The Handyman Can

 

Who can take a screwdriver? (Who can take a screwdriver?)
And strip a stubborn screw (strip a stubborn screw)
Cover it with oil and a swear word or two

The Handyman (the Handyman)
Oh, the Handyman can (the Handyman can)
The Handyman can 'cause he patches it with tape
And covers it up with glue (covers it up with glue)

--The Handyman, Time Waits 

First, under no circumstances would I consider myself a handyman. Over the years of owning houses I have learned that I have very little aptitude for DIY projects and repairs. Oh, I've tried. In my first house I did a valiant attempt of sanding old hardwood floors soaked in pet urine with a rented drum sander. I almost passed out from the heat and smell. And I hid the result under strategically placed throw rugs. I have tried sheet rock, tile, vinyl flooring, painting, and replacing a toilet and bathroom sink. All with marginal if not laughable results.  Now I try to hire people to do shit.

But because of Amazon, I am called upon frequently to assemble furniture and put up shelves. I've also assembled crap from IKEA with instructions that have driven me to tears. I do these things without complaining or expecting thanks or even acknowledgment.  The job has fallen on me the way taking out garbage, mowing lawn, emptying dishwashers, cleaning cat litter boxes and feeding screaming pets have.  I didn't choose to be the furniture assembler, it chose me. The boxes would sit unopened for months, maybe years unless I stepped in dealt with them. I stopped protesting about it. Chores find you. Accept it. 

I've grown fairly adept at navigating instructions written in English by non-English speakers. I follow diagrams pretty well. Most times I assemble things with minimal parts left over and they seem sturdy. I don't gloat about it. I don't claim to even be good at it.

My father was DIY kind of guy. He had a workshop with lots of old, dusty, oily and for the most part unused tools. The workshop...more of a shed than a workshop...had been a large chicken coop at one time when my grandparents raised chickens in the early 1930s. My dad converted it as some point. It was functional and had two rooms and tons of crap and scraps. There was an old wood stove in the room off the main workshop. My father also had a band saw and a table saw. I'm not quite sure. He cut things quite a bit but never seemed to build anything with the wood he cut. The things he did build were...how should I say this...rustic. My mother never failed to tell him when something looked like crap. He didn't seem to care. After he died I inherited lots of things he had patched together. I kept them more for sentimental reasons than because they were well made or even functional.

So I learned how to nail things, screw in screws, cut things and other basics. I don't really recall my father teaching me these things other than I picked them up by watching him. It was kind of like YouTube live. When I bought my first house I spend hours at the local hardware store picking up how to flyers designed to make you buy tools that you could never really use correctly like trowels and grout floats, plum line thingys and miter boxes.  I never took great joy in DIY home improvements because I could always see the flaws. One time I meticulously installed a home alarm system with window and door sensors wired to the attic where there was a siren. I plugged it all in and turned on the power and the siren went off even though none of the sensors had been tripped.  I just never turned it on again.

I write this blog because my son ordered a shit load of furniture for his game room that had been damaged by faulty construction in the adjacent bathroom (built ironically by contractors we paid a ton of money to for their expertise. Apparently they were DIY tile installers, too. Regardless his room was trashed just recently got restored. He had to have all new stuff from Amazon and IKEA. I put together a bookcase, a media center, and a couch. And last night I put up three free standing shelves on the wall that had to be spaced evenly apart and centered. I required major measuring, using a level, drilling, drywall locks and screws.  I will be damned if I finished it all and they looked decent, evenly spaced and solid.

Maybe I am a handyman after all.  Or maybe even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and then. 

Not that I like nuts.

 

I've got crab legs

 

My sideways journey as a crab began because the National Calendar people designated this as National Crab Meat Day. So I scurried to find some existing designs to fit the sentiment. Believe it or not I'd created several crab designs in the past few years including:

This one was in response to constant social media stories I kept seeing about thousands of crabs vanishing from the Bering Sea. I envisioned aliens got tired of nabbing cows and were going after crabs.

And there was this one:

I think I created it in response to National Hermit Day or some such nonsense. So I posted both designs on Bluesky with serious doubts that I'd get much response. Then I enlisted ChatGPT to help me with another idea.

