Apparently, it also rained in my car.

This morning, unsuspecting, I went out and I dunked my dainty toe right in there. In that dirty puddle! IN MY CAR! It is deceptively deep. Who could have anticipated a deep, dirty puddle where my driver's side floor used to be? What is a dirty puddle doing in my car, anyway? The window wasn't open. The door wasn't open (or was it?).

After the jump, please enjoy* the arduous process of bailing out my vehicle.
(*PROCESS** NOT ACTUALLY ENJOYABLE.)
[**NEITHER THE BAILING PROCESS ITSELF NOR THE PROCESS OF READING ABOUT THE BAILING PROCESS.]

Question 1:
The easiest was the Tom, Dick and Harry one.

Harry, earning more than the manager, cannot be the manager, nor the teller (that earns the least.) Therefore Harry is the Cashier.

Tom cannot be the teller, as he has a sister. Since Harry is the Cashier, that makes Tom the manager.

Dick is the teller by default. Sucks to be him, being poorest paid.

Total Time: 2 minutes, using a neato match-chart.

Question 2:
65 sides, by my calculation.

5 on each short side x two short sides = 10
25 on each long side x two long sides = 50
5 on the top x 1 top = 5

Total = 65

I did this by making a little engineering plan style drawing.

Total time: 2 min.

Question 3:
This fucking compactor/cube problem was the worst.

x is the edge size of the older compactor, and y is the edge size of the newer compactor.

We're told x > y and x and y are integers.

The volume of each cube is x^3 and y^3.

Each cube has twelve edges, so the total length of all the edges on both cubes is 12x + 12y.

Some asshole observed the following:
x3 + y3 = 12x + 12y

I spent much misery in algebra, attempting to get this down to something edible. My misery was unconstrained.

Among many others, I can make it all of the following:
x(x2 -12) + y(y2 -12) = 0

x3 / (x+y) + y3 / (x+y) = 12

and my personal favorite manipulation:

x4 + y4 + x^3y + xy3 -12 = 0

at this point, I became stuck, and brute forced it. (I have a feeling the last equation above is readily solvable. I got fed up, and realized that there aren't that many integral candidates that even potentially would work.)

x = 4, y = 2 satisfies the initial equation.
4^3 + 2^3 = 12(4+2)
64 + 8 = 72 = 12*6

Total time? 30 fucking minutes.

Who the fuck "notices... that the combined volumes of one cube from each compactor was numerically the same as the combined length of all their edges." I work in a lab, a real scientific lab, and can guarantee such a situation never happens. Nor will it ever happen. I mean, really, this has no business being a word problem. Fucking stupid. I'm glad she lost.

(Thanks to Brian G. for the tip.)

It won't be nearly as fun as Luke's recent interview with baseball Hall-of-Famer George Brett, who told him all about shitting his pants the other night: "I'm good for that about twice a year."

But Burbank and producer Jen Andrews are lovely, funny people. Too Beautiful to Live is, obviously, the best thing about KIRO.

But ZooBorns I can get behind--"the newest and cutest exotic animal babies from zoos and aquariums around the world."

BABY ARMA-GODDAMN-DILLO!!!

It's like cute stuff meets David Attenborough! Oh, and what's this? "Tiny Ocelot Kittens Born at the Woodland Park Zoo"? If I enjoy your kitten photographs, ZooBorns, maybe I will just go down to my neighborhood zoo and HANG OUT WITH THOSE TINY OCELOTS IN PERSON!!! Get back to me when you can personally invite me to that guinea pig's birthday party, Cute Overload.

Doesn't it look red? Eli Sanders says I'm being ridiculous. To compare, here's my perfectly normal left eyeball:

The more I think about it, the more I feel a slight burning coming on. But is it all just in my mind? Or do I seriously have a fucked-up red eyeball!?

Look at this tiny, fake orange!

Wouldn't you like to know how to make this tiny, fake orange?

Well you're in luck! There's a step-by-step photo tutorial on how to make this tiny, fake orange right here at the "Weird and Funny Stuff Around the World" blog. I'm sure it's not, but the process looks really easy. If you can roll dough in to a ball and use and X-Xcto knife, then you can make a tiny, fake orange. Why you would want to, I'm not sure, but I have the sudden urge to get some Sculpey after SLOG HAPPY tonight and make a whole bowl full of these things.

Suddenly in Los Angeles, I walked across an unevenly paved bridge over a highway. On the other side: nowhere, just abandoned buildings and a sense of doom. I was afraid. Up ahead, Barack Obama appeared, carrying a large golden trophy. I watched myself catch up to him, then as the two of us were attacked by street people—homeless people and meth-doers and gang members and assorted stereotypically terrifying characters. Most were minorities. From afar, I watched as I was dragged away to some nefarious place, some awful end. Barack Obama eventually escaped the attack and walked on, still holding his golden trophy. I woke up, shaken, at 5:30 this morning.

I think I need a prescription to get through this election.

The victims told deputies they awoke Saturday morning to the stranger applying spices to one of them and striking the other with an 8-inch sausage.

Burrimond said money allegedly stolen in the burglary was recovered. The sausage was tossed away by the fleeing suspect and eaten by a dog.

More details in tomorrow's Last Days.

A transformer across the street had just blown. In addition to the power we'd lost--some departments had it, some didn't (the phone system had lost power)--we'd lost internet and email access. This posed a special problem: Without the internet, we couldn't get pages to the printer. Our solution? Senior ad designer Mary Traverse took a computer to Grey Gallery & Lounge across the street from our offices, because they have free wi-fi, and uploaded one page (the one that was ready at that moment) to the printer's FTP site from there. Meanwhile, we were still finishing up and proofreading pages on the few computers in the production department that still had power.

Eventually, big orange trucks from Seattle City Light showed up.

There was a white truck too--according to our tech support guy Brian Geoghagan, the white truck is always the supervisor's truck--and Geoghagan took it upon himself to march up to the white truck and ask the man inside when the power was going to come back. The man in the white truck informed him that, actually, the power was about to go out. All of it. The whole block. More than the whole block. The City Light guys needed all the power out in the area to solve whatever the problem was.

Delightful!