AKA the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:
He was a gambler down on his luck; she was a hooker with a heart of gold—solid gold, in fact, which made her corpse (now nestled awkwardly between the spare tire and overstuffed suitcase in the trunk of his ’83 Impala) some 80 lbs heavier than was natural, and was, at this moment, among the foremost of his problems.
And it only took me two years to figure it out. All I did was take the long stem out of the original lamp.
A couple years back it occurred to me that it would be cool to have wheel locks for my bike like those that are already available for cars. They’re just special lug nuts that are sold four to a set (you only need one locking nut per wheel, after all). Each set features a unique pattern of interlocking circular grooves (the “lock”) that is pseudorandomly generated by the machinery at the factory, together with a mating wrench (the “key”). The profile of the nut is round everywhere else, so as long as you don’t lose the key you’re the only one with the proper tool to remove the nut. Of course, like pretty much all tamper-proof fasteners, it can still be defeated by casting, but that extra effort is probably enough to deter the average street thief.
Anyway, they’ve got ’em for cars already. You can buy a set at AutoZone. I did. And I wish I could get them for bikes, too, but nobody makes them. This prototype is my attempt to hack a car lug nut onto a bike axle, and although I did make it work by ordering a replacement axle with an unusual thread and using a pipe fitting as a thread adapter (plus a couple of odd washers) it was pretty wonky and probably unsafe.
Note parafilm wrap sealing globe to fixture.
One week's accumulation of bugs before Parafilm wrap.
Same fixture, 6 months after sealing with Parafilm wrap.
If you’re sick of dumping dessicated insect bodies out of your outdoor light fixtures, and your fixtures are of a type which is amenable to the process, you might consider sealing them with a couple turns of Parafilm laboratory film. Shown immediately above is my front porch light, six months after sealing with Parafilm wrap. Above that is the same fixture, before sealing with Parafilm, just one week after emptying. Note that this process only works with relatively cool bulbs, like CFLs or LEDs. Bulbs that get too hot will melt the Parafilm and/or cause it to break.
If you’ve ever spent any time in a chemistry or biochemistry laboratory, you are probably familiar with Parafilm, which is sold by the roll and is somewhere between wax paper and cling wrap (but considerably pricier than either). Parafilm is waterproof and resists many solvents, and sticks to itself to form air- and moisture-tight seals that hold up under most conditions for months, if not years. And while it’s probably not worth keeping around just for this use, once you play with it a bit you are apt to discover all kinds of non-laboratory uses for it.
Before.
After.
I love magnetic parts trays. When I’m taking something apart, using one for the screws and other tiny metal bits is one of the best things I can do (together with taking pictures as I go) to make sure that it all goes back together again more or less as it’s supposed to. So the last time I was disassembling an appliance for repair (a video projector, in this case), and I was carefully arranging the screws for each subassembly in a separate little pile in my parts tray, it occurred to me that it’d be nice to have a magnetic parts tray with compartments for this purpose. And when I was imagining what the dividers would look like, a shape like the blade of a fruit wedger occurred to me.
For some reason, I have two fruit wedgers. I never use a fruit wedger, but when and if I ever do, I am confidant that one will meet my needs.
So I busted the plastic off ring off of one of them and, with a bit of clipping to round the ends of the blades, discovered that the blade assembly fit pretty well into my 4″ magnetic parts tray. And actually works pretty well as a divider, too. Problem solved.
I very much want to ask Timothy W. Ryback what he did with the hair he found in the Library of Congress basement:
In the spring of 2001, when I first opened Osborn’s Berlin in the subdued atmosphere of the Rare Book Reading Room, with the muffled sounds of midday traffic, I discovered, tucked in the crease between pages 160 and 161, a wiry inch-long black hair that appears to be from a moustache An extension of the Benjamanian conceit–the collector preserved within his books, literally.
I have not yet finished Hitler’s Private Library, and it may be that, by the end of it, I will learn the fate of What Might Be Hitler’s Hair, but somehow I rather doubt it. Rybeck, a skilled humanities scholar whose talents are evident throughout the book, clearly understands the historical gravitas of discovering the hair, but so far gives no indication of having understood that the hair is more than just a symbol or a curiosity, but, like the book that contained it and the library to which that book belongs, an interesting opportunity for further historical scholarship.
Although there have certainly been dubious claims before, Rybeck seems to have at least an outside chance of having discovered an authentic sample of Adolf Hitler’s DNA. If genuine, the hair would be over 60 years old, but preserved, like the book that contained it, in a dry temperature-controlled environment for all that time. Does it have an attached follicle, one wonders? If genetic material can be recovered from the hair, the resulting analysis might provide strong evidence about whether it truly belonged to “Mr. H” himself. And if the markers are right, there is no telling what else we might learn, including, perhaps, a more authoritative answer to the question—presently hypothesized from saliva samples of a set of Hitler’s surviving relatives—of Hitler’s Jewish ancestry.