I'm actually proud of this one.  It took a bit of coaxing to get it out of ChatGPT because at first it had lots of cartoony crabs instead of the sleezy ones I envisioned.  So don't let anyone tell you AI is going to replace creatives because, although it is quick and usually pretty good, it gets stuck on certain things and still occasional delivers deformed images that you are better off repairing in Photoshop than going back and forth.  And I can't get it to not carry over stuff from previous designs. When I asked it to make a crab image of me it popped up a crab with my head holding a martini.  Even when I asked it to make my head more crablike it just stuck a crab shell on top of my head and a couple of crab eyes but it didn't remove my real eyes. So I fixed it myself.

The "I've got crab legs" headline here comes from these mind numbing commercials from a restaurant chain that killed its last crab in October 2023. It was called Sea Galley and they had commercials with sing chefs who literally had crab legs.

The jingle for the commercials was, "We've got crab legs, Sea Galley!" It is a ear worm for me to this day. But it is likely another pop culture reference that escapes most people.

Sorry, I'm feeling crabby today.

I'm sure you saw that one coming.

Wasting Daylight Saving Time

 

I'm kind of okay with Fall back, but the Spring forward sucks big time. I forgot about the time change last night. So I woke up at what I thought was 6 a.m. (but it was technically still 5 a.m.) and plodded upstairs to feed the cats and then realized it wasn't 6 a.m. (when our Bengal starts nudging me to feed her and knocking things off my nightstand to get my attention). Both cats were still asleep and I cursed whoever came up with whole idea of messing with the clocks in the first place.

In the first place, time is an artificial construct. So we can't technically save it. We can just fuck with our concept of it. It's kind of like jet lag on a large scale basis. Turning the clocks forward just makes the entire day off (not to mention any analog clocks).  Our dog and our cats seem to be okay with it since I fed them at what the clock said was 5 p.m. and it was really 4 p.m. for everyone's body clocks. But they are always hungry so none of them turned the food down. We'll see what happens tomorrow morning.

Daylight Saving Time did give me an excuse to post several "Time for a change" t-shirt and clock designs on social media. I think they are loosely disguised protests that it is time for a change in National leadership. But who knows what the morons on social media think. 

Personally, I think it is about time for someone to buy one of my fucking t-shirts. 

Cereal Killer

 

It is National Cereal Day. I am not sure the cereal associations had this in mind when they prompted the National Day Calendar people to promote it, but it is the first thing I thought of. 

Which is not what most people think about when they pour out a bowl of Fruit Loops or Cheerios.  But that is unfortunately how my mind works. This is good (I think) if you are coming up with ideas for t-shirts that people think are clever (but have no desire to buy and wear).

Maybe it has something to do with me starting to restream the series Penny Dreadful.  It stars Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett and Vanessa Ives.  It is about a group of Victorian-era monster hunters and supernatural figures blending classic literary characters like Dracula, Wolfman and Frankenstein with some original creations.  Ironically none of them seem to eat cereal. But it is set in London and has a very Jack the Ripper vibe. So it is right down my alley.

Always after me Lucky Charms.

Talk about having the blues

 

It is National Dress in Blue Day.  And blue happens to be my favorite color....along with black and gray. I can trace blue being my favorite color back to First Grade when we were on the playground and my First Grade teacher put blue felt tip marker marks on the back of our hands to designate what team we were on in some playground game. I was on the blue team. So it has nothing to do with gender norms or stereotypes. Though I don't like pink or magenta.

I have seen the Blue Man Group perform four or five times and think they are amazing. But they would be amazing regardless of what color they were named.

Back in the days when I had a friend who worked in a casino he told me they referred to all of the old people who would come in on tour buses and sit at the nickel slots as "blue heads" because that is the shade many old lady's hair would turn when they used certain hair products.  

I wouldn't say I'm overly fond of the Blues, but I always like the Blues Brothers. 

I'm thinking Jake and Elwood have nothing on me! I fact I'm thinking I need to get me a basic black, vintage suit. Maybe if I made three wishes...

You know, if I was a famous person, this serious would get serious attention and appear in GQ or something like that...Tim's Blue Period. 

I think I should have stopped when I was a genie. But I don't feel as blue any more. Well, I'm technically blue...or literally blue, just not blue, blue. 

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder

 

It is National Absinthe Day.  Absinthe is a spirit made by infusing wormwood, fennel, anise and other herbs into alcohol through distillation. Pierre Ordinair, a French doctor, created absinthe as an elixir in the early 19th century as a cure for many illnesses. It has a very high alcohol content so I imagine that, if it didn't cure the illnesses, it made you forget them for awhile.  It is also known as the Green Fairy, the Green Goddess and the Green Lady and was also rumored to have hallucinogenic effects. As with most popular things in history, it was blamed for causing madness, seizures and low morality. Many countries banned it, including the United States, but that ban has since been lifted. 

