cruz on it, it says “California”, like our entire state is known globally as a surfing destination. It’s a fricken piece of overpriced tourist crap, probably made in some sweat shop somewhere which is very un-Santa Cruz. Lastly it was coated in some sort of clear coat which has thankfully all peeled of now, and fortunately it appears unnecessary as none of the images are coming off even though I regularly scour the cup (in resentment) with a scotch-brite sponge.

And that brings to my last bit of ranting, vegetable stool. I’ve recently been eating a fair amount of vegetarian food, which is not anything I really sought out to do. Yeah I plan to remain a card-carrying-heathen-meat-eating-bastard for the foreseeable future, but I’ve been compelled to eat vegetarian at times out of convenience (I’m dating a vegetarian)… Fortunately neither of us are forcing the other to switch teams here, and personally I’m trying to eat more home prepared meals and healthier fare. I’m not convinced that Vegetarianism is going to make me live longer, but I’m tired of eating prepared meals and eating overly processed foods.

So what is Vegetable Stool? Well…Er…Umm… It’s a state of being I’m trying to determine if; it’s something I’ll experience during an adjustment period, or this is just part of eating vegetarian. I’m not really a fan of soft stool, I prefer good old fashioned solid stool. The kind that’s reinforced with sweet nourishing beef fiber, and so rigid you could knock a baseball out of the park with it. So densely compact it leaves almost no residue on the paper. Still reading?

The other “enlightening” detail is the rainbow of unexpected colors, and other artistic attributes. Now I can actually relive my meals, being able to clearly identify what I ate, and how long it took to “pass”. For those of you that haven’t experienced this “joy”, perhaps you’ve fed you canine friend a corn cob at a backyard barbecue, only to later find slender corn-coblets strategically place around the yard. But now I digress.

I arrived to my office a bit earlier than usual today, only to find I had accidentally arrived in time to “blog for bagels”. I moved my main office to a coworking facility called NextSpace in Santa Cruz. Lots of interesting things happen here, including social networking experiments. Margaret, one of the Q-Mamas from Quiddities and Mahesh Grossman, whom I haven’t met yet, decided recently that Thursday was Blogging for Bagels Day at Nextspace. The purpose is to encourage people to blog because most of us that have them just neglect them. It’s also a way for us to get to know each other by sharing our blog posts. Now that’s kinda scary, but I digress.

So today’s blog is about toilets. Why? Well, because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to blog about while my bagel was toasting, and I inevitably ended up in the bathroom where I asked myself – “Do toilets in Austrailia really flush the other way?”. Of course this was planted in my mind several years ago my the great folks over at the Fox Network in an episode of The Simpsons. I thought about a few other things, but I won’t share them here, yet…

So it turns out a French scientist named Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis published some papers in the 1800s based on his experiments with friction and hydraulics. In the 20th century, the phrase Coriolis effect began to be used in relation to meteorology. But we’re talking toilets here, and the Coriolis effect also applies to the draining of bathtubs and toilets. Unfortunately the Coriolis effect is most consistent in large system, so the pop culture reference is mostly a myth.

So there you have it…

I’m finally coming out of the closet (no, not *that* closet) and putting some content on my site. I’ve owned this domain for nearly 12 years, and it became evident in the early part of this century that my name is very common. I’ve received a number of inquiries on purchasing this domain, largely because it appeared unused. Truth is I’ve been using chrismiller.com for email since the beginning, back when domain registration was $50/yr!. Time will tell what I put up on the site, but at least this is a start…

Chris