Studies have proven there is nothing hallucinogenic about Absinthe. But again, it is high octane alcohol so I imagine if you drink enough of it you will see things with foggy green gogs.  So bottoms up.

Taking the plunge

 

It's Marching Music Day.  And being a former band geek and Drum Major,  I couldn't resist putting my own twist on Marching Music Day with this design:

It was an updated design based on text version I did a couple of years ago. I also produced this one:

It's a bit more esoteric. I am selling a t-shirt and a tote bag version. We'll see if anyone appreciates my dad joke inspired genius. It is also National Pound Cake Day and I worked with ChatGPT to create an appropriate design.  At first it gave me this:

I was concerned it might be a bit difficult on first glance to understand the joke. And it made the guy look too much like me shoving cake in my face. So I asked for a different version:

I liked it but ChatGPT kept making the hammer head look like it was at a 45 degree angle and couldn't seem to correct it, so I fixed it myself in Photoshop. Plus ChatGPT tried to sell me on smashing a Bundt cake instead of a pound cake for some reason. I've been in marketing too long not to know that there would be some cake freak out there that would write me to tell me that wasn't a pound cake, it was a bundt cake. So I held my ground. I did let it do another version with a redneck looking guy in it though.

I created t-shirts with both designs. But I only promoted the redneck one on X because X is full of redneck freaks. We'll see if there are any out there that like to pound cake. It was a productive day, but I'm beat. 

Get it.

Soupy Sales

 

It is National Soup It Forward Day (which really doesn't have any practical meaning other than perhaps giving your soup to another person, preferably before you've started eating it). But I try not to think too much about what motivates people to contact the National Day Calendar people and create these random days. I just glom onto them like a lamprey on a salmon and try to ride them through to selling t-shirts or posters or mugs. So far it has worked remarkably badly. But I keep on throwing the shit onto the wall to see if it sticks.  I know those are lots of tasteless metaphors, especially associated with soup.

I do like the National Day Calendar people because they like lots of my stuff on social media. I'm pretty sure it's because they are padding their stats with people who actually use their hashtags for their National Days. Honestly, there are pitifully few people who use the hashtags so I'm not convinced it is effective. That and I haven't sold a frigging thing since I started aggressively marketing them on social with encouragement from ChatGPT and random AI babble about timing, search engines and persistence. 

Sometimes I wish ChatGPT had a darker side like Marvin the robot from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and actually told you your stuff was crap. At least I'd have a sense I was being told the truth. 

Not that I think my stuff is crap. Sometimes I'm in awe of how much I've produced. But I did learn at the conference I was at in Savannah that there are a large number of people who are viscerally opposed to things created with the help of AI. One young man was rambling on about how we are destroying the water supply because of the resources being used to cool the servers that support AI. I suppressed the desire to call for the microphone at the session and politely say, "Fuck you."  It would not have been well received, even if I was more polite about it and said, "Thank you for sharing your opinion, but fuck you and the moped you rode in on."

Soup anyone?

Staring at the past

 

Over the years I've talked about my Great Great Grandfather.  He was born around 1830.  I inherited maybe four photos of him. But I know barely anything about him other than he was in the Civil War fighting on the Union side (thank god).  I have the original version of this portrait above my desk at home. I think I look like him. So the other day it occurred to me that ChatGPT might be able to bring my old black and white photos to life.

It was an image of my Great Great Grandfather I'd never seen. 

This was a portrait of my Great Great Grandmother, my Great Great Grandfather and my grandmother. It breathed new life into their memory. Then I asked ChatGPT to bring me face to face with my Great Great Grandfather.

There were no photos of my Great Great Grandfather from the side so this really was powerful to me. Plus ChatGPT gave him a hint of a smile. Now he does look like David Letterman but I can see myself in him. It's as if we could look at each other and I could ask all of these questions about who he actually was versus how I imagined he was. He had died before my mother was born so she never spoke about him. His wife was about 20 years younger than he was so my mother knew her.  I heard lots of stories about her but never her husband. 

I showed a version of me next to my Great Great Grandfather and her reaction was that I should lose my beard so I wouldn't look as old as him. But I don't think he looks so much old as someone who lived a long and probably hard life.  So I'm proud to have a beard like his. 

Besides, even if I shaved it, I'd still look old, but old with a fat face. So I imagine my Great Great Grandfather would pat me on the shoulder and say, "Grow the bear back boy."

Flying pigs

 

This started out as more of an homage to National Pig Day. I posted a Swine Flew t-shirt design on social assuming it will sell when pigs actually do fly.  But I keep trying. I do actually like pigs (which adds to my guilt when I eat bacon, ham and pork roasts).  As animals, they do get a bad rap.  

I had ChatGPT mess around with images of me as a pig that were quite disturbing (mainly because was too easy of a transition.

I have to say the flying pig image made me think about my recent experience flying to Savannah for my conference. On the way their I sat next to a person on a small airplane who was so large they couldn't have the armrest between us down or use their tray table.  I do not believe in body shaming, but it is bad enough being crammed into an airline seat without being crammed next to someone who barely fits in two seats. And immediately after they sat down I reached into my pocket for a tin of Altoids and popped one in my mouth. The large person immediately said, "Ohhhh...Altoids, can I have one?" I was completely taken aback. I gave them one, but in my world I would never ask a stranger for anything.

But I digress. 

Pigs also made me think of what my country is becoming, especially after attacking yet another country yesterday and assassinating their leader.

It makes no sense to me. Nothing good will come out of it. Then I read an article this morning that the Pentagon is concerned that they are using up too many Tomahawk missiles because we may need more if we get into a war with China.  Call me stupid, but I think we'll need more than more Tomahawk missiles if we pick a fight with China.  They are no Greenland.

All that glitters...

 

I was at a conference for most of the week in Savannah, Georgia. So I didn't blog.  I did end up watching lots of hotel television with endless Pawn Stars, History's Greatest Mysteries and the Curse of Oak Island (which is a series I've watched for several years but only in hotels...it is about treasure seekers at this island who don't seem to know when to give up and stop digging).  I watched tons of programs about the Spanish conquest of the New World and their endless search for El Dorado. One thing I noted is that they never seemed to find it and when they did find gold, it was never enough. 

And I noted that in ever village they passed through they asked where El Dorado was and the villagers always pointed to the next village. I'm thinking Conquistadors were not the sharpest sword in the scabbard because they kept marching on oblivious that the villagers just wanted them to leave without excessive pillaging.



Still people think that El Dorado is out there just out of reach. I always ponder this when I see the commercials that swarm Ancient Mystery and treasure programming. There are lots of offers to diversify and buy gold or silver coins as a way to have money in case everything goes to hell.  The thing that baffles me is that gold and silver really are just metals we've assigned value to because they are fairly scarice (especially to Conquistadors). If the world went more to hell than it is now, wouldn't food and water be more valuable than a hunk of metal?

It is this line of reason that made me stop believing in religion in my early teens.

That takes the muffin

 

Do you know the Muffin man

The Muffin man, the Muffin man

Oh, do you know the Muffin man

Who lives on Drury Lane?

            --The Muffin Man 

I have never been particularly fond of muffins. They seem to be an odd mutation of a cupcake sans the frosting. But it is National Muffin Day and I wanted to get into the spirit. The Muffin Man song has been stuck in my head since my college aged kids were toddlers. 

Make it stop.

I'm not making a t-shirt out of this image of me as a Muffin Man because I'm sure it violates someone's intellectual property or copyright. Because you can't write brilliant lyrics like that without copyrighting them. I have always wondered if the "Muffin Man" is a euphemism for a drug dealer.  I get this image of a shady character saying, "Hey, yoose know the muffin man? Yeah, the muffin man. He lives on Drury lane."

If you ask AI about the origins of "muffin" you get lots of vague references to "Low German," "Old French" and "Guttural Dutch." The first English spelling was "moofin" from 1703 where I imagine an Dickens-like character uttered the words, "Wud ya like ta 'av a moofin, gov'nuh?"

Apparently all of the roots of the muffin share the characteristics of being small, soft (unless you are at a conference and eating the free continental breakfast) and cake-like.  Cake-like is the key because muffins seldom taste like cake and seem like the Putennesca of baked goods because bakers seem to throw whatever shit they have leftover in the kitchen into them

The fact that I wasted a whole post on muffins is a miracle in its own right.  

Move along. There's nothing but a muffin to see here.